These little mushrooms are a metaphor for my research. They grew on a sidewalk in Mexico City where a homeless man sat the last moments of his life. No one knew his name. No one stopped to help. No one claimed his body. In Mexico City, the sense of insecurity permeates the air. It’s best to keep to one’s self, to do the right thing, and look the right way to avoid death. My dissertation titled, NecroSecurity: Youth, Death, and Life in the State of Right examines how life is secured through the death of others. Mexico City was recently cast as a space of respite from drug cartels and their violence that now plagues much of the country. However, the middle and elite classes explain, as I learned during my ethnographic research, that the cartels have arrived at the city and their violence affects “everyone,” overlooking the racial, class, and gender asymmetries at play in the proximity to death. For a brief moment in time, these mushrooms stood their ground unnoticed despite living on a heavily transited, dirty, and crooked sidewalk. One morning someone stepped on them and kept on walking without looking back.
