Grappling with Exposure in Mexico City

In Mexico City, residents of colonias populares grapple with lead’s power for damage and for engendering pleasurable congregation through shared meals eaten from lead-glazed ceramic dishes. Residents of these neighborhoods live within the Great Swirl, a dynamic combination of substances, smells, sounds, and relationships. Grappling acknowledges both the hazards of and the pleasurable connective dependencies with complicated presences (substances, chemicals, beings). Grappling defies the tendency of experts and authorities to focus only on the damage individual toxicants can do to individual bodies. Alongside other dynamic practices developed by those living in assumed permeability, grappling offers a powerful alternative to the industrial-age scientific model of “enclosed exposure” that posits exposure to toxicants as a discrete event that individuals can prevent. To conclude, I describe my collaborations with environmental health researchers to develop experimental forms of data collection that seek to grapple with, rather than enclose, exposure.