Waiting: Migration and Time in Four Motions

An critical experiment that attempts to make sense of movement by weaving literary analysis, field notes, news reports, theory, and poetry into four narrative motions that dwell on the phenomenon of waiting. The first motion will take up the duration of waiting; specifically, the intervals that cannot be defined by the modern impulse to accelerate and collapse time. But duration must also be thought alongside instances of waiting that mark modern enclosure; therefore, the second motion takes up enclosure as it plays out in the San Antonio Express News report on July 25, 2017. Entitled “A torturous ride,” this document of the “details [of] migrants' deadly 150-mile journey” will placed alongside Rivera’s …y no se lo tragó la tierra […and the earth did not devour him] to examine the language and spaces of enclosure. The third motion unfolds through a series of passages made up of field notes and reflections wrote while taking busses from Longmont, Colorado (United States) to Tapachula, Chiapas (Mexico). These notes suggest a precarious waiting that takes the form of passages whose uneven recesses and effects reverberate from moving vehicles. The final motion echoes historical instances of radical time that challenge us to question waiting in order to disquiet a world where lives are realized and lost in waiting.