From 1980 to 2022, Los Pepenadores, a labor union in the garbage dump of Oaxaca, Mexico, developed multisensory, embodied sonic practices to locate, collect, and sell recyclable materials, maintain health and safety, and build community. Although the city materially benefited from their work, it never awarded the union a government contract or officially recognized its labor, thereby perpetuating the union’s precarity inside and outside the dump. Union families lived for decades on the unnamed road bordering the landfill without electricity or running water. In 2010, when the union successfully petitioned the city for electricity, it encountered a bureaucratic snag: unnamed streets were ineligible for metered service. In response, union members officially named their shared road Calle de Progreso (“The Street of Progress”). I argue this act of naming was both indicative and declarative; it publicly inscribed what residents had enacted for decades: material, environmental, and collective progress through frontline recycling labor and vibrant community life. As a sonic counter-archive to systemic ignorance, Calle de Progreso stores memory in accumulated everyday acts: footsteps, radios, arguments, and laughter have inscribed the street through audible and remembered sound. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s concept of “pedestrian speech acts” (1984) and Kathleen Millar’s notion of “forms of living” (2018), this paper examines working, walking, listening, and sound-making as practices of social and sonic inscription. Understanding Calle de Progreso as a sonic counter-archive demonstrates how everyday sonic practices build collective identity and perform self-representation in contexts of structural power and disregard.

In Assam’s postcolonial tea plantations, lanes running through tea fields are spaces where Adivasi women pluckers—descendants of communities brought to the region as indentured labourers by British colonisers beginning in the nineteenth century—encounter tea estate administrative and managerial staff during their workday. This paper explores the everyday sounds and silences that inhabit these lanes during plucking shifts, weighing breaks, and lunchtime. I argue that these lanes hold heterogeneous sonic co-presences through which relations unfold, and plantation pasts and presents gather in layered temporal encounters. Through sound, I analyse relationalities including Adivasi kinship among women pluckers and administrative staff, friendships among the women, expressions of motherhood, and working relations among labouring, administrative, and managerial staff. I attend to “pyāri gāli” or scoldings of affection directed at labouring Adivasi women; to the songs they sing as brief moments of respite; to their gossip and laughter; and to the silences that settle in when the managerial staff are nearby—alongside other everyday sounds and absences that shape the lanes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across three tea plantations in Assam between 2024 and 2026, I situate my analysis within scholarship on listening (Kapchan 2017; Rice 2015), voice (Harkness 2013; Weidman 2008), and the Plantationocene (Baruah 2024). Unlike dominant narratives that frame Adivasis of Assam solely as victims of the plantation system, this paper turns to the soundscapes of the plantation lanes to foreground Adivasi connections to land and their everyday practices of survival and world-making.

March 20 is said to be the quietest day in València, Spain. Musicians have stowed their instruments, and kids have thrown their last firecrackers. But March 19, the final night of the city’s annual Falles Festival, features its own silences, the most palpable of which are those that punctuate the ritual burning of the massive satirical artworks that lend the festival its name. Marking the transition between these collections of silence is the cremà, the fiery process whereby the hundreds of monuments that populate plazas during Falles Week are consumed by cleansing fire. I linger in one such plaza across three festival years (2024, 2025, and 2026) to show how the cremà’s silences activate the collective memories essential to the internal and external legibility of the festival. Because it captures the not-yet-disappeared aspects of the outgoing festival year as it prepares for the coming of another, the cremà is a present so laden with the past and future that its present is necessarily an absent-present. Silence becomes the expressive device of this absent-present because it operates through a kaleidoscope of unpredictable, always-plural signifying modes (Smilges 2020), all the while feigning its own non-presence (Ochoa Gautier 2015). Through its cycles of presence and non-presence, silence generates what I call an axis of memory that charts the perceived distance between past, present, and future. This axis molds to the shifting collections of memories that shape participants' relationships with one another, with the festival’s practices, and with the festival spaces these practices animate.

Discussion