Trauma remains: The material afterlives of the 1989 Alton school bus crash

Abstract

This is an essay about how the material remains of automobile crashes remain in place to give road trauma a performative dimension through material objects. The paper draws on two decades of fieldwork on multiple roadside shrines throughout the American Southwest, but focuses on the site of the 1989 Alton school bus crash, which claimed the lives of 21 junior high and high school students in Alton, Texas, a small town on the border between Texas and Mexico. My analysis focuses on the way the trauma of the crash lives on in the materiality of the site—how it is structured visually, materially, and spatially at the shrine, but also how it is situated in relation to the adjacent intersection, guardrails, and fence, as well as the quarry and city park below. I argue that the shrine ensures not only that lost bodies receive a material afterlife in the form of a commemorative memorial, but also that the trauma of losing those lost bodies takes on a material afterlife in the structure of the site as well. By integrating both of these sets of material afterlives, the shrine becomes capable of translating Alton's collective trauma to a much broader collective made up not only of subsequent generations of Alton residents, but also of anonymous non-residents, forming a vast trauma collective that is stretched across time but always anchored to the materiality of the site.