Stories of decolonial resilience

ABSTRACT

Many scholars, analysts and commentators have noted that the neoliberal conjuncture has seen the rise of a veritable explosion of discourses and theories of resilience. Some regard this discursive and narrative profusion as integral to the ongoing project of a neoliberal ‘worlding’ that seeks to reconfigure all aspects of human subjectivities and social relations. Meanwhile, the ongoing outpouring of neoliberal discourses and narratives of resilience is accompanied by the expansion of disasterscapes across the planet as we speed apparently toward what the Caribbean scholar Sylvia Wynter calls an ‘unparalleled catastrophe for our species’. Some of these expanding disasterscapes are emerging across the terrain of a five-hundred-year history of genocidal and appropriative colonial practices. The people and communities inhabiting these disasterscapes have been struggling to develop counter-praxes of collective cultural resilience and survival in the face of the many catastrophes wrought over the centuries by coloniality. We turn to Wynter’s concept of homo narrans to examine Indigenous praxes for the performative enactment of alternative genres of the human that contest the worlding of neoliberal discourses and apparatuses of resilience. Wynter’s contributions to the de-universalization and thus relativization of Eurocentric ‘Man’ aim to make the present proliferation of the genres of humanity, our storytelling species, culturally intelligible in ways that might not only undercut the work done by neoliberal discourses of resilience toward the production of disastrous consequences in places like Guatemala and the obliteration of our capacities to imagine the world otherwise, but perhaps even ward off the potentially impending ‘unparalleled catastrophe for our species’. This paper draws on our ongoing research in Guatemala, which involves Indigenous and poor ladino survivors of the 2018 eruption of the Fuego Volcano, as well as survivors of the 2005 landslide that followed Hurricane Stan.

KEYWORDS:

• Disasters
• resilience
• Guatemala
• coloniality/decoloniality
• volcanoes
• popular culture

Introduction: resilience and its discontents

Numerous scholars have noted that the neoliberal conjuncture has seen the rise of a veritable explosion of discourses and theories of resilience. Many have traced the emergence of resilience to ecological theories of the 1970s, where it designated ‘the capacity of a system to return to a previous state, to recover from a shock, or to bounce back after a crisis or trauma’ (Neocleous, 2013: 3). One Foucauldian genealogy of resilience situates its appearance as a contemporary key term for political thought in the strategies of disaster preemption and preparedness concocted ‘within Cold War era civil defence and war planning activities designed to secure liberal order against surprise nuclear attack’ (Grove, 2013: 149). Others have noted a contemporary saturation of discourses of resilience across a ‘strikingly wide array of thematic areas (such as ecology, economy, psyches, or political regimes) as well as on distinct levels of analysis (from the macro-level of systems to the micro-level of selves)’ (Bracke, 2016a: 851). Discourses of resilience have multiplied to the point that they now permeate contemporary popular culture to a ‘truly striking degree’, as is notably expressed, for instance, via ‘the popularization of psychological theories that revolve around the notion of the “resilient self”’, including Build Your Resilience: Teach Yourself How to Survive and Thrive in any Situation; Resilience: Bounce Back from Whatever Life Throws at You, and The Power of Resilience: Achieving Balance, Confidence, and Personal Strength in Your Life, to list ‘just a few titles of literally thousands of recent books that offer visions on becoming resilient as well as exercises and techniques to do so’ (Bracke, 2016b: 53).

There appears to be a growing consensus among critical commentators that the contemporary mania for resilience is ‘part and parcel of a neoliberal “worlding”’, and that this is symptomatic of the extent to which neoliberalism constitutes ‘a cultural project bent on reshaping the structure of social relationships and subjectivities’ (Bracke, 2016a: 851).¹ Some have argued that discourses of resilience have gained prevalence as a technique or technology of the self that aims to colonize and discipline political imaginaries, as it ‘thwarts’ the development of ‘skills of imagining otherwise’ and thrives amidst ‘profound investment in the motto at the heart of neoliberalism: “There is no alternative”’ (Bracke, 2016a: 853; also see Neocleous, 2013). As Brad Evans and Julian Reid (2013: 85, emphasis added) put it, ‘building resilient subjects involves the deliberate disabling of the political habits, tendencies and capacities of peoples and replacing them with adaptive ones’. Moreover, discourses of resilience undercut ‘affective connections that might serve as the basis for radical action against the institutional sources of existing suffering and vulnerability’ by promoting the production of ‘resilient subjects and systems that are indifferent to suffering and insecurity in the present’, and by making ‘the object of political and ethical practice the capacity of a system to withstand future surprises, rather than the manifold sources of social and ecological insecurity’ that already run rampant here and now (Grove, 2013: 153, emphasis added).

A number of contemporary analysts and theorists are seeking to rethink existing theories and discourses of resilience and to reorient the political impetus that drives their formulation toward more progressive or radical trajectories. For instance, Alf Hornborg observes that, instead of inspiring opposition to ‘the neoliberal world order against which it was launched, the concept of resilience has been incorporated as a central component of the neoliberal model itself’ (2013: 127); he therefore attempts to rearticulate the concept to leverage an ‘underexplored potential of resilience theory to radically confront such power structures’ (2013: 116-7) and thus to turn its discursive force against neoliberalism. Similarly, Kevin Grove (2013: 146) notes that resilience theory emerged as ‘a beacon of hope on the left’ but has given rise to a panoply of knowledges, practices and initiatives that are often mobilized ‘to defend and strengthen the political economic status quo’; Grove nevertheless suggests some strategies and resources for escaping the limited political imaginaries generated by theories of resilience that are grounded in ‘the centred subject of modernist political thought’, and which might thus open ‘potential avenues for rethinking resilience politics’ (p. 147). Sarah Bracke deploys a deconstructive strategy to reconceptualize the relationship between vulnerability and resilience, and thus to interrogate and unsettle practices of neoliberal worlding that are built upon individualist ontologies. Her analysis suggests that although neoliberal resilience is built upon a denial of vulnerability, which is regarded as a shameful state under neoliberal regimes of truth and systems of meaning and affect, the very pursuit of resilience necessarily entails the at-least-implicit acknowledgement of haunting vulnerabilities. As Evans and Reid (2013: 84) argue, ‘the underlying ontology of resilience, therefore, is actually vulnerability. To be able to become resilient, one must first accept that one is fundamentally vulnerable’. The acknowledgement of vulnerability that is implicit in all striving for resilience thus leads Bracke, via Judith Butler (2004), to a glimpse of the radical potential that lies at the core of resilience theory: its opening toward an alternative ‘social ontology centered in relationality and interdependence’ (Bracke, 2016b: 72) that escapes the narrowly individualist ontologies of the neoliberal imagination. Moreover, Bracke (2016b: 71-2) usefully notes that despite ‘the ubiquity of resilience as a concept and frame to make sense of experiences and politics under a neoliberal regime of biopower’, we must keep in mind that ‘resilience means different things in different geopolitical contexts and according to different positionalities’, and that there is therefore a variety of ‘situated processes of resilient subjectification’ and an accompanying variety of ‘kinds of embodied agential modalities’ that such situated processes ‘foster and foreclose’. As Sylvia Wynter might put it (and about which we will have more to say), the modalities of resilience associated with the neoliberal worlding of a Eurocentric ‘overrepresentation of Man’ do not exhaust the full range of generic praxes for the performative enactment of humanity (see Wynter and McKittrick, 2015).

Indigenous peoples throughout the world have developed a variety of forms of collective cultural resilience over centuries of colonization and ongoing coloniality. Hornborg (2013: 129) notes that, despite their absorption into the Inca Empire during the 14th and 15th centuries, and the ravages brought about by Spanish colonization and the consequent collapse of the Inca Empire during the sixteenth century, ‘many rural, Quechua-speaking communities in Peru still practice today sustainable subsistence agriculture on terraces constructed several centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire’, and that the ‘local, socio-ecological building blocks of pre-colonial Andean civilisations’ thus appear to have been ‘sufficiently autonomous to recover from the recurrent shocks of supra-system breakdown’. Similarly, Penehira et al. (2014: 99), writing from Aotearoa/New Zealand, note that, like ‘Indigenous people in other parts of the world, Māori have shown and continue to show incredible resilience through our resistance to colonisation’, for ‘resilience is one of a number of inter-related Māori and Indigenous approaches which, all together, constitute a system for responding to colonial oppression’.

By the same token, however, coloniality, too, consists of a highly resilient, indeed virulently persistent, set of social, cultural, economic, and epistemic practices and formations. We use the term coloniality to acknowledge and signify that, while most formal colonial administrations came to an end with independence for many nations, numerous ideological formations, knowledges, discourses, practices, and racialized hierarchies and inequalities that colonialism created are still highly active throughout the world. Contemporary challenges to neoliberal discourses and practices of resilience must understand their rootedness within what Ramón Grosfoguel (2011: 5) calls the ‘modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’. While the centuries-long and disastrously catastrophic conditions otherwise known as formal legal colonial expropriation and administration that were imposed upon Indigenous peoples and ways of life may no longer hold sway, coloniality nevertheless persists in a multitude of insidious ways, deprives racialized people of life-affirming opportunities, condemns many to premature and avoidable death, and now increasingly demands officially sanctioned forms of ‘resilience’ from those least protected from and most exposed to a variety of grave deprivations, dangers, hazards and risks. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction defines ‘resilience’ as ‘the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from’ disasters ‘in a timely and efficient manner’. Although it makes no reference to the ongoing disaster of coloniality, Indigenous Guatemalans have nevertheless developed their own shared pedagogies and tactical approaches to the challenges it poses.²

Penehira et al. (2014: 102) suggest that an Indigenous approach to resilience must include at least three elements: an awareness of the necessity for collective resistance to colonial oppression; a recognition of the importance of Indigenous knowledges, cultures and forms of governance as key sources of shared strength and well-being; and cognizance of the ‘histories and contemporary experiences of colonisation, coupled with the ongoing racism and oppression intrinsic to this’ that Indigenous people must routinely confront. Along similar lines, Atallah’s (2016: 98) work with Palestinian refugees in a UN camp documented a number of key sources of resilience; these included ‘their engagement in political resistance, their harnessing of cultural and spiritual resources for perseverance, their re-gaining of ecological capital through direct engagement in native lands, and the re-gathering of memories of their aboriginal villages, oral histories, and rich native ecosystems’. Indigenous resilience clearly emerges from political resistance, including the conservation of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, storytelling, and struggling for the return of stolen lands. These are Indigenous praxes for the performative enactment of alternative genres of the human that powerfully contest Wynter’s overrepresented Eurocentric ‘Man’ and concomitant struggles to promote the worlding of neoliberal discourses and apparatuses of resilience.

Such examples, along with the rise of decolonial theory in Latin American cultural studies and beyond prompt us to consider how we might then theorize ‘decolonial resilience’. Decolonial scholarship provides us with many resources for challenging and rethinking core aspects of Euro-American modernity, epistemologies, and dualist ontologies, including those that fetishize and centre individualism, disavow reciprocity and relationality, and differentiate categorically between culture and nature, between social life and the economy, and between disaster and the everyday lives of formerly colonized and subjugated peoples. How might we rethink resilience along the lines of a nonmodern relational ontology that produces a ‘world as pluriverse’ governed by ‘a deeply relational worldview that shapes’ the prevailing meanings of ‘personhood, community, economy, and politics’, and that is built upon a deep recognition of ‘the embeddedness of the economy in social life and the restricted character of the market’, and of ‘the continuity between the natural, the human and the supernatural’ (Escobar, 2010: 9)? How might a reconceptualized decolonial resilience help us to rethink concepts such as ‘disaster’, ‘crisis’ and ‘catastrophe’, and their relationships to structural inequalities and to processes of representation and narrativization in a complexly mediatized world? How might such questions help us to address the incorporation of ‘resilience’ as a key component of neoliberal ‘worlding’ projects that struggle to produce flexibly adaptive subjectivities and to foreclose capacities to imagine the world otherwise? In addressing these questions, we’ll draw upon our ongoing research in Guatemala, which has involved in-depth interviews and two workshops with Indigenous and poor ladino survivors of two key disaster events: the 2018 eruption of the Fuego Volcano and the 2005 landslide that followed Hurricane Stan and affected the community of Panabaj near Santiago Atitlán.³ We begin with some background on Guatemala’s colonial disasterscape and the eruption of the Fuego volcano. We’ll then deploy Sylvia Wynter’s concept of homo narrans and related theoretical developments to examine practices of volcanic storytelling and popular culture, and end by outlining some of the decolonial negotiations around demands for neoliberal resilience that we have witnessed in our fieldwork in Guatemala.

The expansion of calls for neoliberal resilience reminds us in some ways of the ‘capitalist sorcery’ conjured by Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (2011). Like neoliberal ‘resilience’ in particular, which, as noted, seeks to replace political habits with adaptive ones (Evans and Reid, 2013), capitalist sorcery more generally works through incantations that ‘poison’ situations, events, and participants by capturing and depoliticizing them. Neoliberal sorcery that works through incantatory apparatuses and discourses such as those of resilience thus paralyzes thought, feeling and struggle by getting ‘a hold over something that matters’ (Pignarre and Stengers, 2011: 43) and depoliticizing it. Such practices of capture are often the work of neoliberal ‘minions’ who advance capitalist sorcery by spells that work through the generation and proliferation of ‘infernal alternatives’, which enchant those who might otherwise think, feel, and struggle by seeming ‘to leave no other choice than resignation or a slightly hollow sounding denunciation’ (p. 24). Neoliberal minions and sorcerers work to continuously reorganize the operations of capitalism ‘in such a way as to disempower any possibility of action that might find a reference point outside of the system and its logic’ (p. 27). For example, capitalism’s scientific and regulatory minions sought to mesmerize, capture and depoliticize the field of struggle over genetically modified (GM) foods, crops, and the like, by generating a slew of ‘infernal (rhetorical) alternatives that were hurriedly mobilized: that you either accept GM organisms or you promote irrational fears, accelerate the brain drain, refuse progress that poor, famished countries desperately need’ (p. 30). Such infernal alternatives call for ‘counter-magics’ capable of breaking the spells of neoliberal sorcery, so that ‘when an operation of capture succeeds, then, one will learn instead to yell, to cry, to find words that rise up like lamentations to speak this disgrace, to transform it into a force that obliges one to think/feel/act’ (p. 135). We appeal to Wynter’s concept of homo narrans to guide our search for stories that might, like such counter-magics, break the spells of neoliberal sorcery and enable people ‘to become capable once again of inhabiting the devastated zones of experience’ (Pignarre and Stengers, 2011: 137).

Guatemala’s colonial disasterscape

Guatemala’s recent disaster events take place within a conjuncture characterized by persistent state and military violence and dispossession, as well as tenacious resistance struggles on the part of Mayans and poor ladinos. After five centuries of colonial appropriation that has concentrated wealth and resources in the hands of an elite ladino minority, twentieth century Guatemala became the site of some of the most brutal human rights abuses the world has ever seen. The 36-year-long civil war began in 1960 but escalated sharply between 1978 and 1985. In the early 1980s, the Guatemalan army, which was heavily supplied with US military aid and fuelled by anti-communist geopolitical obsessions, murdered and disappeared thousands of poor and Indigenous people, and wiped at least 440 Mayan villages off the map completely. Many Guatemalans became refugees in Mexico or joined internally displaced populations who hid in the mountains. In total, more than 200,000 people perished during the civil war; 83% of these were Indigenous Mayans and the vast majority were civilians (CEH, 1999). One of the key findings published by the UN Commission for Historical Clarification after the peace accords of 1996 is that the civil war resulted in the ‘extermination, en masse, of defenceless Mayan communities . . . through methods whose cruelty has outraged the moral conscience of the civilised world’; these massacres were accompanied by ‘multiple acts of savagery’ that included widespread sexual violence against Mayan women, the extraction of the viscera of living victims in the presence of others, and the use of petrol to burn people alive (CEH, 1999: 533). While the civil war came to an end in 1996, state-led violence did not. Moreover, the social conditions that led to the civil war are still very much in place today. In the last two decades, thousands of Guatemalans, including many environmental defenders, have been subject to extrajudicial killings or have been forcibly displaced as a result of structural and gender-based violence, human trafficking, organized crime and gang attacks, and extractivist projects, as well as by earthquakes, tropical storms, landslides, and volcanic eruptions (Bonilla, 2018).

Charles Hale (2019: 82) has identified forms of what he calls ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ in Latin America that have perversely left ‘unchallenged, and often more deeply entrenched than ever, pervasive relations of structured racial inequality’. He argues that neoliberal multiculturalism has been attractive to some Latin American states because it generally requires no redistributive economic policies and even facilitates novel techniques of top-down control as the Black and Indigenous beneficiaries of certain cultural rights thus ‘come under the purview of State management in new ways’ (Hale, 2019: 81). Hale and Mullings (2020) observe, furthermore, that the ‘deepening racial inequalities’ (p. 42) driven in Latin American nations such as Guatemala, Colombia and Brazil by ‘global patterns of neoliberal capitalism’ (p. 47) have given rise to substantial backlash against Black and Indigenous social movements that have ‘gone too far’ (p. 42) in the eyes of mestizo and ladino elites. It is within this neoliberal conjuncture that the contemporary Guatemalan disasterscape has been struggled over and taken form.

Fuego, known as Chi Q’aq’ (‘where the fire is’ in Kaqchikel) is a highly active stratovolcano near the tourist city of Antigua. Fuego produces frequent explosions, tall ash plumes, lahars, and lethal pyroclastic flows; it erupts frequently and has unleashed multiple serious and damaging eruptions since the colonial era, including major events in 1582, 1717, 1932 and 1974. The communities around Fuego exist mostly as a consequence of the establishment of large farms and plantations by Guatemalan and European capitalist investment in the production of sugar cane, rubber, quinine, African palm, fruit trees and especially coffee. The dramatic expansion of the commercial coffee economy in the nineteenth century resulted in the territorial displacement of local Indigenous settlements, whose members were forced to relinquish their historical communal claims to and occupation of the land and become manual labourers under a colonial plantation system that is still in place today (Gallini, 2011). Between 1974 and 1999, the volcano went into a phase of reduced activity that coincided with a population increase and the foundation of new agricultural settlements by both large agribusiness and communities displaced by the army massacres of the 1980s. Conflict, landlessness, and unemployment attracted dispossessed people to the area, exposed them to risk and maintained their marginal and exploited status. Fuego’s current phase of highly eruptive activity began in 1999 with small weekly explosions and lava eruptions (Waite et al., 2013). People living on the flanks of the volcano became used to frequent ash fall, seismicity, loud rumbling, lahars, and occasional pyroclastic flows or pyroclastic density currents (PDCs).

On 3 June 2018, Fuego erupted powerfully, generating fast-moving PDCs and lahars that caused the barrancas to overflow. The flows hit several of the communities in the vicinity and buried the main road (RN14) between Antigua and Guatemala City. The worst affected community was San Miguel Los Lotes, where hundreds of people died when they were buried by a rapidly moving pyroclastic flow. Many of the survivors from this community lost loved ones and witnessed their friends and neighbours screaming as they succumbed to the hot ash. Most survivors cannot adequately describe what they witnessed, but talked about the ‘intolerable heat’, ‘the children burned all black’, and ‘300 families buried’; they told us how ‘the earth shook, the houses disappeared, as if it were a movie’. In the words of one survivor, ‘Los Lotes was finished off. Everybody died’. Other communities such as La Trinidad managed to protect life through self-evacuation strategies but lost their coffee harvests and their livelihoods. More than 12,000 people from these communities were evacuated to shelters in the neighbouring towns of Escuintla and Alotenango (CONRED, 2018). While some were rehoused, many returned home to their communities, where they remain highly exposed to lahars that result from the mixture of seasonal rains and accumulated volcanic material. These events demonstrate that coloniality and racism place people in hazardous locations; however, they also invite decolonial interventions, as we show in the next section.

Nowhere was the coloniality of disaster more evident than in the community of San Miguel Los Lotes, which was wiped off the map, as were so many Indigenous villages by the brutal military assaults of the 1980s. By contrast, La Reunión, a nearby luxury hotel and golf resort, was evacuated early enough to avert casualties altogether, even though much of the complex was destroyed. It is clear that CONRED, the state organization charged with disseminating information about risk, failed to communicate appropriate warnings to the people of Los Lotes, and could have been prepared to evacuate those from the community who lost their lives, as were the wealthy tourists at La Reunión.⁴ Decolonial theory alerts us to the presence of an ‘abyssal line’ that differentiates the ‘zone of being’ inhabited by Euro-Americans and others who belong in the Global North (including the wealthy foreign tourists who may be visiting select spaces within the Global South, such as La Reunión), on the one hand, from the ‘zone of nonbeing’ (Fanon, 1968: 2), whose ‘dysselected’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015) denizens, such as those Guatemalans who are neither light-skinned nor middle-class, may be condemned to premature death without compunction or substantial perturbation among the privileged (see Grosfoguel, 2018). We might say that the eruption of Fuego rendered the abyssal line that divides Los Lotes and La Reunión, and thus the close proximity of the zone of being to that of nonbeing, strikingly visible.

The road construction workers sent to repair the volcano damage to highway RN14 found, upon their arrival at the site, the remains of people killed by the eruption and quietly dumped these remains in the river or disposed of them in plastic bags. In her analysis of ‘necronationalism’, Shaira Vadasaria (2015) argues that the management, and particularly the disappearance or erasure, of the dead bodies of Indigenous people plays a central role in practices for the production of settler-colonial national imaginaries and identities, and in the ongoing renewal and attempted purification of colonial nationality and of its accompanying and buttressing mythologies. As Vadasaria (2015: 119) writes, necronationalism is ‘a technique of settler colonial nation building in that the very formation and maintenance of settler memory and nationalism rests on the capacity to disavow the markings of Indigenous death, starting at the level of corporeality. In the absence of such traces, necronationalism makes room to consolidate settler mythologies’. Necronationalism thus produces colonial spaces and identities. In this way, the colonial ‘management of death . . . reveals how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined’ (Vadasaria, 2015: 129). These insights help to reveal the coloniality at work both in the production of the intertwined fates of San Miguel Los Lotes and La Reunión, as noted above, and in the Guatemalan government’s prioritization of the restoration of RN14, the main road from Antigua to Guatemala City, which is thus a key signifier of ‘modernization’ and of the development imperatives of the ladino nation-state; the logics of necronationalism impel this nation-state toward the erasure of Indigenous and poor ladino bodies that expose the close proximity of the zones of being and nonbeing on either side of the abyssal line made starkly visible by the eruption of Fuego, and toward the speedy restoration of this colonial nation-state’s newly endangered highway to colonial modernity.

Like the 2,000 or so who are thought by community members to have been killed in San Miguel Los Lotes (the official toll records only 200) and who were left buried in the rubble deposited by the eruption, those whose bodies were dumped in rivers or stuffed into plastic bags by highway construction workers were sacrificed to the colonial national identities, mythologies, and memoryscapes that are under constant construction by the ladino state. In this sense, the erasure of their presence contributes to the work of neoliberal and colonial ‘resilience’ in its foreclosure of the opportunities for imagining otherwise, for ‘the ability to produce and renew settler mythologies of discovery and possession requires the persistent denial of Indigenous ties to land, memory and history. In the absence of all that is purged – and in the presence of all those who continue to survive – lies a new set of stories that inevitably requires new forms of maintenance’ (Vadasaria, 2015: 117, emphasis added). Herein lies the urgency of our need to bring forth new modes of ‘radical thought . . . tasked with uncovering the utterances of “the living corpse,” whose lives were a theater for violation’ (Alagraa, 2018: 169); and herein lies the urgency of our need for the revival and renewal of Indigenous, popular, and subaltern stories.

Despite the ongoing labours of necronationalism described above, the traces of the lives erased by agents of the ladino nation-state, like the mass graves created during the civil war (which were ultimately exhumed many years later), nevertheless persist and remain available for re-narrativization, counter-memorialization, reactivation, and thus the inspiration and mobilization of alternative political imaginaries and projects. One can see the traces of the lives and deaths that have been erased by Fuego (and by the ladino state) in the shoes, clothes, toys, bottles, and letters that lay strewn across the terrain of destruction (see Figure 1). Their traces remain as well in the memories of those who have survived Fuego, governmental neglect and indifference, and five centuries of coloniality. If such traces, memories and persistence against all odds constitute a form of resilience, it is, unlike the neoliberal sort, a form of resilience that refuses to grant, tacitly or otherwise, legitimacy to the forces and practices of coloniality that struggle to contain or extinguish it. It is a form of resilience that sustains a capacity to imagine otherwise and that articulates a refusal to accept the ‘coloniality of Being’. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007: 257) writes, the coloniality of Being ‘shows itself forth when the preservation of Being (in any of its determinations: national ontologies, identitarian ontologies, etc.) takes primacy over listening to the cries of those whose humanity is being denied’; it ‘appears in historical projects and ideas of civilization which advance colonial projects of various kinds inspired or legitimized by the idea of race’. The refusal of this coloniality of Being inflects the protests voiced by Fuego’s survivors in San Miguel Los Lotes:

The government doesn’t care. Our poverty makes it impossible to find a way out [Participant 1].

CONRED should have warned us as they did at La Reunión. Government agencies only worry about people who have money. We are a humble community. That bothers me. [Participant 2]

God, why didn’t you send [the eruption] to the richest people? In La Reunión they got them out in time, the people with money. [Participant 3]

Figure 1. San Miguel Los Lotes: quotidian destruction. Photo Credit: Julie Cupples.

Spatial stories, Fuego, and homo narrans

Wynter’s account of homo narrans, which is deeply inspired by the work of W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire, among others, mounts a decolonial critique of Eurocentric knowledges of humanity and develops an astonishing genealogy of the diverse ‘genres of the human’ that are rooted in the cosmogonic origin stories told by different cultures. Wynter calls her approach ‘meta-Darwinian’ for its rejection of the ‘biocentric’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 17) notion that humans are ‘naturally selected’ and can thus be understood ‘on the natural scientific model of a natural organism’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 21). Instead, Wynter argues that it is necessary to understand the co-evolution of human brains (unlike those of all other species, including all other primates), with the language and storytelling faculties that are linked to the unique ‘mythmaking region of the human brain’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 25).⁵ She therefore asserts that humans are hybridly constituted by both biological/phylogenic/ontogenic codes carried in our DNA (which she calls our ‘first set of instructions’) and sociogenic/narrative/mythic/fictive codes carried most especially in the origin stories that anchor particular societies and naturalize their orderings (which she calls our ‘second set of instructions’). Wynter draws upon not only the work of cultural, anticolonial, and radical Black theorists but also of brain scientists, paleontologists, archaeologists, systems biologists and others to argue that the mythoi generated by different genres of humanity constitute ‘genre-specific orders of truth’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 32) that define ‘particular conceptions of being human’ which people instantiate and live out ‘only because of our capacity to turn theory into flesh’ via ‘process[es] of transmutation’ that are ‘effected’ through cultural systems of representation (Wynter, 2000: 40). The lessons Wynter takes from Fanon’s (1968) insistence on the dual (skin/masks), hybrid constitution of people as both bios and mythoi, lead her to argue that humans are thus literally biologically built, in part, by our stories. The storytelling foundations for the existence of different genres of the human have been increasingly obscured, however, by the global hegemony of the Enlightenment’s ‘fully desupernaturalized’ Eurocentric narratives of ‘Man’, which have propounded their own purported ‘universality’ around the world for the past five hundred years, initially in the guise of homo politicus (‘Man1’), which was subsequently reinvented by Darwin and the nineteenth century British bourgeoisie as homo oeconomicus (‘Man2’) (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 35).

From a Wynterian perspective, then, we can see that the processes of ‘neoliberal worlding’ that have led to the generation of a multitude of discourses and narratives of resilience across a wide variety of cultural sites and terrains are a consequence of what she refers to as the ‘overrepresentation of Man’ that has accompanied the Eurocentric hegemonization of the world under contemporary forms of globalization. Her work therefore aims ‘to relativize the West’s hitherto secular liberal monohumanist conception of our being human, its overrepresentation as the being of being human itself’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 31). The globalized ‘overrepresentation of Man’, with its ‘imperative supraordinate telos of increasing capital accumulation’, has brought about a ‘systemic repression of all other alternative modes of material provisioning’, so that ‘there can ostensibly be no alternative to’ Eurocentric Man’s ‘planetarily-ecologically extended, increasingly techno-automated, thereby job-destroying, postindustrial, yet no less fossil fuel-driven, thereby climate-destabilizing free-market capitalist economic system, in its now extreme neoliberal transnational technocratic configuration’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 22). To speak instead, then, of the ‘genres of being human’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015: 31) might offer some hope for the recovery of pluriversal modes of being that are capable of constituting or contributing to praxes of Indigenous and popular resilience, and thus of enabling the multiple genres of the human to become more visible, audible, and legible to others. As Judith Butler (whose understanding of the performative constitution of gender is cited by Wynter as a key inspiration for her theory of the constitutive narrative enactment of the different genres of our humanity) wrote some thirty years ago in her deconstruction of gendered identities, her hope was to help enable ‘cultural configurations of sex and gender’ to ‘proliferate or, rather’, to help bring about a situation where ‘their present proliferation’ might ‘become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life’, thereby hastening ‘the denaturalization of gender as such’ (Butler, 1990: 190). So too do Wynter’s critiques of the ‘overrepresentation of Man’ and contributions to the de-universalization and thus relativization of this Eurocentric subject aim to make the present proliferation of the genres of humanity, our storytelling species, culturally intelligible in ways that might not only undercut the work done by neoliberal discourses of resilience toward the production of disastrous consequences in places like Guatemala and the obliteration of our capacities to imagine the world otherwise, but perhaps even ward off an impending ‘unparalleled catastrophe for our species’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015).

While Wynter decisively rejects liberal humanism, she offers in its place a ‘counter-humanism’ that differs sharply from the deeply racialized humanisms of Eurocentric modernity (which were inaugurated with the conquest of the Americas that began in 1492), rather than another of the various versions of posthumanism that have taken hold in European critical theory since the 1990s.⁶ In her account of what she calls (following Fanon) the ‘new human’, Wynter emphasizes, in much the same way that many posthumanists do, the autopoiesis of different genres of the human. Thus, Wynter’s counter-humanism posits genres of the hybridly human (another key concept that is central to both Wynter and to posthumanism) that create rather than are created by external powers that Euromodern humanisms project onto entities such as ‘God’, ‘Nature’, or ‘the market’ (Erasmus, 2020: 54). Furthermore, the ‘human’ that Wynter theorizes is rooted in radical Black, anti-colonial thought lines that long predate (and also anticipate aspects of) both anti-humanism and posthumanism; her counter-humanism derives from the perspectives, intellectual traditions, and ‘lived experience[s] of dominated and liminal people’ (Erasmus, 2020: 53). Unlike contemporary posthumanism, Wynter’s counter-humanism is built around an account of racialization and coloniality that lies at the core of its engagement with ‘the violent misalignment of an anti-black symbolic world with the black body and black civilizations’ and in its arguments that ‘the stories we live by and dream of shape what we do and make “the human” a set of practices’ (Erasmus, 2020: 56). Her theoretical development of Fanon’s concept of ‘sociogeny’ emphasizes ‘the stories with which we think’ and ‘for which we fight’, which number among the ‘resources we draw on as we make our lives with what we find in a configuration of power at a particular time’. Human (hi)stories are ‘about both memories and futures’, so ‘the stories we struggle for’ engage not only ‘the conditions that oppress us’ but also ‘those that facilitate practices of freedom’ (Erasmus, 2020: 56).⁷

Wynter’s notion of homo narrans resonates interestingly with Michel de Certeau’s concept of ‘spatial stories’. As we’ve seen, for Wynter, stories are constitutive of (different genres of) the human; for de Certeau, storytelling is instrumental in the production of spaces and places. Furthermore, he writes, stories ‘carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places’ (de Certeau, 1984: 118). De Certeau famously uses ‘place’ to designate the spatial orders produced, delimited, authorized, and regulated by dominating powers and authorities (governments, corporations, bureaucracies, city planners, scientific institutions, colonial administrations, authors), who thus determine and enforce the norms of ‘propriety’ and of who or what belongs within this or that place. By contrast, he ascribes the production of ‘space’ to the tactical and opportunistic practices, impertinences, and raids on established orders that are conducted by those who are socially disempowered within these orders and who thus lack the luxury of a stable and permanently held ‘place’ to call their own, and who must therefore devise ways of making do within worlds and power-bearing systems of knowledge that they neither control nor by and large benefit from. As de Certeau writes, ‘space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e. a place constituted by a system of signs’ (de Certeau, 1984: 117). Throughout the modern period, as discourses of ‘science’ have produced and colonized places and practices for the ‘legitimate’ creation and validation of ‘knowledge’, de Certeau notes that the contemporary ‘geographical form’ of the map has gradually displaced, erased and marginalized the spatial stories that are the ultimate precondition for the production of place and of mapping in the first instance. The imperious modes of spatial totalization captured and made legible by contemporary maps, which are ‘constituted as proper places in which to exhibit the products of knowledge’, thus differ categorically, in de Certeau’s account, from the spatial stories that ‘exhibit on the contrary the operations that’ produce space (i.e. the tactical practices of the socially weak), ‘within a constraining and non-“proper” place, to mingle its elements anyway’ (de Certeau, 1984: 117). Maps (in their contemporary form) produce the ‘places’ of the powerful; spatial stories and other tactical practices of everyday life produce the ‘spaces’ within places that are temporarily transformed and held by the socially weak within the orders that otherwise seek constantly to constrain them and hold them ‘in place’. As John Fiske (2016: 153) writes, ‘maps are powerful discourse, for they bring together science and representation to function as explicit instruments of control’. Maps exhibit a totalizing knowledge that both produces places and exerts control over them – places that, ‘from the ancient cosmos to contemporary public housing developments, are all forms of an imposed order’; by contrast, spatial stories are ‘operations on places’ that tell us ‘what one can do in . . . and make out of’ them (de Certeau, 1984: 122).

Stories link, organize and ascribe meanings to places, and telling them is among the practices of the socially subordinated that produce partially liberated spaces. De Certeau gives an account of the stories of Frei Damião, ‘the charismatic hero’ of many poor residents of the Brazilian state of Pernambuco who, in the tales the people tell of him, visits ‘celestial punishments’ upon the rich and powerful. These stories work to produce two stratified spaces: one that is ‘polemological’ and that reveals clearly both the ruthless power and the duplicity of the rich and of the police, and one that is ‘utopian’, where any sense of the legitimacy of the imposed colonial, capitalist order is tenaciously denied by the people of Pernambuco, even though the fact of their ongoing subordination is inescapable in all aspects of their everyday lives (de Certeau, 1984: 16). Although the historic injustices imposed upon ‘the vanquished of history – the body on which the victories of the rich or their allies are continually inscribed’ (de Certeau, 1984: 16) – are presented to the poor as if there were in effect ‘no alternative’ to their perpetual immiseration and exploitation by the dominant, the stories of Frei Damião ‘create another space’ and ‘provide the possible with a site that is impregnable, because it is a nowhere, a utopia’ (de Certeau, 1984: 16). While these spatial stories therefore do not overturn the existing orders of coloniality and domination, they nevertheless mark the defeat of these orders’ efforts to extinguish the capacities of its subjects to imagine the world differently, and they mark a popular refusal to grant the legitimacy both of the world as it exists and of the narratives of the powerful. We might say that these stories contribute at once to the (re)production of a particular genre of humanity and of its spaces of subaltern, decolonial resilience. Over and against ‘the statutory fact of an order presenting itself as natural’, the devotees of Frei Damião narrated ‘supernatural events’ that produced ‘another scene’ where the ‘historical contingency of this “nature”’ shone resplendent. This other scene constituted a ‘place for protest’ where ‘the unacceptability of an order which is nevertheless established was articulated, appropriately enough, as a miracle’ (de Certeau, 1984: 16). Frei Damião’s ‘“believers” thus subvert the fatality of the established order’ (de Certeau, 1984: 17). Moreover, their spatial storytelling tactics are suggestive of the possibilities that arise when, in Wynter’s terms, the ‘second set of instructions’ of one genre of humanity (in this case, the Christian origin myths transported to the Americas by its colonizers) are appropriated by those of another genre. Such practices might be said to constitute a form of border thinking (about which we’ll say more below).

Narratives of Indigenous cultural resilience

Returning to the Guatemalan disasterscape, it is notable that volcanoes have become powerful cultural signs that have repeatedly been mobilized in the service of distinct Central American political projects and narratives, both colonial and decolonial. During the movements for independence, for instance, volcanoes became central figures of resistance against foreign colonizers and in foundational nationalist narratives, but were also fashioned into disciplinary tropes of chauvinistic national legitimization (Anderson, 2011). Furthermore, the threatening figure of the erupting volcano has been reappropriated by resistance struggles against internal colonialism. As Anderson (2011: 109) writes, ‘the volcanic metaphor of a nation forged by fire is often turned on its head by proponents of social revolution, coming to symbolize internal class warfare between the impoverished masses and the political and economic elite’. Narratives of the unsettling and potentially explosive uncertainty and psychological trauma that result from living under an active volcano can thus be readily articulated to, and can in this way be used to articulate a response in the face of, the stresses and instabilities that arise from social and political exclusion, marginalization and repression.

Such articulations can be found in Guatemalan popular culture, as in the legend of Juan Noj, a supernatural ladino character with horns who lives inside the Santiaguito volcano near Quetzaltenango.⁸ Because the volcano is so active, his house is always getting burnt, so he requires souls to help him rebuild it. He sends illnesses to the surrounding communities and puts the souls of those who die from these afflictions to work for him. Juan Noj’s racialization as an exploitative ladino render him as an inverse of the figure of Frei Damião: rather than enacting imaginary punishments of the rich and powerful as payback for their immiseration of the popular classes, the spatial stories of Juan Noj’s predations serve as constant reminders of what Indigenous and poor ladino Guatemalans are up against as they struggle for decolonial resilience. Juan Noj’s legends are thus used by the people as ways to make sense of living simultaneously alongside an active volcano and with ongoing colonial dispossession and exploitation. The spatial stories of Juan Noj that are circulated by Mayan Guatemalans create and sustain a place for the refusal of forms of ladino coloniality that are institutionalized in the plantation system and in the zone of nonbeing that lies across the abyssal line from sites like La Reunión.

From the perspective of traditional Indigenous Guatemalan cosmogonies and origin stories, volcanoes or ‘Ixcanul’ (literally ‘sections of land falling down’) are sacred entities that give birth to new topoi and are key actors in the production of socio-natural worlds that are central to Mayan spiritualities and cosmovisions. Ixcanul tower over the terrain and constitute interlaced sets of geotectonic, atmospheric, spiritual and narrative processes, for as Reid and Sieber (2020: 223) note, storytelling is ‘often inseparable from the land itself and geographic entities’ in Indigenous conceptualizations. Volcanoes and volcanic imaginaries are ubiquitous in Central American literature and popular culture and produce intense cultural, religious, and spiritual meanings that sometimes arise from and intervene in struggles over colonialism and coloniality. Indeed, the presence and significance of Central American volcanoes were core to the accounts of early chroniclers, and both Indigenous peoples and colonizers saw these landforms as active supernatural agents that could do grave harm if not placated through sacrifice or baptism (Viramonte and Incer-Barquero, 2008). The Spanish colonizers believed volcanoes were sites of demonic activity that required exorcism and baptism, and priests often placed crosses inside or near the mouths of volcanoes. But volcanoes frequently resisted such attempts at baptism. For instance, the Nicaraguan volcano Momotombo remains an ‘unsanctified’ volcano, as ‘the old friars who started for its summit, to set up the cross there, were never heard of again’ (Squier 1860: 534). The Fuego volcano also violently resisted the baptism and renaming attempted by Spanish Franciscan monks in the sixteenth century when it erupted and spat out a large, wooden cross they had placed in its mouth, which sent the holy object hurtling toward the bishop’s home in Antigua (Dussaussay, 1897).⁹ To this day, residents of the region smile with recognition when this locally familiar spatial story of anti-colonial refusal is recounted, as our research team discovered during fieldwork there.

Such examples demonstrate the importance of narrative disarticulation and rearticulation that are at work in the ongoing pursuit of Indigenous, decolonial modes of resilience. As we’ve argued, neoliberal worlding and coloniality mobilize discourses that promote the formation of virulently individualistic subjectivities and Eurocentric knowledges that deny pluriversality and seek to suffocate the skills of imagining differently. By contrast, decolonial resilience incorporates forms of sociality and storytelling that assert Indigenous ways of being and modes of belonging, that link state neglect and emergent disasterscapes to broader histories of colonial violence and racialization, that regard the disastrous and catastrophic events which increasingly erupt around the world as political problems requiring collective mobilization against the power-blocs and institutionalized forms of ‘business as usual’ responsible for the reproduction and sustenance of coloniality, and that nurture the development of ‘border positions’ and forms of ‘border thinking’ capable of sustaining ‘active de-colonizing projects . . . from the lived experiences (e.g. subjectivity) of diverse communities’ (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 213). Such projects that aim at ‘de-colonizing being and knowledge’ (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 219) open lines of flight toward what the Zapatistas have called ‘a world in which many worlds fit’ (Gahman, et al., 2022: 18).

The situations in which the relocated Indigenous communities of La Rochela and La Trinidad find themselves reveal two distinct tactical modes of negotiation around coloniality and approaches to the development of decolonial resilience. La Rochela is an Indigenous Mam community made up of people originally from Todos Santos Cuchumatán in Huehuetango who were displaced by the war and relocated to the shadow of Fuego. They have therefore lost their ancestral lands and now live in a highly dangerous place that lacks even the most basic elements of infrastructure such as a decent road that would enable them to evacuate in case of eruption. Their ability to escape an erupting volcano is thus hampered by state neglect and the lack of investment in conventional forms of development. As a result, they often react angrily to scientists who come to study Fuego as they know that scientific understandings will be of little use without a means of escape. As one survivor from La Rochela told us:

I always told CONRED when they came to the community: ‘It is of no use for you placing the signs for evacuation routes if the road is in such bad state. It’s even better if you don’t’. It makes no sense to have an evacuation route signposted if they are leading us to a place where we are going to die. That is deceiving people. [Participant 4]

By contrast, the community of La Trinidad was formed by a group of refugees who had returned from Mexico, where they were driven in exile when state-led terror campaigns against Indigenous communities were radically intensified in the early 1980s; after the civil war peace accords were signed, they managed to secure land near Fuego on which to grow coffee. These refugees had been revolutionaries – indeed some of them were guerrilla fighters and sympathizers – who had further developed their political skills while living in Mexico and are in fact often credited with inspiring the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. At the time of our first period of fieldwork in 2019 they were still living in temporary shelters in Escuintla, but were fighting for a new farm and developing pioneering forms of community redress by both drawing and building upon their considerable experiences as refugees and revolutionaries.¹⁰ They had gained a seat on a body called the mesa multisectorial, which was a kind of post-Fuego negotiating table that had been established by the Guatemalan government, but from which most ordinary community members had been excluded. They told us:

We weren’t invited or taken into account at the negotiation (mesa multisectorial). Everyone there was scared [of us]. We presented the first document to the government asking for our relocation to a new site. Not a single minister wanted to accept the document. But now we are accepted, and we are the vanguard [leading the other communities]. [Participant 5]

Thanks to the political leadership of La Trinidad, several other communities went on to gain seats at the table where decisions were being made. When talking about the volcano, survivors mobilize a strong decolonial critique that emerges not from academic study but from the experiences of everyday life:

Guatemala’s biggest problem is the distribution of land. It all began with the conquest. [Participant 6]

Wealthy people get more protection than the campesinos. We poor people also have the right to life. [Participant 7]

The government never gives anything, you have to grab it from them. We are going to grab it and of that we are sure. [Participant 8]

Developing decolonial resilience in a disasterscape that has endured hundreds of years of coloniality is a risky endeavor, as it involves community-driven political capacity-building and speaking back to power. The eruption of new crises and the appearance of instabilities create opportunities that both the power-bloc and the politically subordinated social formations and alliances work to turn toward their own advantage. When a major 1976 earthquake struck Guatemala, the government branded many community leaders as ‘troublemakers’ and mobilized the army to kill or drive these leaders into exile (Anderson and Woodrow, 1998), just as they subsequently did to the activists who years later would return to La Trinidad, bringing new political strategies with them from Mexico to advance local struggles for decolonial resilience, as noted above. In October 2005, nearly thirty years after the 1976 quake, Hurricane Stan produced a landslide that buried hundreds of members of the Tz’utujil community of Panabaj in the town of Santiago Atitlán and displaced thousands more. Then-president of Guatemala, Oscar Berger, sought to minimize the landslide’s impact in the media by telling reporters that poor people were well accustomed to living in difficult conditions (Hermesse and Tobar Gramajo, 2010). However, Santiago Atitlán was also a community that was accustomed to struggling against coloniality. In 1990, the townspeople, who were tired of the routine state-led (and US-backed) killings, disappearances and human rights abuses that had become regular features of life there, successfully drove the army out and fought to win a presidential declaration of Santiago Atitlán as a demilitarized zone (as it remains today). It was upon this terrain of decolonial struggle that Elena Chiquival would emerge as a leader in the local Tz’utujil movement against racism and sexism, and for decent housing, the recognition of the humanity and of the specific cultural needs of Indigenous peoples, and for the flourishing of pluriversality and alternative modes of being human in the world.

In March 2019, our research team took Pati and Carmen, two community leaders from the Fuego region, to Santiago Atitlán to meet with Elena, who discussed her role in local struggles for political redress after the Guatemalan government proposed to relocate homeless Tz’utujil people displaced in 2005 by Hurricane Stan to inappropriately small dwellings in an area that was as hazardous as the one they’d been displaced from, without even conducting a proper environmental impact assessment. After many years of fighting against both the government and the squalid conditions they were forced to endure in overcrowded temporary shelters, they won the right to relocate to a post-disaster housing project known as Chukmuk. Elena noted that she and the others had responded to the post-Stan situation in four main ways. The first is by asserting Indigenous ways of being in the world and demanding homes with ‘pertenencia cultural’: culturally appropriate modes of belonging. For Elena, Indigenous culture is not something that provides folkloric colour to Guatemala but is her community’s very means of survival:

Constructing [homes] with a sense of cultural belonging means taking into account how Indigenous peoples live in this place. What our culture is like, how Indigenous peoples really live. The state has a house size standard of 7 × 14, but in Chukmuk we managed to negotiate a size of 10 × 15, which is 150m² for each family. And this is because we incorporated cultural belonging. Culturally, we need food sovereignty, the women need a small garden in their homes to grow cilantro and mint; this is not something we purchase. We also need a space for around 10 chickens, somewhere to store our firewood – because we cook with firewood. Not all families are comfortable cooking with gas and we need space for the temazcal [steam bath].

De Certeau (1984: xxi, 119) notes that narratives related by apartment dwellers tend to recount the practices whereby the latter inscribe their identities into places they don’t have the luxury of owning, so that these spatial stories form itineraries of the appropriative actions and ways of inserting memories that make space for subordinated modes of belonging within an imposed order. Such acts participate in the same mode of creativity as linguistic production or walking in a city designed by bureaucrats and planners: they disrupt the determinations often presumed or intended by authorities to flow from the level of structure to that of practice, and thus insert alternative logics and modes of operation into imposed orders. In this way, they might be said to constitute an ingredient of subordinate cultural resilience.

Second, Elena makes a clear articulation between the community’s treatment in the wake of Hurricane Stan and during the civil war, and notes that the modes of violence are in each instance embedded in the same logics of coloniality. As it has been developed within cultural studies, and particularly by Stuart Hall, the concept of articulation carries the twin meanings of linking and languaging, such that new meanings are produced by new articulations of signifying elements that may be but aren’t necessarily ever connected to one another. When such connections produce new, socially and politically effective meanings, they also carry the potential to inspire and mobilize popular social and political formations such as Indigenous communities and movements, who link, attach, or articulate themselves to and through these meanings, and thus they open new forms of and possibilities for decolonial resilience. Elena related to us how, after Stan struck, the government had suggested the relocation of the affected community to another area on the coast; she and her comrades responded by articulating their post-Stan treatment to the atrocities of the civil war and to their successes via the peace accords and the work of the subsequent truth commission:

We told them to go to hell with all their proposals to relocate us to land on the southern coast. We were victims of the war, a war that was waged against us by the state. The people who died in the hurricane were people who occupied these lands after the war, after the army left, and now you want to send us to the coast. We’re not going, we’ll go to the international court if we have to, but we are not going to live on the coast. We have a totally different culture here. [. . .]

In other countries in the world . . . they don’t send people to live on the flanks of volcanoes, they always carry out a study in advance. But not in Guatemala. In Guatemala, they see us like a cage of chickens that can be left to die. We are 250,000 victims of the conflict, of Mitch, Stan, Cambray, and now of Fuego. It is not nature that is working against us, it is the bad politics of this country and therefore we have to fight.

Third, she engages in forms of what decolonial theorists call ‘border thinking’, which help to build solidarities and alliances and to assert Indigenous interests within and beyond her community. The ‘double consciousness’ theorized by Dubois ‘lies at the very foundation of border thinking’ (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 211) and ‘border gnosis’, which is ‘knowledge that takes form at the margins of the modern Western world’ (Irwin, 2001: 509). Border thinking is ‘a site of criss-crossed experience, language, and identity’ (Saldívar, 2007: 350) that involves ‘dwelling in the border, not crossing borders’ (Weier, 2017: 11). The border in border thinking is both geographical (as it marks the racialized difference between the zones of being and nonbeing imposed by coloniality and imperialism) and epistemic: ‘Border thinking is the epistemology of the exteriority; that is, of the outside created from the inside; and as such, it is always a decolonial project’ (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 206). Border thinking ‘emerges from the colonial and the imperial wound’ and constitutes ‘the epistemology of the future, without which another world will be impossible’ (Mignolo and Tlostanova, 2006: 207-8). Elena engaged in border thinking to both draw upon and intervene in the ladino world of Eurocentric rationalities and thought. In our conversation, she expressed the need for a scientific environmental impact assessment to be carried out by geologists and for a proper land-use plan (‘ordenamiento territorial’). When the geologists and volcanologists of CONRED ‘determined that Panabaj, the area south of Santiago, was a non-habitable zone because of its risk level’, Elena and the other survivors made use of this Western knowledge to halt the government’s efforts to relocate them and to focus their energies on the fight for Chukmuk. She also discussed how the legal lacunae in what she calls the ‘racist Guatemalan constitution’ can be mobilized toward the preservation of life and dignity. The hegemonic epistemological order needs to be subverted and displaced, but can in the process be harnessed through practices of negotiation, rearticulation, and border thinking to produce important victories for Mayan Guatemalans.

Fourth and finally, survivors of the Panabaj landslide and Fuego eruption contest the necronationalistic displacement and management of Indigenous bodies, meanings, and narratives, and thus they contest the ongoing production and purification of colonial spaces and identities in Guatemala. As we’ve noted, the eruption of Fuego left many people buried, especially in San Miguel Los Lotes. In their desperation and in the absence of any state-led initiative to recover the remains of their loved ones, many family members turned to private companies with excavating equipment and to civil society organizations such as Antigua al Rescate, which was formed after the eruption and managed to exhume a number of bodies. When the Guatemalan government sought to utilize the space that was opened in part by their participation in the erasure of Indigenous bodies in the wake of Fuego, as we have observed previously, to stage a celebratory media event in honour of the reopening of RN14, which we have characterized above as their highway to colonial modernity, the survivors from Los Lotes disrupted this celebration by staging a counter-event that took the form of a roadblock-cum-protest on the highway, where they placed the remains of their newly recovered family members in defiance of the government’s attempts to exploit their erasure in the service of necronationalistic colonial narratives and media events (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Highway RN14 media counter-event: roadblock-cum-protest. Photo Credit: Mischa Prince.

These latest exhumations that were necessitated by the colonial ladino state’s renewed attempts to erase the Indigenous bodies disappeared across the Guatemalan disasterscape further link the impacts of Fuego with the long civil war, the genocidal massacres of the 1980s, and Mayan resistance struggles for justice in their wake. In its 1999 report, the UN Commission for Historical Clarification

concluded that the existence of clandestine and hidden cemeteries, as well as the anxiety suffered by many Guatemalans as a result of not knowing what happened to their relatives, remains an open wound in the country. They are a permanent reminder of the acts of violence that denied the dignity of their loved ones. To heal these particular wounds requires the exhumation of secret graves, as well as the definitive identification of the whereabouts of the disappeared [CEH, 1999: 28, emphasis added].

The exhumation of mass graves in Guatemala has been an important part of the pursuit of justice for Mayan people there, and the emotionally draining and painstaking work of cleaning and identifying skeletal remains done by forensic anthropologists has thus been an important source of hope for survivors (see Nolin, 2018). Exhumations have contributed to Mayan resistance against the production of necronationalistic spaces, identities, narratives and memoryscapes, and thus to the project of building decolonial resilience, but they have also been extremely painful to endure, as bones have an ‘emotive materiality’ and an ‘affective presence’ (Fontein 2010: 424). Elena says that ‘for us, exhumation was really devastating. When I think of all of the conflicts internal and external that I’ve had to overcome, the one thing that I still haven’t been able to come to terms with is the question of exhumation’. She recounted during our interviews her experiences in Santiago Atitlán after the army was expelled:

The thing that upset me the most is the time I spent with victims of the armed conflict in 1993 and 1994 after the army left. I worked with women who had nothing to eat because they’d been widowed by the civil war. I’d meet them when they were exhuming the bodies of victims. They were just like stiff cheese, there they were. It’s hard to see someone who has suffered all their life and couldn’t even have a dignified death because of the politics of the state. I used to rub this in the face of [President] Berger and [Vice-President] Stein. I used to tell them it’s because of the bad policies of our country that we are in the state we are.

Elena and her comrades also extended their struggles against the erasure of Indigenous bodies by the colonial ladino state to include those of living Panabaj survivors, whom she marshaled in the spatial stories with which she confronted the government each time they sought to renege on agreements they had made with Mayan communities:

Yes, Mr President, if it is not possible to carry out the reconstruction in a way that is in accordance with our collective interests, tomorrow we will drop off the disaster victims (damnificados) to you. We’ll pay their bus fares, we will erect plastic tents and bring them from the temporary shelters. You’ll have to feed everyone and all of the Parque Central and all of the National Palace and the Presidential Office is going to be full of tents. We’re going to bring 915 families.

Conclusion: decolonial resilience amidst the disasterscapes of coloniality

Recent decades have brought about an outpouring of neoliberal narratives of resilience, as the grip of this particularly virulent and rapacious, yet also highly rationalistic formation of capitalism has tightened, and its work of restructuring contemporary subjectivities and social relations has ever more deeply penetrated societies around the globe. As Wendy Brown (2015: 17) writes, among the ‘basic elements’ of contemporary societies that neoliberal rationalities have reconfigured are their ‘vocabularies, principles of justice, political cultures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule, and above all, democratic imaginaries’. The latter constitute key targets for the exertion of neoliberal disciplinarity and narrativity, which seek to replace political capacities with adaptive ones (Evans and Reid, 2013). But neoliberal imaginaries and the narratives they generate are not yet the only ones that are active and effective in the world. Wynter’s concept of homo narrans represents one attempt to expand our capacities to grasp the profound importance of the existence of multiple praxes for the constitution of different genres of humanity and ways of being human. Indigenous communities have been learning to negotiate and contest colonial imports such as homo oeconomicus and neoliberal narrativity for a long time. Decolonial modes of thought and social movements arise from struggles against five hundred years of disastrous coloniality, and generate sharply different conceptions and narratives of what it might mean and look like to practice resilience in the age of contemporarily expansive disasterscapes. Decolonial praxis and decolonial resilience generate spatial stories that contest necronationalist narratives that seek to manage Indigenous bodies and the memoryscapes that form around their connections to colonized lands. Border thinking and border gnosis tactically appropriate elements of imperializing, colonial knowledge systems while relativizing the universality of Eurocentric ‘Man’ and creating space for the constitution of pluriversality and difference. In the Guatemalan disasterscape, a pluriversal decolonial resilience emerges from the wounds inflicted by coloniality and struggles with whatever narrative resources are ready to hand in everyday life to contest and subvert the abyssal line that protects some and condemns others.

Ethics

The research in this manuscript was approved by the School of Geosciences Ethics Committee and the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures Ethics Committee at the University of Edinburgh. Neither of these bodies uses approval numbers. All participants signed forms giving their informed consent to participate in this research.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Eliza Calder and Alistair Langmuir for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper and their contributions to the field research with Guatemalan participants for this paper. Any faults that remain are, of course, our responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was funded by the following NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) grants: NE/P015751/1 (Communication with Hazard Maps in Central America: A multidisciplinary science-media-community network); NE/S011498/1 (Dynamic Risk at Fuego Volcano: Communities living in a post-eruption but still persistently active context); and NE/T010517/1 (Ixchel: Building understanding of the physical, cultural and socio-economic drivers of risk for strengthening resilience in the Guatemalan cordillera).

Notes on contributors

Kevin Glynn

Kevin Glynn teaches at Northumbria University in the UK and has published widely in cultural studies, media studies, and cultural/critical geography. He is author of Tabloid Culture (Duke University Press) and co-author of Communication/Media/Geographies (Routledge) and Shifting Nicaraguan Mediascapes (Springer).

Julie Cupples

Julie Cupples is Professor of Human Geography and Cultural Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has been working in Central America for three decades and is the author or editor of eight books, the most recent of which is Development and Decolonization in Latin America.

Notes

1 Although we have here invoked the notion of a ‘“neoliberal” worlding’, we do not regard neoliberalism as a monolith but rather as ‘a complex assemblage of ideological commitments, discursive representations, and institutional practices, all propagated by highly complex class alliances and organized at multiple geographical scales’ (McCarthy and Prudham, 2004: 276). Julie Cupples (2022: 65) notes that ‘neoliberalization has been a complex, uneven, and at times contradictory process in Latin America’. Francisco Panizza (2009: 10) argues that Latin American neoliberalism is best understood as ‘a relational construct, whose contested meaning is defined and redefined by the political struggles between’ those who promote and those who challenge and resist its apparatuses and discourses. Juan Ricardo Aparicio (2017: 334) identifies in Colombia, for example, a formation he calls ‘humanitarian neoliberal governmentality’, which he characterizes as ‘a node where the technocratic languages of law, policy and the economy are articulated with moral pronouncements around the protection of the “suffering stranger.”’ We share Stuart Hall’s view that ‘there are enough common features to warrant giving’ neoliberalism ‘a provisional conceptual identity’ that might form the basis for further refinements, elaborations, qualifications, and particularities, and that ‘naming neo-liberalism is politically necessary to give the resistance to its onward march content, focus and a cutting edge’ (Hall, 2011: 706), and we recognize that ‘neoliberalism has many varied contours, is never finished and is highly contradictory and unpredictable in its outcomes and effects’ (Cupples and Glynn, 2014: 360; Larner 2003).

2 See https://www.undrr.org/terminology/resilience.

3 Guatemala is the only Central American country (and one of only two Latin American countries) where a majority of the population identifies as Indigenous; ‘ladino’ is the widely used designation for Guatemalans who have both Indigenous and European ancestry (as do the majority of Latin Americans), but don’t identify as Indigenous.

4 We’re grateful to Eliza Calder for her observations on this point.

5 While Wynter’s position can be understood as a form of human exceptionalism insofar as she regards the production and circulation of narratives and other forms of sign formation and symbolization as uniquely human practices, she does not hierachize humans in relation to non-human animals nor regard the former as ‘better’ or superior beings.

6 Like Edward Said (2004) and others, Wynter rejects ‘the conflation of all versions of humanism with the worst aspects of Europe’s liberal humanism’ and thus seeks to recover from humanism the idea that ‘the historical world is designed by humans, not given by God or nature’, and that human experiences and mutual engagements can enable us to ‘understand and to change the world we make’ (Erasmus, 2020: 49). As Erasmus (2020: 62) writes of Wynter’s approach, ‘living beings bring forth their worlds by what they do. Life is universal. Its modes are pluriversal’. Wynter’s approach is in some ways close to that Marxism often paraphrased in cultural studies circles: that people make history, but not in conditions of their own making. Wynter developed her counter-humanist approach in part as a response to her dissatisfaction with Marxism, which she came to see as inadequate for the formulation of a proper critical theory of race (see White, 2010; Wynter and McKittrick, 2015). In her unpublished and undated manuscript from the early 1980s, she writes that ‘what Louis Althusser calls the ideological state apparatus . . . comprises all areas and levels of the society—including the level of production—so that these can produce and reproduce the apparently concrete fact of the most valued social being, theirs making possible the functional law of value. . . . The mode of social relations—and not the mode of production—then determines the “functional value” of differentiated social beings’ (Wynter, n.d.: 729-30).

7 Erasmus also argues that Wynter’s counter-humanism is much more alive than contemporary European posthumanism to the deeply racialized and intertwined constructions of ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’ that have long been at work in Euromodernity. Regarding differences between posthumanism and Wynter’s counter-humanism, Erasmus (2020: 61) writes that ‘Wynter’s conception of biological (the born; the emergent) and symbolic life (the made; meaning) as distinct but pervious suggests that while both meaning and matter are vibrant, matter does not speak back to power in the same way that humans do. For example, to paraphrase Wynter, when property—embodied in a slave—rebels, it asserts its human status’.

8 We are grateful to Matthew Watson for first bringing the stories of Juan Noj to our attention.

9 We are grateful to Alistair Langmuir for bringing this reference to our attention.

10 Many of our participants were driven by the COVID-19 pandemic to flee the overcrowded temporary shelters, where infection risks were high, and return to La Trinidad.