Putting out fires: The varying temporalities of disasters

Abstract

How does a community with a history punctuated by responding to disasters understand the slow risk posed by industrial toxic exposure? Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a contaminated informal settlement in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, I explore the neighbors’ understanding of toxicity as mediated by previous experience with disaster and displacement. Esmeraldas is home to the largest refinery in Ecuador. Located only meters away from smoke stacks and other industrial structures, 50 Casas is one of the neighborhoods in closest proximity to the petrochemical complex. Since their arrival in the area, residents of the neighborhood have faced a variety of disasters ranging from earthquakes and intermittent floods to industrial accidents. I present a case in which the conjunction of temporally distinct risks has shaped the community's protective strategies to focus on the urgency of impending disasters, while deprioritizing the mitigation of slower contaminants. Drawing on the concept of slow violence, I show, first, that a conjunction of threats with varying temporalities may have the unintended consequence of minimizing the danger of slower threats, second, that risk perceptions are intimately tied to personal experience and history, and third, that residents mobilize their identity as “contaminated citizens” to demand infrastructural works aimed at minimizing the danger of sudden disasters.