In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador

By A.J. Faas

In the Shadow of Tungurahua relates the stories of the people of Penipe, Ecuador living in and between several villages around the volcano Tungurahua and two resettlement communities built for people displaced by government operations following volcanic eruptions in 1999 and 2006. The stories take shape in ways that influence prevailing ideas about how disasters are produced and reproduced, in this case by shifting assemblages of the state first formed during Spanish colonialism attempting to settle (make “legible”) and govern Indigenous and campesino populations and places. The disasters unfolding around Tungurahua at the turn of the 21st century also provide lessons in the humanitarian politics of disaster—questions of deservingness, reproducing inequality, and the reproduction of bare life. But this is also a story of how people responded to confront hardships and craft new futures, about forms of cooperation to cope with and adapt to disaster, and the potential for locally derived disaster recovery projects and politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978831582

A.J. Faas

AJ Faas is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at San Jose State University. His work focuses on exchange practices, social organization, organizational practice, and epistemology in contexts of environmental crisis--disasters, displacement and resettlement, development, and violent conflict.. His has principally conducted research in Mexico and Ecuador, but also in the United States and China. He is a founding member of the Risk and Disasters Topical Interest Group at the Society for Applied Anthropology, where he has organized more than 200 panels on the applied social science of risk, hazards, and disasters.

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Preface

This is meant to be messy, but I don’t mean to make a mess of it. I felt compelled to color outside the lines a bit because my primary motivation for writing this book was to tell my friends’ stories more completely than I ever had before. In article-length publications, finding the space for people to live as people on the page and not merely serve as illustrations of some narrow theoretical claim has often proved beyond my abilities. Here I have simply tried to tell their stories and to draw on them somewhat selectively to speak to important matters in anthropology, disasters, and politics. However, some stories along the way are meant simply to relate the experiences of people living in the shadow of Tungurahua. There is surely more to theorize here than I have attempted. Sometimes this is the result of exercising restraint and not wanting to get in the way. At other times, maybe things simply have not occurred to me. At any rate, I find these stories worth telling and have tried in my own way to do them justice.

In 2006, I was working under Linda Whiteford and Graham Tobin as a graduate student at the University of South Florida, studying social support and social networks in Nahua villages around the stratovolcano Popocatepetl in Mexico. When Tungurahua erupted in August of that year, Linda and Graham traveled to observe the eruptions and evacuations. I followed the ensuing response and recovery efforts closely through the press and through Linda and Graham’s work for more than two years before setting off to Penipe myself in January 2009. My idea was to continue our work studying social support and social networks in what I then mistook for post-disaster resettlements. As a White American who grew up in the 1980s, at first I thought of social support along the lines of the Mr. Rogers’s question: Who are the helpers? Good question. But pursuing it seriously in different contexts required me to expand my ideas of help. Some things help even when they are not meant to. All kinds of helping can do real damage or at least set things up to do so. And what about social networks? Well, with all due respect to my friends who pursue social network research agendas, in every attempt I made to understand people’s lives through this lens, I found that what mattered was always just out of frame. After creating elaborate maps of people’s networks, I would sit with them and look them over, hoping to have a meaningful conversation about their structures, pathways, and contents, but not even my closest friends were in the slightest bit interested. I was talking to myself again. However, when I cast the networks aside and earnestly listened to people and followed them through their daily lives, pursuing the everyday as much as the exceptional, things like mobility, legibility, minga, and convivir—the structuring metaphors of this book—came into view. So too did the fact that the post of the disaster, much like the post of postcolonial, only signified the period after its beginning, and certainly not its end. They were all hooked in together, and I had to find new ways of understanding and representing them.

When I came to Penipe in 2009, I remained a doctoral student working under Linda and Graham and Art Murphy and Eric Jones, who were then at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. We were expanding the Mexico study of social support in disaster contexts to a cross-cultural comparison with sites around Tungurahua in Ecuador, with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. I lived in the heart of Penipe Township, renting rooms in the sprawling compound of the Barragan-Pilco family, who really took me into so much more than their house. In that first year of fieldwork, Fabiola Juárez Guevara and I worked together to map and make a census of each of the resettlements, conduct dozens of focus group interviews, and administer hundreds of semi-structured interviews on well-being and social networks, while living and working alongside resettlers in Penipe Nuevo and Pusuca and villagers who returned to live and work in their home village of Manzano. Toward the end of part I, these three communities come increasingly into view as focal sites of my research.

After leaving Penipe in early 2010, I returned for another year in 2011 with my own funding from NSF and the Natural Hazard Center and Public Entity Risk Institute’s (PERI) Dissertation Fellowship in Hazards, Risk, and Disasters. By then, I was squarely focused on minga cooperative labor parties and the humanitarian politics of disaster and resettlement. I conducted roughly eighty interviews about minga practice and dozens of oral histories and key informant–type interviews with local leaders, government officials, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) staffers. It was during this time that I also labored in mingas in both Pusuca and Manzano, often several times a week. I returned for a short fieldwork visit for several weeks in 2013 and then again for several months in 2018, the ten-year anniversary of the resettlements, when I conducted dozens of oral and life-history interviews, worked on a few mingas, and generally went visiting. Over the years, I also conducted archival work, including making extensive media analyses of press coverage of the eruptions, evacuations, and resettlements and studying minga and assembly attendance records for Manzano and Pusuca; a village ledger (Libreta de Actas) of Pusuca; the archives of the Diocese of Riobamba; resettlement agency reports; volcano situation reports; and development plans and policy documents of the Municipio of Penipe. And of course, I keep in regular touch with many of my friends in Penipe (that is one reason why I remained on social media longer than I might have otherwise), and I have even had the pleasure of hosting some friends in the United States.

People often ask what language my interlocutors and I spoke and wonder at the meaning of some key terms. Though I am a native English speaker, I arrived in Penipe fluent in Spanish after living and working for several years in Mexico. This did me very little good with the Chimboracense dialect of Spanish spoken in Penipe and throughout Chimborazo Province. Chimboracense has much in common grammatically with inland Spanish dialects in Latin America but for leísmo, which is the substitution of the indirect object (le) for the direct object (lo, la), which caused me a good deal of confusion for a while. And in addition to a rich variety of locally specific idioms (e.g., dios le pague, sigue no más, no me enseña) the regional dialect includes countless Kichwa terms (e.g., minga, achachay, ñaño/a, randimpa). Suffice it to say that I was very clumsy for a couple of months before I got a handle on it, sadly learning far too late that the local expression áh-áh does not in fact signal an affirmative like the English uh huh, which meant I had to toss a few early censuses and start over. In the end, however, all the interviews I conducted were in Chimboracense Spanish, which is the language I used for daily life and for making friends in the shadow of Tungurahua. All English language translations that appear in the book are my own.

It is also worth explaining my use of two terms throughout the book, campesino and mestizo. Campesino often translates as peasant, a term frequently used in English to denote tenant farmers in a feudal system and which scholars sometimes feel uncomfortable applying to contemporary peoples. While some people in Penipe are tenant farmers or sharecroppers, most are smallholding, subsistence agriculturalists who take small surpluses to marker and refer to themselves as either campesinos or agricultores, and this is all I intend the term to denote. Mestizo is a term conventionally used to refer to people of mixed European and Indigenous descent in Latin America, and for a million reasons, above all an unwillingness to reify racialized categories, I use the term as sparingly as I can and to refer only to mixed European and Indigenous heritage and in contrast to those who individually and collectively identify as Indigenous. Many people living in Penipe do come from Indigenous parents and communities, which is often reflected in their practices and speech, and many others do not, but the communities in Penipe do not collectively identify as Indigenous, even if some people personally do. Local life consists of a diverse mix of European and Indigenous cultural practices, expressions, and institutions—and it is this mix and nothing more that I mean to signify with the term mestizo.

And what of the people and how I name them? The characters who feature most prominently in these pages are some, but not all, of my closest friends in Canton Penipe: Bernardo Huerta, Angel Turushina, Martina Barriga, Rosa Barriga, Judith Guamushi, Mateo Barragan, Julia Granizo, and Washington Sánchez. Some good friends, like Marco Murillo and the late Klever Andrade, make only minor appearances, and a number of them do not appear at all. I feel truly fortunate to call these people my friends, and I will be forever grateful for their friendship and willingness to invite me into their lives, their struggles, and their joys. Even in the most backbreaking mingas or most contentious village meetings, I was always moved to be welcomed into these spaces. It would not be honest to call everyone a friend because many people are better described as acquaintances and some I knew only in the research context, so I use the term only when appropriate and not simply to refer to everyone I met or interviewed. At times, it may be true that our friendships developed because, in my endeavor to be a good ethnographer, I gravitated toward certain people who appeared either to be at the center or the margins of the action in Penipe. I suppose this is only natural, but especially in those early days in 2009 and 2011, my interview and observation strategies were still guided by ethnographic sampling conventions; this work is by no means a product of convenience. And though some people might be happy to be named in this book, I elected to use pseudonyms for everyone but political leaders from the mayoralty and up because those were the terms of participation in 2009 and 2011, I am not in regular contact with those who are not my friends, and I prefer to err on the side of caution in protecting people’s identity, if only from mild embarrassment.

Of course, there is the related messy matter of people’s and nonhumans’ dogged refusal to conform to even our most well-reasoned and empathic expectations. Is disaster a social phenomenon? It is. Is it a purely social phenomenon? Of course not. Is it natural? Well, yes and no. Do those categories even work? It depends. Their utility as generalizable categories seems decidedly on the wane in disaster contexts. And don’t disasters reveal incredible altruism, people putting aside old divisions and helping one another? They do, but in these stories, romantic ideals of what this looks like will not survive a close examination unscathed. And once the optimistic faith in collective action takes a real drubbing in the contest with cooperation as a colonialist institution, it marshals one heck of a comeback. Minga is, or can be, a utopian project—but also an awfully messy, smudgy business. I took a long time to read through the many layers of the minga palimpsest in my efforts to do these dynamics justice. I hope I have at least approximated that.

Some things simply are messy. The state at its margins, be it in the colonies or the rural periphery, is a tangle of endless complications, which have real consequences that can mean the difference between bare life and living well. Naturecultures—co-living of humans, nonhumans, hills, and volcanoes—are not rational systems. Things get covered in mud and rain and shit and gossip and ash and pyroclastic material and tellings told. It is hard to get people on the same page from day to day. Try organizing even the most committed group to dig, to really dig, an irrigation canal across nearly ten kilometers of rocky and uneven mountainous terrain at 3,000 meters above sea level. Feed the pigs, trek up the slopes to tend the cows, plant the corn, make it to the meeting (even if the bus is late), work the minga, greet the ministers, get the vaccines. Work hard on the mountain but get back to your government-granted house before they visit to threaten you with eviction. Todo eso para el sueño de salir adelante.

There were fine messes too. My friends in Manzano and Pusuca found a great deal of humor in seeing me get dirty, and I loved working alongside them. Never have I been happier and more willing to play the gringo loco. In my years spent there, Penipeños welcomed me in the broadest and most generous spirit of co-living for which I am forever grateful.

In the Shadow of Tungurahua

Prologue

Fire on the Mountain

People recall the eruptions of Tungurahua in 1999 with a mixture of fascination and terror. On October 11, Teresa Caicedo was at home with her sixteen-year-old son, Angel Turushina, in El Tingo, a small unincorporated village in Puela Parish of Canton Penipe, on the southwestern flank of the volcano. Teresa recalled:

I was watching, I believe, up until 12 A.M., I was watching with my son.… You might say I’m crazy, but, how can I say, the volcano was scary how it erupted. We at the foot of the volcano, we were scared, but we went to sit out front with some blankets. All covered up, we watched how it spewed. It was spectacular, frightening, but it was marvelous. I’ve said this to many people.… We say that it spewed … the lava came down, but then a fog seemed to obscure it, so my son said, Let’s go to sleep.

After Teresa took stock of her first aid supplies, she and Angel went to bed. As they slept, she kept the emergency radio on, and she recalled that at around two or three in the morning she heard Hipólito Nogales, then village council (cabildo) president of nearby Palictahua, who was pleading for help. Please come and get us out! Please come and get us out because it’s already erupting. The situation is grave. The cascajo is already falling, he said. It’s those burning stones. She says her thinking must have been clouded by sleep, as she thought, Ah, but that’s in Palictahua. Yet Palictahua is just as close to the volcano as El Tingo and just a little over three kilometers away to the east. I didn’t even consider how close Palictahua is to Puela—it’s close. But, half asleep, I thought, ‘No, it’s far away.’

Just as the sun rose, she went to open the door and survey the situation outside but was unable to do so because such a large amount of ash and lithic projectiles, referred to locally as cascajo, had piled up outside.¹ She pushed and pushed until she finally pried her way out. Angel was asleep on the second floor, but she was unable to scale the uncovered outside steps, as they too were covered in ash and cascajo. I said, ‘Let’s go!’ to Angel. ‘Open the door, my son,’ I said; ‘Get up, because this thing has already exploded. Get up!’ And my son got up, but he was just in slippers because he was sleeping. And like that, falling cascajo can burn his feet.… It was very frightening. They say young men are strong. But that’s a lie. My son Angel was very frightened.

They heard on the radio that they were sending trucks to evacuate people in Palictahua, but getting there from El Tingo would entail a harrowing trek along the southern flank of the volcano. Instead, they ran to a neighbor’s house and later hopped on a bus that carried them to Penipe, where they found shelter in the high school for several days.

Penipe is the eponymous central township of Canton Penipe in Chimborazo Province, whose southern and northern extremes are marked by a dormant volcano, El Altar, and an active stratovolcano, Tungurahua, respectively. Tungurahua sits astraddle the border between the Chimborazo and Tungurahua Provinces, and three of Penipe’s six rural parishes—Bilbao, Puela, and El Altar—form the western and southern flanks of Tungurahua in the zone designated as high risk for ashfall, lahars, pyroclastic flows, lava, and seismic tremors. Tungurahua is one of many volcanoes in mainland Ecuador, which, along with the greater Andean cordillera, are products of the subduction of the oceanic Nazca plate by the South American plate. The forty-four volcanoes of Ecuador—twenty-nine on the mainland, another fifteen on the Galapagos Islands—and nineteen of Colombia constitute the Northern Volcanic Zone of the Andean volcanic belt, which is part of the larger Pacific Ring of Fire, a series of oceanic trenches and volcanoes around the Pacific Ocean. The gradual subduction of Pacific Ocean tectonic plates against the South American continental plate accounts for the prevalence of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which have significantly influenced South American and Ecuadorian history. This is a land of eruptions and tremors but also a land people call home—have made their home—for generations, crafting full lives together in more-than-human collectives that made more of their scarce land and limited resources than they could individually.

Before that, no one told us anything. Absolutely no one.

—Rafael Ocaña

Around Canton Penipe, people’s experiences and memories of the eruptions vary, but nearly everyone agrees that prior to 1999 they never thought Tungurahua presented any risk. Before it came roaring back to life in that year, Tungurahua was last active from 1916 to 1918, when the volcano generated ashfalls and intense pyroclastic flows and then returned to slumber for roughly eighty years. Occasionally, someone will recall hearing stories of those past eruptions from their parents or grandparents, who remembered unnerving days of darkness as clouds of ash blackened the sky and tremors shook the earth while pyroclastic flows ran down the mountain. Santos Amancha’s grandparents relayed a story of cutting branches and tying them to their bare feet so they could walk to safety without getting burned by fallen cascajo. Santos wanted to share his own stories of how they survived with his children and grandchildren so that they would have knowledge to draw on should the volcano erupt again.

Although Tungurahua has been scientifically monitored by the Ecuadorian Instituto Geofísico since 1989, no official information on risks posed by the volcano was actively disseminated to the public prior to the 1999 eruptions. Several volcanic tremors caught the attention of monitoring agencies in 1994, but nothing provoked a declaration of emergency. Yet from July to August 1999, Tungurahua registered roughly twenty earthquakes and generated numerous hybrid eruptions, large ash plumes, and sulfur dioxide gas emissions. Authorities raised a yellow (nonemergency) alert on September 15, indicating that a major eruption was expected within weeks. On October 11, the volcano spewed incandescent material, registered several more explosions, and emitted columns of ash and steam that stretched two kilometers high and reached as far as seven kilometers from the crater. Two days later, smoke curled from the crater as ash fell heavily on surrounding villages. Word spread from village to village that a greater eruption was imminent, and many villagers began evacuating of their own accord. Explosions, tremors, gas emissions, and incandescent flows continued, and on October 15 the Instituto Geofísico convinced authorities to raise the alert level to orange, indicating an impending major eruption. This prompted the temporary evacuation of villagers around the volcano, including Penipe’s three northernmost parishes of Bilbao, Puela, and El Altar. This was soon followed by the mandatory evacuation of the northern rim of the volcano—the popular tourist town of Baños and surrounding areas in Tungurahua Province—and civil defense forces evacuated an estimated 26,000 residents in combined operations around the volcano (Global Volcanism Program 2011).

Throughout the chaotic evacuations, the state scrambled to discern and act upon populations around the volcano, while locals struggled to make sense of the state. The process was problematic because there was no clear and effective system in place to communicate emergency warnings to the rural populations living around the volcano. Many people found themselves suddenly pivoting from their initial reluctance to evacuate to fleeing in haste as cascajo rained down on their villages and colossal ash clouds turned the sky black. Many recall that either the civil defense, the police, or the military—they were often unsure which was which—arrived only once the eruptive process was well underway, when many people had already begun to flee aboard local busses responding to the emergency as the ash fell ever more heavily. Once the evacuation orders were given, military personnel took to forcibly extracting those who refused to leave.

The combination of surprise and lack of information and preparedness is one reason why disasters are so often mistaken for unforeseeable events visited on societies as external shocks. Bernardo Huerta, the long-serving cabildo president in the village of Manzano in the Puela Parish of Penipe, explained, It caused great fear because, in the first place, we didn’t know what was going to happen to us.… Had we been informed and prepared, we would have had the knowledge, and all of this would not have happened. If it hadn’t happened this way, no one would have died or anything like that. He felt that they lacked the necessary knowledge to understand and respond effectively to the volcano and was anxious to collect this knowledge for the future. But, Bernardo continued, lamentably, the authorities did not inform us, and, because we lacked the knowledge, we lost. He said they had always convivido con el volcán (co-lived with the volcano), invoking an idiom that would grow in importance for people living in the shadow of Tungurahua in the decade after the eruptions.

Over the years since I first arrived in Penipe in 2009, I have collected countless narratives of loss and trauma. What is remarkable is that mentions of material loss—of property, crops, animals—regularly give way to a broader account of lost livelihood, community, culture, and capacity for making their own lives. This too would often give way to a more abstract sense of lostness that many people felt for periods ranging from months to years. Celia was in her early twenties when she evacuated. She hailed from the village of Yuibug in Bilbao Parish, very near the gorges that channel pyroclastic and lahar flows. They came on Saturday at two in the morning, the [civil] defense. But narratives often revealed difficulty in distinguishing the civil defense from police and military. She continued,

Those from the army obliged us to leave but we didn’t want to. They came and they brought us here to Penipe. They put us here.… We did not leave voluntarily; rather, they made us. It was fast; they didn’t tell us how we should leave, as a family, nor were we able to think about what to do, where to go.… The military came and took us out by force. And we had no idea where; they just said, You’re getting out of here, period. They didn’t say where we were going, nothing. They were heading out and they told us we had five minutes, but it was like they just took us and everything of ours remained behind; our belongings, animals, produce that we all had, crops, everything. And all was lost.

Ecuadorian authorities were in many ways unprepared for such an emergency, and there were no formal shelters in place to house the thousands who were evacuated. Many people were shuttled in buses and military vehicles to Penipe Township or the nearby cities of Riobamba in the south or Pelileo in the north, where they had nowhere to stay. In the ensuing melee, several families were separated for days or weeks as some found refuge in homes with family or friends or else in various improvised shelters. Patricia, a woman then in her mid-twenties from Puela Parish, shared her story of being left to her own devices on the streets of Riobamba.

And the worst of it was that they took us out and they didn’t permit us to return. This meant that we lost our produce, we lost everything there.… I remember that they left us in a park in Riobamba with my mother and my two nephews, who were much younger; yet I didn’t have any friends with me, and I was pregnant. So, we stayed there in the park at first. We did what we could, with just, just a suitcase that we had … and we had no one, and my mother had only the sandals on her feet. So, imagine, it was like five-thirty in the afternoon and we were in Riobamba. And now where do we go? That was the question.

Don Mateo and his wife, Sara, both nearing sixty years old, fled Manzano during the eruptions. Mateo was a smallholding, subsistence agriculturalist (campesino) who grew corn, potatoes, and small plots of other crops, while also raising chickens, cuyes (guinea pigs), pigs, and cattle. He and Sara lived in a three-room house with an earthen floor. When he shared his evacuation story with me, he emphasized how they had previously lived a tranquil life in Manzano without ever imagining leaving. He watched as the sky grew dark from the ash. He had his animals, some ten cows, further up the hill, near a neighbor’s house. Mateo remembers the military coming to evacuate them, saying, ‘You have to go, get going!’ It’s not easy to leave all in a moment. How are we going to leave and abandon our things? Everything was covered in ash and there was nothing we could do. Mateo and Sara stayed behind. Two days passed, and conditions became worse; on the third day, worse still, as ash continued to rain down and the rumbling of the volcano intensified. Like so many of their neighbors, they were concerned about the animals. Where could they take them? After three days, the police and military returned, saying there were trucks to take us out of here. But how can we go and jettison everything? No one should have to go, stay who wants to stay. But after fifteen days of increasing explosions, the authorities said Tungurahua was going to explode and the military trucks came through. They yelled, ‘Get in! Get in!’ They grabbed a few of their most important belongings. By a kick from the devil, I went.… We went, all the families loaded into trucks for Riobamba.

What followed for Mateo was an anxiety-ridden process of navigating familiar places that had been transformed by the state of emergency to do what little he could to secure his animals.

All the animals remained abandoned—chickens, cuyes, dogs, pigs, all of them. When I arrived in Riobamba, I saw one truck, another truck, another truck. And the trucks from the army here, there, over there, and one stopped with a jefe from the police—no, the army. I asked him, The animals, what will happen with them, jefe? They will stay there, he said. But what can we do? The animals just stay there, abandoned? What animals do you have? he asked. Up there I left pigs, chickens, dogs, everything. He called to the driver of a truck, and I ran. He said, Come here and go back with this señor, he’s going back. He’ll say where you’re going to bring pigs, all the pigs.

But almost as soon as Mateo hopped in the truck, the driver, a frontline state actor (police? military? civil defense?), was seemingly deactivated in this capacity and appealed to Mateo to pool their resources for the journey. The driver complained that he had no gas, so how would he make the trip? The jefe ordered him to go. "Then, on the way, the driver says, ‘Listen, sir, do me a favor, I don’t have money for the gas.’ I said I didn’t have it either, but let’s split it. From there, we split it, got gas, came back here, loaded up the pigs, the chickens. We loaded them up and headed out. Then, once we had them, we didn’t know where we would bring them. We had to find out. Where would I put them, on the