Resisting Relocation amid Environmental Disaster: The Politics of Precarity and the Failure of Development in Chinautla, Guatemala

In the mid-1950s, Guatemala City development planners constructed a new water drainage system for the capital, channeling wastewater and sewage away from the wealthy suburbs south of the city and toward the Río Las Vacas and marginalized communities to the north. This showcase of urban modernity had disastrous effects for the Poqomam Maya municipality of Chinautla, as the main tributary that flowed through the center of their town became a deadly channel of polluted water, exacerbated every year by seasonal flooding. In the 1970s, the Guatemalan state proposed relocating residents, and some did move to neighborhoods on the capital’s periphery, accepting the offer of subsidized land, modernized houses, and moving assistance. The majority, however, resisted relocation, instead insisting that the state pursue engineering solutions to redirect the water. Then, on February 4, 1976, a 7.5 magnitude earthquake caused significant infrastructure destruction in Guatemala at a moment of heightened political tension and internal insecurity due to ongoing civil war—and it devastated Chinautla’s remaining infrastructure. In the earthquake’s aftermath, the state, in partnership with NGOs, once again suggested relocation as the solution, which unsurprisingly, many chinautlecos still rejected.

In the context of the Cold War in Guatemala, for an Indigenous person—who the military state had racialized as subversive—to refuse a state project was a dangerous act. This paper examines this resistance to relocation and argues that different understandings of precarity shaped residents’ priorities, as many Indigenous chinautlecos maintained that abandoning their land, which held sacred and cultural value for them, would render them in a worse condition than the physical precarity they faced. As a localized history of development, it elucidates how minoritized ethnic groups challenged discourses of modernity, refuted First World notions of peasant passivity and malleability, and shaped the terms of development interventions in their lives.