Thinking Through Crisis in Latin America
Año nuevo aymara [Aymara New Year]. Tiwanaku, La Paz, Bolivia. 2024. Image taken by Annelí Aliaga. Copyright Annelí Aliaga, 2024
Crisis, krisis, κρῐ́σῐς: as with many concepts rooted in Ancient Greece, exploring its etymology becomes an inevitable first step in understanding what this ubiquitous term signifies today. Both reassuring and potentially misleading, this search for a primal meaning features prominently in virtually any exploration of what the word “crisis” means—or encompasses—today. As a noun, the word has had legal, theological, and, more notably, medical usages validated by authorities such as Thucydides, Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen. Since its verbal root, krinein, can be translated as “to choose,” “to judge,” or “to decide,” the term’s meaning splits from the outset into what is ultimately the difference between a condition—a decisive moment—and the act of reaching a verdict.
Reinhart Koselleck, the authority on the historical evolution of the concept, emphasizes that “in classical Greek . . . the separation into two domains of meaning—that of a ‘subjective critique’ and an ‘objective crisis’—was still covered by the same term” (“Crisis” 359). A critical moment and a critical choice have been intrinsically intertwined with the meaning of crisis since the term’s inception. Its medical meaning has remained relevant well beyond its Greco-Latin origins, highlighting, first, a specific relation between crisis and temporality and, second, the recurrent emphasis on two drastically divergent outcomes. Hence, a crisis was initially conceived as a transient state that represented a point of inflection, even if it proved relatively lengthy. In addition, its outcome was understood as either recovery or demise. This origin story is, in any case, a condensed version of the Hippocratic disquisitions, which have influenced Western thought for centuries. “From the seventeenth century on,” writes Koselleck, “crisis” was “used as a metaphor, expanded into politics, economics, history, and psychology” (“Crisis” 358). As expected, the term loses its clinical meaning in all its figurative deployments.
As it undergoes further metaphorical expansions—proliferating in academic titles, popular media, or becoming politicized and even weaponized— the word “crisis” comes to signify too many things and too vaguely. Crisis can be a synonym for “decay,” “deterioration,” “struggle,” “troubles,” “conflict,” or “predicaments.” There are “international crises,” “constitutional crises,” “housing crises,” or “identity crises.” We can discuss the “crisis of the humanities,” “the crisis in Main Street,” or speak, somewhat paradoxically, about “the crisis of critique.” Often, “crisis” becomes an empty signifier in the ever-overlapping languages of politics and the media: a placeholder, a buzzword, a rallying cry serving diverse and sometimes competing ideological agendas. At its worst, “crisis” can serve as a rhetorical device for reactionary politics or populist speechmaking. At its vilest, it becomes a tool for what Naomi Klein called disaster capitalism. Indeed, a hallmark of neoliberal strategy is the exploitation of crises to advance policies promoting deregulation, globalized commerce, and economic dominance while advocating market-driven solutions that benefit powerful economic actors, often at the expense of local economies or national sovereignty. In that sense, the geopolitics of “crisis thinking”—already present in its most influential analyses—becomes clearer.
From the 1770s onward, the term “crisis” emerged as a defining feature of Modernity, primarily viewed through a Western-centric lens. This view is evident in Koselleck’s seminal research, which traces the term’s usage in German, French, and English, focusing on events like the Austrian War of Succession, the French Revolution, and the American War of Independence. Koselleck draws upon the works of European intellectuals like Friedrich Schiller, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and Thomas Paine, further emphasizing the Eurocentric nature of crisis discourse. While thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Zygmunt Bauman, and Jacques Rancière have also helped illuminate the centrality of crisis to the project of Modernity, their narratives also situate this process within the Global North, where we find, so to speak, the crises that matter. This dominant framing calls for critically examining crises beyond these power centers, particularly in regions often marginalized by Western political and economic structures. The North/South divide becomes crucial in understanding the geopolitical disparities related to crisis thinking and representation, particularly in the context of humanitarian and environmental disasters. Devastating floods do not seem equally newsworthy whether they occur in Florida or South Asia; even fictitious disasters present their own hierarchy of pretend importance. We know that the catastrophic impact of climate change will be worse for the so-called developing countries and the Global South. We also know that our current environmental crisis will exacerbate poverty, force migration, and accelerate the detrimental effects of rapid urbanization. Yet the mainstream apocalyptic imagination in sci-fi films and novels tends to choose the centers of the world’s most powerful nations to stage the end of civilization.
In the face of such an imbalance in what we should consider the field of crisis studies, the intellectual—and perhaps moral—mandate would be to explore the charged geopolitical considerations surrounding the concept of crisis, examining how its understanding and application vary across different regions and power dynamics. In other words, the Western-centric bias in its historical analysis and the exploitation of crises for political and economic gains underscore the need for a more nuanced understanding that considers the diverse experiences and perspectives beyond the traditional Western framework. With the title Thinking through Crisis, this third edition of the LACIS REVIEW has accepted that intellectual mandate and offered the much-needed nuance and diversity. The essays collected here indeed provide a valuable and complex view of Latin America as a region grappling with multiple, intersecting crises.
A prominent theme across the articles is the impact of the climate crisis on Latin American communities, along with the various forms of response and resistance to it. Both Carlos Arenas and Nicole Bonino address the plight of the Guna people as climate refugees to discuss climate-induced migration. Arenas highlights the case of the ancestral Guna islands in Panama, which have become uninhabitable due to rising sea levels, forcing their relocation to the mainland. Focusing on the same indigenous community, Bonino explores how artists are using their work to document the experiences of climate refugees, advocate for sustainable changes, and challenge dominant narratives about the climate crisis through “eco-artivism”—a fusion of creative practices with environmental activism to raise awareness and inspire action. Lily Zander examines the devastating ecological crisis in Metztitlán, Mexico, highlighting the interconnectedness of climate change, neoliberal policies, and water scarcity and illustrating the importance of community-based solutions in confronting ecological crises. Concentrating on the Laguna de Salinas salt flat in Peru, Barbara Galindo Rodrigues analyzes the destructive impact of mining, an industrial practice that amounts to an eco-genocide against Indigenous communities and their ancestral lands.
Ligia González turns to one of the many migrant crises across the continent, as shaped by what she posits as competing “regimes of the gaze” where migrants’ first-person accounts on platforms like TikTok provide crucial agency to migrants, allowing them to construct their own images and challenge prevailing stereotypes. Pedro de Jesús González contrasts Western and Andean perspectives on catastrophe, invoking the Andean concept of pachacuti, a cyclical transformation process in which humans are not central but rather participants in a larger, interconnected cosmic order. Mental health is the crisis identified by Beatriz Botero as a silent epidemic in the region. In her piece, Botero argues for a comprehensive approach to improve mental health in Latin America that involves reducing stigma, increasing access to care, promoting conversations about mental well-being, and addressing underlying social and economic inequities. The crisis in higher education in Peru is the focal point of Fidel Revilla’s contribution, which offers a critique of the rise of for-profit universities, or “universidades bamba,” that prioritize profits over academic quality and have been accused of engaging in corrupt practices and neglecting investment in research and infrastructure. Alec Armon examines the Alliance for Progress, a U.S. initiative to counter communism in Latin America, focusing on its impact in Chile and the concerns of researchers at the University of Wisconsin’s Land Tenure Center about its limitations and contradictions, which failed to prevent the rise of Salvador Allende and the U.S.-backed coup.
The confluence between crisis and literature is also a recurrent theme in this issue. Oana Alexan Katz analyzes Reina María Rodríguez’s Otras cartas a Milena (2003), exploring how the book portrays the emotional, sensory, and bodily intensities of nostalgia within the context of Cuba’s post-Soviet economic, social, and political crisis. For Katz, Rodríguez’s writing becomes a form of resistance, expressing the “explosion” of individual subjectivity against the biopolitical control of the state, ultimately showcasing the limitations of language in representing the depth of this crisis. Rocío González-Espresati Clement examines the activist performance art of Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo, exploring how the artist uses her own body as a medium to expose the systemic violence against women, forcing viewers to confront the brutality of the situations she depicts and compelling them to act against indifference to human rights violations.
Lyric poetry and photography also find a place in this multifaceted approach to crises in Latin America. The urban landscape of Mexico City, captured by German photographer Wilfried Raussert, and the poems by American poet Ann Fisher-Wirth merged into what the artists call “photopoems” to contest our everyday crisis of attention, of awareness, of life itself amid “piercing sci-fi landscape,” “construction that buried the sky” and melting buildings. The interconnected nature of the many crises explored in these essays resonates through this poetic and visual crisis thinking as well: a fitting colophon to the diverse and insightful analyses that precede it. The seasoned scholar, the budding academic, the activist, the poet, and the photographer meet in the following pages to offer a deeper understanding of the challenges confronting Latin America today while celebrating the resilience and resourcefulness of its people.
About the Guest Editor
Juan F. Egea is a Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature and Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of La poesía del nosotros: Jaime Gil de Biedma y la secuencia lírica moderna (Visor, 2004), Dark Laughter: Spanish Film, Comedy and the Nation (UW-Press, 2013) and Filmspanism: A Critical Companion to the Study of Spanish Film (Routledge, 2020). His forthcoming book is titled Visualizing Disaster: Crisis Photography in Contemporary Spain (McGill-Queen’s University Press).
References
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books, 2007.
Koselleck, Reinhart and Michaela W. Richter. “Crisis.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 67, no. 2, 2006, pp. 357-400.