Di neks die afta di harikien Ai seh, Ai fi bil bak mai chradishonal huom, and Ai disaid se Ai gwain bil bak mai chradishonal hous ahn Ai staat bil ih, bikaaz wi hafi gat somting fi aidentifai wi. Ahn Ai work haad, bil bak mai hous wozn somting iizi. Bot Ai fiil gud. Ahn wai Ai fiil gud, bikaaz Ai bil bak mai huom miself. Ai had di schrent fi bil bak mai chradishonal hous.1Raizal carpenter from Old Providence Island
1 Introduction
On November 15 and 16, 2020, Category 42 Hurricane Iota devastated Old Providence and Santa Catalina (hereafter, OPSC), small islands located in the Colombian Western Caribbean. The impact of Iota was tremendous and disastrous. Devastation was general. Almost 50% of the houses and infrastructure collapsed, while the other 50% was damaged to different degrees (UNGRD 2020). Many trees fell, vegetation was burned and lost its foliage and numerous mangroves died. Although the number of deaths was low, with four people losing their lives as a direct consequence of the hurricane, everybody in the community was affected, in one way or another.
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Very few places remained for people to safeguard from the climate conditions, and the population was exposed for weeks, and even months, to rain, cold, and high temperatures, and was without electricity and endured precarious access to water and food.3 Strong winds also continued, knocking down tents and provisional refuges, and frightening people who had just experienced the trauma of the hurricane. The devastation was so deep that many local people, especially children and the elderly, abandoned the islands in the following days (Valoyes 2020). Meanwhile, those who remained faced great difficulties to survive, overcoming the disaster, and starting the recovery process.
It should be noted that OPSC is home to the Raizal people, an ethnic group of African descent that results from the British colonization process that brought Europeans (mainly British) and Africans of different origins to the Archipelago of San Andrés, Old Providence, and Santa Catalina (hereafter, the archipelago) from the sixteenth century onward, as well as other Caribbean migrants during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (mainly Jamaicans, Caymanians, and Central Americans) and Asians by the last part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (mainly Chinese). Despite their British colonization background, the islands passed to Spain and then to Nueva Granada and Colombia in the nineteenth century, but they retained cultural traits similar to other former British Afro-Caribbean societies, including their language, an English Creole (Parsons 1985; Sandner 2003).
During the twentieth century, Colombia promoted cultural and economic assimilation policies that generated deep changes in the local society and created strong tensions with the state. These led to local movements to reclaim Raizal’s rights to culture, identity, and territory, as well as autonomy and self-determination, and also to struggle for the declaration of the islands as a Biosphere Reserve, a recognition that was finally given by UNESCO in 2000. Although the Raizal people were recognized as an ethnic group by the Colombian constitution in 1991, the implementation of cultural and territorial rights has been very difficult (Guevara 2007; Padilla 2010; Márquez-Pérez 2014; Valencia 2015).
Raizal people constitute 90% of the islands’ population, and were the main group affected by the disaster of Hurricane Iota. Culture—understood here as ways of being and relating to the world, knowledge, practices, and any other aspect of human life learned from being part of a social group, but also “unevenly distributed and utilized as a resource by individual actors as they construct strategies of action for everyday life” (Swidler cited in Clarke and Mayer 2016: 4) --plays a fundamental role in how Raizal people relate to each other and inhabit their land and seascapes, and includes detailed environmental knowledge and particular ways of relating to marine, coastal, and terrestrial ecosystems (Correa 2012; Márquez-Pérez 2014). As I will try to show, this knowledge and these cultural practices allow us to understand, at least in part, the responses of islanders to attempt to adapt to this new context of devastation.
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Nevertheless, the reconstruction process has only superficially included the local community, and paid less attention to the inclusion of social and cultural issues. Governmental actions focused on the recovery of basic infrastructure, such as roads, the airport, and the dock, but seemed to forget to provide substantial aid for local people who, for many days and even months after the disaster, continued to live in precarious conditions (El Espectador 2021). Despite the slow and chaotic governmental response, the community responded to the situation in its own way, overcoming many of the difficulties, adapting to the new situation, and reorganizing their ways of life, in what could be seen as cultural resilience: the capacity of a cultural system to overcome and adapt to extreme perturbations, and to adapt to new circumstances.
Although culture has not been central to the discussions arising in the OPSC emergency context and reconstruction process, mainly managed by outsiders, it is worth reflecting on the role that it has played so far, and the one that it could still play, in shaping how islanders deal with the post-disaster situation, the recovery and reconstruction process, and in the face of the impacts of climate change. Additionally, it is important to ask whether a reconstruction process that does not incorporate a deep cultural approach may constitute a threat to the cultural survival of the Raizal people. Culture is not only important in adapting to the new post-disaster context where the whole material world of the people of OPSC people has changed, and in adapting to the increasing impacts of climate change that intensify these small islands’ vulnerability, but also in dealing with the symbolic and emotional process that the victims of such an event must go through. The material impacts are only one dimension of the disaster, while their symbolic ones are numerous, although less visible and analyzed.
On the other hand, as many community members have shown in many ways in the period since the hurricane, Raizal culture does concern local people in the post-disaster context. As many recognize, knowledge, practices, and ways of being and living in the world are severely threatened by the new processes that the islands are subject to within the framework of reconstruction. The community is experiencing a high level of social vulnerability, which makes it extremely sensitive to surrounding events, affecting its resilience. There is apprehension about what the reconstruction process might imply for the cultural survival of the Raizal people and the relationship with their sea and terrestrial living places, and there are expressions of cultural resistance to what has been happening. So, even if culture is not central to those who manage the reconstruction, it is key for the people who lived through the hurricane and who continue to face its consequences.
This chapter is the result of my personal experience of Hurricane Iota and the reconstruction process that I have lived and experienced as both a community member and an anthropologist. In this sense, this account relates to autoethnography, a methodological approach that “seeks to systematically describe and analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience” (Ellis et al. 2015: 250). I spent part of my childhood and youth on Old Providence Island, and was living there with my family in November 2020 when the hurricane struck, and I remained there during 2021 which allowed me to participate in different local processes that took place in the first year after the disaster.
Thus, I had the opportunity to develop participant observation of the different stages of the situation, from the day of the hurricane to the weeks and months that followed, and even until today, as I continue to visit the islands every month. During that time, I participated not only in what became day-to-day activities, such as picking up rubbish, helping friends and neighbors, and answering institutional surveys, but I also assumed other roles inside the community, including my participation as an advisor to the OPSC Fishermen’s Federation, which emerged and strengthened in the midst of the disaster, a role that I still have today, and as a community overseer of household and health issues in the context of reconstruction.
Based on this, here I present a reflection grounded in participant observation and the analysis I have been able to make through my experience on the role that Raizal culture and its resilience capacity have and should play in the process of rebuilding OPSC. I consider this contribution to be not only an academic exercise, but also a “political, socially fair and socially conscious performance” (Ellis et al. 2015: 250), related to the postulates of autoethnography. In this way, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of the experience OPSC people have gone through trying to overcome Iota, analyzing one of many possible aspects of this process. As Camargo (2020) has pointed out, despite being a disaster-prone country, Colombian anthropology has not paid much attention to these “rather evident and transformative events”, so this reflection also hopes to contribute to this area.
In order to do this, I use some concepts drawn from cultural perspectives on disasters, climate change, and resilience, to reflect on what OPSC people have lived. I try to understand and highlight how islanders have used culture in different ways to prepare, adapt, change, and resist the current situation, creating new ways to relate to their islands and community that play an important role in their future. Although cultural dimensions have been underemphasized in discussions on climate change perceptions, adaptation, and mitigation, as well as on those concerning disaster and post-disaster scenarios, the need for perspectives that include these dimensions is clearer every day if we really want to create effective responses to current climate change challenges, as well as reconstruction processes (Adger et al. 2013; Companion 2015; Clarke and Mayer 2016).
2 Some Key Concepts and Discussions
Resilience is a concept that has gained importance in recent decades, while its growing use has given way to different interpretations and meanings, not always consistent (Kendra et al. 2018). The concept has its origins in nineteenth-century natural sciences and was consolidated in the twentieth century to study ecosystem changes. Holling (1973: 14) defines it as “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables”.
Since the 1950s, the resilience concept has gained importance in the social sciences, especially in ecological anthropology, related to social and cultural change discussions, a question that has been central to this field. For a long time, many in the social sciences assumed that human societies tended towards equilibrium while resisting change. However, this view was questioned from different perspectives, giving resilience more importance, understood as the social and cultural capacity to deal with changes and disruptions (Moran 2022).
In recent decades, social and cultural resilience discussions have broadened and complexified across diverse knowledge fields, so there is no single approximation to it. In this sense, it is important to review some definitions that contribute to a better and more complex understanding of the concept that I consider useful for my discussion. Holtorf (2018: 639) defines it as “the capability of a cultural system (consisting of cultural processes in relevant communities) to absorb adversity, deal with change and continue to develop”, where different aspects such as a society’s cultural identity, values, norms, knowledge, and practices play a key role in how a social group deals with dramatic changes.
Crane (2010: 2–3) defines it as “the ability to maintain livelihoods that satisfy both material and moral (normative) needs in the face of major stresses and shocks”, emphasizing cultural resilience not only on the material but also on the symbolic level. In this sense, the definition “respects the integrity of subjective normative experience, recognizing that people’s lives mean something to them, while also accommodating changes in behaviors, values, and social institutions that are inherent in cultural dynamism”. Meanwhile, Holfort (2018: 639) also shows how “recent conceptions of resilience de-emphasize notions of ‘bouncing back’ to a previous state and place more emphasis on processes of ‘bouncing forward’ involving absorption, learning, adaptation and transformation than on specific outcomes in relation to a previous status quo”.
It is important to highlight that Crane’s (2010) definition evidences the way symbolic and emotional dimensions also play a role in how societies face disruptive experiences, even though this is usually set aside in the face of the forcefulness of material issues. The definition of Holtorf (2018) emphasizes not only recovery capacity but also change capacity, complexifying the idea of coming back to a previous condition to foreground the capacity to absorb impacts, learn from them, adapt, and transform, as strategies to overcome extreme changes. This last point is significant because it questions the idea that changes only produce negative impacts, by showing that resilience deals with all kinds of changes and not only the negative ones. In this way, resilience could be seen as a conservation mechanism for cultural patterns, which tends to delay and slow down changes but also creates innovative tools that allow societies to adapt even to the worst contexts.
Here, it is worth adding the definition given by Clarke and Mayer (2016: 2) who define cultural resilience as “the capacity of communities to mobilize cultural resources in response to external crises and threats, which in turn shapes individual and community actions related to the recovery process”. This definition is important because it gives space to agency, the capacity for individuals to make use of cultural resources in different ways, recognizing the complexity of society. As these authors put it, following Swidler (1986), “these cultural resources exist in conjunction with a social–ecological system, but they reside in the knowledge of individual actors, and they are used to construct “strategies of action” for everyday life” (Clarke and Mayer 2016: 2).
This last definition of cultural resilience comes from disaster studies, a knowledge field that has strengthened in recent decades, as global environmental and technological change increases risk and vulnerability. Here, it is important to highlight that I understand a disaster from an anthropological perspective, as “a process/event involving a combination of a potentially destructive agent(s) from the natural and/or technological environment and a population in a socially and technologically produced condition of environmental vulnerability” (Oliver-Smith 1996: 305). This implies that disasters are not natural but socially constructed, as they are not limited to natural phenomena and result from the interaction between these and society. Barbosa and Zanella (2019) suggest the need to denaturalize the concept of natural disaster, proposing the “socio-environmental disaster” concept, considering that “the social living conditions of a population determine the disaster impact level” (Barbosa and Zanella 2019: 49). From a complementary position, Cupples (2017) highlights the need to take responsibility away from nature, focusing on human-ecological relations and considering how social, cultural, political, and economic factors have a direct relation to the configuration of disasters.
Given the role of disasters as creators of extreme change for societies, resilience has also played an important role in disaster studies, where it has diverse uses and approximations. It is worth noting that there has been an important transformation from a material and technologically centered perspective to the recognition of the role that society and culture play in disasters. However, as different authors point out, culture continues to be underestimated, despite the growing evidence of the key role it plays (Companion 2015; Clarke and Mayer 2016; Kendra et al. 2018; Webb 2018).
Kendra et al. (2018: 87), show some of the ways in which resilience has been used in disaster research:
For researchers interested in the topic, it is an explanatory framework for systems functioning under stress. For policymakers and officials charged with managing disaster, resilience is an aspirational state to which they might target capacity-building initiatives. Resilience, too, is a positive expression, as opposed to vulnerability, which suggests incapacity or lack of agency. And resilience and the closely associated idea of vulnerability have seemed to provide, either alone or together, unifying frameworks for drawing together streams of scientific findings on what makes people more or less able to deal with risk, or the manifestation of risk as disaster.
Despite the diversity of approaches, it is important to show how the cultural approach is useful to think about different aspects of disasters. In the case of disasters related to natural phenomena, it is important to highlight that all human responses and perceptions of climate change are mediated by culture (Adger et al. 2013). As these authors put it, knowledge, practices, beliefs, and values, all of which belong to culture, can be effective—or not—in adapting to climate change. However, “research and policy on adaptation and mitigation have largely focused on material aspects of climate change” (Adger et al. 2012: 112), while leaving culture aside. Recent research on the topic shows how overlooking culture can lead to maladaptive outcomes (Adger et al. 2012), including the limitation of cultural resilience and thus an increase in vulnerability (Clarke and Mayer 2016).
From a resilience perspective, culture can create short-, medium-, and long-term mechanisms for communities and individuals to deal with these situations, on both the material and spiritual levels, but it can also be a source of vulnerability. In fact, culture can create conditions for society or individuals to ignore or underestimate threats, leading to situations where people expose and put themselves at risk, worsening the scenario (Webb 2018). In any case, as Webb (2018: 109) affirms, “it has become abundantly clear to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners that the key to achieving future societal resilience is gaining a deeper understanding of the role of culture in both producing and preventing disasters”.
Based on a deep literature review on resilience and disasters, Kendra et al. (2018: 94) identify nine resilience elements that “are repeatedly discussed in the theoretical literature”. These are “capitals or capacities” which include “social, economic, human, institutional, political, and community capital, improvisation, natural resources, and physical resources” (see Fig. 5.1 in Kendra et al. 2018). Although this approach can be questioned for its focus on capital and resources, as well as the almost complete absence of culture, which clearly contradicts the cultural turn in disaster studies proposed by Webb (2018), I consider it useful as a base for the analysis and reflection on cultural resilience in OPSC of this chapter.
In the following pages, I will try to apply these theoretical insights in relation to cultural resilience to reflect on the specific case of OPSC in the context of the disaster and post-disaster events caused by Hurricane Iota, analyzing and reflecting on some of the diverse roles that culture has played in the context of the disaster the islands experienced, and trying to link them to discussions on climate change adaptation, risk, and vulnerability that are currently central to the future of these small islands.
3 Cultural Resilience in Post-Iota Old Providence and Santa Catalina: Islandness, Local Knowledge and Experience
OPSC culture is expressed in particular ways to relate to the environment, knowledge, practices, and livelihoods, as well as specific cultural expressions such as music, dance, cooking, architecture, and activities related to the land and the sea, such as farming, fishing, and navigation (Márquez-Pérez 2014). Although local culture has experienced abrupt changes in recent decades, particularly as the result of Colombian assimilation policies, promoted from the beginning of the twentieth century (Valencia 2015), it should be noted how the Raizal people consider culture to be a stronghold of islanders’ identity and a source of pride.
A key cultural aspect to consider here is islandness, understood not as isolation but as particular ways to live in a limited and remote space (Diegues 1998), where capacities and arrangements to deal with limited access to goods and services, such as water, food, and building materials, can be included. In the case of OPSC, some examples of the above are the islanders’ custom of building houses with cisterns, where rainwater is captured in order to guarantee water supplies during dry seasons (Aguado 2010; Correa 2012), as pipe water is recent and has never been stable; as well as important knowledge related to food preservation methods, such as food drying, corning, and smoking, as well as sugar and cane syrup recipes, and coal and wood cooking (Ministerio de Cultura 2016). Notwithstanding, the most relevant example are the community and family links and networks that still support reciprocal economies, where common good and solidarity prevail (Márquez-Pérez 2014). Although these practices have weakened over time, they have not totally disappeared and they have been key in facing disaster.
Another cultural aspect relates directly to hurricanes. Although OPSCs have not historically suffered frequent or severe hurricanes, these have been present in people’s memories and experience. The most recent was Beta, a category 1 hurricane that struck the islands in October 2005, which many of the current local population experienced and remember. Even though Beta was much less destructive than Iota, it caused various types of damage and showed the usefulness of certain measures, such as sealed cement roofs that can be used as hurricane shelters. This influenced the fact that, after Beta, many people continued to build bathrooms and other spaces in their houses this way, which ended up being vital during Iota, allowing many people to shelter in them and survive.
The experience of the people of OPSC with hurricanes is not limited to those that have affected the archipelago. As frequent migrants across the Caribbean region (Márquez-Pérez 2013), many Raizal islanders have experienced hurricanes in places such as Nicaragua, Honduras, the United States, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands. Particularly, many islanders lived through Category 5 Hurricane Ivan, which caused severe damage in Grand Cayman in 2004, as well as experienced the reconstruction process that followed, where many even actively participated as construction workers. As a result, many people had experience implementing techniques used by Caymanians before and after Ivan, which also explains the resistance of some roofs and structures to Iota. These two last examples show how resilience is not only a matter of coming back to previous conditions after a disruptive event but is also an experience of learning and adaptation (Holtorf 2018).
The existence of specific climate knowledge (Correa 2012) and abilities acquired fundamentally, although not exclusively, from sea life (Márquez-Pérez 2014) must also be added to this. Even if it was not possible for islanders to predict in detail what was coming with Iota, nor the dimension of the hurricane’s impacts, many people were attentive to the situation days before the unfortunate date, and even before institutions alerted the community. Meanwhile, sea and island life abilities relate to a well-known capacity to react rapidly to unexpected events, as well as manual skills that allowed many people to deal with the complex situations experienced during and after the hurricane.
That night, in the middle of winds over 250 km/h, OPSC islanders used these abilities and skills to survive. There were people who tied themselves and their relatives to trees and cisterns, standing all through the night with the sea up to their necks; some emptied their cisterns and sheltered inside them; others hid in sealed rooms (mainly bathrooms), as well as closets and under beds and mattresses. In general, people recurred to anything on hand to secure themselves and to try to stand the wind and the rain, nailing down windows, drilling ceilings, and bailing out water. This can be compared to what Clarke and Mayer (2016: 7) point out in relation to the community they studied in the Gulf of Mexico, where “experience with regular climatic weather is said to lead to a stoic preparedness on their part, both ready and resigned at the same time”, as well as to the historical accounts that Crawford (2020: 56) has rescued of Caymanian turtlers, such as the press note of the Caymanian newspaper that described a 1909 hurricane offshore event in the following words: “But like brave mariners they stood their ground. There was no excitement among them even at the most trying hour… So the idea struck them that their ropes would be of use to them; and each man securely lashed himself to a tree”.
4 A Reflection Based on Resilience Elements
To deepen this reflection, in the following pages, I present an analysis based on the identification by Kendra et al. (2018) of the main resilience elements, which include at least nine different types of capacities that I examine in the light of the OPSC experience. As I will try to show, although culture is not explicitly included by the authors, many of these elements are directly related to it. This is clear in elements such as social capital, considered one of the most important concepts in resilience and disaster discussions (Kendra et al. 2018: 94), where a sense of community and belonging play an important role, as well as in human and community capital, where issues such as temperament, optimism, solidarity, and local understanding of risk are central and directly related to cultural traits. However, it is also very interesting to notice how culture actually influences all the identified elements, including those that are apparently unrelated, such as improvisation (as in technical knowledge), physical and infrastructural resources (as in housing) or natural resources (as in the efficient and traditional use of water). Here I present a revision of each of the nine elements, highlighting some of the different roles culture has played in the post-Iota scenario in OPSC.
4.1 Element 1: Improvisation
Disaster studies research identifies improvisation as a fundamental component of resilience, referring to the capacity to find or create solutions to unexpected situations or problems that characterize disasters (Kendra et al. 2018). As I briefly showed above, improvisation is part of islander culture, particularly for fishers and sailors who are accustomed to dealing with complex and unpredictable problems in contexts of limited resources, such as the ones posed by sea emergencies. It is also a key element in solving minor daily issues that happen in small and isolated environments such as these small islands, where it is difficult to access certain types of expert knowledge and adequate technical resources.
In the OPSC context, improvisation comes together with specific abilities that imply a high degree of training and technical knowledge, usually acquired as part of daily life and enculturation, which includes capacities and abilities related to machine and tool management, mechanic and electrical knowledge, or manual and motor skills such as knot-making, an important expertise developed by seafarers. Islanders usually feel proud and value themselves for these aptitudes which are also elements that contribute to their social reputation, a feature that plays an important role in the Raizal and other Caribbean cultures (Wilson 1973).
Improvisation and creativity played a role in the low number of deaths and injuries during Hurricane Iota. Survivors’ memories are full of examples of how people improvised to save their lives, as buildings and other shelters collapsed, finding ways to protect themselves or, at least, to guarantee their survival. Improvisation continued to play a role in the aftermath and even until today, as people have had to improvise refuges and temporary houses, find ways to guarantee food and water, and rebuild their livelihoods.
4.2 Element 2: Natural Resources
OPSC has an important natural base with terrestrial, freshwater, coastal, and marine ecosystems. They are surrounded by an extensive coral reef complex with mangroves, seagrass beds, and rocky and sandy bottoms with a diversity of species. During Hurricane Iota, the barrier reef and coastal mangroves contributed to reducing wave strength, especially on the east coast. Similarly, the dry forest that still covers a good part of the mountains helped to reduce the wind strength. It is important to highlight that these ecosystems’ good condition has a direct relation with traditional practices of sustainable use of nature that are part of Raizal culture (Correa 2012; Márquez-Pérez 2014). In fact, the archipelago was declared a UNESCO Seaflower Biosphere Reserve in 2000, as a recognition of the islands’ valuable ecological and cultural heritage, and as a result of the local people’s struggle to defend their environment and culture (Padilla 2010; Márquez-Pérez 2014).
Social relations with nature have resulted in different knowledge and practices, such as farming and agriculture, fishing, and navigation. There are also important uses of water—a seasonally scarce resource—that is stored in cisterns and other deposits, usually built under or to the side of houses. Iota destroyed the majority of crops, and the large amount of fallen trees limited access to farms. It also destroyed the majority of the artisanal fishing fleet, thus affecting the local food supply. However, fishers and farmers quickly reactivated to a subsistence level. Even with the limitations mentioned, fishers who did not lose their boats and engines started to fish a few days after Iota, as a way to guarantee food access for many and to contribute to the community.
Although the fishing productive chain has been only partially reestablished, as a result of the many obstacles created by the chaotic government response, a year after Iota the local supply was already working. In this sense, the fishers’ struggle to recover their productive chain is also one of the best examples of cultural resistance and resilience. This has been led by the Federation of Old Providence and Santa Catalina Fishermen, an organization that joins four cooperatives and associations that existed on the islands prior to the hurricane, and which have been proposing and enacting solutions to the delicate economic, social, and cultural situation that OPSC people have faced since Iota (Jay 2021). A similar process, although less visible, has taken place in relation to agriculture, led by Agroprovidencia, a local farmers’ organization that links the majority of the people dedicated to this activity.
Here it is worth mentioning the concept of cultural resistance which also plays a role in disaster and post-disaster scenarios, even preceding cultural resilience. According to Marchezini (2015: 294), “before exercising resilience, populations often perform acts of resistance. The concept of resistance includes a sense of action and of opposition to someone or something, which can be visible or invisible, recognized or unrecognized”. This author bases his analysis on the disaster caused by a flood in a small Brazilian village in 2010, where “the federal, state, and municipal agencies directed their actions to the process of material reconstruction of the city. This left the luizenses to seek references in the body of their cultural life to reaffirm their identities and recover themselves in the social plane. In this process of recovery, the experiences became meaningful again. This allows the absorption of the event into its history and the body of its culture, rather than negating its existence”.
The experience of OPSC fishers and farmers exemplifies cultural resistance as well as agency in the disaster response process. This struggle has allowed people in the community to create tools that help them deal with traumatic experiences, whose effects on the symbolic and emotional plane are frequently ignored, while they might also be crucial for cultural resilience. It has also given these actors a key role in the institutional reconstruction process which has systematically tried to avoid real community involvement.
4.3 Element 3: Physical and Infrastructural Resources
This refers to issues such as housing type and characteristics, as well as institutional infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, churches, and refuges. Although not immediately evident, culture is also related to this element. In the case of OPSC, local infrastructure has some adaptive characteristics, particularly those built in line with local traditions, for example, buildings on stilts that are designed to adapt to swamp areas and/or to resist floods and sea level increases, and roofs designed to favor wind circulation, which guarantee better climate conditions inside, as well as some resistance to strong winds. However, they were not designed to resist the enormous strength of Hurricane Iota, which ended up damaging the majority of the infrastructure on OPSC.
After Iota, infrastructure and housing reconstruction has been subject to many discussions between the local organized community and the central government. Local leaders and many other community members were opposed to constructing only one type of prefabricated house and pressed to guarantee a rebuilding process which respected local and traditional architectonic styles, as well as one which would incorporate anti-hurricane measures. Although not completely successful, given the unbalanced power relations, this has been another strong example of cultural resilience, and resistance, as many people in the community have chosen to fight for their right to houses adapted to their traditional lifestyles and customs. This was even used as an excuse by the central government to justify delays in the reconstruction process which, in reality, resulted from the chaos and corruption previously mentioned.
Despite the difficulties, the outcome is that the reconstruction process in OPSC has been readapting to follow patterns that fit, in some way, with their architectonic traditions, which can be seen as a success of cultural resistance in which the community valued their culture and traditions as fundamental to their ways of being in the world,4 as well as their possibilities of economic reactivation through tourism. One example of this is the late inclusion in the reconstruction process of a house model built on the remaining foundations of houses destroyed by Iota. This was proposed by the community from the beginning, but only incorporated by external reconstruction managers after delays and problems evidenced its practicality. This shows how the valuation of local knowledge proves fundamental to reconstruction, as well as to climate change adaptation and mitigation, just as its non-incorporation also brings consequences (Adger et al. 2013; Companion 2015).
4.4 Element 4: Institutional Capital
This element includes important aspects such as emergency infrastructure, critical equipment, alternative sources of water and energy, risk mitigation plans, catastrophic events insurance, and disaster management plans and training, amongst others (Kendra et al. 2018). Here it is worth mentioning how disaster preparation at the institutional level was and continues to be very low, linked to the lack of efficiency on different governmental stages and high levels of bureaucracy and corruption, similar to other experiences in the region such as in Honduras, Puerto Rico, and Barbuda (Barrios 2014; García-López 2017; Boger et al. 2019), which corroborates the idea of disasters as not natural but socially constructed phenomena (Oliver-Smith 1996).
Notwithstanding the existence of a National System of Disaster Risk Management and abundant legislation on the matter (but not including hurricanes), as well as previous and permanent disaster experiences across the country, neither the local nor the national government responded adequately. The institutional management of the disaster has been chaotic, with many examples of problems and delays that have permanently affected it. Indeed, the government has not been able to successfully reestablish housing and public infrastructure, and many failures have arisen along the way, with serious delays and dubious priorities in the process. Thus, more than a year after Hurricane Iota, the hospital remained in tents, risking both patients and medical personnel, and there were still families around the islands, including children, living in precarious conditions (Oquendo 2021).5 This situation worsens with the weakening of environmental, planning, and other regulations, resulting from the government’s disaster declaration.6
Something that aggravates this is local political culture, where clientelism plays an important role, leading people to choose to participate in it and to tolerate corruption and bad government. In this sense, many people in the community tend to turn a blind eye and do not demand things from their politicians, either because they have lost their faith or prefer not to enter into a conflict with political authorities in order to benefit from them. In the context of the reconstruction, clientelism has also played a role, with the use of gifts and favors as a way to co-opt people from the community, reduce resistance, and gain political power, similar to what Barrios (2014) described for post-Hurricane Mitch Honduras.
Here we can see a scenario in which institutions reproduce inequalities and contribute to several social and environmental injustices, corroborating the unnaturalness of disasters and their link to capitalism and colonialism (García-López 2017; Rivera 2022), an issue that merits further research. From this perspective, the islands’ low institutional capital is at the base of the disaster and the reconstruction chaos and conflicts, also marked by inefficiency, authoritarianism, corruption, and other features that make up Colombia’s political panorama of permanent institutional crisis. This, of course, limits resilience and reproduces vulnerability.
4.5 Element 5: Community Capital
This refers to community action capacity, as well as to collective flexibility, creativity, efficiency, and empowerment (Kendra et al. 2018), amongst other features that can be understood as culturally based. However, as Barrios (2014: 330) points out, communities are “never static nor bounded”, they are in a “constant state of emergence over time” and “are shaped by dynamic, politically and epistemically charged relationships among assisting governments, aid agencies and disaster-affected populations”. This helps us to complexify our view of community, showing how resilience and vulnerability are constructed over time, as well as to highlight agency.
In the case of OPSC, community capital has been evident in the strong response to an inefficient reconstruction process maintained by political and economic governmental power. The already mentioned opposition to the standardized house rebuilding, the struggle to reactivate fishing and farming, as well as the strong opposition to the opportunistic attempt to build a coast guard base in an inadequate place, are examples of community capacity and resilience. It is also important to highlight the support given by the Raizal diaspora, a group of organized migrant islanders who have been backing up local processes after Hurricane Iota.
It is worth deepening here on the process triggered by the intention of the Army to build a coast guard base at the Bowden Gully mouth in Old Town Bay, beside one of the main local fishers’ organizations (Fish and Farm Coop), which prompted a strong community response and resistance. Here, it is important to consider previous events in 2015 and 2016, when a prior consultation process took place in relation to a coast guard station. The consultation prompted complete opposition from the local community and the result was no agreement, taking into account environmental, social, and security issues. However, a prior consultation process does not imply a veto in Colombian legislation, and higher authorities passed over community interests to approve the base. Nevertheless, the Army never advanced on the project nor even informed the community. Until Iota struck.
A couple weeks after the disaster, the coast guard not only occupied the land acquired by the Ministry of Defense, but also built a dock using sea space where the local fishermen’s organization had previously had one, which was destroyed by Iota. In the midst of the humanitarian crisis that islanders were facing, and considering the social discontent that the reconstruction process had already created, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. On February 10, 2021, a group of fishermen started a peaceful protest, occupying the ruins of the Fish and Farm Association and blocking car access to the coast guard base; the news soon spread and many people from the community answered the call and joined what turned into the Dignity Camp (Bent 2021). With the support of the Raizal diaspora and other organizations, the movement grew and consolidated as a strong political actor in the context of reconstruction.
Despite facing several difficulties, including internal crisis, collective empowerment has achieved important victories, even taking into account the unbalanced power relations. Today, the Dignity Camp continues to lead the resistance of Raizal islanders, not only to the coast guard base that was the original trigger, but to all the injustices and cases of corruption that have taken place during the reconstruction. Here, the fight for a culturally-oriented reconstruction has played a central role in the movement’s discourse and demands, putting in discussion fishing and farming, not only as key economic activities but also as cultural manifestations central to Raizal people’s lives (Bent 2021; Jay 2021).
In this way, OPSC community capital may have been the most important cultural resilience element, which is not surprising if we consider the relevance that community life still has for Raizal people (Márquez-Pérez 2014). In addition, the islands’ community also responded with what some authors have denominated therapeutic communities, whose key elements involve “agreement on the nature of the problem, consensus on what to do about it, and an overwhelming outpouring of sympathy and support from others” (Webb 2018 citing Fritz 1961).
Moreover, in community capital, it is possible to include the sum of the individual and collective knowledge and practices that conform to islandness and are key for survival on small isolated islands, as well as boats and ships, which were significantly expressed during the Iota. Other remarkable expressions of this are monitoring and preparedness before the hurricane, and solidarity during and after it, which continues to be evident until now. Given the “relational and emergent nature of social groups” (Barrios 2014: 347), internal social conflicts have always been present in the post-disaster, aggravated by the delicate living conditions people have been experiencing and institutional chaos. Notwithstanding, it is worth highlighting the existence of significant agreements amongst many people in the community, which have permitted a certain degree of union and mutual support, guaranteeing the continuity and cohesion of the struggle, as well as the possibility for many to have certain minimum standards of wellbeing.
Religion also can be included in this analysis showing both the positive and negative roles of culture. The people of OPSC are a strongly religious community, where Christian religions7 play a key role in everyday life, with religious leaders (pastors and priests) having an important role in what happens on the islands. Although not as visible as other actors, churches helped their members as well as other people in the community after Iota, through the channeling of donations and other help. On the other hand, although the majority of the churches were themselves highly damaged or even destroyed, hindering the possibility to hold services for some time, religion was key for people’s emotional containment in the midst of such an extreme and painful situation. Religious beliefs helped people to face reality with stoicism, always thanking God for the opportunity to survive.
However, it should also be mentioned that religious beliefs might also have played a negative role. For example, in the days and hours prior to Iota, many people believed and publicly assured (for example, on social media) that God would protect the islands, believing that nothing extreme was going to happen, relying on collective prayers and leaving everything in God’s hands. As religious faith is so strong for many, this may have fostered a situation in which some people did not take enough measures to face the situation, including some who jeopardized their own lives by remaining in high-risk areas, refusing to abandon their homes. Besides religion, the idea that the islands were not a place that is vulnerable to strong hurricanes, reinforced by historical facts (no record of a previous category 5 hurricane, and only 3 hurricanes before Iota in the last one hundred years), might also connect to this belief.
Below, I elaborate on some specific aspects related to community capital:
Monitoring: Weather monitoring is part of local culture, as fishers and seafarers depend on weather conditions to develop their activities safely. Before Iota, many fishers and seafarers manifested their worry about what was forming in the Eastern Caribbean, at least two weeks before Iota struck. This was strengthened by the recent but highly important practice of consulting weather websites and apps (Correa 2012), such as the Hurricane National Center of the USA and Windy App, which is part of current innovations used to reduce risk and uncertainty on sea activities, key for islanders’ livelihoods. These websites and apps were checked by many people before the disaster, which allowed for at least part of the community to be aware of the situation days before it happened, preceding official reports that arrived very late. Thus, many were better informed than local authorities, whose response was indeed belated and insufficient, and never included serious warnings of the imminent danger. Based on this individual and collective monitoring, many people had the chance to take precautions, including cutting and pruning trees, tying roofs, and buying provisions, even if these preparations were hardly enough for the eventual strength of the Category 4 Iota.
Preparedness: As Hurricane Iota turned into a real menace, many people started to prepare for it. A general measure was to tie and reinforce roofs, doors, and windows, which probably made a positive contribution even if the impact of Iota overcame many of these efforts. Similarly, some tried to stock up their homes with food and water, while many others trusted in their cisterns and tanks. Cisterns played an important role in guaranteeing the water supply after Iota although, in many cases, the water was spoiled or salinized. However, the traditional practice of disconnecting gutters before this kind of event, as a measure to avoid water being spoiled with organic matter accumulated through the rain, allowed many people to continue to have access to water after the dramatic event. Tanks were less efficient as many fell from high places or their covers blew away with the strong winds, allowing the water to spoil. Some people stocked their homes with food and other tools needed during and after the hurricane, such as lights, batteries, candles, radios, emergency aid kits, hammers, and nails. However, many did not and even many who did, lost them during the disaster. Cellphones were particularly important to communicate, while there was still connection, and as lights and cameras, after and while electric sources were available.
Solidarity: Solidarity and mutual support were and still are basic components of the cultural response that allowed many people to survive during Hurricane Iota, and are also key elements of Raizal cultural traits generally. There were always people helping others who were at risk and, sadly, two of the hurricane victims actually died because of the risks they took to help others. In fact, during the emergency, many people risked their lives to help family and neighbors and, in the aftermath, many of those whose houses resisted the impacts gave shelter to those whose houses did not. Similarly, support from family and neighbors was remarkable after Iota, with many people exchanging water, food, tents, work, and other goods and services needed to guarantee survival. This solidarity extended from several networks conformed after the hurricane, including people from the neighboring island of San Andrés, who were the first to arrive with help one day after Iota hit, and OPSC islanders’ relatives and friends living in different places around the world, who have consolidated what is today recognized as the Raizal diaspora.
4.6 Element 6: Political Capital
This element is composed of “capable governance, fair distribution of resources, ability to vote, access to people in leadership or distributing resources” (Abramson et al. 2015 cited in Kendra et al. 2018: 95). As previously mentioned, institutional political capital in OPSC is low, and was overwhelmed by central government interventions which practically substituted the local government by subordinating it and taking its responsibilities and decision-making capability. However, at the community level, political capacities appear greater, despite also being part of what has been described in terms of community capital.
This political capital relates to the struggle people have undertaken to defend their rights and positions in the face of the authorities and, in particular, central government authoritarianism. It is worth mentioning the increase and diversification of the community and ethnic leaderships, which have mobilized different sectors of the community, including fishers, farmers, and young people, as a way to respond to the complex scenario created by both the disaster and the reconstruction. Here, culture has also played a central role in local discourses which have emphasized the defense of particular worldviews and ways of being in the world. As one of the emblematic leaders’ communications expressed “Thanks to the Navy, because the transgression of the environmental rights of our people made us gather at the Dignity Camp… Thanks to the mistakes of the reconstruction managers because they caused the most important mobilization in our history, generating an awakening of our ethnic and territorial consciousness” (Raizal Dignity Camp 2022). Thus, Iota may have contributed to a rearrangement of power relations and social mobilization, and a transformation in political consciousness, in ways that we have yet to understand, an issue that has been central in anthropological discussions on political factors in disasters (Oliver-Smith 1996).
4.7 Element 7: Human Capital
Human capital includes traits such as education, training, expert knowledge, efficiency, and optimisms, which can also be part of community capital and have been included in some way within this point. In OPSC, formal education is precarious and difficult to access, but there are still many professionals in different areas, many of whom have supported local processes in the post-Iota context. From a different point of view, islanders, including men and women, have an exceptional education for life on the islands, which is part of what was already mentioned as islandness (Diegues 1998): many of them are outstanding swimmers and divers; they drive cars, boats, and motorcycles with great ability, as well as managing diverse tools and equipment such as GPS, cellphones, computers, machetes, drills, and saws; they climb trees and know how to fish, raise animals, and farm. This capital has played and still plays an important function as it has served the victims to be able to deal with many of the situations faced, such as recovering and rebuilding provisional or new houses, as well as working in different areas and creating new businesses, even in activities they had never performed before, as a way to economically reactivate.
4.8 Element 8: Social Capital
Many researchers agree that “social capital is at the forefront of thinking about resilience, and many disaster scholars have pointed to social capital as a vital, perhaps even decisive attribute of social systems in places that influence a community’s ability to respond and recover from an event” (Kendra et al. 2018: 94). Their components are diverse and range from alternative energy, food and water sources, and volunteers, plans, and resources to attend community needs, to the community organization level, reflected in NGOs and other kinds of organizations (civil, religious, sports), citizen participation and sense of community, with a certain emphasis on formal structures. In the case of OPSC, although social capital is important, in this reflection I have emphasized community capital, as formalization is not very strict, and it is not analytically useful to establish a deep differentiation between the two.
4.9 Element 9: Economic Capital
This economic capital includes a variety of components including income, employment, level and diversity of economic resources, and many others. From the economic point of view, OPSC is a municipality with a relatively high budget in the Colombian context, considering its small population. It is one of the few places in the country where there are no statistics of absolute poverty, although many people face difficult economic conditions with a high level of unmet needs and were already affected by the global pandemic (Márquez-Pérez 2020). Besides that, institutional infrastructure is modest, as a consequence of inefficiency and corruption, as was already signaled. This means that, for example, even before Hurricane Iota, the local hospital only attended to basic health issues and schools were precarious, either in terms of infrastructure or quality. At the community level, houses in OPSC are predominantly modest and basic, many in bad condition, which also contributed to the high level of destruction during Iota. There are few big or luxurious constructions, which can be attributed to cultural patterns, since even those who have the economic means do not usually exaggerate.
Notwithstanding the low economic capital and limited access to many goods and services, a majority of people have good living conditions, something reinforced by the islands’ beauty—it is a place that is often qualified by the same locals as a paradise—as well as by the access to certain valuable goods such as fresh seafood and local fruits and crops, all of which were otherwise highly affected by Iota. But it is precisely these limitations imposed by insularity, which also result in moderate lifestyles and traditions that can be linked to islandness (Diegues 1998), as has been described here and also linked to cultural resilience in other isolated contexts such as the case described by Clarke and Mayer (2016). This economic soberness is also linked to cultural resilience and to the high capacity to deal with extreme situations, such as those that islanders have experienced after Iota.
5 Final Considerations
In this chapter, I have tried to present a reflection on the OPSC experience of Hurricane Iota from both my own experience of the hurricane and the perspective of cultural resilience, a concept that helps to understand the social and cultural processes that occur in societies which experience extreme disruptions because of disasters. For these reasons, I have presented a description of different aspects considered important in order to understand what happened before, during, and after Iota, and subsequently offered an analysis, based on the identification by Kendra et al. (2018) of key elements concerning disaster resilience. Although culture is not even considered to be one of the above elements, the framework remains useful as the analysis shows how culture is actually transversal to everything, and is also one of the most important components of many of the elements, including those apparently with no connections.
The analysis allows us to better understand many aspects of what has happened before, during, and after Iota. This includes some negative aspects, such as the resistance of some OPSC inhabitants to believe that something severe could happen, but it mainly contributes to understanding positive aspects, such as the surprisingly low number of deaths, people’s capacity to deal with the hard situation created in both the disaster and post-disaster scenarios, and the strong community response to the authoritarian and exclusionary process imposed by the central government that has resulted in many inefficiencies and irregularities during the reconstruction. This last issue is the most remarkable in what has been analyzed regarding the islands’ cultural resilience, and resistance, which belongs to what has been termed community capital and is based on community cohesion and cultural identity. This community capital plays an additional role by superseding the weakness of other capitals, such as economic, political, or institutional.
As I have tried to show, Raizal culture has emerged as a stronghold of the struggle that islanders have undertaken in order to guarantee better living conditions and a reconstruction process aligned with their particular livelihoods and worldviews. This has been the reaction to a disaster response and reconstruction that have not really taken into account local views and cultural dimensions, showing not only the importance of the inclusion of these into this kind of process, but also how resilience and vulnerability emerge from the relations between different actors (Barrios 2014).
The OPSC community has shown its flexibility and capacity to recover, as well as the resistance to certain changes considered negative, and the ability to learn from experience and adapt to new situations. This is not an easy process, and it is full of risks, as the current context exacerbates social, cultural, and economic vulnerabilities, ultimately threatening cultural survival. However, local community processes like those described here are a source of hope for those of us who wish that OPSC people may continue to inhabit their land and seascapes with autonomy, as has been done until now. In this sense, the analysis also opens new questions on different social and cultural issues related to the OPSC disaster experience, including social and environmental injustices, disaster capitalism, and other situations that currently threaten the cultural survival of the OPSC Raizal people. These should be addressed in order to deepen our understanding and ensure better actions in the future.
This chapter presents clear arguments to show that culture is not only important, but fundamental, to understand the disaster experience of OPSC islanders and that this experience should be included in the reconstruction process to contribute to its success and reduce risks in terms of the cultural survival of the Raizal people. Additionally, it must be incorporated into the local processes related to climate change adaptation, an issue that gains urgency and relevance given the experience of Iota and the complex regional scenario where hurricanes are projected to increase and worsen. This signifies the valuation and recognition of local knowledge and practices, and the need to promote knowledge exchanges with other types of knowledge. As the complex experience of the OPSC disaster, post-disaster, and reconstruction processes shows, technical and scientific knowledge falls short when it ignores the cultural and territorial realities of the areas it intends to impact.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my family and friends, as well as all the people from Old Providence and Santa Catalina Islands with whom I have lived, learned, shared, and discussed our experience of Hurricane Iota. I would also like to thank my father, Professor Germán Márquez Calle, for his help, reviews, and suggestions; CEMarin for the interest and economic support; and the anonymous reviewers who made suggestions and adjustments in order to improve this chapter.
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