"The need obliged us" : culture as capacity during the Hurricane Stan emergency response. A case study from Tectitan, Huehuetenango, Guatemala

A major deficiency in disaster management plans is the assumption that pre-disaster civil-society does not have the capacity to respond effectively during crises. Following from this assumption a dominant emergency management strategy is to replace weak civil-society organizations with specialized disaster organizations that are often either military or Para-military and seek to centralize decision-making. Many criticisms have been made of this approach, but few specifically addresses disasters in the developing world. Disasters in the developing world present unique problems not seen in the developed world because they often occur in the context of compromised governments, and marginalized populations. In this context it is often community members themselves who possess the greatest capacity to respond to disasters. This paper focuses on the capacity of community groups to respond to disaster in a small town in rural Guatemala. Key informant interviews and ethnographic observations are used to reconstruct the community response to the disaster instigated by Hurricane Stan (2005) in the municipality of Tectitán in the Huehuetenango department. The interviews were analyzed using techniques adapted from grounded theory to construct a narrative of the events, and identify themes in the community’s disaster behavior. These themes are used to critique the emergency management plans advocated by the Guatemalan National Coordination for the Reduction of Disasters (CONRED). This paper argues that CONRED uncritically adopts emergency management strategies that do not account for the local realities in communities throughout Guatemala. The response in Tectitán was characterized by the formation of new organizations, whose actions and leadership structure were derived from “normal” or routine life. It was found that pre-existing social networks were resilient and easily re-oriented meet the novel needs of a crisis. New or emergent groups that formed during the disaster utilized social capital accrued by routine collective behavior, and employed organizational strategies derived from “normal” community relations. Based on the effectiveness of this response CONRED could improve its emergency planning on the local-level by utilizing the pre-existing community organizations rather than insisting that new disaster-specific organizations be formed.

The Role of Fraternal Organisation in Migration and Informal Labour Organisations in Mining Communities: Cornwall, the Keweenaw, and California Compared

During the second half of the nineteenth century fraternal and benevolent associations of numerous descriptions grew and prospered in mining communities everywhere. They played an important, but neglected role, in assisting transatlantic migration and movement between mining districts as well as building social capital within emerging mining communities. They helped to build bridges between different ethnic communities, provided conduits between labour and management, and networked miners into the non-mining community. Their influence spread beyond the adult males that made up most of their membership to their wives and families and provided levels of social and economic support otherwise unobtainable at that time. Of course, the influence of these organisations could also be divisive where certain groups or religions were excluded and they may have worked to exacerbate, as much as ameliorate, the problems of community development. This paper will examine some of these issues by looking particularly at the role of Freemasonry and Oddfellowry in Cornwall, Calumet, and Nevada City between 1860 and 1900. Work on fraternity in the Keweenaw was undertaken in Houghton some years ago with a grant from the Copper Country Archive and has since been continued by privately funded research in California and other Western mining states. Some British aspects of this research can be found in my article on mining industrial relations in Labour History Review April 2006