List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Foreword
Kim Fortun

Introduction: Crisis without Guarantee and the Social Science of Pandemics and Disasters
Roberto E. Barrios and Virginia García-Acosta

Part I: A Pandemic Where Crisis is the Norm

Chapter 1. Uncertain Futures, Wavering Hopes: Crisis, Pandemic, and Expectations around the COVID-19 Vaccination Process in Argentina
Sergio E. Visacovsky and Gabriel Noel

Chapter 2. Fear as Luxury: The Intersection of COVID-19 Policies and Violence in El Salvador
Norbert Ross

Chapter 3. The Pandemic in a Disastrous Context: COVID-19 Conjuncture and Post-Earthquake Conditions in Morelos, Mexico
María N. Rodríguez Alarcón

Part II: Pandemic Governance in the Post-Colony

Chapter 4. Responsive Scholarship and COVID-19 in Southern Ecuador: Exhaustion, Ethnographic Collaborations,and Vulnerability
Maka Suárez and Fu Yu Chang

Chapter 5. Resisting Necropolitics: Mutual Aid and Grassroots Responses to the COVID-10 Syndemic in Brazil
Victor Marchezini , Marcos Rodrigo Maciel Ferreira and Fernando Severo

Chapter 6. The Pandemic Crisis Reveals Indicators of DRM in the Strategy against the Disaster in Mexico
Raymundo Padilla Lozoya

Chapter 7. Dis/Connections in the Argentinean Interior: (Im)Mobility and Morality in Times of Pandemic
Susann Baez Ullberg and Diego Zenobi

Part III: A Transnational Pandemic

Chapter 8. “We Don’t Have That Freedom”: Labor, Stress, and the Racial Capitalism of Agriculture at the Advent of COVID
Claire Branigan, Jessica F. Brinkworth, Korinta Maldonado, Ellen Moodie, and Gilberto Rosas

Chapter 9. The SARS COVID-19 Pandemic: A Critical Moment of Vulnerability in Guatemalan Migrations
Alfredo Danilo Rivera

Chapter 10. Collective Reasoning When Plunder is the Established Ethos: The COVID-19 Pandemic in Honduras and the Epistemological Basis of Social Disaster
Gustavo Peña-Flores

Conclusion: A Pandemic’s Revelations
Roberto E. Barrios and Virginia García-Acosta

A Revelatory Pandemic

Crisis, Agency, and COVID in Latin America

Edited by Roberto Barrios and Virginia García-Acosta

Foreword by Kim Fortun

286 pages, 16 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-83695-278-7 Hb Published (December 2025)

eISBN 978-1-83695-280-0
web ISBN 978-1-83695-280-0

Details

“This book deals with an interesting subject and chain of events triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Its main value is the editors’ attempt to conceptualize crises in Latin America, while connecting this notion with other concepts such as risk and disasters.” • Gonzalo Lizarralde, Université de Montréal

“This is an excellent book that critically examines how the pandemic was produced, contested, and experienced by differently situated groups and subjects throughout Latin America.” • A.J. Faas, San José State University

Political leaders and the news media described the public-health catastrophe of COVID-19 as a crisis, while scholars and public intellectuals portrayed the pandemic as a debacle that would lay bare the inequities and contradictions of an increasingly neoliberal global political economy and usher in an era of progressive, transformative change. Bringing the anthropologies of disaster, epidemics, and crisis into conversation, A Revelatory Pandemic subjects these hopeful expectations of post-pandemic change to social-scientific scrutiny across Latin America and challenges popular and scholarly assumptions about the causes and outcomes of crisis.

Roberto E. Barrios is Professor of Anthropology and Doris Zemurray Stone Chair of Latin American Studies at the University of New Orleans. He has conducted research on disaster recovery and mitigation in Central America, Mexico, and the United States and is author of Governing Affect: Neoliberalism and Disaster Reconstruction (2017, University of Nebraska Press) and co-editor of, Disaster Upon Disaster, with Susanna Hoffman (2022, Berghahn).

Virginia García-Acosta is a social anthropologist and historian based at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She has published over 100 articles and book chapters and twenty-four books in Mexico, the United States, Europe, South America, and China. She is the former director of CIESAS (2004-2014) and a founding member of the disaster research network "La Red."

Series: Volume 9, Catastrophes in Context

Subject: Medical Anthropology Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

Area: Latin America and the Caribbean

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC057000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Disease & Health Issues; SOC026000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/General

berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

A Revelatory Pandemic

Crisis, Agency, and COVID in Latin America

Edited by Roberto Barrios and Virginia García-Acosta

Foreword by Kim Fortun

Series: Volume 9, Catastrophes in Context

Subject: Medical Anthropology Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

Area: Latin America and the Caribbean

Home -> Title

Contents

A Revelatory Pandemic

Crisis, Agency, and COVID in Latin America

Edited by Roberto Barrios and Virginia García-Acosta

Foreword by Kim Fortun

Series: Volume 9, Catastrophes in Context

Subject: Medical Anthropology Political and Economic Anthropology Sociology

Area: Latin America and the Caribbean