When the earth shakes, bodies come together

The accounts of the earthquake of June 24th in Caracas and La Guaira all share a fundamental point. When the earth shook, the response inside homes wasn't every man for himself; on the contrary, those present sought each other out and huddled together. Amid the terror, with the certainty that the roof was collapsing and the walls creaking, the immediate need was to cling to one another. In that critical moment, the words "embrace," "I love you," and "thank you" appear in almost every account. This gratitude occurred right there, under the tremor, as an act of love from someone saying goodbye while acknowledging the existence of "us," a final word uttered in the face of imminent death.

Modern housing ended up being organized under a colonial and individualistic logic that privileges isolation, the nuclear family, and private property. But it only took the awakening of the subsoil for that structure to fracture and the house to become a threat. What emerges in that space, however, is not the individualistic panic that Eurocentric sociology always predicts, but a jolt that returns bodies to their most ancient memories. Those who gathered in the hallway or the living room under the trembling roof did not respond from selfishness, but rather activated the community-family and that extended kinship that has historically sustained life in our Andean and Caribbean territories.

There, on the brink of collapse, a very specific historical memory awoke, one etched into our very being. Five hundred years before the cement of Caracas and La Guaira cracked, the pearl diving of Cubagua had already attempted the first phase of reducing the body to an isolated unit, measuring the Guaiquerí indigenous people or the enslaved African by the quantity of pearls they extracted. Against this same dispossession that sought to destroy everything, community resistance sustained life. This memory did not disappear with colonization. It changed forms, passed through generations, and remained inscribed in daily practices that resurface when life is once again threatened. Therefore, when the devastation of 1541 swept through Nueva Cádiz, or when today an earthquake fractures beams and columns, what is activated is not a mere reflex, but the collective effort of shared work, the unwavering spirit of those who resist the same shipwreck together, and an archipelagic ubuntu that knows no one is saved alone. The embrace under the creaking roof is physical proof that the body disobeys the colonial design when danger is real.

Faced with the shattered ground, the answer lies neither in tallying the damage nor in controlled panic. What unfolds in our homes when the earth trembles is the defense of life in its most basic and radical form, with the collective body expanding to withstand the blow. The gratitude expressed in the midst of the earthquake demonstrates that, when modern infrastructure collapses, the territory that sustains us was never the concrete of buildings, but the human and more-than-human fabric that chooses not to let go (of us).