From Strangers to Neighbors: Post-Disaster, Resettlement, and Community Building in Honduras by Ryan Alaniz (review)

Ryan Alaniz’s academic interest in Honduras dates to 2001–02, when he was in the country “volunteering at an orphanage.” That experience presented him with the opportunity to visit resettlements established for survivors of Hurricane Mitch, which occurred in late October 1998. The material destruction and human misery and massive death that the hurricane produced in Honduras—between 10,000 and 15,000 dead—probably generated the image of “Honduras” best known in the United States, up to the current “threat” posed by “the caravan” of immigrants that departed the country almost 20 years after Hurricane Mitch.

Alaniz’s 2001–02 visit to Honduras led to the social science research project that resulted in this book. The research was carried out between September 2009 and June 2010, in the midst of the worst repression and human rights violations visited upon resisters to the coup of June 2009. For his research, Alaniz returned to the resettlements Suyapa and Pino Alto, in a valley about a half hour from Tegucigalpa, the country’s capital. He also returned to the origins of the “strangers” made into “neighbors” and “communities” supported financially and logistically by international funds administered mostly by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) after 1999. Alaniz’s research “instruments” were mostly different “resettlement surveys,” albeit complemented with interviews, analysis of NGO documents, and a degree of sociological ethnography. The format of the surveys is neatly presented in appendices, and this primary research is complemented with a subtle reading of other scholarly social science studies on this topic in Honduras and beyond.

The preface states that the book is written for a “general audience interested in relocation, resettlement and community development” (x), and for “resettlement theorists and practitioners” (73). My reading of this book is that its primary audience comprises mostly the segments of the latter audience, whether in Honduras or anywhere else in the world with weak states facing social disasters consequent to war, climate change, or poorly planned urbanization in vulnerable environments. Its claims about the much greater success in community development after Hurricane Mitch (1998) in the Suyapa resettlement, compared to its Pino Alto counterpart, draws on a range of theoretical frameworks, including “path dependence” and “community process” development “metrics.” These, among others, are no doubt easily recognized and digested by “resettlement theorists and practitioners.” From their vantage point, I believe this brief book will be a very welcome contribution to their debates and concerns.

On the other hand, as a member of a “general audience interested in relocation, resettlement, and community development” in Honduras, and as a Honduran academic committed to scholarly renditions of the country’s past and its contemporary relevance, I found this book lacking substance and a richness still possible within the limits probably imposed by the press’s editors and publication costs. For example, the history of Honduras before Mitch is reduced to a few paragraphs, and some scattered sentences. Tegucigalpa’s own history and context up to 1998 is virtually nonexistent, other than in aggregate “metrics” of macroeconomic or social science indicators, especially crime and poverty data from the last few decades, even when a “Tegucigalpa mentality” is brought to Suyapa and Pino Alto. The history of “the Valley” where Suyapa and Pino Alto are built is also not characterized, almost as if it were irrelevant to the analysis of the resettlements after 1999.

My sense is that these problems do not stem from the author’s lack of respect for Honduras, or its complicated and rich past and relevance to “resettlement theory” and practice. It is probably linked to the author’s sense of history and its methods. Even though overall its language and syntax is marked by Alaniz’s sensitivity to his informants and their plight, including a Honduran friend murdered in 2011, I too often found myself thinking that I was reading a diagnostic social report...