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Paper short abstract

After the 2024 Quilpué wildfire, this paper examines how residents translate suffering into institutional languages of trauma, risk, and eligibility. It argues that reconstruction depends on making experience legible to the state without ever being fully captured by it.

Paper long abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Pompeya Sur and Población Argentina, Quilpué, with residents affected by the 2024 Valparaíso wildfire, this paper examines how suffering must be made legible within post-disaster institutions. We argue that wildfire’s aftermath is shaped not only by loss, displacement, and bureaucratic delay, but by the ongoing demand to translate lived experience into forms that authorities can recognize, record, and act upon. In this context, recovery depends not simply on access to aid, but on rendering pain, damage, and territorial belonging intelligible through the institutional languages of trauma, eligibility, regularization, and risk.

The paper focuses on practices of translation through which residents pursue political recognition while resisting full incorporation into bureaucratic categories. Rather than refusing institutional vocabularies, they engage them strategically, mobilizing psychiatric diagnoses, property histories, and narrated losses in order to be heard by officials and to inscribe their claims in meetings, reports, and administrative procedures. Making suffering legible, we suggest, is not a secondary representational task but a constitutive dimension of post-disaster life.

At the same time, this labor of legibility exposes an irreducible excess. Residents’ suffering is not experienced as an individualized wound produced by a discrete event, but as a relational and territorial condition shaped by burned landscapes, insecure tenure, precarious infrastructures, and long struggles to remain in place. Post-fire politics, we argue, turns on this creative and conflictive process of translation, through which suffering becomes public and politically actionable without ever being fully captured by the state’s categories.