ABSTRACT
Julio Hernández Cordón’s Polvo (Dust) is a 2012 fiction film that recounts the impossibility of shooting a documentary about the victims of the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996). What gets in the way of filming is dust itself, which debilitates the protagonists with allergies, migraines, and insomnia. This chapter argues that Polvo revisits the war’s legacy by interweaving disability and environmental concerns through ecochronicity—the process through which bodies become chronically debilitated in toxic environments. Working at the intersection between disability studies and the environmental humanities, this chapter develops the notion of ecochronicity from contemporary debates about the chronic. Examining ecochronicity in light of Elizabeth Freeman’s definition of the chronic as a state of endurance, Mel Y. Chen’s conceptualization of how toxicity circulates among bodies and debilitates them, and Heather I. Sullivan’s dirt theory, this chapter considers the political and ecological dimensions of dust, articulating the way in which Polvo instantiates a “dirty” aesthetics. In Polvo, an ecochronicity is carried out in the aftermath of war and its legacies of violence: dust disables weak bodies, fertilizer acts as a toxin, and the Mayan Highlands remain a nonhuman casualty of war.
