The social scientific literature on natural
disasters in Latin America has been abundant, yet uninspiring, in recent decades.
When writing a book on an 18th-century
earthquake in Peru, I tried to read up on
this field (or fields) but found myself returning to ‘‘my story’’ or to other literatures. New and old work on the baroque or on female religiosity in the early modern period proved more germane and more interesting than studies of contemporary disasters in the Americas.