How does a community with a history punctuated by responding to disasters understand the slow risk posed by industrial toxic exposure? Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a contaminated informal settlement in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, I explore the neighbors’ understanding of toxicity as mediated by previous experience with disaster and displacement. Esmeraldas is home to the largest refinery in Ecuador. Located only meters away from smoke stacks and other industrial structures, 50 Casas is one of the neighborhoods in closest proximity to the petrochemical complex. Since their arrival in the area, residents of the neighborhood have faced a variety of disasters ranging from earthquakes and intermittent floods to industrial accidents. I present a case in which the conjunction of temporally distinct risks has shaped the community's protective strategies to focus on the urgency of impending disasters, while deprioritizing the mitigation of slower contaminants. Drawing on the concept of slow violence, I show, first, that a conjunction of threats with varying temporalities may have the unintended consequence of minimizing the danger of slower threats, second, that risk perceptions are intimately tied to personal experience and history, and third, that residents mobilize their identity as “contaminated citizens” to demand infrastructural works aimed at minimizing the danger of sudden disasters.

一个有着灾难应对历史的社区如何理解工业有毒物质暴露带来的缓慢风险？在厄瓜多尔埃斯梅拉达斯一个受污染的非正式定居点进行了 13 个月的人种学实地考察，我探索了邻居对毒性的理解，这些理解是通过以前的灾难和流离失所经历来介导的。埃斯梅拉达斯拥有厄瓜多尔最大的炼油厂。距烟囱和其他工业建筑仅数米之遥，50 Casas是最靠近石化综合体的社区之一。自从他们到达该地区以来，附近的居民面临着从地震和间歇性洪水到工业事故等各种灾害。我提出了一个案例，在这个案例中，时间上不同的风险的结合已经塑造了社区的保护策略，以关注即将发生的灾难的紧迫性，同时将减缓缓慢污染物的缓解放在首位。利用缓慢暴力的概念，我首先表明，具有不同时间性的威胁的结合可能会产生意想不到的后果，将缓慢威胁的危险降至最低；其次，风险感知与个人经历和历史密切相关，第三,