Back to a Redeemed Future: Rural Communities and Apocalypse in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Peru

In 2020 and 2021 in Peru, hundreds of thousands of people left large cities to avoid strict pandemic lockdowns and pandemic-related dangers. Most of these forced migrants returned to their “community of origin:” rural, agrarian areas in the Andes or Amazon where they had roots and/or family connections. This essay discusses three ways in which these journeys were time journeys. Firstly, they disrupted hegemonic narratives of progress that locate the future in cities and relegate the countryside to “backwardness.” Secondly, they facilitated the reintegration of returnees into communities whose economies are less monetized and whose temporalities are therefore phenomenologically more closely connected to ecological processes. Finally, these journeys had an apocalyptic quality for many returnees whereby the multiple crises they faced were the context in which God revealed a need to return to the gratefulness and generosity that returnees associate with agrarian life in the countryside.