Edinburgh Napier University

  Latin America has a history of “internacionalistas”: outsiders travelling to help resistance efforts against murderous right-wing regimes. In the 1950s and 1960s, Che Guevara volunteered as a medic in Guatemala, Cuba, and Bolivia, and in the 1980s, internacionalistas flocked to Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Western volunteers still come to Latin America. Nowadays, though, they talk of “doing development” in place of fighting for social justice. They blame bad luck and corrupt local governments, and describe “giving back” and “helping out”, as if their presence —and a few crumbs from their table— can change a global economic system designed in their favour. Unlike Che Guevara, most are not doctors. Most are not teachers. And most have little idea how to build a school, because why would they, these wealthy, educated Western young people who are not usually builders? Unlike the internacionalistas, many don’t even speak Spanish. And many keep one eye firmly on the social-media optics of it all, buying into white saviour complexes even as they bring their own ways of being and knowing — risking what Cisneros Puebla calls ‘epistemic violence’.

This performance text presents ethnographic and autoethnographic research from Guatemala, Peru, and Nicaragua conducted over four years, from 2013 to 2016. It critically examines the perspectives and discourses of local people —the ‘voluntoured’— as well as the voluntourists themselves.I show that activism is a highly contested space and that good intensions may be far from enough.

Some practices are easy to problematize: in the data are non-medics doing injections and helping deliver babies, non-teachers writing and implementing curricula of their own devising, and non-experts running development programs even though their only qualification is a degree of enthusiasm. This kind of non-experts-in-expert-roles voluntourism is framed as a form of colonising that, in place of extracting minerals and slaves, extracts character-building experiences and intrepid-sounding lines on volunteers' CVs; the volunteers, I posit, are practising on local people rather than learning from them. Such experiences are predicated on framing “local people” as lesser — unworthy of the same care and quality the volunteers themselves expect and receive.

But it is much harder to critique the exporting of socially just 'wokeness', such as where host societies are sexist and/or homophobic and where those trying to effect change are rich, white outsiders. How are voluntourists to be activist without being imperialist? How far should cultural relativism go? Is local pushback always laudable resistance, or is it sometimes stubborn ignorance, too? I therefore ask: (how) can we do social justice activism across cultures without simply pushing “our” norms and paradigms onto “them”?