Collateral Damage: Nature and the accumulation of capital in Héctor Aguilar Camín’s El resplandor de la madera and Jennifer Clement’s Prayers for the Stolen

Mexican novelist Héctor Aguilar Camín’s 1999 novel El resplandor de la madera traces the feats, misfortunes, and scandals of the Casares family over five generations, providing a broad historical scope for the portrayal of business practices from the colonial era to the present. In doing so, El resplandor captures the consistent desire for profit as the protagonists’ primary motivation and reveals their indifference to the environmental implications of their practices. Jennifer Clement’s Prayers for the Stolen (2014) is an equally compelling novel whose insights into nature-culture relations in Mexico are similarly profound. Narrated from the perspective of the protagonist Ladydi García Martínez, an adolescent girl who lives in the mountains of Guerrero in a nearly exclusively female community, it is a story of the ways in which the trafficking of women intersects with the violence of Mexican drug cartels. This essay analyzes the relationship between nature and culture in both novels, asserting that these two seemingly disparate works contain a point of contact in their portrayal of systematic forms of slow violence through the representation of nature as collateral damage in the battle for accumulation of capital.