When Times Flow Together: Anticolonial Temporalities and Geological Intimacies in Matías Rendón’s Pluma de agua y fuego

Abstract

This paper analyzes how Ana Matías Rendón’s Pluma de agua y fuego explores survival and resistance through Indigenous epistemologies and Afro-Indigenous alliances. As a Mixe and Afrodescendant author from the people never conquered, Matías Rendón crafts a narrative that moves between the 1629 Mexico City flood and the 1692 Indigenous uprising, challenging linear understandings of colonial apocalypse. Through a dialogue with Kathryn Yusoff’s work on geological intimacies, this analysis explores how the story’s protagonists, Atlacatluitl and Khira, embody temporal sovereignty, ways of understanding time that recognize the inseparability of human bodies, ancestral knowledge, and geological processes. Their alliance demonstrates how anticolonial resistance emerges through maintaining alternative temporal frameworks despite centuries of colonial attempts at erasure. The narrative’s movement through multiple catastrophes reveals how colonized communities have preserved ways of knowing that refuse both the finality of apocalypse and colonial temporal impositions. At a moment when climate discourse often presents apocalypse as a future event, Matías Rendón’s work reminds us that understanding environmental crisis requires recognizing the multiple ends of worlds that colonialism has already enacted, and the temporal sovereignties that have enabled survival.