Las historias de vida de las piedras: trauma, alonetud y aprendizaje en el tiempo profundo

Las piedras hablan. The stones speak. A bilingual scholarly reflection on trauma, alonetude, and what it means to learn through geological time beside the shore of Loreto, Baja California Sur.

For a full list of all sources cited throughout this project, see the References page.

Key Concepts

Alonetude (Tucker, 2026): A positive, intentional relationship with being alone: full presence to oneself without performance, audience, or apology. Distinct from loneliness or solitude.
Somatic Knowledge (Levine, 1997; van der Kolk, 2014): Knowledge held in the body: sensory, felt, and pre-verbal. The nervous system as a site of meaning-making and memory.
Slow Violence (Nixon, 2011): Gradual, dispersed harm that unfolds over time and space, often invisible because it lacks spectacle. Used here to describe institutional and ecological erosion.
Institutional Gaslighting (Tucker, 2026): Systematic denial, minimisation, or reframing of a person's experience by an institution, causing them to doubt their own perception of reality.
Institutional Violence (Galtung, 1969): Harm produced through institutional structures, policies, and cultures, rather than by individual actors. Often normalised and difficult to name.
Third Shore (Tucker, 2026): A liminal space between departure and arrival: the threshold where old identity dissolves and new inquiry begins. Both a literal place (the Sea of Cortez) and an epistemic condition.
Positionality: The researcher's location within social, historical, and institutional structures. How one's standpoint shapes what is seen, what is asked, and what is possible to know.
Ambiguous Loss (Boss, 1999): Loss without closure: the grief of leaving something that was both sustaining and harmful, where mourning has no clear object or endpoint.

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