III
CARNIVAL AND REVOLUTION: MEXICO CITY’S EARTHQUAKE
POWER FROM BELOW
Shaking Inside and Out
One disaster utopia lasted. During the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, citizens discovered each other, their own strength, and the superfluity of what had seemed like an omnipotent and pervasive government, and they did not let go of what they discovered. It reshaped the nation. The real disaster began long before the earthquake, just as the utopia of social engagement and community strength lasted long after—and existed more vigorously than in much of the United States before as well. Utopia itself is rarely more than an ideal or an ephemeral pattern on which to shape the real possibilities before us. Mexicans tasted it and took steps to make it a larger part of everyday life.
Marisol Hernandez was a young single mother taking her son to day care on her way to work as a seamstress in a Mexico City sweatshop on the morning of September 19, 1985. Twenty-two years later, she said, “I wasn’t at work yet because we came in at 8:00 a.m. and I was taking my child to the nursery; he was two years old. We were in the metro—I was in there with him when it happened.” As people so often do, she continued onward as though everyday life still existed. She worked in the Pino Suárez neighborhood of sweatshops and garment factories just south of the Zócalo, the huge plaza at the heart of the immense sprawl of Mexico City, the symbolic center of the nation. Though she is no longer young and her life was never easy, the only sign of time on Hernandez’s smooth oval face is that she looks no particular age as she speaks intently of that moment of rupture. “I went to the nursery to leave my son and went walking because the metro and the transportation wasn’t functioning, but the ground was all broken up and the buildings had collapsed. I walked to Pino Suárez, but already everything had collapsed. I think I was at the point of losing my reason as I was seeing all of that. A long time passed where I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
The earthquake that hit that morning at 7:19 lasted an endless two minutes, while buildings swayed and shook and cracked and millions were awakened, startled, shaken, or crushed at the beginning of their day. Among the buildings that toppled or fell to pieces were many recent structures built badly under corrupt regimes. The builders had used substandard materials or skimped on reinforcing steel, and the officials in charge of safety had looked the other way. Particularly hard hit was the central city—its ground is the old lake bed that had surrounded the Aztec island city of Tenochtitlán, drained for expansion long ago but not quite terra firma even now. Most of the collapsed structures were south of the Zócalo, on the poorer side of the city, though one of the worst disasters was the collapse of the huge Nuevo León apartment building at Tlaltelolco in the north. It tipped over on its side like a grounded ship beached in its own rubble, once-horizontal floors tilted to the sky. Nearly five hundred people died inside it. Also collapsed were the central telephone exchange downtown, through which most of the city’s phone calls were routed, the communications tower of the Televisa television station, two large hospitals, several downtown hotels, the buildings housing the ministries of labor, communications, commerce, and the navy, and many large apartment buildings. Ham radio operators were among the first to get news out to the world. Several hundred buildings were destroyed, more than two thousand irreparably damaged, and countless thousands more somewhat damaged. Though the percentage of buildings damaged was small—Mexico City was one of the world’s largest cities—what was lost was central, literally and figuratively, for the administrative, commercial, communication, and transportation systems of the region and the nation.
A cloud of dust rose up to coat everything in pallor and choke those who moved through the ravaged streets. Eight hundred thousand people had almost instantly become homeless, at least temporarily. Estimates of the dead range from ten to twenty thousand, though many were not yet dead, just trapped and maimed by the collapse. Some would cry out for aid for days. Some would be rescued from ruins quickly or after volunteers tunneled for days through unstable heaps in which the smell of those who did not survive became terrible in the warm September air. A maternity ward collapsed, and twenty-two babies were eventually extracted from the heap it became. Eight infants were rescued from the ruins days after the government had ordered the collapsed structure bulldozed.
Students lay down in front of bulldozers so that the search for survivors could continue. But many were lost. Judith Garcia, who lost two small children and a husband when her apartment building collapsed and lived only because the quake threw her out the window, said bitterly, “I want to state that the people who died didn’t die because of the earthquake; that is a lie. People died because of poor construction, because of fraud, because of the criminal incapacity and the inefficiency of a corrupt government that doesn’t give a damn about people living and working in buildings that can collapse. The government knows that many buildings are death traps.” The earthquake was a force of nature, but the disaster was not a natural disaster. The devastation was terrible, but the response was remarkable.
Marisol Hernandez was walking into one of the worst-hit districts. Pino Suárez has a beautiful old church at its center, but the rest of the neighborhood is a grid of nondescript slablike buildings made of the ubiquitous cement of Mexico City, taller and more regular than the houses and hovels of other parts of the city. The popular Super Leche restaurant was already serving customers when the earthquake flattened it and the apartment next door, killing hundreds. Garment-industry buildings weakened by being overloaded with heavy equipment and goods crumpled. One eleven-story complex turned into a three-story building. Those already at work were crushed in the collapse. A twenty-five-year-old worker, Margarita Aguilar, said that she “ran on the stairway and a wall came on us because the warehouse collapsed. The wall fell across our path and blocked our exit. My legs and one arm were trapped in the rubble, but one hand and my head, the most important things, were free. I climbed on a piece of furniture and broke a side window. I cut my hand and came out. Many compañeras ran toward the windows, and those were the ones that were saved because the part of the building that crashed down as if in a spiral was its center. But the windows to the street were free, so I looked out and shouted—or should I say that I wailed—“help” to the people who were down on the street. They sent us a rope.” Another group of seamstresses threw bolts of fabric out the factory window and slid down those, abrading their skin as they slid and tumbled, but escaping. Citizens who were not injured or trapped came to the collapsed buildings and began organizing rescues immediately after the earthquake.
Hernandez was lucky she was not yet at work, and Aguilar that she escaped. An unknown number of seamstresses died that day. Unknown in part because the police prevented families from trying to dig loved ones out of the rubble, in the name of preventing looting or because the ruins were unsafe. In one notorious case, they also provided protection for an owner who wanted to salvage not the trapped women crying out for rescue but his equipment. Accounts suggest many owners did the same. Some of the buried had no one to dig for them because they were single mothers of young children. Some were themselves children in their teens. Sixteen hundred garment workers died according to one estimate. Eight hundred businesses were demolished. And somewhere between forty and seventy thousand garment workers were suddenly unemployed. By law, their employers owed them their wages and severance pay, but many of those bosses made themselves scarce. So the seamstresses started round-the-clock vigils at some of their work sites. “Looking back, the seamstresses pinpoint the day they watched their bosses remove machinery over the bodies and screams of their co-workers as a turning point in their lives,” writes Phoebe McKinney. “It was then, they say, that their political consciousness was raised, and they realized it was time to demand the legal right to organize to protect themselves as workers.” Out of the rubble was born the first independent women-led union in recent Mexican history. Marisol Hernandez changed that day. So did her country.
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When police and soldiers were sent out into the city, they were ordered to protect property from looters—and in many cases, they became looters. There was little institutional assistance in rescuing or rebuilding, and people so distrusted the government that had overseen the creation of the doomed structures that they preferred to do it for themselves. The earthquake literally cracked open the facade of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and revealed the corruption underneath: in the ruined basement of the attorney general’s office were found the bodies of six men who had been tortured, two of whom had died from their wounds; another tortured body showed up in the trunk of a car in that basement. Attorney General Victoria Adato shrugged, “It’s absurd to suggest we tortured them. They had already confessed.” Donated foreign aid was siphoned off; tents and supplies went astray; search-and-rescue teams from abroad were kept from saving lives—the Spanish had their equipment held up in customs, one group of French was given no guides or maps, and another was taken to a nice hotel when they wanted to go to work. (Some disaster scholars point out that search-and-rescue teams often arrive too late to rescue the living, who are more likely to be saved by the neighbors. Because the media often arrive when the neighbors have already done their rescuing, they naturally focus on the professionals.)
The Nuevo León building at Tlaltelolco was a particularly grim case. Tlaltelolco, or the Plaza de las Tres Culturas—Plaza of Three Cultures—was built around an old Spanish church and Aztec ruins, a reminder of the conflicts that had riven Mexican society since conquest, conflicts that survive in the majority of the population, who are mestizo, or mixed: descended from both Spaniards and indigenous people. Tlaltelolco had been the site of another conflict, the most infamous clash in modern Mexico, the massacre of students demonstrating in the plaza in October of 1968, just before the city was to host the Olympics. It crushed the student movement at the time, but the government massacre in which hundreds or thousands died is considered to be the moment in which the PRI lost its legitimacy, particularly with young and progressive constituencies. Dissatisfaction simmered, but nothing substantial happened afterward until the earthquake broke the stalemate between government and society. When the Nuevo León collapsed, it already bore a banner denouncing the inadequate repairs made after an earlier earthquake. The army troops that showed up at the building did nothing to rescue the residents within. Survivors from the Nuevo León and surrounding buildings went to the agency that managed the complex of dozens of multistory buildings and were told that the officials were too busy to meet with them. The next day hundreds of residents marched, only to be told that the man in command had to wait for instructions—the top-down bureacracy was paralyzed. As the meeting grew heated, a large second earthquake hit, the protestors fled, and hundreds trapped in the ruins of the Nuevo León were crushed as the rubble settled. But soon a citywide housing-rights movement was born.
Similar battles over housing went on in other poor neighborhoods as the residents realized that even many standing buildings were dangerously damaged. With that they became the damnificados, the damaged people, and they numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Most camped outside their former homes, concerned that if they left the area they would lose their right to return—and the PRI proposed moving many displaced people far away, as they had feared. The earthquake could have become a pretext for a large-scale displacement of the poor and for gentrification. Many poor Mexicans had long benefited from rent-control measures that reduced their monthly payments to figures so low that some landlords didn’t bother to collect and had little incentive to make repairs. By October 24, the citywide housing-rights movement had a name, the Unified Coordinating Committee of Earthquake Refugees (Coordinadora Única de Damnificados). They began to win battles to secure housing rights. In many cases tenants were able to purchase the homes they had long rented. Through their struggle after the quake, they did not merely preserve their existing situation but improved it.
Alessandro Miranda was fifteen that morning when his home—two rooms he shared with his parents and two others—collapsed around him. His father, who cut hair in the open-air market nearby, dug them out and then went to Super Leche to begin trying to rescue others in their Pino Suárez neighborhood of modest homes and sweatshops. The son said in 2007, “The streets were cordoned off by the army; we couldn’t get out to too many places. People would arrive with water, provisions, and sandwiches, and they would offer us these things, as there were no resources. There were very many people of noble heart, with a clean way of looking at things. That’s the good side.” The bad side was looting—but he said that given the direness of people’s poverty, it was not surprising that citizens stole too. But he saw as much generosity as greed and he still remembers the refugee camps positively. “During that time there was a beautiful community, the people of the barrios, the people from below began living really well, there was a lot of good coming from the people from below; they were very noble. There were fiestas, posadas, there was a lot of integration. We went at night to the park of San Miguel and there were cafeterias and we would order a sandwich and a coffee; whatever you needed they would give you. If you needed clothes, they gave you clothes, also breakfast, lunch, dinner. You didn’t have to pay anything.” His family’s building on Regina Street was expropriated, and his parents became homeowners, as did many of the neighbors. They still live there, modestly, in a few neat rooms opening onto a communal courtyard where children and pets play. Miranda was traumatized by the earthquake and still responds swiftly to any intimation of another one, but he also became an architect dedicated to the role of design in radical social possibilities.
In many arenas, groups began to coalesce and take action, creating a citizenry stronger than it had been before. While the damnificados were finding common ground, Marisol Hernandez and other seamstresses were forming their union. She recalled, sitting in a little cement apartment in a raw, blank blue-collar edge of the city, with clusters of apartment buildings scattered across the pale soil, “From many sectors, from all over, many people were supporting the seamstresses. I can’t say anything without being grateful, because definitively, they never left us alone.” She still sews for a living now, but at the modest home she owns, with no commute and time to take care of her grade-school-age daughter. Laura Carlsen, an American-born activist who came out to organize with the seamstresses of Mexico City and stayed for good, recalls, “They began to have sit-ins at the homes of the owners, and the owners themselves became visible, much to their chagrin, because they would bring out flyers of their faces that said ‘Wanted: Owner of This Shop’ for failing to rescue, for not paying the legal compensation to these workers, and they went to their homes to say this.” In the early days of the union, there were huge marches, and behind the scenes the members organized to chart the workers and places of employment, to make visible the invisible industry in which they had worked and their sisters had died. Carlsen adds, “When the stories started coming out, people on the Left, feminists, and even civil society on the whole began to get involved in this. They had people from all over the world coming and visiting to talk about the experience to see how their organizing was going. They were heavy times. First there was a period of the sit-ins and the marches and the militant actions.” Then came the less dramatic phase of actually registering the union members, eight to ten of whom became union employees. “In many cases these were women who didn’t have more than maybe three years of grade school. So they were also going through these crash courses in basic leadership and literacy.” They were for a time “the moral center” of the earthquake, or rather of the society galvanized by that earthquake. Support came from all over.
As time went on, outside pressures—including the globalized garment industry’s “race to the bottom” in search of the lowest wages on earth—undermined the union. But the women were forever changed. Many became homeowners through the movements they got involved with, and many gained a sense of their own rights a
nd power they had lacked before. Hernandez now says, “At the beginning before we organized, I thought that Mexico, our nation, was all sweetness, that we didn’t have problems, that everything was equitable, and after I am very clear that that is not true. There is a lot of injustice for all the workers, especially because they want to use cheap manual labor. At the personal level, I feel I am not the same, and I will never be able to be the same, because I learned a lot and it was a great learning.” Gains from the earthquake were as tangible as a union and housing, but they went far beyond that. Mexico changed, on a scale as personal as principles and agendas and as grand as government and society. Citizens found a communal power to remake their world, and they did not let go of it. Carlsen says, “One of the seamstresses told me—and she was confused when she told me this—that her son one day said to her: ‘Mom, I think when the earth shook it left it shaking inside you.’ He was seeing a completely different person as his mother now.”
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 17
