Chris Loftus looked heartbroken as he flipped through the photos on his cell phone. He and a group of friends had loaded up a truck with donated toys, clothing, toilet paper, and food, and headed down to Juchitán de Zaragoza, the city in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico, hit hardest by the massive earthquakes in September.
“It’s so much worse than any of the reports you see on the news,” he told me. The first thing you notice, he said, are the piles of rubble at the edge of every town, from the houses that have collapsed.
People are living in tent cities, afraid to sleep in damaged houses that could fall on them at any moment. Aid has been spotty, and there are news stories about corrupt local officials making off with millions of pesos intended to help the displaced. But the thing that made Chris choke up as he described his trip was how grateful people were in the small towns around Juchitán when he and his friends pulled up in their truck. People whose every possession is buried under the ruins of their homes thanked Chris and his friends passionately for the small toys and donated shirts. It was painful, Chris said, with tears in his eyes.
He showed me photos of his group’s bright green truck trailer, festooned with colorful plastic balls of the type you find in crates at the grocery store. Rolling from town to town in this funny-looking vehicle, Chris and his friends played with the kids, handed out care packages, and tried to lighten the mood. There are hundreds of similar, small volunteer brigades arriving all the time. They can barely make a dent, given the scale of the destruction.
Chris is my husband’s Spanish teacher. About a week after we talked to him, we made the beautiful, five-hour drive through the mountains to the Isthmus region around Juchitán along with a friend who is a tour guide in Oaxaca. We drove past the wreckage by the side of the road, and the towns that look like they’ve been bombed. Buildings have crumbled to the ground on every block.
Still, life goes on. The market is hopping. Vendors hawk huge piles of shrimp and fish, fruits, and flowers, alongside the elaborately embroidered dresses typical of the region.
We spent three nights in a tent city in Juchitán. Our neighbors in the fifty-odd tents around us received us with graciousness and good humor. Since we hadn’t brought mats for sleeping on the concrete, one young man fished some out of a supply tent. He led us to our sleeping area and told us to make ourselves at home. “This is an excellent section,” he joked. “They are all people of quality.” A gaggle of children surrounded us and asked questions. “Do you speak English? Say something in English! How do you say ‘dog’?”
I had to ask eight-year-old Luis to repeat his question twice before I understood what he was saying: “Do you know Donald Trump?” No, I said, I do not. He was unconvinced: “Is it that you don’t know him, or just that you don’t get along?”
For people who have lost all of their possessions and must sleep in tents (and, on hot nights, in lawn chairs), the residents of the tent city were amazingly friendly and relaxed.
“People are in shock,” our local host Shalia Ruiz told me as we walked through the rubble-strewn streets. She was wearing a pink baseball cap with the words “I am the bride” printed on it. Her wedding, two months ago, was still much on her mind. She showed me pictures and told me all about the three-day celebration. We passed the large colonial church where it took place—now surrounded by a chain- link fence and bulldozers. The bell tower had collapsed.
“After the first earthquake, people still had some spirit,” Shalia said. But the second major quake, on September 23, knocked the wind out of everyone. “I don’t know what to say to people,” she said. “If I ask them, ‘How are you?’ They start to cry: ‘My house is gone!’ ”
Shalia’s own house was slated for demolition during our visit. But she and her husband, Héctor, seemed to be doing well, still energetic and laughing, coasting on the good feeling from their wedding. They are lucky. Both are still employed. The little food stands and businesses run by some of our other neighbors in the tent city were completely wiped out.
Some people go to work every morning and come to the shelter only to sleep at night. Others hang around all day with nothing to do. Shalia goes to her job in the courthouse, filming crime victims’ testimony, and helping to translate, since she is fluent in both Spanish and Zapotec. Héctor travels all over Mexico as a safety inspector for large companies, including the nearby wind-energy plants.
Still, they don’t know how long it will be until they can rebuild.
The government has deployed bulldozers to knock down damaged houses all over the region. That’s why the rubble from ruined houses is piled in makeshift dumps at the edges of nearby towns. Residents are eligible for up to 120,000 pesos (about $6,600) in aid if their houses are destroyed. But people in the towns of Unión Hidalgo, Ixtepec, and Ascunción Ixtaltepec said the government officials who visited them told them they had to allow the bulldozers to wreck their houses in order to receive the aid.
Some people are turning the bulldozers away, even if it means they don’t get any money to rebuild.
In Unión Hidalgo, local activist José Arenas, who is part of an indigenous collective Colectivo Binni Cubi and works with the Zapatista-friendly radio station La Otra Radio 99.9FM, urged his neighbors to form a community self-help group and work with the architects and engineers who are trying to help locals salvage their homes. The architects, led by Marcos Sánchez, who specializes in eco-construction and old building methods using local earth, fibers, and stone, are offering their expertise for free to groups of at least ten people who form a barn-raising effort.
Over and over I heard people use the word “shock” to describe the situation of local residents. I could not help but think of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and her description of the brutal way the Bush Administration and its corporate cronies exploited the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, withholding aid, criminalizing victims, and using the disaster as an opportunity to push gentrification and privatization at the expense of a distraught and disempowered populace. The fallout helped defeat the Republicans and elect Barack Obama in 2008.
Mexicans are less shocked at the possibility that their government does not have the people’s best interests at heart.
In Mexico, people generally expect corruption and dysfunction from public officials. The answer, for the community activists we met, is to fight to strengthen an indigenous model of community life, in which taking care of your neighbors and building a strong civil society are core values.
“Civil society is better than the government,” Elvis Guerra, a twenty-four-year-old Zapotec poet and advocate for local culture—and a rock star to his community in Juchitán—told me.
Elvis has made it his cause to promote Zapotec language and traditions. He oversees a group of twenty-five young people working to make sure that some 800 grandmothers affected by the earthquake get their traditional outfits replaced.
These elderly ladies—queens of the market in their flowered skirts and beribboned hair—refuse to put on donated clothing. “They say it’s not for them,” he explained.
“The grandmothers are a very important symbol in our society,” he added. “They practice traditional medicine, keep the language and traditions alive.”
Elvis’s project, which is called la otra mitad de mi corazón, “the other half of my heart,” gives work to designers and seamstresses who were earthquake victims. He is also donating ovens to women whose livelihood is tortilla-making. “We’re more working to reactivate the local economy,” he explained. “A donation of food lasts two days—then what?”
This kind of thinking could help reenergize the whole region, he suggests.
“In the reconstruction effort, it’s not just architecture and the economy but the language, the culture—it’s starting over,” Elvis said. “We have to reinvent.”
As the world confronts more disasters and the shocks that follow, there may be a model in these efforts to preserve a local economy and culture—even for people outside the earthquake stricken region of Mexico.
Ruth Conniff is living and working in Oaxaca, Mexico, this year as The Progressive’s editor-at-large.