In the past few years, the social, cultural and political dimensions of natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, droughts and epidemics have been a topic of interest among Latin American historians. The examination of debates around these events and the state responses to them has emerged as a valid perspective for identifying societal and political fissures. This book, based on archival work, secondary sources and sound interpretations, is an original addition to this new area of research that provides a balanced, intertwined perspective on the material destruction caused by earthquakes and the human experience that comes with it. Its suggestive title is really a metaphor; in the book, the term ‘aftershock’, usually used to refer to the smaller quakes that follow a major earthquake, is used to underline the religious and political debates that emerge in the wake of destructive earthquakes.
A corollary organising principle of the book is suggested by the presence of the phrase ‘popular politics’ in the subtitle. Debates around earthquakes have revealed undisputed notions of political order and social class, elicited populist policies as well as relief and rebuilding efforts, and brought the state and the urban poor (who usually criticise the unpreparedness and wrongdoings of the state) much closer together. As a result, earthquakes became metaphors for the people of what should be changed or destroyed in a society. These ideas become clear in some of the studies in the book, but as in most collected essays some works are better than others.
The powerful introduction – undoubtedly one of the highlights of the volume – is a summary of historical works on earthquakes. It clearly explains the way in which the disruption that earthquakes cause to everyday life offers a window to understanding inequality of power and social relations, because earthquakes ‘strip away’ the routines of everyday life. The studies that follow range from the colonial period to the present and deal with earthquakes that occurred in Lima (1746), Caracas (1812), Valparaiso in Chile (1906), San Juan in Argentina (1944), Guatemala City (1976), Managua (1972) and Mexico City (1985).
Initially the main meaning attached to earthquakes is divine punishment. By the late twentieth century this reasoning obliterates or is combined with political debates around reconstruction efforts and popular discontent over the unfulfilled obligations of the state. The outstanding work of Charles Walker on colonial Lima analyses the popularity of a number of premonitions of God's wrath directed towards the ‘decadent’ lifestyles of urban dwellers. The final section of this chapter is an interesting demonstration of how guilt, rumours and other popular sentiments can be a superb theme for historical research. The nicely researched study by Stuart McCook on Caracas opens with and reflects the famous quote of Simon Bolivar, ‘If nature opposes us, we will struggle against her and force her to obey’. According to the author, both conservative religious authorities loyal to Madrid and elites seeking independence tried to politicise the earthquake but failed. As a result, interpretations of the earthquake as a manifestation of God's will did not translate into political support for any single cause. Moreover, there were a number of secular responses to the earthquake. This study confirms the studies that argue that independence in Venezuela was not the product of a popular revolution and produced a fragile republic.
Samuel Martland's study on a port city in Chile has a remarkable description of events and finds no direct relationship between the city's 1906 earthquake and the creation a few years later of a national service to study earthquakes. Mark Alan Healy's study on an earthquake in a provincial city in Argentina concentrates on relief debates about the advantages and possibilities of resorting to concrete buildings (a symbol of modernity). These debates emerged shortly after the quake and caused a confrontation between state officials, supported by modernising architects, who sought to rebuild the city on a new site, and the local and more conservative San Juan elites, who received the help of local engineers. Although Peronism, already popular in Argentina, promoted the modernisation of social policies in other areas, this political movement took a conservative stance in San Juan and did little to change the way vulnerable constructions were made. Ultimately, rebuilding the city in the same location was instrumental to the concentration of power by the local urban elite.
The quakes of Mexico and Nicaragua are blunt examples of how a natural disaster reveals the corruption, abuse, negligence and incompetence of the state. In the case of Managua, the scandalous selling of blood plasma by the infamous Anatasio Somoza became an important factor in the demise of the Somoza dynasty that ruled the country for decades. According to Paul J. Dosal, the author of this chapter, the scandal was an important catalyst (as was the assassination of the journalist Pedro Chamorro) that led to riots and the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in the late 1970s. The interpretation of earthquakes as punishment for sins reappears in the more recent and intriguing case of religious, catholic and protestant explanations around the Guatemala earthquake. Another interesting perspective appears in the chapter on Mexico by Louise E. Walker that analyses how the middle class is formed and reacts to the realisation of precariously constructed buildings (in general, previous studies concentrated on the urban poor and urban working-class neighbourhoods). In sum, the last chapters of the book reveal a profound popular distrust of the state and a catalyst for popular and middle-class discontent.
In sum, this is a significant edited book that describes and examines details of the social and political reactions to a common natural phenomenon of cities in the region and provides the basis for a comparative perspective on a topic of growing interest for social historians.
