A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

The chapter opens with a statement on how the changes brought on by Mexico City’s 1985 earthquake occurred. Then, Marisol Hernandez’s story is recounted. She was on her way to work at a sweatshop when the earthquake hit. She continued toward work anyway, after bringing her son to daycare. The earthquake caused many shoddily constructed buildings in the garment district and elsewhere in the poorer areas of the city center to collapse. Major destruction to hospitals, telecommunications infrastructure, and apartment buildings occurred. In the factory where Hernandez worked alone, hundreds of workers were killed. Afterwards, many factory bosses came back to collect their machinery from the rubble, even stepping over people trapped in the rubble rather than helping them. These bosses owed wages and severance pay, but many fled to avoid paying. This event revealed the cruelty of their bosses to the women and is identified as the start of the first women-led workers’ union in Mexico.

Afterwards, aid efforts were often corrupt and inefficient, worsened by a militarized government toward which the people had developed extreme animosity and distrust after student protests two decades prior. When large apartment buildings that had been under scrutiny for lack of repairs fell in the quake, a new housing rights movement was born, organizing tenants to buy their houses from landlords and demand safe housing.