Aftershocks: Earthquakes and Popular Politics in Latin America (review)

Natural disasters are not particularly natural, as scholars worldwide have been suggesting for decades and as this book also demonstrates. Catastrophes are social and political because societal forces make people—and some groups more than others—vulnerable to disasters. Moreover, debates about how best to prevent disasters often have as much to do with political struggles, economic development, and social relations as they do with structural engineering or geological knowledge. Although geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists have studied these issues in Latin America, historians have devoted relatively little attention to disasters in the region. Aftershocks thus fills an important niche, and, given its clarity and accessibility, it deserves to reach a broad audience.

Each chapter examines a specific earthquake in Latin America’s past: Peru (1746), Venezuela (1812), Chile (1906), Argentina (1944), Nicaragua (1972), Guatemala (1976), and Mexico (1985). The contributors start with the earthquakes, but they are primarily interested in using disasters to understand state–society interactions. Chapters tend to focus on four themes. The first theme is the explanation of earthquakes, which several chapters address but are most thoroughly analyzed for Peru and Venezuela. Many people interpreted earthquakes as divine retribution for Lima’s sinful ways or for rebellion against the Spanish Crown. Social, cultural, political, and economic forces shaped disaster explanations, which, in turn, affected relations with the Crown or state.

The second theme examines disaster-prevention building codes and urban planning, which Chileans tried to establish after the 1906 earthquake. In Argentina, experts and government officials debated with local dignitaries about architecture and structural engineering, but the regional elite wanted reconstruction both to preserve their social status and to reflect their supposed modernity.

The third theme examines how earthquakes exposed the inability of governments to ameliorate widespread social discontent. Disasters exacerbated and highlighted corruption under Somoza in Nicaragua, class conflicts in Guatemala, and middle-class suffering and economic woes in Mexico. In all three cases—and this is the fourth theme—the earthquakes mobilized social groups to challenge, sometimes violently, the existing governments. The Sandinistas rose to power in Nicaragua. Revolutionary groups and grassroots Catholic organizations increasingly emerged in Guatemala, and the middle classes fought against the Party of the Institutional Revolution (pri) in Mexico.

This volume’s strength is its excellent on-the-ground case-study narratives of specific earthquakes. Chapters focus on fresh topics and provide new information about most of these disasters. Theoretical contributions to disaster studies are less explicit; the contributors do not engage much with historiographical debates or disaster scholarship. Nor is there a concluding chapter to underscore key themes. The chapter about Mexico stands out for explicitly arguing how the study of earthquakes can help to revise the historiography about the state in Latin America. The book’s interdisciplinary contribution is primarily its analysis of building codes, architecture, and structural engineering. Future interdisciplinary scholarship might probe earthquake science, geology, and “indigenous explanations,” which are beyond the scope of this volume and have received little attention in disaster histories of Latin America in general.

Overall, this book contains important new earthquake studies that illuminate both the conditions that led to so-called “natural” disasters and their contentious aftermath, when various social groups and state agencies debated about how best to minimize vulnerability, how to prevent future calamities, and how to achieve greater social equality.