Aftershocks: Earthquakes and Popular Politics in Latin America ed. by Jürgen Buchenau and Lyman L. Johnson (review)

The Latin Americanist, June 2010 Americans’ desire to gamble, drink, and buy sex to fill both Tijuana’s coffers and personal bank accounts. These essays address a broad range of issues and raise as many questions as they settle, the mark of good research in a relatively untilled field. Neither Coffey nor Pilcher consider how the consumption of Mexican folk art or food or their changing modes of production might affect consumers. Nearly all of the essays assume that “tourism” means “foreign tourism,” just as the Mexican government has, but Kaselstein and, to a lesser degree, Sackett and Wood note that domestic tourism is also important. I would have liked the authors to place their work in relationship to tourism history more consistently, for the study of Mexican tourism should loom as large among scholars of the industry as Mexico does among the world’s tourists. The local and national contexts are critical, as is the United States as the main source of Mexico’s tourists, but the market for tourism— and histories of tourism—is global. For example, Veracruz’s carnival was only one of many to be revived for the sake of tourism during the twentieth century. Acapulco, Cancún, and the Escalera Naútica are three important moments in the gradual rise of seaside resorts from English peculiarity to global commonplace. The uses and abuses of indigenous histories and peoples are widespread in settler society tourism. But these absences will surely be addressed if, as should happen, both historians of Mexico and historians of tourism read this book. Catherine Cocks Historian, Writer, and Editor AFTERSHOCKS: EARTHQUAKES AND POPULAR POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA. Eds. Jürgen Buchenau and Lyman L. Johnson. Albuquerque: U New Mexico P, 2009, pp. x+236, $29.95. As the aftermath of the 2010 catastrophes in Haiti (January 12) and Chile (February 27) has shown, earthquakes represent much more than the shifting of tectonic plates. They have the ability to turn society on its head and to crack the power-laden and hierarchical crust of the social, cultural, and political structures that have dominated Latin American society , laying bare these structures to be reshaped by those who normally would not have the ability to affect them. Editors Jürgen Buchenau and Lyman Johnson have compiled seven essays on the history of earthquakes in Latin America. Based on the concept that earthquakes have a “special place in the region’s consciousness” (4), the essays demonstrate how earthquakes’ aftermath, beyond physical destruction, includes the popular and state responses to disaster, effects on politics, and on the region’s religious identity, both in the interpretation of the reasons for the earthquakes and the response of the religious communities. Taken as a whole, this book provides the reader with an array of views on the effects of 128 Book Reviews earthquakes on Latin American society as well as many new perspectives on its history. Earthquakes create crises that demand political reactions, in whatever form they come. Several articles scrutinize the response (or lack of response ) that the state made in the areas of reconstruction, distribution of relief supplies, and attention to the injured and dead. Stuart McCook’s essay on the 1812 Caracas earthquake shows how the nascent republic’s inability to respond to the demands of the citizenry following the quake led to a decline in support for the patriot government, contributing to its collapse. Paul Dosal recounts the bungled response and nefarious actions of the Somoza regime following the 1972 earthquake in Managua: Tachito’s kleptocratic mishandling of the relief effort delegitimized his dictatorial regime, providing fuel for the opposition which, when lit by the Chamorro assassination in 1978, led to his ouster by the Sandinistas. The state was not the only entity to respond to the effects of earthquakes; civil society also reacted to their challenges. Mark Healey chronicles the relief efforts led by Juan Perón and his government in Argentina after an earthquake leveled the city of San Juan in 1944. Healey shows how civil society—in this case the powerful wine growers, the conservative political and economic elite, and the Catholic Church—banded together to challenge the state’s plans of rebuilding...