A Paradise Built in Hell (23 page)

When the earthquake hit, President Miguel de la Madrid was nowhere to be seen. He toured the ruins but didn’t meet with the people or speak in public until late on the evening of the twentieth, and his televised speech seemed detached and distant. He came to seem superfluous. Afterward, he began focusing on macroeconomic measures to shore up the national economy rather than on providing relief for the sufferers. The country was in the grip of economic “liberalization” measures guided by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Their measures were supposed to bring economic development funded by huge loans, but mostly brought instead huge debts and economic-austerity programs to pay for those debts. When First Lady Nancy Reagan showed up with a check for a million dollars, de la Madrid gave it back to her, asking her to credit it to the national debt “since during the time that it took to get the pen out and sign, the debt grew by $12 million because of interest.” The country was already in a recession augmented by a fall in oil prices and the adoption of neoliberal policies that would increase poverty—policies it is fair to call a disaster.

As the emergency subsided, citizens who had done without the government when it came to rescuing their families and neighbors, feeding and sheltering each other, organizing relief brigades, cleanup crews, and more, didn’t lose their increased sense of power, connection, and possibility. The quake marked the rebirth of what Mexicans call civil society. A skinny young man who became one of the moles who tunneled through the rubble to bring aid and rescue trapped survivors sums up something of what that experience was when he says that he “participated in that brigade and learned that being an anonymous human being can be, like, a very great satisfaction, and that you can grow inside, and that is better than to be recognized by the whole wide world pointing at you and saying, ‘You did this, you did that.’ ” In finding a deep connection with one another, people also found a sense of power, the power to do without the government, to replace its functions, and to resist it in many ways. They began to do so, with astonishing results. The era of the earthquake was akin to that of the civil rights movement in the United States, when what had long been the status quo was found to be intolerable. When that happens, change follows.

On the grand scale, Mexico City, which had been governed directly by the PRI, with a mayor chosen by the president, by 1987 gained the right to elect some of its representatives, though it would take a decade more before they elected their first mayor directly. The shock of the earthquake freed them from the sense that the PRI was inevitable. By 1986, a political earthquake had riven the party over economic policy and internal corruption. One party member, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, demanded that the process of nominating a presidential candidate become more democratic, and in 1988 he broke with the party to become the candidate of six left-wing opposition parties. The son of Lázaro Cárdenas, one of the least corrupt and most beloved presidents in Mexican history, he was himself a reformer advocating for economic justice, more accountability, and less corruption. Much evidence shows that he won that presidential election less than three years after the earthquake, but the PRI announced that
“se cayó el sistema”
—the system has crashed, a phrase that became notorious—and stopped the computer tally of votes. Days later the party announced that their candidate had won. Few believed them, and millions rose up in the streets to protest, but they lost.

By 2000, the stranglehold of the PRI had been broken, and Mexico was a multiparty democracy of sorts, even if Vicente Fox of the PAN (Partido Acción Nacional, or National Action Party, a powerful conservative party) was not much more of a populist or reformer than the PRI’s candidates had been. Meanwhile, Cárdenas became the first elected mayor of Mexico City, a position of considerable power, and his successor and party-mate Andrés Manuel López Obrador appeared to have won the 2005 election—only to have it apparently stolen again, this time by the PAN (some disagreement about the real outcome of that election exists). Once again, Mexicans rose up, and the Zócalo at the center of the country and its surrounding streets became the site of a massive encampment of a million outraged citizens. The uprising failed to change the election, though an earlier march of a million through the city had prevented the PAN from disqualifying López Obrador from running in the first place. Electoral politics and reform at the national level were disappointing, though simply making Mexico a multiparty state was a huge achievement.

Less easily measured is what gets called
civil society.
The term is as popular nowadays as it is slippery. As Michael Edwards writes in his investigation of the idea, it can mean nongovernmental associations and organizations, or it can mean society in general when it flourishes, or it can mean the public sphere and public life. In Mexico it most often means the first version of the term: the grassroots and citizen organizations that are independent of and often counterweights to the government. “I am clearly convinced that the country changed after 1985,” the activist and theorist Gustavo Esteva declares, twenty-three years later. Esteva was involved with the black-marketeers’ barrio of Tepito, not far from Tlaltelolco, which defended its housing rights and strengthened the ties that made it one of the most tight-knit communities in Mexico City. After the quake, he saw the term
civil society
emerge in Mexico at the same time that it became important in the Soviet Bloc countries to define the society, or the public, that could counter the monolithic governments of communism—and of Mexico in that era of global change. “As far as I can see, at the beginning of October, someone asked, ‘But who are you?’ Someone said, ‘We are the civil society.’ They really represented a radical change, a different way of thinking. The organization of the colonias/barrios was clearly strengthened. There was this feeling you had the world in your hands, beyond army or government. We created something like an alternative government. . . . Really, this country awakened after the earthquake—ordinary men and women can take things in their hands. Suddenly we saw that the people themselves were having real agency. In the late 1980s they were doing marvelous things.” The housing movement and the seamstresses’ union were only two manifestations of a widespread new engagement.

Former playwright, political prisoner, and then president Václav Havel, who was instrumental in the 1989 liberation of Czechoslovakia by a carefully cultivated independent civil society, defines
civil society
as “a society in which citizens participate—in many parallel, mutually complementary ways—in public life, in the administration of public goods, and in public decisions. . . . The functions of the state and of its structures in such a society are limited only to that which cannot be performed by anyone else, such as legislation, national defense and security, the enforcement of justice, etc.” You could say that civil society is what unimpaired mutual aid creates; or that civil society is the condition and mutual aid the activity that produces it. In Mexico City in 1985, mutual aid is what people first set out to provide as they rescued and aided each other; as the tasks became less urgent and more politically engaged, civil society is what they built up.

Definitions of civil society often imply it is at odds with government, though the success of civil society can be measured by how effectively it shapes government to its needs and desires or, in Havel’s terms, whittles government down to a minimum. Esteva, Kropotkin, and Thomas Paine, among others, would argue that a sufficiently potent civil society could render formal government superfluous or create a genuinely grassroots government, a true direct democracy. In many ways civil society performs the work of government, of providing vital services and decision-making structures. Barrios like Tepito had long regulated themselves informally, with a fluid but direct process more accountable and more truly democratic than electoral politics, in which a bare majority may choose a candidate but be unable to hold him or her accountable. In places across the world where government fails—remote parts of Africa, for example—a civil society often arises to serve the functions of regulating and providing basic services.

No one tells the story of the Mexican capital’s civil society rebirth more ardently than Mexico’s foremost cultural critic, Carlos Monsiváis. He wrote, “During the months of September and October, Mexico City changed. To the presidential residence in Los Pinos marched the seamstresses, nurses, the neighbors of Tepito, the neighbors of Tlatelolco, and doctors. This pressure changed many decisions . . . and for the first time many people learned to speak in assemblies and meetings.” What he tells is the by-now familiar story of disaster: “Not even the power of the state . . . managed to wipe out the cultural, political, and psychic consequences of the four or five days in which the brigades and aid workers, in the midst of rubble and desolation, felt themselves in charge of their own behavior and responsible for the other city that rose into view.” This was the city of power that came from below, of the earthquake of popular will that shook loose the grip of the PRI and began to remake the country. The earthquake is a mythic moment in Mexican history, and civil society is the phoenix that rose from its rubble.

Edwards points out that civil society is shaped by culture, writing that “norms of participation are different among whites and African Americans in the USA, for example, with the latter more likely to take part in protest and campaigning activities as part of an oppositional culture that characterizes many of their associations. Islamic and Confucian cultures think differently about belonging, solidarity, and citizenship, in part because of a stress on the collective rather than the individual.” The differences between Mexican and U.S. or Canadian culture matter here. Mexicans often put a higher value on public life of the most immediate sort, on strolling, gathering, and celebrating in public; they have inherited a public architecture of plazas, monuments, and open marketplaces; these things are part of society there in a way that they are not in most places farther north. (Urbanists know that when a U.S. neighborhood or city Latinoizes, its public and pedestrian life often flowers.) Public life still plays a strong role in many Latin American countries as both a pleasure and a source of political power, and Latinos have a stronger recent history of political organizing outside and against institutions. The United States before the Second World War was very much more such a society, before suburbanization and McCarthyism, among other postwar forces, launched a great withdrawal. Some of this is simply the way that traditional cultures have long functioned, with assemblies and informal decision-making structures, some of it the way the overlooked poor care for each other, but some the legacy of a radical tradition that values popular power. Another way to frame it is to say that Mexicans are often better versed in Dorothy Day’s other loves.

Thanks to a long legacy of corrupt and opportunistic governments, Mexicans are less likely to trust authorities to perform well or in the public interest and more likely to improvise other systems of support and decision making. Membership matters. So does, for many if not all Mexicans, a revolutionary romanticism that is far removed from the quotidian cynicism of the United States, where people believe either that little or nothing can change for the better thanks to human nature (the right) or the overwhelming power of government and capital (the left). Throughout Latin America, political volatility gives most citizens cultural memory of both insurrection and dictatorship, things to both fear and hope for from the political process. The long stability of the two northernmost countries in the hemisphere provides no such sense of risk and possibility. Revolution has a different legacy here, and the idea of radical change a different currency. It is as though they had an ability to recognize that disaster utopia, name it, connect it to other experiences, and make something of it. In other places, the unnamed qualities of a richer civic life and deeper ties often slip away for lack of a language and framework to prize them. It remains an orphan experience, unconnected and ultimately lost.

All these factors gave Mexico City’s citizens the power to act outside their government and to pressure it to change. But they weren’t only tools to apply to the state. They were pleasures Pauline Jacobson had celebrated, a few weeks after the destruction of her city in the 1906 earthquake and fire: “The individual, the isolated self was dead. The social self was regnant. Never even when the four walls of one’s own room in a new city shall close around us again shall we sense the old lonesomeness shutting us off from our neighbors.”

It’s easy to see in Mexico City that the city of physical structures is paralleled by another city of social ties, affections, and commitments—or not paralleled, for the one can be strong where the other is weak, and the ties are often strongest in the poor neighborhoods. The community of Tepito had met with 150 other communities and organizations in the week after the earthquake, forming a dense net of information, alliances, and services to help itself through the disaster. In 1906 San Francisco the conscious pleasure in the sense of community and affection cropped up in individuals. In Mexico City in 1985 those individuals coalesced into communities that lasted. Elite panic in Mexico City wasn’t panicky at all; the government seemed to fear the citizens hardly at all and instead to sweep them aside in pursuit of the usual interests. Elite selfishness or elite callousness might be a better term here. But the citizenry were also resolute, and in facing down the government and the institutions of power in this disaster they won many battles. A great many of the participants were young men who seemed to be living out William James’s “Moral Equivalent to War” in making of their strength and freedom to act a force to salvage their community and solidify civil society. One such young man told me of how he left his house with a camera but never took a picture, didn’t go home to sleep, and became part of the brigades, as they were called. These
brigadistas
did so much while the policemen and soldiers did so little that the people on the streets ignored the officials and concentrated their support on the young volunteers who went into the ruins, directed traffic, ran messages, organized resources, and demonstrated solidarity and commitment.