Caitlin Cooper

A giant crack divides Iztapalapa, Mexico City’s most populous borough, diagonally. In some places, pavement hovers atop; in others, a spiderweb stretches roots to water. It becomes a solid fracture before turning south into a single road: Andador Unión, postal code 09960, La Planta.

Walking along the Andador, neighbours look either up or down from their doors; the road, meaning union walkway, marks the middle.

“This park used to be here,” Elisa Velasco points to the Andador, now sitting a meter above a sunken swing set. A resident of La Planta since 2000, Elisa has always paid special attention to the paracaidistas, paratroopers, as they call themselves, who built her neighbourhood as they settled on unclaimed land. Now, she monitors their safe relocation, thirty years after they first arrived.

A venturesome plan is underway to reconstruct Mexico City after the September 2017 earthquakes. According to the city’s acting Commission for Reconstruction, nearly half of the 7,416 houses and buildings registered have already been reconstructed or rehabilitated. Some 264 are pending determination or will be relocated.

However, there is still no cohesive strategy to correct the city’s ill-treated undersoil. Many of the damnificados, meaning “people affected,” live on or near pre-existing fractures. The insecurity of their homes didn’t begin with the quake. Rather, their problem is the geological risk immanent in the Southeastern boroughs of Iztapalapa and Tláhuac. Aggravated by dense and rapid urbanisation, the slow crumbling of Mexico City’s poorer neighbourhoods is a long-ignored crisis extending the length of the megalopolis’s Eastern edge.

“They brought us here from Valle de Luces,” says Patricia Zamudio, 67, one of the paratroopers. There, 10 km northwest of La Planta, close to 5,000 families settled in 1985.

“We formed an association, CASA A.C. (Autonomous Committee of Solidarity and Support), and divided the land among a group of 100 families.”She refers to the past project as a human settlement, physically and emotionally temporary in her memory.

Part of a long history of expropriation by private and public actors, the land in Valle de Luces was deemed “public utility” by President Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994). In 1989, the neighbours of CASA A.C. were told that the land they claimed was conservation land, as confirmed by the Federal District’s then Commission of Natural Resources. The official decree states otherwise, specifically, that the settlement was seized for improvements including social housing.

So Patricia moved, along with 12 other neighbours, to Andador Unión.

Because the agreement was “land for land,” CASA A.C. received deeds authorising the relocation.

“In 1989, no one lived on this street.” Patricia remembers that “neighbours knew of a crack, but we didn’t.”

“The first neighbours filled the cracks with rubble. At night the ground would be level and by morning it’d be hollow. They knew,” Elisa confirms.

So did the city. Urban planning documents published by the Secretariat of Urban Development and Housing (SEDUVI) during this time period alert to the latent risk in La Planta.

Starting in 1991, less than two years after CASA A.C. settled along the Andador, the undersoil began to foreshadow an end of the road. Every year, Patricia and her neighbours counted new crevices and ignorantly filled them, tending the union.

“Every rainstorm opened the Andador a little deeper every time, and then the tremors, and then the earthquake,” Patricia’s voice leans toward the recent past.

The second earthquake of September 2017 finally revealed the split. In some stretches, the fissure reached 10 meters deep, about three storeys. An unsparing independent report on Iztapalapa and Tláhuac prepared in the following year found that 47% of homes in La Planta were “in imminent danger of collapse.” Nearly four years later, thirty homes wait for relocation to apartments. Crevices reemerge beneath plaster placed in 1998. Gravel swims below cement floors. Some have abandoned their homes in fear, and sadness. Patricia has stayed.

Plastic petals and spray paint scatter a plot two doors from Patricia, where Julio Fernández makes and sells “permanent” flowers. His art is enduring and uniform, a still life in three dimensions.

I met Julio on the third anniversary of the September 19 earthquake while he was living in his garage. Like Patricia, he wanted to keep an eye on the Andador so he built the garage to have a better roof over his head. Following a 7.4 earthquake in June 2020, the garage cracked.

While Patricia’s side of the Andador is lifted at different levels, Julio’s ground keeps sinking. In March 2021, the street-level garage sat around 36 centimetres higher than it did in September. At the current rate, the southern shore of the Andador will have sunk another 30 centimetres by September 2021, likely doubling the borough average of 21-30cm a year.

“If it weren’t for the crevice at the foot of my door, this house would be flooded,” Julio remarks. He comes and goes from another family home where his mother stays. While he is away, an aquarium keeps a light on in the living room. “Whenever I leave,” Julio says, “I always bless the fish.”

Piranha, Angelfish, and Ocean are a few of the streets where La Planta ripples into Colonia del Mar. On Snapper, Karina Solís stands on a paved road that buckles in waves like haphazard speed bumps. Square banners hang from the windows of damnificados, serving as an above ground map of the Earth’s scattered strikes four septembers ago. Door numbers have been replaced with telephone numbers, in case a builder arrives.

“Many claim that [the damnificados] ask for a lot, including the government,” Karina laments. “They ask why we built here [in the first place]? This neighbourhood had electricity, drainage, water. How were we to know?”

Colonia del Mar reported nearly 1,000 affected homes at the end of 2017. Approximately one hour from the city’s ill-fated high-rises, Colonia del Mar was also in ruins, but the ruins were just “casitas,” Karina says. Like La Planta, Colonia del Mar is largely single-family housing. “Our homes weren’t mansions but they were homes, and they cost us [money].”

Whereas Andador Unión will be relocated, Colonia del Mar will be rehabilitated or reconstructed. The morale required to remain is persevering because “the neighbours see that reconstruction really is their right,” Karina says.

Karina and several other neighbours are members of Damnificados Unidos, the biggest housing collective to form after the earthquake in late 2017. The unification of damnificados from all over the city successfully pressured the government to design a reconstruction plan that included the periphery, and one-storey homes. Since the passing of a new Law for Reconstruction in 2018, they have run food drives, community workshops, and mutual aid for damnificados, in addition to actively monitoring the transparency of the reconstruction programme.

Their slogan is “until the last one of us returns home.”

Karina says the people in Damnificados Unidos are “organisationally and emotionally better prepared” than any government initiative. The pandemic has been an important test.

“The census doesn’t know how many damnificados have passed away in the pandemic, lost their jobs and their own families who have left because the house was no longer safe.

“But we know, from organising,” Karina explains.

More importantly, collectives of damnificados are absorbing a growing number of people who don’t necessarily have an earthquake to blame, but rather years of overexploitation of groundwater.

Edith Rodríguez laughs as she turns on the aquarium light, illuminating four goldfish.

“Even the fish survived,” she says, referencing September 19, 2017, when she came home to a pool in her living room. The earthquake had jolted her house’s foundation upward in such a way that her floor now slopes downhill, perceptibly, progressively.

“We can’t have any tall furniture anymore because it all falls,” Edith says as she walks me through her home, the second floor of a two-storey building. At the lowest point, she’s arranged an office, where a couple of desks and chairs safely rest against the back wall. Edith’s dispatch guards public budgets, opinions from revolving specialists, and meeting minutes.

Following the earthquake, Edith got involved at her son’s school, which lacked emergency stairs. Edith and a group of parents successfully petitioned the government to reconstruct the cafeteria, and now they are working on a new activity room. Her family’s home, however, remains “red.”

Every day Edith walks down a metal staircase separating her apartment from the other side of 9C. In an area of 6,500 m2, Edith’s complex illustrates the entire range of outcomes contemplated by the Commission for Reconstruction. To her right, buildings A and B line up like domino doubles - minor damages require rehabilitation . Across the parking lot, a marble races across G’s floor - complete demolition. To Edith’s left, buildings D, E and F balance - rehabilitation, for now. Edith stands where a cistern united the two sides of C.

At one point, neighbours of Villa Centroamericana’s block 9 say the Commission wanted to demolish across the board. Now, only C and G need reconstruction. “If our cistern broke in half,” Edith asks, “what awaits us after reconstruction?”

The walls two streets north are a damning indication. While not considered in the plan for reconstruction, homes in Villa Centroamericana’s block 21 have developed cracks since the 2017 earthquakes. Neighbours look down the road to Canal de Chalco, the city’s intravenous drip. 68% of Mexico City’s water supply is extracted from underground wells. The city’s original lake beds, Iztapalapa and Tláhuac supply most of it.

In terms of water policy, “we don’t have a future mentality,” Edith says. “We’re drying up the city. These are the consequences.”

Since 2017, the Commission for Reconstruction has been the government agency responsible for documenting damages and coordinating aid ranging from monthly rent subsidies to construction contracts for eligible damnificados. On the agency’s website, a transparency portal features an interactive map of their technical census. Not La Planta, Colonia del Mar, nor Villa Centroamericana are documented in their entirety.

“In some ways the Commission for Reconstruction was new in that it was supposed to be a one stop shop [for reconstruction]” says Naxhelli Ruiz, Doctor of Development Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

In reality, Dr. Ruiz says the program lacks a more global vision. “We don’t know details of who [the damnificados] are, where they went, what health conditions they might have. Issues beyond ‘here, have a house.’”

Dr. Ruiz mentions that whereas other countries talk about the recovery of housing, the language of Mexico City’s law stops at reconstruction. “Recovery is a more comprehensive idea. It includes the living environment, the quality of life, and the specific necessities of the affected population.” When benefits are bound up in red tape, an ignorance to social characteristics establishes new barriers to access. The legal structure of the Law on Reconstruction requires documentation like deeds, contracts, and property titles. In contrast, only 43% of homes in Mexico City had a deed to their home in 2010. In 2016, this number was estimated at 39%.

A smaller scope of repair is the result. Dr. Ruiz, representing the Institute of Geography at UNAM, recently renounced her position in the Commission’s Transparency Committee. The letter, presented by organizations Ruta Cívica, Ciudadanía19S and Dr. Ruiz cited “poor political will, low operational capacity and an active resistance to conducting an open and transparent reconstruction.”

“The Law for Reconstruction guarantees the human rights of the affected,” Dr. Ruiz continues. “But the operationalisation of the law doesn’t change the way we regulate the ground nor does it address the long-term insecurity of property.”

The Commission has a committee dedicated to surface cracks, a Comité de Grietas, but the committee has failed to publicise studies or recent meeting minutes, as explained in a letter to the Committee published by Ciudadanía19S in May 2020. “The issue of the undersoil is poorly conceptualised [within the law],” says Dr. Ruiz. “We’re talking about complicated geological processes like subsidence and water extraction, which require integrated management. It’s not a problem of just cracks. It’s a problem of multiple facets affecting the undersoil.”

“That your house doesn’t collapse is not sufficient,” Dr. Ruiz says. “Even with adequate management of the undersoil, several zones of the city need other solutions. We have to make radical changes.”

Walking north along the Andador, the walkway becomes Revolución, from the ground up. “I remember everything because this is where it all started,” Patricia says, “the majority of us built our homes.” CASA A.C. pooled the funds.

Years ago, CASA A.C. planned to build their own schools, hospitals and parks. “La Planta was an enormous project,” Patricia says. In total, seven homes along the Andador were built with shared savings. Popular housing is an ideal replicated throughout Mexico.

“Nearly 60% of Mexico City’s housing is self-construction,” says Josefina MacGregor, director of the organization Suma Urbana. “An urban planning policy for this population does not exist,” Josefina says. Suma Urbana has 20 years of experience promoting risk reduction and citizen engagement in Mexico City’s urban development.

In Mexico City, “the starting point for the design of public policy must be comprehensive risk management,” Josefina continues, “but we’ve seen that there is a lack of political will to make risks public.” At the local level, this perpetuates “a lack of knowledge and culture about how risk affects our lives,” Josefina says.

For neighbours of La Planta, La Colonia del Mar, and Villa Centroamericana, the years of observation are a valuable asset. “We’ve seen that, since the earthquake, our neighbourhoods have maintained a specific type of social unity. Because of that, we can detect problems as a group,” says Elisa.

The right to structural security is still incipient, but its momentum is tangible in Mexico City’s citizenry. “We’ve achieved several objectives because of this unity,” Elisa says. “After reconstruction, Damnificados Unidos wants every neighbourhood to work together to monitor the safety of our homes.”

In Mexico City, neighbours fight to rebuild houses that fell after earthquakes, down fault lines