Where the other chapters of this series dealt with layers of decades and centuries, this one deals with a few minutes. Those few minutes changed everything about Roma.
A few minutes of collapse
On 19 September 1985 a magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck Mexico City Fact. In Roma alone more than 460 buildings partially or entirely collapsed Fact. As Ep.2 showed, because the district was planned in one unified period, it also fell as a single whole Estimate. The population fell from 95,000 in 1970 to 35,000 by 1995 Fact — two-thirds of the district gone.
The people who went in first
In the immediate aftermath the government was slow. The gap was filled by volunteer citizen brigades Fact. Citizens with picks, shovels, buckets, cranes and tractors cleared rubble, carried the injured, prepared food and found medicine Fact. This grassroots movement was decisive in the first days Estimate.
What the disaster pushed up
The disaster did not leave only destruction. In particular, the organising of garment workers, the costureras, who had endured precarious conditions, accelerated through this quake Fact. Demanding rescue, and later compensation, pushed a labour movement upward Estimate. A rare case of collapse producing solidarity.
Memory as an asset
The memory of that civic solidarity stayed on as an asset of Roma. And it was substance, not sentiment — when another earthquake came in 2017, the buildings rebuilt in Roma in 1985 held, because residents had supervised the work properly Fact. What was learned from one collapse prevented the next (Ep.5).