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Aftershocks: Earthquakes and Popular Politics in Latin America. Jürgen Buchenau and Lyman L. Johnson (eds.), University of New Mexico Press, 2009. xi + 230 pp., photos, map, index. $29.95 Paper. (ISBN: 978-0-8263-4623-0).
Natural disasters in Latin America have, until recently, received relatively little attention from scholars. This volume is thus a valuable addition to that slowly growing literature. The focus of all seven authors is the effects that earthquakes had on the political and social structures of the societies that suffered major quakes from 1746 (Lima) to 1985 (Mexico City). The elegant essays reveal how societies changed in dieir varied responses to these disasters. Of course geographers will note that what are called "natural" in this volume, are as much cultural in the sense that man-made decisions on locations and structures of the built environment are just as important as the tectonic effects of nature.
As the editors point out in their introduction, natural disasters often clearly reveal the underlying social structures, how societies were constituted and what their priorities were. In most cases the class and ethnic structures were highly significant, the lower classes, and non-Hispanic bearing the brunt of the consequences in most cases. But not all eardiquakes discriminated against the poor; in Valparaiso in 1906 the upper-class section of town, built on relatively unstable landfill, was destroyed, whereas the lower-class and middle-class neighborhoods on the solid rock hills overlooking the harbor were spared. Similarly, in the 1944 San Juan quake, the rich residents' houses in the downtown area, built...