A Paradise Built in Hell (52 page)

128 Indiana National Guard, 2007:
The article is no longer on the Web site.

129 “Caron said: to heck with this idea”:
Lee Clarke, in interview with the author, July 2007.

130 “Disaster myths are not politically neutral”:
Lee Clarke, introduction to
Terrorism and Disaster, Vol. 11: New Threats, New Ideas
(Stamford, CT: JAI Press, 2003), 5.

131 “It has made me far more interested”:
Kathleen Tierney, in interview with the author, 2007.

135 Marisol Hernandez:
In interview with the author, April 2007.

137 A maternity ward collapsed. . . . Eight infants:
In Julia Preston,
Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 107.

137 “I want to state that”:
Judith Garcia, quoted in Elena Poniatowska,
Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake
, trans. Aurora Camacho de Schmidt and Arthur Schmidt (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 83.

137 “ran on the stairway”:
Margarita Aguilar, quoted in Poniatowska,
Nothing, Nobody
, 146.

138 “Looking back, the seamstresses pinpoint”:
Phoebe McKinney, “Fighting to Survive: Mexico’s 19th of September Union,”
Women and Labor
10, no. 9 (September 1989), and
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1989/09/mckinney.html/
.

139 “It’s absurd to suggest”:
Victoria Adato, quoted in Preston,
Opening Mexico
, 113.

140 “The streets were cordoned off ”:
Alessandro Miranda, in interview with the author, Mexico City, April 2007.

141 “From many sectors”:
Hernandez, in interview with the author, April 2007.

141 “They began to have sit-ins”:
Laura Carlsen, in interview with the author, Mexico City, April 2007.

141 “When the stories started coming out”:
Ibid.

142 “In many cases”:
Ibid.

142 They were for a time “the moral center”:
Carlos Monsiváis,
“No Sin Nosotros”: Los Días del Terremoto 1985-2005,
trans. Brian Whitener, for the author (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2005), 136.

142 “At the beginning before we organized”:
Hernandez, in interview with the author, April 2007.

142 “One of the seamstresses told me”:
Carlsen, quoted in “Mexico City Seamstresses Remember: Two Decades of Aftershocks from Mexico’s 1985 Earthquake,” IRC Americas,
www.americaspolicy.org
, 1985.

142 “The word ‘crisis’ is of Greek origin”:
Prince,
Catastrophe and Social Change
, 16.

143 “since during the time that it took”:
Miguel de la Madrid, quoted in Dianne E. Davis, “Reverberations: Mexico City’s 1985 Earthquake and the Transformation of the Capital,” in
Resilient Cities: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster,
Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 265.

143 A skinny young man . . . “participated in that brigade”:
Poniatowska,
Nothing, Nobody
, 142.

145 Michael Edwards:
Civil Society
(Cambridge, England: Polity, 2004), 86.

145 “I am clearly convinced”:
Gustavo Esteva, in interview with the author, Oaxaca, Mexico, January 2008. He wrote about Tepito’s self-government and autonomy in “Tepito: No Thanks, First World,”
Reclaiming Politics
(Fall-Winter 1991).

145 “As far as I can see”:
Ibid.

145 “a society in which citizens participate”:
Václav Havel, in a speech at Mac alester College, Minneapolis, April 26, 1999, and online at
http://www.eng.yabloko.ru/Publ/Archive/Speech/gavel-260499.html
.

146 Barrios like Tepito:
See Harry Cleaver, “The Uses of an Earthquake,” which draws extensively on Gustavo Esteva’s work in and writings on Tepito. Cleaver’s essay can be found online at many Web sites.

146 “During the months”:
Monsiváis, “
No Sin Nosotros,”
86.

146 “Not even the power of the state”:
Monsiváis, introduction to Poniatowska,
Nothing, Nobody
, xvii.

147 “norms of participation are different”:
Edwards,
Civil Society
, 30.

148 “The individual, the isolated self was dead”:
Pauline Jacobson, “How It Feels to Be a Refugee,”
Bulletin,
April 29, 1906.

149 One such young man:
José Luis Pacho Paredo, in interview with the author, Mexico City, April 2007.

149 “promote social contact, collective life, and public engagement”:
Eric Klinenberg,
Heat Wave
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 91.

150 “Residents of the most”:
Ibid., 127.

152 “Disasters overload political systems”:
A. Cooper Drury and Richard Stuart Olson, “Disasters and Political Unrest: An Empirical Investigation,”
Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management
6 (September 1998): 4.

153 Russell Dynes:
“The Lisbon Earthquake in 1755: Contested Meanings in the First Modern Disaster” (Newark: University of Delaware Disaster Research Center), 3.

154 the earthquake that . . . devastated Nicaragua’s capital:
See Richard Stuart Olson and Vincent T. Gawronski, “Disasters as Critical Junctures? Managua, Nicaragua 1972 and Mexico City 1985,”
International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters
21, no. 1 (March 2003): 3-35.

155 “It is such a shock”:
Gioconda Belli, in interview with the author, Santa Monica, California, April 2007.

156 “kleptocracy”:
Olson and Gawronski,” “Disasters as Critical Junctures,” 10.

159 “The nuclear meltdown”:
Mikhail Gorbachev, “Turning Point at Chernobyl,”
http://economistsview.typpepad.com/economistsview/2006/04/gorbachev_chern.html/
.

160 “Insurrections by a ‘nature’ that had seemed”:
Mark Healey, “The Fragility of the Moment: Politics and Class in the Aftermath of the 1944 Argentine Earthquake,”
International Labor and Working Class Journal
, no. 62 (Fall 2002): 5.

161 secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover:
In John M. Barry,
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).

161 “The provision of relief”:
Healey, “The Fragility of the Moment,” 53.

162 the public rose up chanting,
“Que se vayan todos!”: Marina Sitrin,
Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina
(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 22.

162 On New Year’s Eve of 2001 the American secretary of state:
Benjamin Black-well, “Micropolitics and the Cooking Pot Revolution in Argentina,” on Znet,
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/11740
.

162 “What began angrily”:
Sitrin,
Horizontalism
, 26.

162 “I also remember the feeling”:
Ibid., 27.

163 Jonathan Schell points out that:
“Political theory as well as common sense suggests that overthrow, an act of destruction, should require violence. It seems equally obvious that the subsequent stage of foundation of the new regime, an act of creation, should be peaceful. However, the historical record shows that the reverse has much more often been the case. The overthrow has often been carried out with little or no bloodshed, while the foundation—and the revolutionary rule that follows it—has been bathed in blood.”
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 144-45.

167 “He hath put down the mighty”:
Max Harris,
Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 119.

167 “Carnival celebrated temporary liberation”:
Mikhail Bakhtin,
Rabelais and His World
, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10.

169 “The TAZ is like an uprising”:
Hakim Bey,
T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism
(Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2003), 99.

169 William Wordsworth:
The Prelude
(New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 226.

171 “It was the great national thaw”:
Mona Ozouf,
Festivals and the French Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 134.

171 “Paris is a true paradise”:
Gustave Courbet, in a letter to his family, April 30, 1871, “Paris is a true paradise! No police, no nonsense, no exaction of any kind, no arguments! Everything in Paris rolls along like clockwork. In short, it is a beautiful dream. All the government bodies are organized federally and run themselves,” in
Letters of Gustave Courbet
, ed. and trans. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 416.

171 “Down the Ramblas”:
George Orwell,
Homage to Catalonia
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1952), 5.

171 Eleanor Bakhtadze:
In Mark Kurlansky,
1968: The Year That Rocked the World
(New York: Random House, 2004), 227.

171 “Paris was wonderful”:
Eleanor Bakhtadze, in Mark Kurlansky,
1968: The Year That Rocked the World
(New York: Random House, 2004), 225.

171 “Everbody forgot who he was”:
Josef Koudelka, in “Invasion 68: Prague,” an interview with Melissa Harris,
Aperture
, no. 192 (Fall 2008): 22.

172 “felt life quicken and accelerate”:
Ariel Dorfman,
Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey
(New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 244.

172 “two days that felt as if”:
Gioconda Belli,
The Revolution Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War
(New York: Knopf, 2003), 291.

172 “The whole earth the beauty wore of promise”:
Wordsworth,
The Prelude
.

173 jubilee:
See Peter Linebaugh, “Jubilating; Or, How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism with Some Success,”
Radical History Review
50 (1991).

175 “When we initiated the work of working with tenants”:
Marco Rascón, in interview with the author, April 2007.

175 “Another thing that existed in 1985”:
Ibid.

176 “Super Barrio”:
Marco Rascón, in interview with Ralph Rugoff,
Frieze
magazine,
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_masked_avenger/
.

176 “The first time he showed up”:
Ibid.

176 “Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, with his face of a statue”:
Rascón, in interview with the author, April 2007.

178 “The means are the end”:
This is said many places by Subcomandante Marcos, including in an interview by Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Pombo, “The Punch Card and the Hourglass,”
New Left Review
(May-June 2001): “The seizure of power does not justify a revolutionary organization in taking any action that it pleases. We do not believe that the end justifies the means. Ultimately, we believe that the means are the end. We define our goal by the way we choose the means of struggling for it.”

179 “Marcos is gay”:
Subcomandante Marcos, in
The Speed of Dreams: Selected Writings 2001-2007
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2007).

179 “The Zapatista movement proved the power”:
Laura Carlsen, “An Uprising Against the Inevitable: An Americas Policy Program Special Report,”
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3217/
.

180 “Here the people govern and the government obeys”:
See Rebecca Solnit, “Revolution of the Snails,” February 2008,
http://www.TomDispatch.com/post/174881/
.

185 “I said, ‘The people who were in the towers’ ”:
The reminiscences of Mark DeMarco (November 27, 2001) in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter CUOHROC), 19.

185-86 “They’re back”
and
“I just started down”:
Michael Noble, in interview with the author, April 2007.

187 John Abruzzo:
In Mitchell Fink and Lois Mathias,
Never Forget: An Oral History of September 11, 2001
(New York: Regan Books, 2002), 166-67.

187 “We had to stop several times”:
The reminilscences of Zaheer Jaffery (November 14, 2001, December 4, 2002, and June 24, 2005) in CUOHROC, 17 and 19.

187 “What are you doing?”:
One of the firefighters, in Jules and Gédéon Naudet,
9/11
, documentary film, 28 minutes in.

188 “I remember looking back”:
The reminiscences of John Guilfoy (November 13, 2001, and May 10, 2003) in CUOHROC, 17-18.

188 “with a deep Brooklyn accent”
and
“8:45 a.m. September 11”:
Usman Farman, in Jee Kim et al., eds.,
Another World Is Possible: Conversations in a Time of Terror,
2nd ed. (Chicago: Subway and Elevated Press, 2002), 12.

188 “For a couple of minutes”:
Errol Anderson, in Fink and Mathias,
Never Forget
, 119.

189 “We could not see at all”:
Adam Mayblum, quoted at
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/mayblum.asp
(accessed 2008) and various other sites online.

189 “They say, ‘No’ ”:
The reminiscences of Maria Zambrano (November 14, 2001, and October 28, 2003) in CUOHROC, 23.