Mark Alan Healey "City of Rubble, Visions of Order: Architects, Powerbrokers and the Peronist State in the Remaking of San Juan, Argentina After the 1944 Earthquake" April 5, 2004

Professor Mark Alan Healey spoke on the intersection of architecture and urban design, politics and economics, and natural disaster in his talk at CLAS on April 5. Professor Healey argued in part that the national response to the San Juan earthquake helped to bring Juan Peron to power in Argentina, but local politics and social pressures stymied a truly forward-looking rebuilding of the city.

City of Rubble: Politics in the Aftermath of the 1944 San Juan Earthquake
By Nutida Rasrivisuth

One summer evening in 1944, a devastating earthquake almost entirely destroyed the city of San Juan. The worst natural disaster in Argentine history, it caused nearly 10,000 casualties and left half the province homeless. The tragedy aroused deep resentment against the liberal regime and provided a chance for the newly-installed military government to initiate plans for social justice. The massive relief campaign also launched the political career of Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, the populist founder of “justicialismo,” a movement that would reshape Argentine politics and society. Unlike other scholars who have treated the 1944 earthquake as an anecdote, Mark Healey portrayed the disaster as a critical moment that both revealed and transformed political and social relationships. He analyzed the moment of the earthquake to explore the shifting alliances and conflicts between different social actors and between national and local authorities.

Capital of an arid province with an economy based around wine production, the San Juan of 1944 was the home of an affluent elite and a subordinated, impoverished pueblo. The winery elite and the middle class lived in the urban area concentrated around the colonial plaza, ruling over the poor suburbs. Although the elite in San Juan included many physicians, the province had one of the highest levels of infant mortality in the country. Three-quarters of young men conscripted from the province were eventually rejected by the army on the grounds of medical unfitness. The winery elite were divided, and their rule was not stable. Three times the Cantoni brothers, leaders of the local populist movement, won the governorship but were forced from office. They challenged the elite by sparking political mobilization, increasing wages, building housing, establishing industry, extending suffrage to women and undertaking a wide range of public works.

The destructive earthquake, Healey suggested, leveled the differences between the center and the periphery. The earthquake did not discriminate: state buildings, churches, factories, mansions and shacks collapsed because of poor construction standards and the weakness of the adobe structures. After the disaster, people felt indignant at the previous administration. There were rumors circulating that doctors and landlords fled the city, showing a total disregard for the suffering of the poor. The military officials and the press denounced the fraudulent authority of the corrupt elite. Although a major earthquake had struck San Juan fifty years previously and there were hundreds of tremors every year, there had been no regulations for seismic protection. Even when the first comprehensive plan for the city was decided two years before the 1944 quake, officials believed the issue was not crucial.

The earthquake also demonstrated how the elite acted out of selfishness and lacked any sense of social responsibility. The day after the earthquake, the winery elite presented a list of demands to the Interior Minister. They asked the state to compensate all their losses, to repair their wineries and to recruit men to rebuild their factories, roads, and homes. They demanded 50,000 soldiers when there were only 35,000 in the Argentine army.

The earthquake allowed the military regime to further distance itself from liberalism and launch policies aimed at delivering social justice. The state thus played a social role previously fulfilled by private sectors. Soldiers and medical relief were sent immediately. The provision of medicine, food, shelter and other kinds of assistance demonstrated the ability of the military to build a more just society. In addition, the calamity was a starting-point for Perón’s populism. He showed his enthusiasm and willingness to mobilize aid campaigns. A team of architects recruited by Perón actually proposed a plan to abandon the ruined city and rebuild San Juan on a new site on more solid ground. The new city, Perón believed, would become a model for the nation, showing off the technical capacity and social vision of the military regime.

Nevertheless, Healey argued, the San Juan relief campaign, which began as a national model with a populist platform, fell into disarray. The plan for the rebuilding of the city came apart due to political rivalries and strong resistance from the local elite. The vineyard owners launched a campaign for rebuilding on the same site in order to maintain their urban property. Many military officers in the national government were reluctant to mobilize support or open up the debate for the new plan because of the growing concern for their own political survival while the provincial bureaucracy maintained its allegiance to the local elite.

In addition to the failure of the reconstruction effort, the military government helped to destroy a community rather than rebuilt it. Within a day of the tragedy, the military, motivated by a fear of an epidemic, decided to quickly cremate all the corpses. In the rush, they did not identify or keep track of the dead, causing horror and powerlessness among the bereaved. Also, since food and shelter were not sufficient for all the homeless, the military decided to evacuate as many as possible by train, scattering families and communities across the country. By not including local communities, paying local workers or using local materials when building temporary housing, the state failed to take an opportunity to throw an economic lifeline to the shattered community. In addition, the local authority did not provide services equally to the victims. The best new homes were given exclusively to the elite.

The disaster pushed the subject of social injustice to the foreground, but both national and local authorities failed to fulfill their promises of reconstruction. The officials preferred top-down solutions and disregarded popular experiences that needed to be incorporated into any successful and effective remaking of the community. Avoiding the risk of political instability, the national government was unwilling to fully engage in the debate with the local elite or defend the workers. To secure their political survival, the local government chose to ally with winery elites who considered only their own interests. Finally, the study of the reconstruction of San Juan contains a sharp, ironic twist; what began as an ambitious, inspiring plan for the benefit of the pueblo ended up as a mess.

Mark Healey is Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s History Department. He spoke at CLAS on April 5, 2004.

Nutida Rasrivisuth is a doctoral student in the Latin American Studies program.

Trained as an architect and historian, Mark Healey recently arrived at Berkeley after teaching at New York University and the University of Mississippi. His work centers on the broad transformations of state authority, social life and cultural forms in twentieth-century Latin America, especially Argentina. This talk comes out of his current project, which explores these themes in the unmaking and remaking of the city of San Juan after the 1944 earthquake.