Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 3, December 2003
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The 1985 Artists' Brigades, Mexico City:
An Account From the Streets
by
Tufts University
Abstract:
The Artist's Brigades, Mexico 1985: An Account from the Streets.
This paper interweaves a personal account of the 1985 earthquake with
reflections on and contacts with New York artists post-September 11. The writer
lost both her director and manager in the disaster, worked in the recovery
efforts and, later, in the artist's brigades that performed for those
made homeless by the quake.
Earthquake, September 19, 1985 7:17 a.m. Mexico D.F.
It lasts longer than two minutes.
Nowhere can those in the arts feel more useless than in the face of catastrophe-- where the heroes are crane operators and heavy machinery, cadaver sniffing dogs and amazing cameras and their operators and creators that can push through rubble and spy a body. To be of use. Many of us seek that after a catastrophe, the desire to help but even more so to heal ourselves through work. For artists it can be a time for soul searching. We traditionally crave an audience but now what can we say in the face of such loss?
On September 11, 2001 I receive an e-mail from a writer living in New York:
I was in the city today to turn in some of my book, I had stayed up all night writing and I was so worried -- is it ready, have I done my work? Those questions seem small today -- not unimportant, but smaller, in a new proportion. I kept thinking of how much I have left to do in my life, so many things that are undone, people I haven't spoken to in years. It's overwhelming to feel everyone around me thinking the same thing, the restless thoughts trickling over this bridge as we come back to Brooklyn. I stand with hundreds of others, listening to radios, watching the plumes of smoke and the empty holes in the skyline.
Mexico City, 1985: the first earthquake struck on September nineteenth at 7:17 am. It was 8.1 on the Richter Scale, a "great" quake according to geologists. The second quake on September twenty first brought down many buildings that were damaged but still standing. Although the epicenter is elsewhere, Mexico City with its combination of soil, fault lines, and a massive population bears the brunt of the damage. According to the United States Geological Institute in that two minutes of earth quaking madness over four hundred buildings in Mexico City fell, the majority of them high rises, while another three thousand were damaged beyond repair. According to The World Bank, throughout Mexico some 900,000 homes sustained damage and more than 250,000 people were left homeless. In Mexico City alone nearly 1,700 schools were damaged and thirty percent of the city's hospital capacity was destroyed. Officially the death toll stands at 9,500, but according to some sources, the toll from this earthquake may be as high as 35,000. The great quake "terremoto" was felt by almost twenty million people all the way to Houston Texas and as far south as Guatemala City.
A writer in New York after September 11, 2001 sets up an oral history table. The project allows people to stop, tell their stories, to record them, to listen. Artists strive for relevance and viability in a time when mere survival is a blessing. I lived in Mexico from 1981-1985 and was in downtown Mexico City at the time the quake struck. I wrote in my journal shortly afterwards:
Each one of us-- the 18 million or more in the valley of Mexico, has her story and has to tell it. Everyone asks you, "Where were you?" only to sigh and start their own confessional. They are eager for your details so that they can finally, and once again, tell their own. How can we ever pick it all up and walk on as we did before? sleep in our beds? make love to our husbands or wives? I haven't slept one night yet without jumping up somewhere between one and five am with the certainty that the bed is trembling, the room is swaying... and it takes all my self control to convince myself that it's not so.
This need to tell the story is common to our humanity and integral to what theater is all about.
In 1985 there was generous government subsidy for the arts in Mexico. Painters, poets, musicians, dancers and theater artists would audition for lucrative government tours sponsored by the Secretary of Public Education (SEP) and the Institute of Social Security (ISSTE). On these tours artists would be sent to perform all over Mexico from the large theaters of Monterey to small technological schools and cultural centers. Audiences would range in size, with one hundred people constituting a "small audience" but with around four to five hundred audience members as the norm. In 1982 alone I performed over 134 times on tour with Theater Frederik, an international movement company sponsored by the Flemish Minister of Culture and based in Mexico City. The company was founded by Frederik Vanmelle and his companion and manager Paul Demeyere. I worked with Theater Frederik from 1981-1985 and toured with them to the US, Europe and all over Mexico. In 1985 my husband Stephen Elliott, a mask maker, juggler friend, Patrick Picciano and I wrote our own show and auditioned and were accepted into the government tours. Meanwhile, I maintained a deep friendship and a working relationship with Theater Frederik. Paul Demeyere spoke about managing us. Their address continued to be my "permanent address" in Mexico. Paul Demeyere and Frederik Vanmelle both died in the earthquake.
The government patronage for the arts in Mexico during the 1980s allowed many artists to not only survive but thrive in their art as well as have contact with large, popular audiences. I lived the ex-patriot artist life-- not distracted by the obligations of citizenry, with a five dollar a month house in the country overlooking a lake, and a horse in the back yard. Mexico was a country where one could dream. But cultural life and certainly economic security in Mexico often hinges on Mexico City-- twenty million people in the high altitude valley, Aztec ruins, amazing museums and parks but also a gray smog ridden sky, a packed metro, the streets pungent with exhaust from buses, tacos del pastor, flowers and fruit. Children tugging on your skirt ask for solutions that you are unable to provide. I had sworn I would never again live in the city but our small theater company took a two month government contract for performances there and rented an apartment two blocks from the main plaza. On the morning of September nineteenth we were preparing to perform at a Children's Hospital when the earthquake hit:
Journal: We went to the Alameda only a block away and saw the Regis Hotel smoking. It was like a movie set-- we were shocked. The plaza was full of people in their pajamas. I saw some rich foreigner leading around a porter in full uniform with a high stack of matching black bags. Where was he going?
When we realized the extent of the damage, we walked to our closest friends' house-- Frederik and Paul's only to turn the corner and find that the building was no longer there. The five story building was reduced to a pile a story and a half high. A soldier with a gun stopped us from approaching the ruins. We approached it from another street and saw some of the actors from the company up on the pile of rubble.
Journal: I watched for forty hours at that site, hoping for news. Steve scrambled up on the ruins once he realized that anarchy reigned, that the soldiers were decorations to placate people. They didn't lift a shovel or heave a pick. They stood, eyes a bit glazed over but controlled. They too are Mexican-- but what is this strange terrain of concrete and debris?! The hopelessness before the weight of all that rubble. Frederik was found that first evening. I identified him down below, a crowd pushing around, and I scribbled his name on pieces of paper for the officials. Staring down at his gray body I realized he was long gone.
Paul Demeyere wasn't found until the next day. My husband Steve finds him. Steve had tunneled through the concrete layers and down a collapsed hallway where a graceful Mexican vase that Frederik loved was pulled out perfectly intact-- a miracle! Paul was found later. Pale and dead but curiously unscathed. He was thirty two. Frederik was forty. They were lovers.
I write elsewhere in my journal, "I forgive myself the need to detail." I write knowing that I am part of a larger story-- almost seeing on the periphery the framed version-- movie, theater, novel-- of the event unfolding before me. My mind records the details for posterity, for children I haven't yet birthed. I have survived. One has heard of men at war describing a heightened, intoxicating sense of awareness-- of being alive. Danger seems to do that. It is as if each moment is indelibly recorded, as if our future survival depends on our ability to learn from what we have already survived. There are suggestions that there is a medical basis for this-- the adrenaline rush of fear produces an altered state-- but this state is sustained beyond the initial fear by the monumental charity of strangers, the tenacity of the human body to pass sleepless nights hoping and working. People fed us on the streets, let us into their homes to rest, and worked beside us in the rubble. They are people who we will never see again yet with whom we lived more openly and gave more charitably to than some members of our own families. We cried on their shoulders and held them when they were suffering and we never asked their names. This is part of the story too.
The building that was home to Paul and Frederik was also home to the company, Theatre Frederik. On the roof of the building were storage rooms where all the costumes and theater material was kept. Being on the top, these items were the first to come off the building. Theatre Frederik had a performance scheduled for that morning and all the company members were heading to the apartment when the quake hit, so all the actors and technicians were at the building working to try and find Frederik and Paul. We amassed the remnants of the theater on the sidewalk only to be told by the police that they needed to put all materials into a dump truck where they would be later sorted and could be retrieved. We were all familiar with the notoriety of government official channels and fought to have the theater costumes and props stay together with the company. The local police officer in charge was a decent man. He had seen us working all day. He sent me to the local government offices, the Delegación Cuauhtemoc, to get permission:
Journal: A long night, a furious argument, futile because the bureaucracy continued trying to function despite the fact that the city had already taken steps to uncover it's dead, protect those beloved bodies. "Chinga la burocracia! Fuck the bureaucracy!" I had shouted in the Delegación Cuauhtemoc at two in the morning because they had accused me of being materialistic. "People have died," they explain to me. "Who cares about possessions?" Not realizing... that because I love them-- the dead -- that all those things spread on the sidewalk-- the costumes I had worn, the wedding dress from Frederik's marriage, the top hat from the piece "Tour-de-Force"-- that the soldiers wanted to put in a dump truck with other things that they had found... because I love them I wouldn't let them cart away those things-- paintings, books and pictures and costumes that they had worked all their lives to create.
"Give us permission to have it not carted away. Keep the soldiers there if you will, we'll clear it up in the morning with the Belgium Embassy. Just don't let them cart it off."
She refused saying, "Who cares about these things? People have died."
I vented my wrath at her. I announced in a loud voice to the hundreds waiting that Frederik had died. I insisted that she give me a piece of paper and I printed in bold letters his name, his country, his most recent and now destroyed address. I threw it in their faces and walked out ... only to be hit by chagrin ten minutes later... couldn't I have just looked around? The room was full of parents, relatives, grieving people and each had come to the delegación with their own petition and listened desperately to mine. If they gave me permission what would they have to do for all the others?
I returned to the site and told our policeman-- a kind-faced man, tired, with gray hair-- that I had been unable to speak to anyone at the government offices. He quietly and quickly allowed us to take the theater costumes and we continued working at the site side by side.
On September twentieth the second earthquake hits. It is 7.5 on the Richter Scale. There is pandemonium on the streets, buildings that are partially damaged collapse. We spent the first night on the street in front of Paul and Frederik's apartment. Now that they are found, this second night we sleep in our car. There are five of us in all-- Steve Pat and I and two people that we never see again. One is a woman who arrived as a tourist that day. The president of Mexico doesn't want to lose tourism dollars and no one at the airport bothered to tell her about the cordoned off city, the fallen hotels. We never sleep in our apartment again, it is too damaged. We bury Frederik and Paul in a chaotic and crowded cemetery scene. There are so many dead that it is hard to find a coffin and vendors are scalping flowers for outrageous prices. We pull over and pick wild flowers on the outskirts of the city and cover the grave site with them.
That night a friend puts us up in his apartment on the outskirts of the city but it is hell. What can we do? We go to check the Red Cross to volunteer. They are deluged with offers, food, supplies. Traffic is horrible. People use the subways although everyone is terrified by the idea of possibly being trapped there. Many camp outside, the parks are full next to people's homes. They even run electricity and bring out furniture-- chairs, beds and their TV. Everyone has a radio. The weather holds.
Journal: What was important for us was not to stop the momentum of our days, in doing so I felt we would fall apart. Work, work work. The last thing I wanted to do was sit and contemplate the destruction that surrounded us. We were wracked with anxiety and with guilt that we were alive.
Finally, a place accepted us as volunteers-- Voluntariada Nacional. We had a car and so we were sent to pick up some boxes of syringes. We didn't have a brigade number so the man in charge gave us one. "Later I may change this but right now you two are Brigade 700." And there it stayed, we became Brigada 700. We moved boxes at the center until we heard that a cry was going up for teachers. The children were homeless, some without families, and, on top of it, bored. They needed teachers to attend them. When they heard that we were jugglers and clowns Brigada 700 became an artist's brigade.
The fourth day after the big quake we began going to the shelters and giving a short juggling, clown show followed by a workshop of new games. Later we would perform our fifty minute show, "Un Día Mágico." On our first time out to perform a group of men surrounded and stopped our car as we drove through the destroyed city , "We're hungry. We've been digging at this site all day and we need a hot meal." I explained to him that we were performers. He pointed to my brigade number and repeated his request. We ended up contacting our organization and hot food for forty workers was quickly delivered. People were so eager to help that things got done quickly and without all the paperwork! We were now an empowered clowns! We could feed forty workers!
The first two days at the shelters, we performed at a huge tent city that had sprung up and taken over the Plaza de las Tres Culturas where the Aztec pyramids of Tlatelolco, the seventeenth century Templo de Santiago, and the modern Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores (Foreign Ministry) were housed. It was there that the survivors of Tlatelolco set up camp. Tlatelolco was a huge government subsidized multi-building housing complex with up to 30,000 tenants. Two massive buildings had fallen and eleven were damaged. This tent city, sprawled over the sacred Aztec ruins, would soon become a hot bed of anger and political strife. A newspaper article relates, "Tlatelolco is an area with a lengthy tradition of being in the middle of the fray. It was here that several hundred student demonstrators were gunned down by security forces shortly before the 1968 Mexico Olympics. More than four hundred years earlier, it was where the Aztecs made their last stand against the Spanish conquerors."
Prior to the earthquake, tenants had long complained to the government about shoddy construction and had demanded repairs for structural cracks that had been noticed in the buildings. Within a week after the earthquake the first of many protests and marches at Tlatelolco would begin. Placido Domingo, (Spanish born but Mexico raised), lost four relatives there and would later help raise money for the homeless and the tenant's organization. I bring this up because in those anarchic early days after the quake the natural organizations of the victims were accepted. In other words, where the people camped out was fine-- the country was in a state of national emergency. Later, not only did the government want the homeless off of the Aztec ruins, (citing both safety and historic preservation as reasons), but officials almost immediately gave orders to demolish the two dozen city blocks of buildings without announcing how they would accommodate the surviving tenants. A World Bank report writes, "So forceful was the residents' response that the minister who gave the order was removed from power -- a rare example of the Mexican government at such a high level admitting to mistakes in the face of grassroots criticism." Our performances in Tlatelolco were crowded and disjointed with people coming in and out. We moved among the crowd and found children to work with in small groups.
The next shelter at which we performed was the housing complex of Benito Juarez. I had performed there before with Theater Frederik and a group of children recognized me and gathered around us.
Journal: It was a dramatic place to perform-- the albergue [shelter] was right there in front of the fallen building. So, as I walked to the gym where we were going to perform across a green stretch of tennis courts and soccer fields, I could see the building. The ordered green, nicely cut and watered grass in the foreground and the gray, sliding rubble of over one hundred units destroyed behind.
Rescue efforts were continuing as we performed. My husband Steve recalls, "While some of the audience members seemed to have fun others were quite aloof." Indeed, it was here that we had our first strong, negative reaction to a part of our show. At one point we juggled around two children volunteers from the audience, playfully giving them an insurance policy to sign before we dressed them up. A woman squinted at the large prop policy and once she understood it, ran down to her child and dragged her off. A life insurance policy gag was no joke to her. Her child was very disappointed. Another child sprang up in her place and the show went on. Later on, after discussing it, we cut that part of the show for subsequent performances. We still brought the kids on stage but we downplayed the "danger" and emphasized the zaniness and fun.
A performer never knows exactly what will hit their audience as inappropriate. Weeks earlier, before the quake, we had performed for a children's burn unit. These were children who had been terribly burned in the gas explosion that had killed hundreds the year before in a suburb north of Mexico City. In the show we juggle fire and told the director of the school that we thought that we should cut that part. She insisted that seeing fire in the context of clowns would be a healing way to experience it-- that they wouldn't even relate it to the terror they had been through. She was right. We cried when we peeked through our set before the show and watched our audience arrive-- tiny little bodies, many too damaged to wear much clothes or even lower their arms-- but we pulled ourselves together and the children sat up delighted and laughed. We juggled around their nurses and the fire was a big hit. With each shelter we visited after the earthquake we had to assess where we were and what was needed.
A week or so into the disaster relief the artists had organized themselves into volunteer brigades. This was facilitated by ISSTE that had organized the government tours prior to the earthquake. They set the schedules and sent the artists out a list of shelters where they would perform. All government contracts had been suspended so the artists were working as volunteers but nonetheless they were clamoring to get on the tour list. Of course, now that the government was involved, only the "officially sanctioned shelters" were on the list. The politicians were anxious to relocate, and in some cases, disperse the tent cities. Housing groups like the one at Tlatelolco, The Plaza de las Tres Culturas, felt that dispersal meant a weakening of their political clout. They defiantly stayed sprawled over the Aztec ruins and the artists would continue to visit them "unofficially."
In all we performed in around twelve different shelters in and around the city and felt honored to be able to do it. We went back and forth from the city to our home in rural Michoacan and performed around there as well. I wrote in my journal at the time, " I can't live in the country now, far away from this suffering, crazy, half-destroyed city. The country fills me with anxiety. I am too far from the faltering heartbeat."
Within a few months we were close to penniless. We had borrowed money from the states to put together our show and now the peso had devalued, our lucrative government tours were indefinitely suspended, by mid-December we were heading for the states and eventually Paris. This is paralleled by the situation of artist in New York. Katie Down, an composer friend in New York writes, "Many arts organizations are dealing with this crisis in different ways. One thing is for sure... the funding is being cut and therefore some organizations are going to be suffering a financial crisis pretty soon. I am pretty much out of work due to budget cuts and funding being pulled."
The Artists' Brigades became so popular in Mexico City that it was impossible to get a gig with them-- too many artists volunteered and the government couldn't place them all. All the huge TV and movie stars were visiting the shelters, rock and roll groups played free. There's only so much art one can have in a day! The outpouring of volunteerism taught me that artists want to be of use and, though the performances might have been healing for the audience, they were as much or not more so for the artist.
Judith Malina writes in her 1949 journal, "I am seized with the desire to do some useful work with my voice, my body, my hands. Some work to make peace. I dream of a way to say it, to show it, to act it out. And so, not having solved my own life, I wish to go out and solve everyone's."
END NOTES
NOTE: This paper also includes twenty slides of performance moments from Theater Frederik. These slides were salvaged from the ruins of Frederik Vanmelle and Paul Demeyere's apartment after the 1985 earthquake. There are also slides of performances by Clown Brigade 700 at shelters for Mexico City earthquake victims.
