| | |  Editorials | Issues 
Much Fear, Little Hope in Quake-Hit Mexico Village
 Sandra Dibble - San Diego Union-Tribune
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April 19, 2010
| | As night falls in the desert around the Cienega de Santa Clara in Sonora, a member of the Rodriguez family snacks on chips in the family’s encampment. (Peggy Peattie/Union-Tribune) | |
Ejido Johnson, Mexico — The birds are still chirping in their cages, and the bougainvillea blossoms are spilling from the shaded yards. But since the magnitude-7.2 earthquake that struck northern Mexico on Easter Sunday, the residents of the tiny rural community of Ejido Luis Encinas Johnson have been gone.
A mile away from their hastily abandoned houses, the community’s 65 families are sleeping beneath tarps and tents pitched in the Sonoran Desert, yearning for home but too afraid to return.
“The fear is that another quake will come and bury us,” said Juan Butrón, 58, a nature guide and leader of the landholding group created by presidential mandate more than three decades ago.
Two weeks after the quake, questions about the future hang over farming towns and villages in the Colorado River Delta near the quake’s epicenter, about 30 miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Most of the damage to agriculture and residences is in Baja California, but the quake also affected communities in neighboring Sonora, and none more so than Ejido Johnson, a collection of small houses located nearly five miles from the closest paved road.
Although many communities suffered extensive damage, few faced such upheaval. Nearly all of the 79 houses are considered uninhabitable, said Guadalupe Herrera, the municipality’s chief representative in the area. With the main irrigation canal now filled with dirt and crevices the fields of winter wheat are withering.
In Baja California and Sonora, the government has pledged to relocate the homeless residents with promises of plots of land and building materials. Baja California Gov. José Guadalupe Osuna Millán initially estimated that as many as 5,200 families faced relocation. But state authorities now say most will be able to move back home, even if they have to rebuild or repair their houses.
Sergio Montes, Baja California’s deputy secretary of infrastructure and urban development, said last week that “perhaps less than a tenth” of the Mexicali Valley’s residents will have to be relocated, but the final tally won’t be known until the state completes its survey next month. In the Sonoran municipality of San Luis Río Colorado, which includes Ejido Johnson, state authorities said 150 houses were destroyed in the earthquake.
At Ejido Johnson, the sandy streets now have a ghostly feel. Most of the houses are still standing. But gone are the billowing lines of laundry, the sound of neighbors chatting in the shade of mesquite and cottonwood trees, the smell of wood fires with bubbling pots of beans.
Gone is Jesús Lara, 76 and blind, who could sit and listen to birds from his front stoop.
“It was paradise,” said his daughter, Silvia Lara, 44.
The temblor “changed my life in one instant,” said their neighbor from across the street, Sara Torres, 65, a widow who was one of the original settlers. One afternoon last week, the fragrance of roses hung over her garden as she sifted through the ruins of the small adobe house.
Torres was outside on Easter Sunday, tending to her goats, when she felt a sudden boom. Returning to the house, she found that a wall had crumbled. Across the street, her neighbor’s adobe wall had also fallen.
Like other residents of the region, the villagers remember how foundations sank, deep crevices formed in their yards and streets, and jets of water and sand shot up, creating pools and leaving craters everywhere.
Leaving “makes me sad,” said Butrón, the nature guide. “But what are we going to do if nature commands us? We could always fix our houses, but the problem is the ground.”
Luis Mendoza, a seismologist based at a scientific research institute in Ensenada, said Ejido Johnson, like many parts of the Mexicali Valley, suffered from a process known as liquefaction, in which sandy soil saturated with water liquefies during an earthquake, pushing through the earth’s surface.
“These soils become like a soup, and as a result the soil loses strength — some of these houses sunk into the ground,” said Jorge Meneses, a San Diego-based geotechnical engineer and president of the local chapter of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, a nonprofit technical society. “In San Diego, if we have an earthquake of that magnitude, we’re going to have the same problem.”
Although the community’s land covers more than 13,000 acres, the group has water rights for less than 600 acres, enough to sustain only a fraction of the population, and many families subsist as temporary agricultural workers in other people’s fields. Despite its isolation and harsh conditions, residents of Ejido Johnson say they feel profoundly attached to their community.
“It’s not a place with a lot of money, but you can live here without a whole lot, and with a great deal of tranquillity,” said Francisco Lara Zavala, 50, a farmer, who has lived in Ejido Johnson since he was 15.
Butrón, the head of the community, has been working to develop eco-tourism. Although Ejido Johnson is one of the delta’s poorest farming communities, it is rich in wildlife, with much of its territory covered by one of the few remaining wetlands in the Colorado River Delta, the Cienega de Santa Clara.
Just a mile from their houses, residents gathered last week on more stable ground in the tent city that will be their home for the foreseeable future. The population has swelled to several hundred, as others from a Baja California community a few miles away have joined them.
On Wednesday, one group of volunteers spent the morning playing games with the children, while others drove up with loads of donated clothes. One family hauled a cart from the town of Golfo de Santa Clara, drawing long lines for free hot dogs.
Ejido Johnson never received so much attention. The town had no police presence, but the tent city has 24-hour police, ambulance service and a mobile medical clinic in the daytime. The Mexican military is serving meals and has set up tents.
As night fell Wednesday, families gathered beneath tarps preparing to end another day. As they fretted over crops and worried about the future, they held to their one certainty: each other.
“We always tried to be protective of one another,” Butrón said. “And when people came from outside, we always opened our arms to receive them.”
Whatever happens, he said, “I think we’re going to continue with the same mentality.” |
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