With the 2017 earthquake, he started working as an assistant. And from there to create a comic book. What was the process like?

I've always been drawn to the journalistic chronicles leading to the comic book. When I felt an earthquake, I was standing in front of the computer working on a graphic project. Right now, all the plans go upside down, the days go by, you just think about what's happening around you. I thought I could pick up all this, collect testimonies and then find the way to spread them. The comic was right for me.

What does the comic book bring if we compare it, for example, to a written chronicle?

It's very subjective what each medium suggests to each of us. My impression is that some journalistic works, however important they may be at the moment, have too intense a rhythm, and it does not give time to analyze things more deeply and to bring to light people's experiences, nor to pick up how their collective memory is being eroded. I also wanted to reflect that more emotional part.

The feeling we have is that Mexico is the chaotic country. The governmental loophole, and in the face of it the community's strength, the auzolan, which in 1985 was more evident than in 2017.

Because Mexico has very special characteristics. On the one hand, there are the institutions, the Government and the police acting on their orders, and on the other hand the people, the community. How each person faces the crisis situation, what protects and prioritizes, what mechanisms they use to guarantee them...

In 1985 it became clear that the Government ' s objective was not to help citizens, but to save companies and their machines. In some areas hit by the earthquake there was total neglect. As the days went by until the government intervened, people organized themselves. And that then sparked deep political movements, new unions emerged ... The fact is that in 1985 there was the greatest damage to working-class neighborhoods, to poor areas, and that repressive forces aimed at rescuing machines, money, documents, etc. I would like to thank the Commission and the Council for their work. The 2017 one hit different neighborhood buildings and the response of the police, army or civil protection was faster, but not more effective. This “nullified” the neighborhood work a little, although people realized that, on the one hand, the earthquake zones are going to be shaken, the institutions respond in one way or another and, on the other, these organizations take advantage of the earthquake to justify themselves.

The police and the army have a very bad reputation in Mexico, it is clear why. The case of the 43 missing from Ayotzinapa lived in the memory of the people... The same is often the case, as we have seen in this pandemic as well: emergency situations take advantage of themselves to try to legitimize organizations that aim at repression. The media also collaborate in this, always presenting the uniforms as “heroes”.

The action of the main Mexican media would be prolonged. He has received many newspaper excerpts in the comic book, interspersed in the narrative.

I have done so to show what the media were doing. In the comic book it can be seen how in 2017 there was some tension between the information transmitted by major media and social networks. Both have their risks, but, in particular, on the performance of the large media, it can be seen that there is a discourse or mechanism that helps to build the official narrative, which is related to the slogan that the citizens repeated when the 1985 earthquake occurred: “Phenomena are natural, disasters are human.” That is, when the media speaks of “natural disasters”, the ways of building lives and the political and economic decisions underlying them are repeatedly omitted, in which things such as investments are prioritized, and some citizens pay out of the skin.

In the case of social media, they're a powerful tool to reflect what's happening on the street, to coordinate people and to protect the community, but we have to act with caution because untruthful information is also disseminated. Sometimes it is difficult to understand what is actually happening in the midst of such a tense situation, when people are afraid and there is a terrible bombardment of information.

In these moments of tension, what role do the power and the police at your command play?

In one of the days I approached the Chimalpopoca neighborhood, they just had conflicts with the police. People were in shock. These are very anxious moments and a small spark can blow up everything. You see that the usual discourse is being sold in crisis situations, “We are all together in this, Mexico united, Valor”, but at the same time they hinder the maintenance of one’s own space and continuity at work, that there is violence everywhere, and that people are not allowed to organize, that the solidarity networks that are emerging are being cut. Institutions enter every corner, to the point where citizens lose all their power.

We have to look at the trajectory of Mexico since the 1990s. Tension between government and society has always existed, but the events of recent years, such as those that have taken place in the name of the war against drug trafficking, have aggravated relations between institutions and citizens and have broken social ties. With the rise of violence, survival has become even more crude for many, making community creation and mutual support difficult in concrete situations. They reflect on the organizational model, they know what are the problems on which they are based, but another thing is the ability to maintain solidarity over time and organize a strong contraband, or build infrastructures.

He speaks in the comic book of the Feminist Brigades.

It is no coincidence that the Feminist Brigade is organized in this neighborhood, as it is directly related to the local memory. In 1985, several buildings fell and many workers, many women, idiots, who were not working in the best conditions imaginable, died. No papers, no ridiculous wages... The buildings, moreover, were not equipped to accommodate so many workers, not even to cope with an earthquake. What happened left a very deep wound in the neighborhood and, in general, in the collective memory of the city.

It continues to be remembered by many by the earthquake's decline, but also by the government's neglect, and by the support networks that citizens created to deal with it. From that experience, for example, the “19 de September” Modistos union emerged, the first with a clear gender perspective. It was a very important turning point for Mexican feminist history.

When the 2017 earthquake hit the same area, where there were some clothing factories and many women working, people jumped to 1985, and from there came the Feminist Brigade with a clear goal: That 1985 should not happen again, that is, that priority should be given not to saving machines, documents and other materials trapped in waste, but to taking people out.

Who reprioritizes.

In disasters that are not “natural” we have often seen, without going any further in May. In the capital a subway pass fell, when residents had been warning them that they had structural problems and that they were at risk of falling, like other buildings. However, what neighborhood was this step in? Who use the metro and in general cheap public transport in Mexico? Well, those people are not a priority for the government. On September 7, 2017, twelve days before the big earthquake, it was a smaller one and the building on the surface of the comic strip was damaged. One worker communicated it, but nobody did anything. That is why I say: To what extent is a disaster “natural”?

Does this not create a point of social hopelessness?

I think so, but, on the other hand, as people do not trust the government, many citizens take it on their own. They have an admirable capacity. Mexico City is an extraordinarily large city and people are used to coping with the situation in small communities, aware that institutions will do little for them. What is happening is that large infrastructures, such as rail or road networks, are on a higher scale, and the political and economic decisions on them are in the hands of others.

As earthquakes moved the foundations of the buildings, confidence in the institutions was eroded...

López Obrador (Morena) is currently president. It's curious, there's another parallelism between 1985 and 2017. After 1985, for some, the popular movements that emerged then – there are certainly more reasons, but good – led to major political changes. And in 2018, the same thing happened. The PRI was back in power, but Morena won the federal elections. I believe, in any case, that social distrust is deeper, that it is not linked to a concrete aspect, but is more systematic, structural. Moreover, it is not limited to Mexican institutions. Relationships with EE.UU, the role of the "global North"… The feeling of lack of power is evident, and that also has to do with what several interviewees told me. They say that the elderly, who have been actively involved in political organizations, perceive a certain despair among young people.

Let's go back to the comic book. Despite the crude accounts, there is no intention of exhausting the reader in tears of crying.

That was very important to me. The Mexican media is known for its horchism or morbid, for showing violence in a very crude way. It was clear that I had to take another path. Sometimes it cannot be avoided because I would have to change the story so that I wouldn’t get excited, because there are experiences so hard that they touched me so much… Rather than creating an emotion in the reader, I have tried to gather the reflections of the interviewees, transmit what they had to say.

He has opted for black and white.

I like the stories told in black and white, that journalistic touch. In addition, earthquakes, the drop in buildings, dust, waste -- it's a very gray environment, and I liked those shades of gray. On the other hand, it helps me with visual development. There are some in the comic book that I would call "graphic aliterations." The image of a fracture is sharply transformed into the root, the kinetic lines of the earthquake are in the following couples I don’t know what… These visual relationships are not planned, arise as I draw and are easier to develop in black and white.

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Voices of Chimalpop

In the neighborhood of Colonia Obrera, in the center of Mexico City, where the streets Bolivar and Chimalpopoca converge. There was the factory that appears on the surface of the Shu Otero comic book, converted into a lot of lead, crystals and stones, one of the many buildings that did not withstand the shock of the September 19, 2017 earthquake. On the same day, but 32 years earlier, on September 19, 1985, the land vibrated in Mexico and the weaknesses of this building became apparent. But the authorities decided there was no reason to strengthen her skeleton and reform her body. In fact, the lack of protocols to deal with large-scale accidents and the institutions’ disillusionment led to real chaos in many parts of the country, which pushed civil society to carry out the tasks of self-organization and rescue as an autonomous body.

When the 2017 earthquake happened, there was a clothing design workshop on a four-storey block, a fabric deposit, a gift and an importing toy, a company that made car safety cameras and a Jewish businessman used the offices. The bodies of fifteen people were trapped among the remains, according to official data: twelve women (eight Mexicans and three Taiwanese) and three men (one Taiwan, one Korean and one Jewish businessman). Most of them spent many hours at work and received a low wage.

When the building fell, people said that they were working foreign movers there, and the collective memory jumped to 1985. Then, from among the waste, the nefarious working conditions of the idiots working in the clandestine workshops were brought to the surface and, in principle, the 2017 one seemed to have the same ingredients. As the hours passed, the existence of differences between the two cases became known, but, as Shu Otero says in the comic book, there were similarities at the base: many deaths were women with regrettable working conditions, the building did not comply with the necessary security measures, almost no one took charge of it, the media concealed information, there were clashes between the attending citizens and the police, signs of corruption, mistrust in the government. First Long Comic by Otero (Voices of Chimalpopoca. Astiberri, 2021) talks about the wounds caused by earthquakes in a city known as the “monster”.

A first-person written account that combines testimonies from people who experienced the earthquakes of 1985 and 2017. Neighbors, members of the brigades, a woman who worked as a Modisto in 1985, a man who lost his mother and sister, a journalist... He recorded over a dozen interviews and collected a sample of them in 222 pages. With her mother, who was in Mexico on September 19, 1985, she speaks Basque in the Otero comic book. Moreover, the narration and quotes of all the characters are in Spanish. Antonio Altarriba was the "godfather", who made the corrections, gave him the recommendations...