City on Fire

Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910

Anna Rose Alexander

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780822981466
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

By the mid-nineteenth century, efforts to modernize and industrialize Mexico City had the unintended consequence of exponentially increasing the risk of fire while also breeding a culture of fear. Through an array of archival sources, Anna Rose Alexander argues that fire became a catalyst for social change, as residents mobilized to confront the problem. Advances in engineering and medicine soon fostered the rise of distinct fields of fire-related expertise while conversely, the rise of fire-profiteering industries allowed entrepreneurs to capitalize on crisis.

City on Fire demonstrates that both public and private engagements with fire risk highlight the inequalities that characterized Mexican society at the turn of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER ONE

FIGHTING FIRE, FIGHTING FEAR

Fire, as a servant and friend, is useful and agreeable; as a master and an enemy, fire is a tyrant and a destroyer.

HENRY L. CHAMPLIN, THE AMERICAN FIREMEN

Stories of a gruesome fire in February 1866 circulated in the Mexico City press, provoking a collective sense of dread that lingered for several months. The fireworks shop on San Antonio Abad Street, which held a large supply of explosive powder, had suddenly and without explanation burst into flames.¹ The blaze incinerated five members of a family of firework makers and left the wife of the owner with her flesh burned to the subcutaneous layer, exposing bone and muscle on her chest and face. Bystanders rushed her to the Hospital de San Pablo, where they treated the deep and extensive burns that left her mangled head hairless and her body blackened by charred skin. No one expected her to live more than a day or two, but she nonetheless hung on for three days after the conflagration, enduring excruciating pain. Maximilian, the European emperor then governing Mexico, and his wife, Carlota, were so astonished by the tragic news that they provided the few surviving widows and orphans with several hundred pesos to rebuild their lives and pay for the burials of their husbands and fathers.² This tragedy affected the imperial couple to such a degree that they reversed their previous insistence that street cleaners use fire pumps for watering the plants in Alameda Park and cleaning the Ayuntamiento buildings. Henceforth, the pumps were to be reserved for emergency situations only. The episode demonstrates the extent to which fire had become a political concern, and officials ranging from low-level bureaucrats to the emperor offered suggestions about how to avoid such a massive disaster in the future.

Material changes to the built environment increased fire risk in the city and affected how citizens responded to hazards. Prior to the 1860s, fire protection, like various other social services in the city, had been a neighborhood responsibility. When a fire erupted, the first person on the scene ran to the nearest church to ring the bell, signaling that neighbors should rush to help suffocate the flames. While the neighborhood firefighting system worked well enough for centuries, with the introduction of highly flammable and often explosive agents residents frequently made comments like this one about a fire in March 1866 that erupted in a shop that sold gas: “The efforts to stifle it were useless, because from the beginning the fire was very lively.”³ The increasing presence of “very lively” fires fueled by gases, gunpowder, or fireworks meant that residents needed more than volunteer efforts and buckets of water to extinguish the flames. The concerns of uneasy businessmen, mothers, shop owners, and foreign investors motivated officials to manage the changing urban environment more effectively.

A culture of fear developed in response to fire hazards in the capital. Expressions of popular culture, ranging from newspaper articles to broadsides to ballads, circulated widely and evoked a sense that the city was a dangerous place. At times, the sense of fear assumed paranoid dimensions and residents questioned all aspects of fire control and prevention. Could neighbors be trusted to practice fire safety privately within their homes? Did city officials have a plan to handle major disasters and the manpower to implement such a plan? Were some areas of the city safer than others? This growing fear of fire motivated residents to intensify their pleas for a professional firefighting brigade. A typical strategy in letters to the municipal government or newspaper articles included detailing the terrifying sensory experience associated with fire hazards. Personal testimonies of the sounds of a hundred voices yelling “fire,” the piercing screeches from policemen’s whistles, or the clamor of church bells heralding fire all brought life and emotion into appeals for municipal support.⁴ Others detailed the unusual beauty of flames enveloping buildings, describing how flames in the distance looked like a sunset made of violent rays of crimson and purple.⁵ Engrained into their memories, these experiences haunted people long after the fire. Months and years later people could recall in precise detail the smell of the burning building or the sensation of heat on their skin.⁶ Whether or not they had experienced a fire firsthand, residents often recalled stories about fire in their communities, and those tales fed collective anxieties and ultimately inspired officials to act.

Stories of conflagrations at home and abroad affected how some people thought about their future. Imagining flames engulfing one’s home or business often brought anxious feelings about lost investments or, even worse, excruciating death. Newspaper descriptions of burning victims jumping out of third-story windows to escape flames or somber reports of stiff, asphyxiated bodies found in the aftermath of fires heightened uneasiness about urban fires.⁷ Certainly, individual fears based on personal experience or psychology existed, but collective experience and memory helped to determine which daily activities became interpreted as risks.⁸ The fear of fire found its way into popular culture and popular politics alike. Printed and oral stories, vividly recounting fires that took place throughout the world, piqued the imaginations of entire communities. Residents of Mexico City pieced together information about great fires, scorched bodies, and lost homes, and transposed their fears of such horrors onto the history of the city. Citizens, paralyzed by fear, imagined the city as an unsafe, disorderly place full of vice and danger.⁹ Whether it was fear of crime or fear of fire, the collective angst that developed throughout the city motivated citizens to use emotionally charged pleas as tools to get officials to initiate public fire protection.

Newspaper articles, broadsides, and ballads contributed to growing anxieties about urban living. Days after the fatal Paris Opera fire of 1887, which took the lives of more than two hundred people, the Mexico City–based newspaper El Monitor Republicano published a lengthy article questioning the safety of the capital’s theaters. The article used the Paris experience as a way to launch a larger debate about fire safety in Mexico City.¹⁰ Similarly, for several days after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the front page of El Imparcial was covered in articles that depicted the disaster, retold personal tragedies, and described the relief measures implemented in a city consumed by flames and buried under rubble. The coverage of the catastrophe in San Francisco even included articles about how Mexican citizens, many of whom had family and friends living in California, had been affected.¹¹ One Mexican account of the San Francisco earthquake and fire described it in the following way: “What dreadful confusion! What indescribable screaming! Some were asking for help and praying to be saved, and all were overcome by the greatest panic one could imagine.”¹² Reporting on the horrors of big and small fires around the world became a standard practice in most major Mexican newspapers. Stories of the rapid destruction of more than one thousand homes in Shanghai in 1894, or of the sounds of screaming patients locked in their cells during a fire at a mental asylum in Montreal, entered Mexican homes and made citizens question their own fire safety.¹³

While Mexico City never had a conflagration on the scale of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 or the Paris Opera fire of 1887, the frightening and descriptive reports reminded Mexico City residents that fire could affect anyone.¹⁴ Many fires during this period could be characterized as accidental—a neighbor leaving a candle lit or electrical lighting sparking in a match workshop—and thus difficult to predict or contain. Nevertheless, they often quickly spread to adjoining structures, making the threat a concern to entire communities.¹⁵ One example involves Alejandro Hernández, the twelve-year-old son of the owner of a fireworks shop, who caused great panic among his neighbors when a spark flew from one of his fireworks onto a pile of lumber and quickly incinerated the business. As the workshop burned, pieces of pyrotechnics shot out from the windows and doors in every direction while neighbors looked on in horror and prayed that they could put out the fire before it spread to adjacent buildings.¹⁶ Such horrifying tales made it seem as though anyone in society could be the victim of someone else’s oversight or unwise decisions.¹⁷

On at least one occasion the fear of fire transmuted into a full-scale urban legend, showing how panic could become distorted by rumor. Rumors spread quickly about a phantom killer known for dousing unsuspecting victims with flammable oils and lighting them on fire. Whispered stories about a shady Jack the Ripper–type arsonist who prowled the streets of Mexico City with an oil can and a box of matches eventually made their way into the written record (newspapers and minutes from Ayuntamiento meetings) and became an issue for government officials. A police investigation confirmed that on two separate occasions, two women had burned to death after their dresses caught fire, but they assured the Ayuntamiento that this was not something that should concern capital residents. In an attempt to quell fears and squash the unfounded rumors, Mayor José María Icaza gave a series of public speeches and ordered municipal officials to hang explanatory posters throughout the capital reprimanding those individuals who had spread such “miserable speculation” and generated “almost universal terror” among the population.¹⁸ As with most urban legends, no one knows for sure if such a character ever existed. No matter the source of the rumor or how true it might have been, these exaggerated stories had the power to circulate quickly and instill fear in the citizenry. But while rumors certainly had the power to generate fear, it is also important to note that rumors often came into being as a product of fear. Rumors about fire spread quickly because at the time it was not inconceivable to imagine burning to death. Therefore, rumor was both generative and reflective of a culture of fear that had developed in the capital.

For those convinced that God would punish a sinful population with floods, plagues, and other natural disasters, the fear of fire was even more arresting. In an article entitled “The True Causes of the Earthquake on November 2, 1894,” the author explains, “it is incredible that Divine Providence punishes all his creatures for the criminal behavior of some of his children,” and goes on to describe the insurmountable crime and vice that had been eroding morality in Mexico City.¹⁹ A similar religious explanation for fire came from a young man who had been badly burned after a chemical reaction in a latrine created an explosion. The physician who treated the burns mocked his patient for believing that the flames that scorched his body came from the gates of hell opening beneath his feet.²⁰ Others also made jokes about superstitious explanations for disasters. In a newspaper article about the San Francisco earthquake fire of 1906, a Mexican journalist in jest questioned whether God had punished San Franciscans with the tragedy. He ultimately pointed out the absurdity of such spiritual logic and instead blamed the earthquake on the fault line that sits below the city. The article ended with an ominous warning that the natural world contained unforeseeable risks that threatened all humanity. For many residents, prayer was one way to deal with tragedy.²¹ Broadsheet images by artist José Guadalupe Posada often depicted scenes of fires, floods, and earthquakes and confirm that many people relied on religion and prayer as their primary tools to confront natural calamity. In one of Posada’s broadsides about an 1894 earthquake, he captured the turmoil and pandemonium of a city plaza being shaken by a temblor. In the background of the image the buildings are askew and lightning bolts dart through the sky, while in the foreground the townspeople are portrayed kneeling in prayer or asking for forgiveness by extending their arms open to heaven.²²

Prayer and religious offerings traditionally offered some citizens a way to cope with or explain disasters. Since the seventeenth century, Mexicans have documented their personal faith through small devotional images, typically painted onto a piece of tin, known as votive offerings (specifically, retablos, ex-votos, or milagros). These modest thanksgiving offerings include narrated pictures of saints performing miracles. In this expression of popular Catholicism, grateful people thank a saint for intervening in their lives during a time of turmoil, often after falling ill or becoming injured in an accident.²³ Votive offerings have become a valuable resource to historians who are interested in studying daily life in Mexico, because the images document everyday suffering, ailments, and accidents and allow viewers to peek into cultural spaces that are usually inaccessible in other types of sources.²⁴ Surviving an accident—whether being struck by lightning, falling off a horse, or catching fire—is a common theme in these offerings. For example, after a fire erupted in Don Silverio Aguilar’s kitchen, his family feared that the flames would reach the thatch roof and spread to the rest of the house. Yet, through what seemed like a miracle, the fire stayed in the kitchen and the family was able to extinguish the flames with ease. The family attributed this miracle to the Lord of Sacromonte and commissioned the painting of a votive offering to tell the story.²⁵ Similarly, in 1902, gunpowder manufacturer Cirilo Ramirez commissioned a votive offering to thank Señor de la Buena Muerte for healing his three children who had been badly burned during a house fire.²⁶ Religious explanations for fire suppression have persisted and remain common today, but as fire expertise developed and the use of firefighting technologies became more widespread, some residents gave thanks to both divine intervention and technological innovation for surviving a fire.

While some suspected that horrific fires could be explained as God’s wrath, this fatalistic interpretation waned as intellectual trends rooted in liberalism, positivism, and social Darwinism became more widely accepted. Slowly, municipal authorities, writers, physicians, and other formally educated groups came to embrace an ideal based on the conviction that reason and science could explain calamity and make sense of the unthinkable.²⁷ By the mid-nineteenth century, with access to new methods in seismology and technologies to combat disasters, discussions of the causes of natural disasters entered the realm of the scientific and moved away from the religious.²⁸ Yet these new urban technologies elicited new and powerful fears of their own. During the heyday of Porfirian development, residents witnessed impressive but unsettling technological, scientific, infrastructural, and architectural developments enter the city. These new and modern developments often increased urban risks. While some residents eagerly awaited new technologies, others expressed concerns that they would bring more fires to the city.

Some residents found new lighting technologies disquieting. Through much of the nineteenth century, gas lamps served as the main sources of lighting throughout the city. To provide fuel to light the lanterns, engin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Modernity and Its Accidents
• Chapter One. Fighting Fire, Fighting Fear
• Chapter Two. Science of Regulation
• Chapter Three. Controlling the Flames—The Fire Brigade
• Chapter Four. Engineering Safety
• Chapter Five. Inventing Protection
• Chapter Six. Insuring Progress
• Chapter Seven. Healing the Hazardous City
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index