There’s Beauty in Tragedy: How Mexico’s Earthquake Strengthened People’s Faith

🌍 The Moment the Earth Moved—And My Understanding of Travel Did Too

I stood barefoot on cracked tile in a courtyard in San Martín Tilcajete, Oaxaca, holding a still-warm clay bowl shaped by hands that had rebuilt their home after the 2017 earthquake. Rain fell softly—not the torrential kind that floods streets, but the quiet, rinsing kind—and the scent of wet earth and copal incense rose from a small altar beside me. An elder named Doña Lucía placed a hand on my wrist and said, "No rompimos. Nos rehicimos." (“We didn’t break. We remade ourselves.”) That sentence, spoken without bitterness or performance, was my first real lesson in what it means to travel through places marked by tragedy—not as a spectator of loss, but as a witness to continuity. There’s beauty in tragedy in Mexico, not because suffering is poetic, but because people’s faith—rooted in community, craft, and quiet daily acts—has deepened, not diminished, since the 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck central Mexico on September 19, 2017.

✈️ Why I Went: Not for Ruins, But for Resilience

I’d planned this trip for months—a three-week slow journey through Oaxaca, Puebla, and Mexico City, focused on textile traditions and vernacular architecture. My intent wasn’t disaster tourism. I wanted to learn natural dyeing with Zapotec weavers, trace colonial-era aqueducts in Puebla’s historic center, and ride the El Tren Turístico de Puebla to Cholula. But when I booked my flight in early August 2023, I knew the 2017 earthquake still shaped infrastructure, access, and local priorities. Not as wreckage—but as recalibration.

I arrived in Oaxaca City on September 18, one day before the seventh anniversary of the quake. The city hummed with preparation—not mourning, but honoring: street vendors sold black-and-white postcards of the damaged Santo Domingo church dome; schoolchildren rehearsed a dance called La Raíz Que No Se Rindió (“The Root That Didn’t Surrender”) in the zócalo; and at the Mercado 20 de Noviembre, I watched a woman wrap tamales in banana leaves while humming a hymn her grandmother sang during the aftershocks. Her name was Marisol. She told me, "We don’t talk about the earthquake every day. But every day, we choose what stays standing."

🗺️ The Turning Point: When the Map Didn’t Match the Ground

My first detour happened on Day 3—intentional, but not expected. I’d arranged transport to Teotitlán del Valle to visit a family-run rug workshop. The driver, Javier, pulled over near a cluster of blue tarps strung between half-repaired adobe walls. "This is where the school was," he said, voice low. "Collapsed in 32 seconds. They built the new one next door—same bricks, same windows—but higher foundations. And look." He pointed to a mural painted across the side of the new building: children holding hands around a giant heart made of corn, cactus, and hummingbirds. Beneath it, in careful script: "Lo que se cae, se levanta con raíces." (“What falls, rises with roots.”)

That mural changed my itinerary. Instead of rushing to the workshop, I spent two hours sitting on a bench with Javier, listening—not to trauma narratives, but to logistics: how parents now rotate volunteer shifts to monitor structural safety checks; how teachers use earthquake drills to teach geography and physics; how the municipal council rerouted tourism revenue to fund seismic retrofitting for homes, not just monuments. Javier wasn’t reciting policy—he was describing stewardship. "Tourists come for color and craft," he said, "but if you see only the bright wool, you miss the loom’s frame."

📸 The Discovery: Faith as Practice, Not Doctrine

Faith, in these communities, wasn’t abstract. It was kneaded into masa for pan de muerto, woven into the warp threads of a jaspé shawl, chiseled into the stone of a rebuilt chapel column. In San Martín Tilcajete, I met Don Tomás, a woodcarver whose studio had shifted location twice since 2017—first after his original workshop collapsed, then again when rains exposed instability in the replacement site. He showed me a cedar carving of a deer with antlers shaped like lightning bolts. "Not a warning," he clarified, sanding the base with steady strokes. "A reminder: power moves through us, not against us. We carve with respect—not fear."

Later, in Puebla’s historic center, I joined a Sunday mass at Santa María Tonantzintla—a church famed for its baroque, indigenous-influenced interior. As the choir sang "Cantad al Señor un cántico nuevo," sunlight pierced stained glass depicting volcanoes and maize stalks. An elderly woman beside me lit a candle—not for intercession, but as calibration: she held her palm near the flame, watching how the heat shimmered, then nodded toward the ceiling. "They tested the vaults last month," she whispered. "This flame doesn’t flicker. So we know the air flows right. So we know it holds." Faith here wasn’t blind belief. It was empirical, embodied, iterative.

🎭 The Journey Continues: From Observation to Participation

I’d gone to observe. I stayed to participate—not as a helper, but as a learner bound by reciprocity. At a cooperative in San Juan Bautista Jayacatlán, women taught me to coil pottery using local clay mixed with crushed volcanic rock (a technique strengthened post-quake for durability). One woman, Ana, pressed my thumb into the base of a small bowl. "Feel that? Solid. Not perfect. But strong enough for beans, for water, for grandchildren’s hands." She didn’t mention the earthquake until I asked—then simply said, "Before, we made pots for markets. After, we made them for homes that needed holding together."

Transport logistics also revealed quiet adaptation. The bus route from Oaxaca to Puebla no longer runs direct through Tehuacán due to landslide-prone sections repaired slowly and deliberately. Instead, services now stop at Huajuapan de León—a town that pivoted from agricultural transit hub to cultural waystation, hosting pop-up artisan markets in repurposed school gymnasiums. I boarded one such bus, sharing plastic chairs with teachers carrying laminated lesson plans on seismic literacy and teenagers scrolling TikTok videos of traditional son jarocho dancers performing atop reconstructed plazas. No one spoke of “recovery.” They spoke of ajuste—adjustment—and continuidad—continuity.

💡 Reflection: What This Taught Me About Travel—and Myself

I used to think “responsible travel” meant minimizing footprint: carrying bamboo utensils, refusing plastic, booking eco-certified hostels. This trip rewired that definition. Responsibility meant showing up with questions I hadn’t prepared—not “How can I help?” but “What do you need me to understand first?” It meant accepting invitations to eat, even when I worried about hygiene (the broth was clear, the tortillas fresh, the hands that served them calloused but clean). It meant declining photo requests when elders gestured gently toward their chests instead of their faces—acknowledging that some strength lives behind the eyes, not for display.

The earthquake didn’t make people “stronger” in a heroic sense. It clarified what mattered: shared labor over individual acclaim; incremental repair over grand reopening; memory as maintenance, not memorialization. I stopped photographing ruins. I started photographing tools—the same hammers, chisels, and looms used before and after—because their wear patterns told truer stories than any before/after slide show.

What Travelers Can Apply Today

You don’t need to seek out “post-disaster” destinations to practice this awareness. Every place carries layered histories—geological, political, personal. In central Mexico, that layer is visible, tactile, spoken aloud. But the principle transfers:

• When choosing accommodations, prioritize cooperatives and family-run casa particulares over international chains—many still channel earnings directly into community-led retrofitting funds.
• Support artisans not by buying “authentic souvenirs,” but by paying workshop fees that include materials, instruction, and lunch—this sustains intergenerational knowledge transfer, which accelerated after the quake as elders formalized teaching to ensure continuity.
• Use public transport intentionally: the ADO bus network routes through smaller towns precisely because municipal governments lobbied for service restoration as part of reconstruction planning. Riding those buses isn’t just practical—it’s alignment with local infrastructure priorities.
• Don’t avoid sites with visible damage. In Puebla, the Convento de Santa Rosa retains its cracked bell tower—a deliberate choice. A plaque reads: "Aquí el terremoto no entró. Entró la decisión de no borrar." (“Here, the earthquake did not enter. The decision not to erase did.”) Visiting means honoring that choice.

📝 Conclusion: Beauty Isn’t the Absence of Tragedy—It’s Its Counterweight

Leaving Oaxaca, I carried two things: a clay bowl signed by Marisol and Don Tomás’ deer carving, wrapped in cloth dyed with cochineal and marigold. Neither item was “about” the earthquake. Both were made within its long aftermath—not as responses, but as affirmations. The beauty I found wasn’t in spite of tragedy, nor because of it. It existed alongside it, like light and shadow in the same courtyard at dawn: inseparable, co-defining, necessary.

Travel doesn’t require witnessing catastrophe to understand resilience. But when you do travel through landscapes marked by collective endurance, you learn that faith isn’t measured in prayers answered—but in hands kept busy, looms kept turning, and bowls kept filled. That’s not optimism. It’s evidence.

❓ FAQs: Practical Takeaways from This Journey