“The government has made a disaster,” he says. “You can’t go in and sell here, because it’s privatized.”

To his chagrin, construction of new attractions continues for a mile along the lakefront. He sells a bag of chips to a brown-uniformed guard at the gate of a building site. Behind the gate, leveled earth stretches along the lake to where Julio squatted in a sheet metal shanty before a 2010 flood displaced him and his partner, Aryeri.

“The tragedy,” he calls the flood.

In his memory, their lakefront home remains an oasis. He recalls the plants that grew in Aryeri’s garden as if saying their names could bring them back: olives, ten o’clock flowers, papayas, passion fruit, mango, hog plum, chili peppers.

At the gate, Julio convinces the guard to let him walk across the construction site. “What a disaster!” he says when he enters the site. Heaps of brush are piled around the few trees that remain. Potable water from a broken pipe streams toward the lake. The square outlines of house walls mark the bare, burnt-umber soil blazed with bulldozer tracks. A crumpled yellow T-shirt, a pair of underwear, and a shredded green plastic cup top a mound of dirt.

There’s nothing else left of the barrio that Julio haunted when he lived on the lakefront. In October 2014, civil defense forces forcibly evacuated about 300 families from the site, though they weren’t in imminent danger. Some wanted to leave, some didn’t. They were all taken to a nearby emergency shelter, ostensibly because of the barrio’s vulnerability to flooding. Many claim that the government cleared the barrio only to develop the lakefront, repeating a process of sacrificing poor people’s homes for profit that happens all too often around the world. But in Managua, most of the nearly 30,000 people displaced between 2010 and 2014 were voluntarily evacuated, fleeing floods, landslides, and crumbling earthquake ruins.

Julio Baldelomar vending on the lakefront in Managua. Photo by Douglas Haynes.

Next to the stream pouring from the broken pipe, a girl wearing baggy black shorts and a black T-shirt many sizes too big pounds a sledgehammer at a slab of concrete. Her curly, dark hair is flecked with crud, and the bridge of her nose bears a dirty scab. Her feet barely cling to green plastic sandals with holes in both heels.

Julio approaches the girl, grabs her sledgehammer, and starts swinging it at the concrete. It’s about a foot thick and deeply entrenched in the soft earth next to the stream. The job is too big for the nine-year-old girl, who is only twice the height of the sledgehammer.

Julio heaves and swings the hammer over and over. His green canvas backpack sways as the head hits the concrete with the full force of his considerable girth. Gradually, the concrete breaks into smaller pieces, revealing several long pieces of rebar. But the steel the girl is seeking to sell for scrap is stuck in the ground. He’s about to give up. Sweat glosses his bronze forehead and drips from his nose. He grabs a white rag out of his pocket and wipes his face. He sets the sledgehammer down, plants his boots firmly, and tugs and tugs on the rebar. He almost falls into the stream. The earth won’t loose the steel.

Then something miraculous happens. A bulldozer driver steers his machine over to Julio and opens the cab door to buy a bag of chips. Then he motions for Julio and the girl to get out of the way. The driver lowers the blade into the soil below the concrete and pushes the slab into the air. But the ground still doesn’t let the steel go.

As the bulldozer backs away, a digger with a bucket loader drives over and takes a swipe at the concrete. It only needs two swipes to loosen the concrete and long rebar from the earth. Julio whacks the sledgehammer at the remaining bits of concrete clinging to the rebar. Within minutes, he has removed nearly all of it. The girl beams.

Julio sees himself in the girl. He used to forage the city for scrap metal as a child, too. The girl will get 20 or 30 córdobas for the rebar, enough to quell her hunger with some tortillas and a soda.

Julio lopes away in his ripped jeans toward the neoclassical towers of Managua’s old cathedral, hollowed out in a 1972 earthquake that killed at least 11,000 people, left hundreds of thousands homeless, and leveled 10 square miles of the city’s heart. Managua has never recovered. Squatter settlements sprang up in the ruins of what was once Central America’s most cosmopolitan downtown. Tons of rubble were dumped in the lake where today’s recreation areas are being built and squatters are being swamped. One disaster has covered another. Despite decades of grandiose plans for urban revitalization, the poor still scrape the city’s margins for the dregs of Nicaragua’s stuttering economy.

On the other side of the cathedral, in the shady Parque Central, Julio washes his arms and hands under a tap in a fountain. He sells a few bags of chips, asking each customer if they want hot sauce. Dusk dims the park. Parakeets roost in the treetops.

After dark, he gets a bus home and walks through the blue door of the new concrete house he shares with Aryeri. It’s the first home either of them has ever had with a legal title, a bathroom, and a floor that isn’t dirt. When the flood drove them from the lakefront, they lived 16 months in an emergency shelter’s dark cubicle. Then the Nicaraguan government gave them this furnished, three-room house in a community for flood refugees. Julio bought plants for Aryeri, and now she tends a new garden, lush with ferns and a red-flowering living fence.

The couple now worries less about Managua’s torrential rains drowning their home, though the rains’ growing intensity and the city’s rapid expansion cause the metropolis to regularly flood. They’ve left the community of squatters who make up about one-quarter of Managua’s residents. But Julio still prizes the camaraderie of street vendors and scavengers he grew up with, and the government’s takeover of the lakefront looms like another deluge for his income.

Before Julio had gone out vending in the morning, Aryeri sat down on his lap. He squeezed her with both arms. Their faces glowed. Julio’s black hair was slicked-back; Aryeri’s frizzed in every direction. She rubbed Julio’s round belly.

“Your cooking is how I got it,” he joked.

He doesn’t have to scavenge for scraps to survive anymore. But he still knows how to find them if need be.

The post Surviving Managua’s Government Crackdowns and Torrential Rains appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Through the curtain-like trees, the 1927 viewer—perhaps a Manhattanite drinking her Sunday morning coffee—peeped at a gallant steamboat, a columned Great House, and a close-up scene of rural black people caught in a picturesque predicament of floating roofs and tugging mules; she saw, even as she looked at an image of catastrophe, a tableau bedecked in plantation nostalgia. To think of the South from the distance of Manhattan was somehow to think back—back to 1868, back to a storied river battle in 1863, or maybe all the way back to an “ancient” time when chivalrous men tilted at dragons. It was hard for Northerners to imagine the South as modern.

It was harder still for Northerners to see the news of 1927—the most destructive river flood in U.S. history—as an industrial disaster partly of their own making. After extreme weather swept from the plains states to the Ohio River valley in fall 1926, levees began bursting in the Lower Mississippi Valley in March of ’27 and kept breaking through May. In all, water covered 27,000 square miles, land in seven states where about a million people lived; 13 major crevasses occurred; roughly 637,000 people became homeless, approximately 555,000 of whom were racial or ethnic minorities; somewhere between 250 and 1,000 people died; and financially, direct property losses totaled $250 to 500 million, while indirect losses brought that figure up to $1 billion. Floodwaters did not fully drain until the end of the summer.

The flood’s most dramatic moment occurred on April 29, when authorities—hoping to protect New Orleans—dynamited the levee 13 miles below the Crescent City at Caernarvon in order to flood the relatively less populated Acadian region of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. The black-and-white photograph of the blast, with earthworks catapulted skyward, look like a scene from the Great War in Europe.

This slow, months-long disaster occurred in an era of a fast new medium—radio—and became intensely consuming for Americans, who had never before experienced a virtual disaster in something close to real time. The media coverage gave citizens outside the flood zone, especially in the North and West, a great deal of time to think out loud about the distressed South. Inhabitants of the Delta in 1927—white planters, but even more so poor whites and African Americans—were imagined by the rest of the country to be historically retrograde, caught in “Lost Cause” nostalgia, outmoded Christian fundamentalism, or feudal social and labor relations. The Harlem Renaissance spokesman Alain Locke, for example, had in 1925 described the northward migration of southern blacks to be not only a geographical move from countryside to city, but also a temporal leap forward “from Medieval America to modern.”

Not only did the South seem perennially behind, but it seemed to need repeated fixing. This sense of the South-as-problem dated back (understandably) to the antebellum period, but it was especially alive in the Progressive Era, as Northerners turned their reformist eye southward, when the region became a laboratory for “readjustment” and “uplift.” By the 1920s, despite their homegrown attempts to remake themselves according to a Northern model, Southerners were feeling especially assailed by the rest of the nation for committing, in the words of Fred Hobson, “crimes against progress.” The South had come to be ridiculed as “a region of belts—the Bible Belt, Hookworm Belt, Malaria Belt, Chastity Belt.” When the flood became a national sensation then, it was no surprise that the Northern pundit H. L. Mencken—a committed critic of Dixie—imagined all Southerners to represent “a hostile tribe on our borders.” The South appeared to be doing what it always did: getting into a mess that required Northern know-how to solve. Southerners needed to be rescued from themselves once again.

On May 20, just before the levee break at McCrea, Louisiana, 35,000 people fled from the fragile levee standing between them and the swollen Atchafalaya River—just as another type of flight, also historic, was underway. Early that morning, a young airmail pilot, Charles Lindbergh, took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island and flew his single-seat, single-engine Spirit of St. Louis in a nonstop arc to Paris. Upon his landing, the world went completely mad with joy. Soon enough, ongoing news of the flood seemed almost an insult amid this brave new world of aeronautical daring. A June 15 editorial in The Nation admitted: “People can stand only so much calamity. After a while it begins to pall and finally it has no meaning whatever.” The editorial added: “We have had spectacular flights to think about.” Lindbergh’s flight stood for the exuberance of the modern world, for humanity’s transcendence of physical limitation. The flooded Delta stood for humankind’s ancient cowering before Nature.

There were many problems with the 1927 version of this abiding narrative of Northern progress and Southern regress. Southerners were the first to make those problems clear. Mississippi journalist Harris Dickson wrote in a nationally syndicated, 12-part series on the flood: “Glance at a map of Father’s vast watershed. Note that our lands lie in the mouth of an enormous funnel. Then remember that every creek and gutter from Western Pennsylvania to Wyoming empties its water into the top of that funnel.” He concluded: “Two-thirds of this Union combines its flood to drown us. So we do earnestly insist that those who dump water into the funnel should help to minimize its disastrous results.”

The popular entertainer Will Rogers, who raised more money than any other individual for flood victims, told the rest of the nation, in his newspaper column, about the Southern attitude: “The cry of the people down there is, ‘We don’t want relief and charity; we want protection.’”

Eventually, other papers and many environmentalists espoused the Southerners’ position: The Mississippi watershed was a continental feature requiring a coherent national strategy and, moreover, it was the human mismanagement of this watershed that caused the 1927 catastrophe. These commentators saw the flood as not merely the result of an engineering mistake in levee design but as the product of environmental practices in the upper part of the watershed: deforestation of the upper Midwest, mowing under of prairie grasses to the west, industrial growth of corn and wheat, and drainage of wetlands.

Without trees, grasses, deep roots, and wetlands, the denuded soil of the watershed could not do its ancient work of absorbing and stalling water after seasons of intense snow and rain. All the work of water management was meant to be accomplished by the towering levee system, one which had no outlets or spillways at the time. When a four-story-high levee burst, the river emptied itself upon southern land with the fierceness of Niagara Falls. Not only were levee structures a modern, industrial feature in the Delta, then, but the water draining so swiftly into the “funnel” was a byproduct of industrialized environmental development.

One might have expected Southern commentators, just two years after the Scopes Trial, to have hailed this disaster as an Act of God. To the contrary. While Northern pundits were reviving old ideas of Dixie, or mythical ideas of the Mississippi “dragon,” it was Southern journalists and writers—from Dickson to luminaries like William Faulkner and Richard Wright—who recognized the forms of human miscalculation in evidence. “Progress” had not occurred in a manner that was sustainable or equitable across regions and races. The flood made that all too clear.

The flood showed too that the U.S. had become one country connected by modernity and industry and an abiding faith in using technology to alter nature and climate. In 1927, Americans demonstrated a lack of preparation for the consequences of that faith—a deficiency that would become tragically apparent again, in the same part of the country, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005.

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