On September 19th, 2017, an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 ML (seismological scale of magnitude of movement) shook the central zone of Mexico; it left a balance of 369 people dead, more than 7 thousand injured, and economic losses close to 8 billion dollars and thousands of families homeless due to collapses and structural damage to hundreds of homes and buildings.
On the same day and month, but thirty-two years after the first earthquake in 1985, Mexico shook again. What followed the earthquake were days and nights without rest, rivers of people swimming through rubble and ruins of what had previously been lives lived and houses inhabited which, after just a minute, would not be the same again.
Even with the previous experience of previous natural disasters, the Mexican government was overwhelmed to respond with the necessary immediacy to the earthquake. Given this, as had happened in 1985, citizens began to organize spontaneously to help in the search and rescue of victims, but also in the collection of food, medicines, and tools for those affected.
Workers, housewives, office workers, students (among many other hobbies and professions) lost their particular faces for several days. The earthquake achieved that, at least for some time, the social classes so diverse, marked, and divided in this country were diluted without distinctions to help and be supported, each one from their possibilities and capacities.
"Not without us" is a photographic chronicle of what happened in the hours and days after the earthquake in Mexico, but it is also a tribute to thousands of people who, in the sum of their efforts, "helping" as a common goal, made it possible to highlight the human spirit in the face of adversity. Portraits will never be enough to show everyone, but each one of them who appears in the photographs dignifies all the others. These faces and these people are a reflection and symbolic representation of many more, who, from anonymity, supported those fatal days.
