1907 hurricane benefits and injuries, in Baja California South

Abstract

This article contextualizes the town of San José del Cabo, Baja California Sur, Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It exposes the effects of a disaster produced in 1907, and analyzes the qualitative and quantitative indicators that allows to justify certain post-disaster benefits with incidence in the continuity of the settlement, in spite of diverse factors like its obvious exposure, diverse threatening natural manifestations and vulnerability to hurricanes. The article focuses in the environmental history to show the established relationship by the “Josefinos” with their natural environment to extract benefits and survive. It describes the environment’s physical characteristics that became a threat to the residents of the area. The technique consisted in relating different historical vestiges and recent studies to integrate a document that together exposes what happened in the 1907 disaster, but mainly to analyze specifically the benefits and damages that were possible to document and that in conjunction explain part of a process that could be socially adaptive between the desert and hurricanes.