DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
JORGE ALBERTO ZAMORA IBÁÑEZ
“El Profe Zamora”
13 August 1941 – 24 January 2021
UNAM engineer who taught Mexico City's buildings, and its engineers, to ride out quakes
The chalk always arrived before Professor Zamora did. It was his habit: a fresh box on the desk at 6:50, a joke on the board by 7:00 and a theorem by 7:05, so that by the time sleepy second-year engineering students sat down they were already behind and happy about it.
Jorge Zamora was born in Atlixco, Puebla, in 1941, the son of a flower grower and a schoolteacher, and came to Mexico City at seventeen to study civil engineering at UNAM. He earned a master's degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, returned in 1971, and spent the next thirty-nine years as a professor at UNAM's Facultad de Ingeniería and a researcher at the Instituto de Ingeniería, studying how buildings behave when the ground beneath them moves.
In September 1985 the ground moved. Professor Zamora was among the engineers who walked the stricken neighborhoods of the Centro and Tlatelolco with clipboards and flashlights, deciding which buildings could be saved and which could not, and he never forgot the families waiting on the sidewalk for his verdict. He spent the rest of his career revising building codes, training inspectors and insisting to anyone who would listen that earthquakes do not kill people; bad buildings do. He walked the same streets again after the earthquake of 2017.
Students adored and feared him in equal measure. His oral exams began, “Tell me what you would do if this were your own mother's house,” and he arrived at every thesis defense with a box of pan dulce. He played dominoes every Thursday in Coyoacán, never missed a Pumas home game at Ciudad Universitaria, and for forty-seven years called his wife Margarita “the best structural engineer in the family.”
He died on 24 January 2021, aged seventy-nine, in Mexico City after a long illness, with the Pumas' next fixture still circled on his calendar. He is survived by Margarita, his daughter Verónica, his son Arturo, four grandchildren and his brother Ignacio. Hundreds of engineers across Mexico, and every building they have kept standing, are his legacy.
“The ground will always move. Our job is to make sure the buildings know how to move with it.”