"The possibility of a decisive erasure, a grand-scale and demented annihilation, took shape in our minds." —Juan Villoro
September is the month of earthquakes, and it is the month of the shout.
I met, the other week, a couple of expats, originally from Amsterdam, who said they plan yoga retreats every September, in far-away Europe, just to escape those two annual tremors that rumble through Mexico City: the great yawping of the earth and the terrible shaking of el grito. I'm more traumatized by sun salutations than seismology so prefer to stay in the city, but to many these are the twin and terrible motors of September, making unfastened doors and windows swing open like hands stretching out to stop a fall. As we’ve previously covered the shouting, today we’ll talk about the earthquakes.
I was born in Virginia, piedmont of entomological wonders, where tragedies come with six legs and wings and a humidity that feels like breathing beneath a blanket. But the ground there is as stable as the air is wet, so my first earthquake wasn't until two summers ago, on a couch across the continent, in Echo Park in Los Angeles. I had run 18 miles around the lake and collapsed onto the cushions, falling asleep in a room with the windows open. Some hours later the couch went up into the air and the couch came down onto the floor. That must’ve been an earthquake, I told my fluttering stomach, and fell back asleep.
My second earthquake was in a cafe in Roma, here in the city, while trying to plug my computer into a wall socket. Hundreds of people gathered, and quickly, in the nearest intersection, where we watched the traffic lights sway, and the blinds inside the windows of the buildings sway, and the birds flying away. Dogs were barking. A block further up the road, a brick wall collapsed.
Earthquakes here come in cruel coincidence. The terremoto of 1985 that killed no less than 5,000 chilangos (and probably more like 10,000), happened the morning of September 19th.1 The quake of 2017 struck on the same date, right after the customary earthquake drill, and for that reason was no less traumatic. My earthquake, smaller still, happened on the 19th of September, too, and for this reason an increasing number of Mexico City residents call September "earthquake month". For this notion there is cosmological support: According to the Aztecs, Earth had come through four great ages, or Suns, before the present era. Each of the previous eras had ended in cataclysm. The Fifth Sun, our world, would be the last, destined to be destroyed in a series of great earthquakes.2 No word from the Aztecs whether that would happen around the start of football season.
If you prefer not to be entertained by these cosmological gnosticisms, the less star-crossed and more geologic truth is this: each of the major earthquakes that have hit Mexico City were centered miles apart, each of them many miles southwest and east from the city, and the reason so many people died in the city, and so many buildings fell in the city, is because Mexico City is, after all, a city—there are more buildings and more lives here, in this city, to be destroyed.3 But these dry facts do nothing to bring back loved ones or calm the nerves of tocados.
Mexico, you may be aware, is located on one of Earth’s subduction zones, where the ocean floor of one plate is forcing its way down (subducting) beneath the edge of another. The southern plate forcing its way down is called the Cocos, named after the only island in that part of the Pacific, where one of the world’s great buried treasures still (allegedly) remains. The upper plate is called the North American. The two plates meet off the southern shore of Mexico, forming a deep underwater trench parallel to the shoreline. This area is called the Middle American Subduction Zone, a name I quite enjoy because it sounds like where you go to sneak a kiss at the Minnesota State Fair.
The snow-capped volcanoes that arch like furious, salt-and-pepper eyebrows above Mexico City—and all the glowering volcanoes of central Mexico and Guatemala, for that matter—owe their existence to the subduction of the Cocos, which is slipping below the North American at a jaunty three inches per year. When the oceanic crust of the Cocos attains a high enough temperature and pressure it releases water, which melts the mantle, which rises as magma, which flows out of volcanoes, which ossifies as black igneous rock, which can be turned into things like molcajetes for muddling avocados and retaining walls for the poetically igneous homes of Luis Barragan.
But to return to the tremors: there are other things to talk about. Like the world’s first public earthquake warning system, which debuted in 1991—a set of ground sensors along the Guerrero coastline that warn of impending shocks, as if they were flashing buoys rising on earthen swells. Those sensors trip alarms in the city, or that’s the idea anyway, providing almost sixty seconds to get out of your house or your office, your panadería or your rooftop co-working space. Depends on where you live, though. The city alarms are almost inaudible in some areas, like my former block in San Rafael, where the only early warning system we benefited from had four paws and a nervous disposition. I’ve since downloaded the less charming but more consistent app SkyAlert which, for the price of eight dollars USD per annum, tends to warn you a few seconds ahead of city klaxons.
Should you wish to embark on some earthquake tourism, you need only find the nearest punto de reunión, a green square with four white arrows pointing to a white circle. Some are as large as a helipad and others as small as a box fan, but all are painted on sidewalks around the city. This is where people are supposed to gather after evacuating when a sismo has been detectado. The meeting points were decreed in a set of 2002 safety regulations. Ostensibly they’re intended to be placed at the most secure locations, but painting those locations is the responsibility of property owners, not of the government—which may explain why they vary so much in shape (squares, rectangles, I once saw an ovoid), condition (some are faded to the point of non-existence), and proximity to very tall buildings, which very much look like they could fall down.
Best not to think about it. Better to enjoy the chiles en nogada and listen instead, this Friday, for the earth-shaking rumble of thousands of chilangos shouting in the Zócalo.
Tenemos sismo, as they say.
🌙 Coming soon: The Moon Scar City Travel Guide
We’re building our itineraries and recommendations for Mexico City, including day trips and neighborhood guides. Is there any area of CDMX you’d like to know more about? Please make your requests the comments, or respond to this email! p.s., and only slightly related: we’re still figuring out the right publishing day and time for this letter; please be patient while we futz around a bit.
Moon Scar City is written by Steve Bryant, who lives and works in Mexico City. More about Steve at thisisdelightful.com.
Fall with me on our moon-scar city, city scratched by sewers, crystal city of vapor and alkali frost, city witness to all we forget, city of carnivorous walls, city of motionless pain, city of immense brevities, city of fixed sun, ashing city of slow fire, city to its neck in water, city of merry lethargy, city of twisted stinks, city rigid between air and worms, city ancient in light, old city cradled among birds of omen, city new upon sculptured dust, city in the true image of gigantic heaven, city of dark varnish and cut stone, city beneath glistening mud, city of entrails and tendons, city of the violated outrage, city of resigned market plazas, city of anxious failures, city tempested by domes, city woven by amnesias, bitch city, hungry city, sumptuous villa, leper city. Incandescent prickly pear. Eagle without wings. Here we bide. And what are we going to do about it? Where the air is clear. — La region más transparente, Carlos Fuentes
Five thousand is the air quotes official number, so airquoted because the administration at the time was too proud to declare an emergency, too proud to ask for help, and too inept to count the dead. President Miguel de la Madrid of the PRI didn’t speak publicly for two days, and the bungled response led to united political opposition and progress on democratic reforms.
An excellent study of the Aztec culture through indigenous writings is Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun, touched upon here in The New York Review.
Neither of the two largest recent earthquakes, the 8.1 in 1985 or the 7.1 in 2017, were centered on Mexico City. The epicenter of the ‘85 earthquake was Michoacán (southwest coast), while the 2017 epicenter was near Puebla (three hour drive southeast). Regions closer to the epicenters were hit harder than Mexico City, but thankfully they’re less densely populated.