In the sprawling metropolis of Mexico City, time takes on a dimension that extends far beyond the rhythm of daily life. Elena*, a lifelong resident, found herself intimately acquainted with this expanded sense of time in the aftermath of the 2017 earthquake. Nine months after the city had last trembled, she lay sleepless in her apartment, the silence amplifying an unsettling awareness. “It was as if I could hear the walls,” she recounted, these nights of insomnia becoming a stark new normal since the seismic event.
The earthquake, a magnitude 7.1 tremor, was, by Mexico’s standards, moderate. Yet, its epicenter close to the capital made it devastating. Elena, like many, emerged physically unscathed, her family and friends safe, her building seemingly intact. However, as the weeks turned into months, insidious cracks began to spiderweb across her apartment walls, deep fissures tracing silent paths through her living space. These weren’t isolated incidents; the cracks mirrored those in apartments above and below, hinting at a deeper, structural malaise within the building itself. Overwhelmed by the building’s subtle yet unnerving disintegration, Elena started seeking refuge in her office during the night, finding a fragile sleep at her desk until the arrival of her colleagues.
Elena describes herself as “tocada,” a term translating to “touched,” but colloquially understood as “crazy” or “touched in the head.” In her fifties, with a lifetime spent weathering Mexico City’s tremors, the 40 seconds she spent huddled on the floor on September 19th irrevocably altered her. Since then, a constellation of health issues has plagued her – a significant weight loss, persistent dizzy spells, and chronic insomnia. Years have passed, yet for Elena, the earthquake’s repercussions remain a constant presence in her life.
For the past four years, ethnographic research has been underway in Mexico City, delving into the far-reaching consequences of that 2017 earthquake. Dozens like Elena have been encountered, each bearing a unique constellation of symptoms: sleeplessness, panic attacks, a pervasive listlessness, wasting, appetite loss, vertigo, and altered behaviors like an inability to sleep alone or a compulsion to sleep fully dressed. Despite the variety, a common thread binds these “tocado” individuals: the earthquake, in some profound way, made them ill.
In Mexico City, the immediate aftermath of an earthquake often brings the saying, “Un bolillo pal susto” – “a bread roll for the fright.” This piece of folk wisdom suggests that carbohydrates are essential to restore the body after a scare. It’s a remedy for “susto,” or “fright sickness,” a condition recognized across Mexico and the Americas. The concept posits that acute shock experiences, such as being trapped in an earthquake, can trigger chronic health issues. In essence, being profoundly frightened can induce physical illness.
“As time passed, cracks began appearing in the walls of her apartment, deep, alarming fissures that wrapped silently around the room.”
While “susto” is recognized within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a “cultural concept of distress,” its diverse symptoms make pinpointing a singular cause challenging. Western biomedical models, with their emphasis on mind-body separation, often struggle to grasp illnesses like susto. Within medical anthropology, which examines the interplay of sociocultural factors and political economies on health, susto is often categorized as a “culture-bound syndrome”—an illness primarily affecting individuals within a specific cultural context. Interpretations vary: susto might be a way of expressing social distress, a cultural label for a universal biomedical condition, or a culturally shaped psychological response to trauma. “Tocado” shares similarities, potentially representing an earthquake-induced form of post-traumatic stress.
However, by moving beyond the confines of universal biomedicine, we can explore “local biologies,” acknowledging how unique environments shape biological differences. This approach also allows us to consider the impact of local geologies, the very earth beneath a city, on its structures and the well-being of its inhabitants. Here, we might find resonance with Elena’s explanation of her condition: that she is unwell because she is trapped within geological time.
“Geological time,” or “deep time,” as poetically described by Robert MacFarlane, encompasses the immense expanse of planetary history stretching far beyond the present. While the concept was initially outlined by Scottish geologist James Hutton in 1788, the term “deep time” is often attributed to writer John McPhee. McPhee illustrated its vastness by comparing Earth’s history to the length of the old English yard, “the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand,” suggesting that “one stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”
Despite this vast timescale seemingly dwarfing human significance, climate change has thrust deep time into contemporary political discourse. It’s become a contested analytical framework, debated for its potential to overcome short-term thinking, or conversely, for risks of flattening history or inflating the present, and even for ontological limitations.
In “Annals of the Former World,” McPhee recounts his travels with geologists across America, captivated by their unique perspectives and fascination with the ancient world intruding into the present. He noted, “Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal.”
This idea of “portals” or “encounters” with deep time resonates deeply when considering Mexico City. Especially when listening to those who identify as “tocado,” the question arises: Can deep time truly manifest in our everyday spaces? Can these immeasurable abysses suddenly open up within the familiar urban landscape?
A cracked building in the Cuauhtémoc borough of Mexico City, illustrating the visible impact of geological forces on the urban environment.
Mexico City, although currently elevated at 7,349 feet above sea level, spent much of its geological history submerged underwater. Until the end of the Tertiary Period, the region lay beneath the sea. Around 30 million years ago, the subduction of the Cocos tectonic plate under the North American plate initiated the region’s slow uplift. This process caused vertical fractures in the continental crust, allowing magma to rise and form the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, a vast east-west volcanic arc stretching 620 miles across Mexico.
The Valley of Mexico, even then a valley defined by the Sierra de las Cruces to the west, Sierra Nevada to the east, and Sierra Pachuca to the north, was drained by the Rio Balsas flowing south towards the Pacific. Around 2 million years ago, in the Late Pliocene, volcanic eruptions began sealing off the valley’s southern outlets, creating a 3,700 square mile basin.
Meltwater from surrounding peaks and seasonal rainfall accumulated in this basin, forming a network of five interconnected lakes – saltwater in the north, freshwater in the south. Recognizing the strategic advantage of this environment, the Mexica people arrived in the 14th century. They constructed an elaborate system of dikes and dams to manage the water, developed “chinampas,” floating agricultural islands, and founded the city-state of Tenochtitlan.
When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés first beheld Tenochtitlan two centuries later, he marveled at the immense city “built on a salt lake” that “rises and falls with its tides as does the sea.” Yet, he soon set about dismantling it. The unfamiliar, watery environment unsettled the colonists, leading them to demolish the dikes and dams that had regulated the lakes. Draining the valley, they established what would become one of the world’s largest cities on the unstable, saturated soil of a former lakebed.
“Though the lakes are gone, the city still floats. Sort of.”
In a 2005 study, Mexican soil scientist Carmen Gutiérrez-Castorena and her colleagues illustrated the precarious nature of Mexico City’s foundation through a thought experiment. They envisioned a rectangular soil prism, one meter by one meter wide and 70 meters deep, reaching the deepest clay layer beneath the city. This 70 cubic meter column of soil, when dried in an oven at 105 degrees Celsius for four days, would lose most of its volume to evaporated water, leaving less than seven cubic meters of solid soil. After the collapse of air pockets left by the evaporated water, only slightly more than half a cubic meter of solid material would remain.
Despite the vanished lakes, Mexico City, in a sense, still floats. Most rainwater is now diverted out of the valley, forcing the city to rely heavily on the aquifer beneath it. This relentless extraction causes the city to sink into the void left behind. The iconic Angel of Independence monument, erected on Avenue Reforma in 1910 with nine steps, now stands with 23 steps, a testament to the ground subsidence around it as the aquifer depleted.
The subterranean soil of Mexico City, a heterogeneous mix of clay, debris, Mexica ruins, and volcanic rock, leads to uneven subsidence across the city. Particularly in eastern areas like Tláhuac and Iztapalapa, the land sinks at a rate approaching a foot per year. Where areas with differing subsidence rates meet, “grietas,” or fissures, form. These fissures are prevalent in central and eastern parts of the city, cracking roads and undermining building foundations. During earthquakes, these grietas violently fracture, while the loose soil elsewhere liquefies, amplifying seismic waves along ancient waterways far beyond the initial tremor.
The most devastating earthquakes in Mexico City’s history, in 1985 and 2017, both occurring on September 19th, caused widespread destruction due to the confluence of soft soils, lax building codes, unstable structures, and the enduring legacy of colonial disruption. While earthquakes are born from tectonic plate movements, the historical decision to drain the lakes amplified the geological forces, allowing them to intrude with greater intensity into the urban environment.
“Footpaths undulate. Potholes suddenly appear in the street and begin consuming the road. A fissure slyly burrows under a building to do unseen work to its foundations.”
Philosopher Manuel DeLanda, born in Mexico City, described cities as the “mineralization of humanity.” Drawing an analogy to evolution, he noted how early invertebrates’ exoskeletons became internalized as bones and spines. Similarly, “human populations began mineralizing again when they developed an urban exoskeleton.” Cities, then, can be viewed not just as collections of buildings and people, but as geosocial formations, inextricably linked to the earth beneath them.
Mexico City’s urban exoskeleton reflects the peculiar nature of its geological foundation. Footpaths ripple and undulate. Potholes materialize and expand, swallowing sections of roads. Fissures stealthily creep beneath buildings, silently compromising their foundations. Similar to the Angel of Independence, newly laid concrete at building entrances is a common sight, patching areas where the ground has given way, hindering access for vehicles and pedestrians.
Anthropologist Cristián Simonetti pointed out that the term “concrete” originates from the Latin “concrescence,” meaning “an unfinished gathering of forces and materials.” This etymological root aptly describes the material used to re-tether the city to its unpredictable foundation.
By perceiving Mexico City as a geophysical entity, rather than simply built upon a geological base, we can recognize a continuum between the imperceptible creep of tectonic plates and the gradual unraveling of buildings and lives within the city. This perspective shifts our understanding of time in Mexico City, from a purely human construct to one interwoven with geological processes.
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A Google Earth map illustrating the buildings damaged in the 2017 earthquake in Mexico City, overlaid with the outline of the former lake system, highlighting the vulnerability of the city’s historical lakebed.
Mexico City is replete with subtle markers of its ongoing seismic narrative, if you know where to look. Abandoned buildings stand as stark reminders in prominent locations. Wilted, unattended plants outside homes signal absence and displacement. Many parking lots, especially outside tourist zones, occupy the footprints of buildings lost to seismic events.
Beyond the aftermath of singular events, there are continuous signs of geological time unfolding. Those who identify as “tocado” develop a heightened sensitivity to these subtle cues, noticing their changes over time. Cracks widening in walls, shifts in the earth’s surface, the increasing tilt of buildings – “tocados” become geological sensors, acutely aware of the city’s perpetual state of flux and slow decay.
This heightened awareness, however, can be disorienting. Alongside physical symptoms like appetite loss and wasting, “tocados” report sudden dizziness, faintness, or vertigo, even at ground level. This “earthly seasickness,” induced by the city’s geophysical instability, can profoundly affect residents’ well-being.
As cracks spread through Elena’s apartment building, another woman, Ana, shared her experience in Tlalpan, southern Mexico City. Walking towards a building she passed daily on her commute, she grasped my arm, exclaiming, “Ay it gives me vertigo, even from here.”
Ana described experiencing two types of vertigo since the 2017 earthquake: typical lightheadedness at heights, and a pressure-like vertigo when near certain buildings. Both were new sensations post-earthquake.
“It makes me dizzy when I’m underneath it,” she explained, “It’s as if I feel it pressing onto me.”
The leaning buildings in Tlalpan that trigger vertigo in Ana, symbolizing the subtle yet pervasive instability of Mexico City’s urban landscape.
Reaching the building’s base, the unsettling sensation became palpable. It felt as if the tops of this building and its neighbor were leaning inwards, pressing down. At ground level, the gap between them was minimal, perhaps millimeters. Five stories up, it widened to an estimated two feet. The buildings appeared occupied, not condemned, seemingly held upright only by the support of adjacent structures.
“Every day I pass it and it looks bigger,” Ana worried. “Something underneath must have given way. How long until they come down?”
Mexico City’s construction code dictates a maximum lean of 0.43% of a building’s height. For these estimated 60-foot tall buildings, that translated to roughly three inches. But how perceptible is a three-inch lean from 60 feet below? Would a two-inch lean truly be safe? And if the lean was still under three inches, how long until it exceeded that limit?
Regulations in Mexico City, even robust ones, offer limited reassurance. While building codes were significantly strengthened after the 1985 earthquake, corruption and collusion remained pervasive. Stories circulate of architects who disregarded new regulations, gaining notoriety for constructing unsound buildings, yet subsequently appointed to government bodies overseeing structural integrity.
Developers often prioritize cost savings over safety, readily dismissing architects and engineers who insist on durable, expensive materials. This creates a market for “firmones” (“signers”) – architects paid to rubber-stamp construction blueprints without proper verification. A tragic example is the school in southern Mexico City where a secretly added fourth story collapsed in the 2017 earthquake, killing 19 children and seven staff. The architect who approved the building’s integrity received a staggering 208-year prison sentence.
Across Mexico City, buildings continue to collapse years, even decades, after earthquakes. Gloria, a retired teacher, moved into her building shortly after the 1985 earthquake. She and her neighbors invested in reinforcement beams to address minor damage. Reassured, she grew accustomed to the stairwell fissures and occasional wall fragments crumbling.
“Like an earthly seasickness induced by geophysical motion, the kinesthetics of this unstable city can make residents ill.”
However, the 2017 earthquake intensified these cracks, making them appear ominous. A city inspection deemed the building unsafe, forcing Gloria and her neighbors to evacuate. The reinforcements installed after the previous earthquake had inadvertently weakened the structure, and the recent tremor exacerbated the damage. Gloria realized her building had been in a state of slow collapse all along. “It wasn’t just the earthquake,” she reflected, “It’s that we were so lucky. It was falling the whole time and we had no idea. The earthquake just aggravated what was always happening there. It was happening all the time, all the time, all the time.”
For Mexico City buildings, destruction is rarely a singular event. Residents, particularly “tocados,” become attuned to the subtle signs of ongoing decay – cracks, gaps, fissures – existing in the ambiguous space between complete destruction and gradual disintegration. This “geophysical sense” prompts temporal anxieties: “Is this new?” “How long has it been like this?” “How much time do we have left?” “When will certainty arrive?”
These questions were palpable in Fernanda, another self-described “tocada,” as she gazed out her window at a neighboring abandoned building. “Se acerca el dia en el que se cae encima de mi,” she murmured – “The day is coming in which it falls on top of me.” Her phrasing, “se acerca el día,” “the day approaches,” was striking. The day of collapse, the geological time bomb, was not something she was moving towards; it was an event approaching her, an inevitable future encroaching on the present.
Time, in her perception, wasn’t centered on her individual experience. Instead, time was happening to her, unfolding as the adjacent building slowly succumbed to collapse. Both Fernanda and the building were trapped within “earthquake time,” a temporal dimension extending beyond human lifespans.
This sense of extended time is what keeps Elena awake at night. Months after the earthquake, noticing the cracks in her building seemingly widening, she began a practice. “As if it were a growing child,” she marked the crack’s edge with a pencil line and the date. Weeks later, she observed the crack had extended beyond her initial mark.
Concerned, she began dating cracks throughout her apartment, as did her neighbors, confirming the building’s ongoing movement. By the time of my visit, the cracks bore multiple dates, a visual timeline of the building’s slow unraveling. Elena’s fear, it became clear, wasn’t solely about the cracks themselves, but about their temporality, the growing realization that a continuous process of geological decay had taken hold within her home.
Dated cracks in Elena’s apartment wall, serving as a physical record of the building’s ongoing movement and the tangible manifestation of deep time in a domestic space.
Deep time is often framed as separate from immediacy, distinct from both daily life and historical time itself. However, in our current era, experiential time, historical time, and deep time are increasingly converging. Which of these temporal scales are being etched onto the walls of Mexico City apartments?
The Anthropocene, a concept famously (and perhaps spontaneously) coined by Paul Crutzen in Mexico in 2000, designates an epoch where human actions exert geological-scale impacts. Capitalism and colonialism, in this framework, are recognized as forces comparable to tectonic plates in their transformative power. Beyond merely registering human impact on a geological scale, the Anthropocene highlights how human history makes the geological present in our everyday lives. In Mexico City, this history has allowed geological forces to infiltrate domestic spaces, residing alongside the city’s inhabitants.
Viewing Mexico City as a geophysical entity allows us to understand “tocado” as a unique, historically shaped way of relating to the Earth. Rather than a condition solely triggered by trauma and earthquake anxieties, “tocados” grapple with the ongoing processes initiated by seismic events: the fissures, subsidence, building leans, and subsequent collapses.
In “The Book of Unconformities,” Hugh Raffles describes the temporal rupture experienced during an earthquake: “Time breaks, it suspends in two senses of the English word: slowing to almost zero and leaving you actually hanging, like particulate spun out of liquid.” “Tocados” in Mexico City inhabit a similar state of suspension, where human time seems overtaken by a more expansive, geological temporality. To paraphrase Roberto Bolaño, this time is less a steady current and more a series of jolting, proximate explosions, some perceptible, others imperceptible.
This “seismic time” is not limited to earthquake events themselves. It begins with an earthquake but persists through ongoing geological and political processes. Rather than a purely individual pathology or culture-bound expression, “tocado” can be understood as an emergent condition through which bodies, histories, regulations, and the Earth itself come into a complex, interwoven relationship. Deep time, in Mexico City, becomes undeniably present for those compelled to notice.
Deep time offers a valuable framework for contemporary analysis, a temporal literacy that situates the long-term ramifications of the present moment within a deeper historical context. However, there’s also a risk of subsuming deep time entirely into the present.
Mexico City points towards a more nuanced understanding of time, one that neither collapses the human and geological nor rigidly separates them. In their embodied awareness of earthly processes, “tocados” reveal deep time not as a mere analytical scale, but as a strange, unfamiliar temporal geometry. In this geometry, homes become both havens of security and vulnerable geophysical entities. Deep time portals open within the city’s cracks, slumps, and fissures, revealing an inconceivable horizon forever rushing towards the present, forever shaping the unique experience of time in Mexico City.
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