UC Santa Cruz

“Mexico City is Two Hours from Mexico City” tells a series of stories about the geological now that became Mexico City’s present from the early afternoon of September 19, 2017. At 1:14pm, the second largest-earthquake in the region’s history struck the city, 32 years to the day after the largest earthquake devastated it. When 2017’s geological coincidence happened, residents say that time changed, so this dissertation asks three exceedingly basic questions: Why would an earthquake change time? How does that feel? What happens next? Written over a period of four magnitude seven earthquakes, however long that might be, this dissertation employs participant observation, interviews, photo/audio/video elicitation, transect walks, mapping, open-source intelligence research, and dream analysis, with informal responders (particularly Verificado19s), victim advocacy networks (specifically Los Damnificados Unidos de Tlalpan), seismologists, memory activists, friends, family, neighbours, and residents. This participant observation research was accompanied by sustained archival work in the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo Historico de la CDMX, the Archivo Historico de UNAM, the archives at the Instituto de la Geofísica, the Biblioteca Nacional de México, the Hemeroteca de La Jornada, and the Hemeroteca Nacional. At its most abstract level, this dissertation is about the relationship between time and history; at its most concrete, it’s about how that relationship is embodied. While deep time is often described as something that exceeds perception, residents of Mexico City endure inhuman processes taking root in the city, its buildings, and their bodies, and are actively creating the conceptual apparatuses that its presence demands. A dissertation written in the elapsing of the events it describes, each chapter is structured by the temporal process it focuses upon, using form and narrative to say things about earthquakes that are difficult to articulate directly. In total, this dissertation explores how it feels when deep time stops being the background against which history is composed, and intrudes upon history, contorting it into terrifying forms.