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Paper short abstract

The two most-destructive earthquakes in Mexican history (1985 and 2017) both struck on the same date, September 19. How can ethnographic realism, with its commitment to process, the quotidian, and historical contingency, write about the experience of absurd and unthinkable events?

Paper long abstract

The two most-destructive earthquakes in Mexican history both struck on the same date, September 19. The first September 19, in 1985, was the most-destructive earthquake in Mexico’s modern history; the second September 19, in 2017, was the second-most destructive. After the coincidence, people across Mexico City developed a fear of September 19, and have theories of Mexican history in which the date plays an outsized role. These fears and theories were confirmed in 2022, when a 7.7 magnitude earthquake shook Mexico City for a third September 19. For residents of Mexico City, the third September 19 earthquake was at once profoundly strange and deeply expected. There is, in Mexico City, something wrong with September 19.

It is difficult to argue that a date can cause an event. This is because anthropology’s focus upon the quotidian smooths ruptures and surprises into structures and processes, flattening time into a neutral, abstract plane. But in Mexico City, time happens, on some days more intensely than others, and truly encountering this experience requires questioning sacrosanct ideas in anthropological thought, such as agency, causality, and historical contingency. In order to recognise that an event can be both historically produced and utterly unthinkable, I propose that we make time happen in our ethnographic writing. Instead of inaugurating a new theory of the event, or outlining a new concept of experience, this paper uses a reverse chronology to both describe the experience of the three September 19s and to reconsider the relationship between time and history.