TOUCHED BY DEEP TIME: Earthquake Sickness in Mexico City

Abstract

In Mexico City, earthquakes are so frightening that they make residents sick. Sometimes referred to as being tocado (touched), the illness might be considered part of the “culture-bound syndrome” known as susto throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, where acute experiences of shock—such as being trapped in a shaking building—induce chronic physiological outcomes. Instead of explaining the illness as an idiom of social distress or a cultural interpretation of a biomedical affliction, I suggest we might better understand tocado's symptomology by following the fright itself. People who are tocado fearfully attune their senses to the signs of seismic risk—puckering potholes, sidewalk fissures, building subsidence, cracks in apartment walls—and develop an embodied apprehension of the ongoing geophysicality of their worlds. We might thus understand being tocado as being sick with the everyday presence of deep time.