Cirrus@Austlit

'LEOPOLDO IS AT least three tacos in before I start talking with him. Mouth full, he tells me, ‘El de huazontle es exquisito,’ raising his hand to the taquero for another.

'It’s a little before 8 am, 19 September 2019. I’m sitting on a broken plastic chair, having just returned from watching the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, hold the annual minute’s silence to honour those killed by the earthquakes that have struck the city over the years. I try the huazontle. It is exquisite. I throw back a few, because I’ll be attending protests and memorial services all day and won’t get another chance to eat until dinner (too busy commemorating events I never experienced). Leopoldo, who has endured all the city’s recent major earthquakes, tells me he’ll participate in the commemorations, particularly the yearly evacuation drill – that it’s an obligation, like a civil duty. Now in his fifties, he has participated in these events since they began after the city’s devastating 1985 earthquake. But, as if memory alone were insufficient for reminding him of the past, he blows cigarette smoke towards the traffic alongside us and says, ‘It’s not that I just want to remember. I want to not forget.’'  (Introduction)