Words When the World Quakes
By Mia Armstrong
Damage from the 2017 earthquake in Mexico City.
When you learn a second language, the words you fumble to make your own come to you in two ways. There are the words you find in the pages of a book, the worksheets of a lesson. And then there are the words you learn because the universe teaches them to you--words that can change the shape of your life.
The first Spanish word I can remember the universe teaching me is simulacro, drill.
It was September 18, 2017, and I was studying in Mexico City. It was day before the anniversary of the 1985 earthquake, a tragedy estimated to have taken the lives of around 10,000 people.
“Tomorrow, the earthquake alarm will sound for the simulacro,” my host mom told me in Spanish, explaining the annual drill. It was an exercise of dual importance: remembrance and preparation.
As she spoke about what it was like to live through the 1985 earthquake—the horror, her own fortune, the collapsed city center—images flashed through my imagination, sepia-toned and distant.
The next day, I heard the alarm signaling the simulacro. It sounded, I think, around 11 a.m. I was at home, getting ready for school. I did nothing. I took the bus to my university.
“That day in Mexico City, the universe taught me words of fear and panic.”
At 1:14 p.m., the earthquake alarm sounded again. This time, though, it wasn’t for remembrance or preparation; it wasn’t a simulacro.
“Mia, está temblando,” my roommate yelled at me, urging me to run. In her Italian accent—which she employed to enunciate the Spanish and Italian that she mushed and molded until they formed their own beautiful language— she taught me the verb temblar (to shake, to quake, as in the earth shaking, both itself and everyone in it).
Several concrete buildings at the Tecnológico de Monterrey campus were interconnected by bridges, an architectural feature that quickly became a death trap as the city violently shook. Bridges collapsed, trapping students beneath them. Their screams echoed across courtyards filled with debris.
The word that I heard yelled amid those screams was not sismo—the word I knew for earthquake—but terremoto, something worse. It was the type of sismo that would leave five students dead on our campus and hundreds more beyond it. The type of sismo that would crumble buildings that are yet to be rebuilt.
That day in Mexico City, the universe taught me words of fear and panic. But I also learned that those words often bring with them with words of seemingly opposite meanings, words of care and love.
“Te quiero,” Ricardo, my boyfriend of 11 days at that point, said to me after the earthquake. He said it as he left the campus, headed toward the buses that had been arranged to take us home, or close to home, or close to the idea of home. Three or four hours had passed since the earthquake. We had watched students and emergency workers pull bodies from under collapsed bridges. We had screamed as a French exchange student tried to light a cigarette, worried about the potential gas in the air from the potentially ruptured gas lines. We wrote down names on a list and passed it around, trying to find out who was there, who was missing.
Ricardo whispered those words in my ear, and before he walked away I said them back, though I didn’t fully know what doing so meant. In Spanish, there are two ways to say “I love you”: te quiero or te amo, with te amo being the stronger of the two. What level of affection could I translate his words into?
Days passed both slowly and quickly after the earthquake. This is the contradiction of time, I’ve found, when you’re stuck inside with the monotony of your own thoughts as the world changes and grieves and comes together around you.
Our university campus closed, and Ricardo and I were stuck on opposite sides of the city, two hours away. Far apart, I found myself returning to the words that held us together.
I thought about how when children learn to speak, we fixate on the first word they say. We assign meaning to this first word, as if it holds a part of the speaker’s identity, or at least clues us in to their priorities.
We pay so much attention to the meaning of the first word that we don’t think much about the words that follow. How do we learn the words that we use to express our greatest hopes? Who teaches us the words that describe our deepest fears? When our worlds collapse, what words can we dig up from under the rubble? And are these the words that will help us rebuild?
I began learning Spanish as a monolingual, Anglo first grader in a mostly monolingual, Anglo charter school in northern Arizona. We all chose or were given Spanish names, a practice I was reminded of earlier this year, when Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar cringe-inducingly introduced herself at a Nevada presidential campaign event with her Spanish class name of “Elena.” Now I think about what a problematic way this is to introduce children to a new language, a way that seems to say, “The people who speak this language are not like you.” A way of saying that Spanish was the language of others, something for us to try on, to play with. A playground of othering.
Soon all of us kids learned how to introduce ourselves with our new fake names, to say where we were from and how old we were. We learned how to talk about ourselves without really saying who we were. We learned the names of animals, colors, likes and dislikes. We learned how to order at restaurants—how to be served, but never how to serve someone else.
“Before I was sent home, Ricardo and I had rented an apartment in Mexico City…Almost every day, I look at photos of its bedroom, kitchen and patio, imagining they’re still ours.”
We learned in the way the book prescribed, but never about the complexity that lay beyond or behind it. We learned to pass a test. We performed our assigned task and passed it.
Several years later, as I sat on the plane to Mexico City, ready to begin my semester abroad, I copied common Spanish phrases into my agenda.
“¿A qué te dedicas?” I wrote. “Un gusto conocerte.” “Hasta luego.” “Estudio periodismo y relaciones internacionales.”
What do you do? Nice to meet you. See you later. I study journalism and international relations.
They were basic phrases, and yet I was convinced I would forget them. I had passed AP Spanish in high school and taken one class in college, but I had only ever conjugated verbs to write an essay or answer a multiple-choice question, never to express my gratitude or tell someone what they meant to me. Even if my brain knew those words, my tongue did not. Those were someone else’s words.
I kept copying down the phrases, I think hoping that when I saw them on paper they might become mine.
As the weeks after the earthquake passed, as Ricardo and I began to build our new normal, my “te quiero” slowly blurred into “te amo.”
After I moved back to the US, our “te amo” led to a desire to return to the country where we had been together, a country I had come to love as I now loved him. A year and a half after I left, I was awarded a Fulbright grant and moved to southeastern Mexico to teach English at a public university, still an 18-hour bus ride away from Ricardo, but slowly getting closer.
It was there that, on March 11 of this year, I learned the word pandemia, pandemic. I had a coffee club with my students. We ate animal crackers and talked about TikTok. I got the notification on my phone that the WHO had designated the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic.
At the time, I remember there being around 10 confirmed cases in Mexico. Six days later, at the recommendation (and later mandate) of the U.S. State Department, I found myself on a plane returning to Arizona, leaving behind my students, my community, the little life I had built during my Fulbright grant—and, of course, Ricardo.
I then found myself in cuarentena, quarantine being a word I had never heard until I needed to be living it. In cuarentena, I’ve realized I’m still missing so many words. I sit in my childhood home, I eat dinner with my parents and my younger brothers, and I don’t know the words to say I’m grateful. I think about the things that have changed, and I don’t know the words to say I’m grieving.
I Skype Ricardo, whom I’ve been dating for almost three years now, and I fixate on the familiar paintings behind his head, the ones in his grandparents’ house in Puebla, Mexico. Almost everything else has changed, but those paintings have stayed the same.
Before I was sent home, Ricardo and I had rented an apartment in Mexico City, our first apartment as a couple, where we were going to start living together on June 25. Almost every day, I look at photos of its bedroom, kitchen and patio, imagining they’re still ours.
We’ve always had a date, a fixed time to wait until we’d next see each other. Now, what we have is more abstract, harder to describe, in English or Spanish.
People talk about the new normal, la nueva normalidad, but I find myself stuck in the old one, remembering the words that filled it, obsessing over the last time things felt right: The day we picked out our new apartment, when Ricardo and I went to the movies. We stopped at our favorite frozen yogurt place and used my purse to sneak our cups of froyo into the theater.
Today, I look inside my purse and try to find the hot fudge stains, forensic evidence of that memory, those feelings, proof that they were real, that they could happen again. But the stains aren’t there anymore. We scrubbed them off. I wish we hadn’t.
Ricardo and I have lived in different countries for a total of more than two years now, but we’ve always had a date, a fixed time to wait and count down until we’d next see each other. Now what we have is more abstract, harder to describe, in English or Spanish.
When we talk, our conversations are often short, following a predictable rhythm. While I now know all the words to express my greatest fears for our future, I don’t want to speak them. We look silently at the rubble, searching for the right words to rebuild and come together again. We repeat “te amo,” almost as an involuntary reflex. Most days it’s a lifeline, because most days those words still feel like enough.
Mia Armstrong is a journalist and Fulbright scholar who writes mostly about criminal justice, migration and U.S.-Mexico relations. She is the 2019 winner of Nicholas Kristof’s Win-a-Trip contest through the New York Times, and her work has also appeared in Slate, The Marshall Project, Longreads and Letras Libres.