Social resignifications of the silence and the sociality of listening in Mexico City. Memory, history and senses in contemporary Mexico

This text questions the notion of “silence” and its metaphorical uses in order to assist in the affective mobilisations of Mexico City’s inhabitants. My argument takes as a premise that listening is an integral experience (corporal, cognitive, sensorial and affective) and a form of inscription in both the consciousness and the memory (Rivas 2019, Gallagher 2016). Next, I consider how specific moments in Mexico City’s recent history can shape societal ways of listening, as well as of perceiving and signifying silence among the inhabitants of the capital city. Reference to specific instances involves considering collective traumatic events, either with natural or social causes, which end up being connected to the collective memory and local history of Mexico City. First, the socio-affective responses to the September 2017 earthquake are described considering its sensory-perceptual relation with the earthquakes of 1985; secondly, two tragic student massacres occurring in 1968 and more recently in 2014. These events have had such an affective magnitude that they have required a sensorial readjustment to name lived experiences and, mainly, to make sense of that which has been lost, which is absent or has disappeared. These ways of naming, or rather, not-naming the absences, but performing the pain they provoke, allow us to speak of a reformulation of the meanings relating to the “silence” that is referred to. The proposal consists of exploring culture’s performative forms, assuming that the modalities of listening and interpretation of the listening/silence dyad in different referenced historical moments allow us to know the affective uses of silence, the performance of listening and the function of both in the collective overcoming of trauma.