It started as a gust of wind last Tuesday afternoon. The sun was shining, villagers around the corner were celebrating something with live music, gunshots and tequila, and we were so captivated by the pulsating fall layers of a huge Popocatépetl eruption some 23,000 years ago that we hardly noticed the dust constantly blowing into our eyes. That Tuesday evening, though, the upcoming storm was becoming hard to ignore: it started to rain heavily, and the wind joyfully played with a large metal piece somewhere in our hotel all night long. The infernal sounds were accompanied by several electricity cuts, occasional heavy hail showers and lightning. All in all, a quite convincing storm.
Now, being a naïve European, I am used to storms that don’t last for much longer than one intense night. The storm that descended on Mexico this week was different. It lasted another two days: strong winds felled advertising boards, trees and electricity posts, and temperatures up to 40°C lower than usual produced hail and snow that paralysed – and at the same time excited – large parts of Mexico (as you can imagine, snow is very rare in Mexico). Fieldwork turned out to be a rather insecure and soul-destroying activity under these circumstances, so we got creative. What follows is a documentation of our life in the times of the ‘big storm’…
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