Historical earthquakes in Mexico. Past efforts and new ... · tions called propios and reales novenos (García-Acosta and Suárez-Reynoso, 1996). This one was a more fruitful choice

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ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 47, N. 2/3, April/June 2004

Key words earthquakes – Mexico – catalogues –seismological compilations – pictograms

1. Introduction

The Mexican Republic is located in a highlyseismic region of the planet, mainly because theCocos and the Rivera plates subduct below theNorth American plate, and the Pacific plate sepa-rates from the North American plate along the Ba-ja California Gulf spreading center. Besides, thecountry is crossed by the Trans-Mexican VolcanicBelt, part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Numerousearthquakes have occurred throughout Mexicanhistory (fig. 1). One of the earthquakes with thegreatest magnitude has been the one that occurred

on 19 September 1985. That year constituted abreaking point in Mexican seismological historyin more than one sense. In fact, catalogue produc-tion has to be understood before and after 1985. Adefinitive interest in rescuing Mexican seismolog-ical history with a holistic perspective has ac-quired special importance since then.

Up to 1985 there existed two types of seis-mological catalogues or compilations:

a) parametrical ones produced with an ex-clusive interest for seismologists, correspon-ding mainly to the instrumental period of Mex-ican seismology and, as such, covering basical-ly the 20th century;

b) earthquake compilations produced main-ly during the 19th century, as part of the great-est amount of enlightenment production linkedto the growing interest in understanding and ex-plaining Nature.

Since 1985 a joint interest developed amonghistorians, anthropologists, ethnohistorians andseismologists to construct a reliable and multidis-ciplinary catalogue. Our task started having a gen-

Historical earthquakes in Mexico.Past efforts and

new multidisciplinary achievements

Virginia García AcostaCentro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), Mexico D.F., Mexico

AbstractThe 1985 Mexican earthquakes demonstrated that knowledge concerning their history was still scarce and pre-carious. In fact those earthquakes acted as triggers, because it was then when a new field of research began todevelop: disaster historical research. An initial task was to retrieve the history of earthquakes in Mexico in orderthroughout to produce an exhaustive inventory. The main result was a paradigmatic catalogue, published someyears ago as the book Los sismos en la historia de México (Earthquakes in Mexican History). It contains infor-mation about every event along 450 years of Mexican seismological history. This paper will focus on the back-ground of this seismological compilation and its characteristics, addressing mainly methodological items con-cerning sources, qualitative and/or quantitative data, the importance of joint and multidisciplinary efforts, andthe research they have inspired on historical earthquakes investigation in Mexico.

Mailing address: Dr. Virginia García Acosta, Centro deInvestigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología So-cial (CIESAS), Juárez 87, Tlalpan, CP 14000, México D.F.,Mexico; e-mail: [email protected]

488

Virginia García Acosta

eral knowledge on catalogues or compilationsfrom other countries (China, the Caribbean,Japan) and particularly, the magnificent 19th cen-tury work of the French Count Montessus de Bal-lore on the seismological history of the Andes.For Mexico there existed some 19th century com-pilations which had omissions and lack of preci-sion, but in fact they were the starting point.

A short time later, in 1987, the joint effortyielded its first product with the edition of thebook «Y volvió a temblar», which means «Andit trembled again» (Rojas-Rabiela, et al., 1987).This title reminds us of the first sentence ofmany colonial documents that reported earth-quake occurrence. One year later, in 1988, thesecond great product appeared (García-Acostaet al., 1988). Research continued for severalyears, during almost one decade. In 1996 themost recent effort appeared with the edition of«Los sismos en la historia de México» («Earth-quakes in Mexican History»), which coversmore than 450 years of Mexican seismological

history, from 1455 up to 1913 (García-Acostaand Suárez-Reynoso, 1996).

2. Methodology

Historical earthquake research was virtuallya new field in Mexico. As such, we did not havea guide or an accurate indication to know whatpath we should follow. For this reason, themethodology of this work was developed stepby step.

Some methodological paths we followed inthis retrieval of the seismological history ofMexico will be mentioned below: a path wemay baptize as methodological lessons learnt.

2.1. Multidisciplinary team

One of the main methodological elementswas working in a team, as a team, with a team.

Fig. 1. 20th century Mexican earthquakes with M ≥ 6.5 (courtesy of Servicio Sismologico Nacional, Institutode Geofisica, UNAM, Mexico).

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Historical earthquakes in Mexico. Past efforts and new multidisciplinary achievements

This is absolutely necessary in studies that,like this one, wish to be exhaustive.

2.2. Bibliographical sources

To guide the search in libraries, we used a se-ries of published bibliographies, some of themeven coming from 19th century, and we also usedpublished indexes, mainly to guide our search inarchives that were really useful before leavingMexico on our way to the Archivo General de In-dias located at Seville in Spain.

2.3. Temporal frame

Source availability determined the temporalframe. As such, the oldest date goes as far as the15th century, while the most recent date was1912. This period corresponds to what is calledthe non-instrumental era of Mexican seismolo-gy, because the instrumental era began in 1910when the National Seismological Network wasset up. Thus, our compilation ended in 1912 be-cause in this year there occurred an earthquakewith specific characteristics and important ef-fects in Mexico City, for which it was particu-larly interesting to compare the new quantita-tive data coming out from the instruments withthe qualitative one.

2.4. Spatial frame

Next, we had to define spatial limits. Be-sides covering Mexico City, and the Valley ofMexico in which Mexico City is located, thespatial limits were defined with the seismolo-gists choosing the 10 Mexican states (estadosin Spanish) that had two characteristics: theyhave been historically identified by their greatseismic activity and, offered archives, li-braries and depositories which could be ex-plored and used.

The ten Mexican states that were chosenwere, from north to south the following: Na-yarit, Jalisco, Colima, Michoacán, Veracruz,Estado de México, Puebla, Guerrero, Oaxacaand Chiapas.

2.5. Critical route

What we called a «critical route» or workroute had to be defined, mainly to know when tocontinue and when to stop. I will mention two ex-amples of what we did with journals and archives.

The large number of 19th century Mexicanjournals that exist in journalistic depositoriesimposed certain modifications to the taskmethod we had employed with bibliographicalsources. The criterion had to be more selective,and the route had to be more specific. At the be-ginning we tried to find out the most importantearthquakes, and went through the journals forthe following 30 days, reviewing differentnewspapers at diverse dates. But this route hadto be changed because the information relatedto a certain quake varied from one newspaper toanother. The variation was not only in quantita-tive terms but also in qualitative ones. We thenhad to choose the «Little Red Riding Hood longway» and decided to examine simultaneouslyseveral newspapers for the same date.

Once we had finished with the search forstrong and important earthquakes, and havingidentified important gaps, we made a daily sys-tematic review of the newspapers to fill thegaps. This path led us to find out some greatearthquakes not previously identified as such,and now well documented in our compilationwith journalistic information. That is the case ofthe event known as «Earthquake of All Saint’sDay» which occurred on Mexico’s Saint’s Day,2 November 1894.

The second example comes from thearchives, and specifically from the ArchivoGeneral de Indias, located so far away fromMexico and where the research time had to beoptimized. We chose four criteria:

i) to look through all the legajos or sectionswhere we knew there were useful data on earth-quakes, as those including documents askingfor tax-exemption;

ii) to fill the gaps we already had, that is tosearch specifically for the years for which wehad no data (this criterion proved useless andtook up too much of our valuable time);

iii) to search for specific dates of specificearthquakes we wanted to document in detail(this criterion was also discouraging; the «un-

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grateful search» began to threaten the research);iv) previous experiences in Mexican archives

led us to look for documents with certain charac-teristics that gave us wonderful results related tobuilding reconstruction and, as such, probably re-lated with earthquake occurrence. We placed spe-cial emphasis on documents coming from sec-tions called propios and reales novenos (García-Acosta and Suárez-Reynoso, 1996). This one wasa more fruitful choice in several senses.

We just mentioned «ungrateful» or «uselesssearch». As usual, we had to face it. It repre-sents what our Italian colleagues call «negativesources» (Gazzini, et al., 1991). One extremeexample comes from Emilio del Castillo Ne-grete’s masterpiece «México en el siglo XIX»(«Mexico in 19th century»). Only in one of its29 volumes did we find useful data.

As the useless research in bibliographicalsources grew, we abandoned them and went tojournals, when this one grew, we jumped toarchives, and so on. Sometimes an ungratefulsearch is continuous and discouraging. That iswhy we decided to help other professionalswho adopted this technique, and tell them ex-plicitly where and what not to look for (García-Acosta and Suárez-Reynoso, 1996).

3. Sources

According to their contents, sources can bedivided into primary and secondary. Accordingto their origin, sources are archives, biblio-graphical, old newspapers and iconographic.Let us take a brief look at these main sources.

3.1. Archives

Undoubtedly, the main source of informa-tion for historians are the archives. They requirea considerable investment of time, and the par-ticipation of experienced professionals inarchive work, in paleography, and in other spe-cialities such as pictographic writing, as we willsee later.

These depositories lack specific sections tolook at. Among all the archives we visited, onlytwo of them in Mexico had specific sections

dealing with earthquakes: the HistoricalArchives of Jalisco, with a section named «nat-ural phenomena», and the Diocesan Archives atSan Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, with a filedealing with earthquakes and volcanic erup-tions in the section Asuntos Civiles-Asuntos Re-gionales (Civil Affairs-Regional Affairs).

We worked in private and public archives.The latter are organized in Mexico at differentlevels, according to the political-administrativedivision of the country, so they can be munici-pal, state or federal archives. Finally, we had asplendid opportunity to search in the ArchivoGeneral de Indias in Seville (Spain), lookingfor data from Colonial Mexico that were notfound in Mexican depositories. Other col-leagues gave us information coming from otherarchives, such as data from the southern Mexi-can border coming from the General Archivesof Central America.

Archives and codices were the sources thatprovided the earliest data about historical earth-quakes.

3.2. Bibliographical sources

200 bibliographical sources provided pri-mary as well as secondary data for the catalogue,going from codices written in pictographic char-acters, to 20th century published books, passingthrough 19th century manuscripts.

A good example came from codices, the pic-tographic documents where Mesoamerican peo-ple recorded the most important events of theirdaily life. They are called «painted books» be-cause the writing system used is pictographic, inwhich each element is determinant: shape, size,color, position of every glyph. The recording ofearthquakes, combining written and calendarsystems, was especially important because ofMesoamerican cosmovision. Earthquakes wererecorded combining the earth and movementglyphs (Fuentes, 1987). As such the earthquakepictogram is the result of the association of bothglyphs (fig. 2). Next to the earthquake pic-togram there always appears a chronologicalglyph showing the date of the event, that is tosay the date when the earthquake or any othernatural, social or political phenomenon occurred

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(fig. 3). Codices offer scattered information, butin some cases it is the only one we have for thePre-Hispanic period.

Manuscripts are other important biblio-graphical sources, like the one written byMartínez Gracida (1890), found in the Gener-al Archives of Oaxaca, which includes nation-wide as well as world-wide information onearthquake occurrence from 1507 to 1885.

3.3. Old newspapers

In our research we used 36 newspapers,half of them printed in Mexico City and the

other half outside the capital, mainly in thestate capitals. Most were printed during thenineteenth Century, when Mexican journalismwas established. Early Mexican newspaperswere associated with the initial developmentof printing in New Spain, between 1536 and1540. The first forms of printed informationwere called hojas volantes or papeles sueltos(flyers or «loose sheets»). The first flyer thatappeared in Mexico City, printed by the ItalianJuan Pablos (considered the first printer inMexico), was a description of the earthquakefelt during the night of 10-11 September1541. It was signed by the notary Juan Ro-dríguez as a witness.

Research in old newspapers and in archivesrequires the greatest amount of time. We had togo through the newspapers on a daily, monthly

Fig. 3. Pictograms coming from Pre-Columbian orEarly Post-Conquest Codices.

Hailstorm

Ollin Movimento Movement

Tlalli Tierra Earth

Date

Thr

ee E

arth

quak

es

Vulcanism

Fig. 2. Earth and Movement (Tlalli and Ollin inNahuatl Language) glyphs and their combinationmeaning Earthquake (Tlalollin).

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and yearly basis to find out a few pieces of in-formation. First we went through the few colo-nial newspapers, then the 19th Century and ear-ly 20th Century, which definitely yielded moreinformation. Data from newspapers cover a pe-riod of almost 200 years (1722, 1728 to 1742and 1784 to 1912).

3.4. Iconographical sources

Iconographic sources were not explored orused enough in our research on Mexicanearthquakes. They represent an enormousfield to look at, and were used more exhaus-tively in our last research dealing with whatwe call agricultural disasters in Mexican His-tory, that is droughts, floods, heavy rains, andso forth (García-Acosta et al., 2003; Escobar,2003).

We used ex votos or retablos for the coversof the two volumes of «Earthquakes in MexicanHistory». These retablos are «an old and deep-seated expression of Mexican popular religiosi-ty» (Rodríguez-Lapuente, 1995), and they arefrequently associated with disasters.

Primary information used in the compila-tion came from archives, newspapers and over60% from bibliographical sources. The Intro-ductory chapter to the book «Earthquakes inMexican History» contains a detailed analysisof each source for the reader to understand itscharacteristics and the type of information itprovides. This source analysis led to the fol-lowing four criteria: i) type of source; ii) typeof material; iii) how the material is presented;iv) reliability and deficiencies.

Newspapers provided the bulk of earth-quake information, especially for the 19th cen-tury. However, in an excellent article on the useof information taken from British newspapers,Musson found that one of their main deficien-cies is that the information was not treated withscientific interest, so it might be incomplete; itoften happens that they do not always describeor even mention some earthquakes found inother sources. Hence the recommendation is touse, as we did, as many different newspapers aspossible (Musson, 1986). So, even when jour-nalistic information is considered primary (ex-

cept when it deals with prior events), it has tobe compared with information coming fromother sources in order to determine its accuracyand reliability.

The details on how the information was ex-tracted, ordered and systematized appear in theIntroduction to «Earthquakes in Mexican Histo-ry». The required characteristics of any pre-in-strumental earthquake compilation or, given thecase, any historical long-term catalogue are four:i) homogeneity; ii) continuity; iii) comple-mentarity; iv) reliability.

Those four requirements have to be accom-plished with sources, include textual informa-tion, as well as all the information obtained inthe documents.

By combining several sources in a comple-mentary way, we managed to cover almost allour study period. This proves the usefulness ofthis method not only in this type of long-peri-od research, but in any exhaustive study. Com-paring several sources also helps us to solvedating problems, such as counting a singleearthquake twice, mistaking an earthquake forits aftershock or its foreshock, confusing twodifferent earthquakes, and so forth. It alsosolves toponymic problems, such as the townnames in indigenous languages, towns thatchanged names, and so forth. Thus, comple-menting and comparing different sources real-ly matters.

Only in this way will the reader, user, andresearcher be able to use the information, tohave confidence, and to choose or discriminateit for his research purposes. They are the min-imal requirements for this type of research thathas a multidisciplinary origin and objectives.It is so because potential users are not onlyspecialists in earth sciences and engineering,but also historians, ethnohistorians, anthropol-ogists, sociologists, art historians, architects,urbanists and stakeholders in general whosework and decisions are related to these issues.For example, diverse earthquake-related stud-ies developed by historians, ethnohistoriansand anthropologists have increased during re-cent years. An example of this are the contentsof the second volume of «Earthquakes in Mex-ican History» (García-Acosta, 2001) that in-clude analysis on topics like: the evolution of

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seismic records throughout centuries; scientif-ic thoughts about the origin of earthquakes;historical social responses to earthquake oc-currence throughout Mexican History.

4. Catalogues and seismological compilationsbefore and after 1985

Catalogues and seismological compilationsinclude primary and secondary material. Thefirst ones were developed in the 19th centurymainly by engineers, geologists, meteorologistsand several members of scientific societies(table I). Many of those coming from the 19thcentury have serious mistakes and omissions.For this reason, they have to be checked andcompared with original data. That is, they donot have the homogeneity, continuity, comple-mentarity and reliability required for thesesources. The same happens with the work ofJuan Orozco y Berra (1887-1888) «Efeméridesseísmicas mexicanas» («Mexican SeismicEphemeris»), which until recently was the onlyreference for specialists, although it containsimprecisions, dating errors and omissions.

This interest to maintain the historical mem-ory of earthquakes was reborn in Mexico afterthe 1985 earthquake, a breaking point in thistype of research as I mentioned before. Afterthat event, many local compilations were madeespecially for Mexico City (cf. Amerlinck,1986; González-Polo, 1985 and Manzanilla,

1985). There have also been many regional,state or local efforts, such as the work of JuanVizcaíno (1986) who studied the seismic histo-ry of his native town Zapotlán or CiudadGuzmán in Jalisco, a city damaged by manyearthquakes including the 1985 one. It is alsothe case of César Luna Bauza (1992), who stud-ied the whole state of Veracruz. Each one coversdifferent periods: 1543-1985 for Zapotlán and1900-1994 for Veracruz. An even greater workwas the catalogue of Garduño et al. (1998)which covers a large western region includingthree Mexican states: Jalisco, Colima and Mi-choacán, or the regional coverage made byMolina del Villar (1988) for the northwesternpart of Mexico. Some previous efforts were theworks of González-Ramírez (1981) on Puebla,superficially covering the 1575-1980 period,and Núñez-Cornú and Ponce (n.d.) on Oaxaca,which covers only the 19th century with a selec-tion of the strongest Oaxacan earthquakes.Many of these compilations and catalogues haveused the same methodology as «Earthquakes inMexican History». Undoubtedly, these local,state and regional efforts will improve the exist-ing databases, which will lead to a new nationalcatalogue with local, state and regional addendato «Earthquakes in Mexican History».

What have these compilations on historicalearthquakes in Mexico inspired? What type ofwork was produced after them? How do seis-mologists use this qualitative information care-fully collected and systematized by historians?

Table I. 19th Century nation-wide Earthquake Compilations.

Edition date Author and title Coverage

1837 C.M. Bustamante «Temblores de México...» 1620-1835

1861 J.G. Romero «Noticia de los terremotos...» 1532-1861

1864 J.N. Adorno «Memoria acerca de los terremotos de México» 1532-1864

1887 J. Orozco y Berra «Efemérides seísmicas mexicanas» 1460-1887

1890(ms.) M. Martínez Gracida «Catálogo de terremotos...» 1507-1885

1893 E.R. de Zayas «Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos...» 1460-1884

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What have seismologists done since the editionof «Earthquakes in Mexican History» and otherderived catalogues? According to the NationalUniversity (UNAM) and the National Polytech-nic Institute (IPN), seismologists are still gen-erating instrumental catalogues going back on-ly as far as 1900, the instrumental period ofMexican seismology (Zúñiga, et al., 2000). Theseismic instrumental catalogues for the Mexi-can Republic have been used, for example, todivide the country into four seismic zones (fig.4), in order to design anti-seismic strategies.This type of catalogues should include homo-geneous historical intensities and other parame-ters useful for hazard and risk studies.

Although there has not been a sequel to«Earthquakes in Mexican History» for the peri-od after 1912, seismologists interested in thissubject acknowledge that this work has allowedthem to study specific historical earthquakes.Nevertheless, even today some seismologistsexpress uncertainty in the use of past earth-quake records. They accept that it is very im-

portant to have such records, but they regret thatsome data are not always accurate and reliable.Sometimes the information is diffuse and it isnot easy or feasible to estimate the magnitude,assign the intensity, locate the epicentre. Whathas been done with instrumental records hasbeen very useful to understand pre-instrumentalones. It is important to know, for example inMexico City, how large and how frequent theearthquakes are, where they have done mostdamage, how intense the movements are, andmake comparisons between past and presentrecords. But for a seismologist it is crucial toidentify the epicentre, and it is not always easyto find out where it was.

Isoseismal maps have been made with pre-instrumental records, based mainly on 19thcentury records, but the weakness of qualita-tive data for some purposes persists. Lookingafter information coming from more localsources may help to avoid these gaps. Never-theless past earthquakes records have led tomajor advances in seismology, as well as in so-

34.00

32.00

30.00

28.00

26.00

24.00

22.00

20.00

18.00

16.00

14.00–118.00 –114.00 –110.00 –106.00 –102.00

LONGITUDE

LA

TIT

UD

E

–98.00 –94.00 –90.00 –86.00

Fig. 4. Mexican seismic zones: A = no historical earthquake records for the last 80 years; B and C = interme-diate zones; D = large historical earthquakes recorded (courtesy of Servicio Sismologico Nacional, Instituto deGeofisica, UNAM, Mexico).

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cial sciences, or in multidisciplinary products(Suárez et al., 1994). By using historical cata-logues, several seismologists have carried outcase studies on certain earthquakes and withvery concrete objectives, such as the work bythe Centro de Geociencias (Earth SciencesCenter) at UNAM. This Center has studiedmainly tectonics and its effects on CentralMexico in states such as Aguascalientes, Gua-najuato and Zacatecas, in contrast to the enor-mous amount of research developed for thecoastal or subduction zone. Another examplecomes from the research done also with infor-mation coming from «Earthquakes in MexicanHistory» on the 1887 earthquake that hit thenorth-western Sonoran area with intensity of 8to 9, which seems to exemplify what is knownin seismology as «triggering». An effort in-cluding these type of analyses will be achievedwith the future publication of the third volumeof «Earthquakes in Mexican History». If vol-ume one of this series includes the seismologi-cal compilation and volume two the analysissocial scientists made with that information,forthcoming volume three will offer the seis-mological perspective emerging out from thesame information included in volume one.

The construction of historical catalogueswith earthquake records constitutes an effortthat has been made all over the world since sev-eral centuries. Current state-of-the-art of simi-lar studies in Latin American countries duringthe last 50 years look very encouraging. Pastearthquakes have been recorded employing sev-eral methodologies and sources, but they arenot so different from one another.

These ideas lead us to some unansweredquestions we already posed ourselves at the be-ginning of this workshop. Some of these ques-tions are the following: How should historicalearthquake catalogues be made? Should they beall-inclusive with the information coming fromevery event ever reported? Should fakes be ex-cluded or not? Which is the best methodologyfor a really complete catalogue? How to dealwith these specific historical sources? How candifferent sources be treated? Can a World Cata-logue be built? How? Is it feasible?

We still have many questions, but weshould agree on at least one thing. The starting

point that encourages this search is the samethat has inspired the construction of cata-logues with information coming from the past,and this starting point is based on the idea thathistorical records should help protect fromearthquakes.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Shri Krishna Singh (UNAM),Ramón Zúñiga (UNAM) and Fernando AnguloBrown (IPN) for the information they offered oncurrent uses of qualitative data for seismologicalpurposes.

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Documents

Historical earthquakes in Mexico. Past efforts and new ... · tions called propios and reales novenos (García-Acosta and Suárez-Reynoso, 1996). This one was a more fruitful choice