September 19th, 2015, was the 30th anniversary of the earthquake that shattered Mexico City. In a conversation with the most senior employee of the Dolores Cemetery, I found out that the night after the quake the bodies found under the rubble had been taken by the bulk to the graveyard lots which were still empty. Unidentified bodies formed massive heaps which overcrowded the cemetery and caused a crisis. If a similar tragedy occurred today, the graveyard wouldn’t have room to receive the same volume of corpses as in 1985.
The graves are laid out one next to the other in a dense lattice of tombstones, crosses, and statues stretching out in one section of the Chapultepec Forest. At the edge of the cemetery, some graves cramp as if about to spill out. The rubble of exhumed graves piles nearby—too old to seem fastened to the ground. In the rubble, we find fragments of tombstones belonging to people who passed away during the earthquake, mirroring the frailty of the constructions that crushed them. These shattered graves mark the inhumation of someone’s remains, whose house might have collapsed during the quake, killing them. [...]