Power, colonialism, and daylight saving time
Three weeks ago, Mexico permanently ended daylight saving time. We fell back one last time, and we won’t be springing forward ever again. (In most of the country; border cities and the state of Quintana Roo—where Cancún is—will stay aligned to U.S. time.) To say I’m thrilled would be an understatement. No more 7:30 a.m. dawns in random months like April and September! No more late sunsets rendered irrelevant by afternoon rainstorms! No more slavering NAFTA-era subservience to the whims of the U.S.! (At least when it comes to the clock; let’s do the border next.) A time zone that makes sense for the people living in it, all year round!
Very long time readers will remember I railed against daylight saving time in Mexico back in 2019, and I’m rerunning the original post below. My critique would be sharper now: Standardized time zones and clock changes are tools of capital and empire, deployed to serve the people and places that already have power and wielded against those that don’t. Millions of Mexicans got up before dawn in the spring and summer for nearly 20 years to make sure the executives of U.S. companies wouldn’t ever trip over an unexpected time difference with their factories. (And it’s not lost on me that the new time regime benefits Mexico City, the seat of almost all economic and political power in an extremely centralized nation.) Europe’s current time zones reflect the continent’s fascist past. China, comparable in width to the continental U.S., has only one time zone, aligned to Beijing, which is perhaps not the worst oppression inflicted on the western part of the country in recent years but is certainly intertwined with the rest of them. The way time is set and changed is never neutral, even as we come to absorb it as natural.
I’m not saying daylight saving time doesn’t make sense anywhere—it can make a lot of sense in places far from the equator. I’m not a rigid partisan for either standard time or daylight saving time, in every place and every season, all over the world. The people of any particular place can be trusted to know what’s best for them, and they should get to decide, weighing the pros and cons of darker mornings vs. darker evenings, regional time alignment vs. respect for local seasonal and circadian rhythms. None of us should have to bend to a time zone. Time zones should bend to us.
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Original post: Against daylight saving time
Published on September 22, 2019
I have never particularly cared about or understood the rage aimed at daylight saving time in the states. Daylight saving time is great! It stays light until like 9 p.m. in the summer! There’s so much fun to be had with those long days! (Especially if you live in a place with a dark and depressing winter—and for those, standard time is the problem.)
Well. After a total of eight summers in Mexico City, I have changed my tune. Today the sun rose at 7:24 a.m. 7:24 a.m. 7:24 A.M.!!!!!! This is a personal offense aimed directly at me and my lifelong struggle with mornings. I can’t wake up without sunlight. Once I slept in a room with blackout curtains and didn’t wake up until 4 p.m. It’s not like I leap out of bed immediately ready to face the day if the sun is shining, but at least I can, you know, open my eyes. At least it’s obvious that it’s morning.
And there’s absolutely no long-evening effect that makes up for the morning torture. Sunset is at 7:31 p.m. today—respectable, but not extraordinary. At most, we get until about 8:30 p.m., when the days are at their longest in June. But in many ways, the actual hour of summertime sunset here is irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, the outside portion of a Mexico City summer day ends at 5 p.m. because that’s when it starts raining. That’s been slightly less reliable this year, as you may recall, but it still gets cloudy and menacing, and you only have to be caught in one hail storm to learn not to risk it.
Summer is a wet and gloomy season here. The evening storms lead to overcast mornings even when the sun does finally deign to peak over the horizon. The cognitive dissonance created by looking at U.S. summer beach day photos on Instagram when I’m getting like 4 hours of good light a day is…intense. I catch myself thinking, Is this really the same season?
And yet, Mexico treats summer just like the U.S. does. Schools go on vacation, people flock to beaches, it’s high season at all the hotels and resorts. Despite the rain, darkness, and sargassum seaweed invasion. It would make so much more sense to switch the relaxing, outdoor part of our year to March, April, and increasingly May, when it’s warm and sunny. Why does the way the U.S. and Europe do summer have to be the way Mexico does summer? Why do seasons have to be experienced the same way everywhere around the world?
The U.S. and Europe get to have their cultural experiences of season line up with their lived reality of seasons. And by U.S., I really mean the East Coast; some of these complaints apply to the way cultural seasons have been imposed on California, etc, too. Of the many things I learned when I moved to the East Coast for college was the point of Christmas lights (sparks of joy when it’s dark and cold!) and Memorial Day barbecues (finally, it’s not dark and cold for while!). Those things make perfect sense there. In Los Angeles or Mexico City or Managua, where I spent a significant portion of a reporting trip in a mall featuring a huge Christmas tree and fake snow, not so much.
The global hegemony of cultural seasons—going to the beach in the summer, hanging up Christmas lights in winter—reveals which cultures matter most. They (we) get to distort the rest of the world until it resembles a twisted, nonsensical image of themselves. They (we) get to feel at home anywhere, while stripping everywhere else of the right to a coherent relationship between a culture and its environment. And Mexico, as it always does, gives in.