José Revueltas states that Tlatelolco “will never end because others will continue writing it”. The Tlatelolco being written, however, might be different from the Tlatelolco that began 47 years ago, and how can we know exactly what happened that year? The “Tlatelolco” we know today, (either followed by ‘1968’ or by itself) has become a symbol of the massacre that took place on October 2 of 1968, as students were protesting government oppression. As Steinberg notes, rather than the memory of the Student Movement that challenged the Mexican government in 1968, was has prevailed is the memory of one single event: the massacre. The legacy of Tlatelolco is problematic mainly because it is represented symptomatically, an unknown grief hoping to be redeemed in order to earn its place in history. October 2, 1968 is “a moment of unrealized possibility”. If students had not feared for their lives at later events, what could have come of the movement?
Poniatowska attempts to recover that Movement that has been buried under “Tlatelolco” by presenting the origins of what led to the massacre of October 2nd. The Student Movement of 1968 is not an isolated fight, among the students marching were the struggles of other movements that were silenced in order to keep the postcard perfect city that Mexico had promised for the Olympic games. A decade later, Poniatowska contemplates the silence that was restored after the massacre; the social struggle has been buried under american hotels and restaurant chains, it has been silenced by Mexico’s modernity, another postcard perfect city. Will the youth dare to recover the lost voice? Or has political assimilation and bribery annihilated the movement?
Tlatelolco, the place of memory, still stands. The Plaza de las Tres Culturas shows the historical overlays of events: the Aztec empire and their defeat, the Conquest victory and their effort to erase the past of their newly acquired territory, and the modern Mexico with its multifamily housing complexes that served as refuge to students on October 2nd of 1968. The blood has been washed away, attempts have been made at erasure, but the footprints of these pasts still exists. Octavio Paz references the space in his poem as he reflects on the massacre, his discontent with the urban landscape and the current modern state. He describes himself as Mixcoac, suggesting he is a native, who is “walking back, back to what [he] left or to what left [him].” His memories of his homeland become part of his present view of the Mexico City, which becomes more bitter and removed as he ventures deeper into the confines of the city. It is the past of this Plaza, of the city itself, that seems to have direct implication to the present that has demanded the students. It is after all, the “Plaza of the Sacrificed”.
Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History states that historicism empathizes with the victor, “ whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day”. Has “Tlatelolco 1968” fallen behind this idea of historicism? Has the victor remained victorious as Tlatelolco continues to be written? Has the memory of the massacre erased what 1968 was, what it could’ve been?
In "Postdata", Octavio Paz suggests an intimate and historical relation between Downtown (Tenochtitlan, El Zócalo) and Tlatelolco: a dialectic relation between center and periphery. While Tenochtitlan fell rapidly under Spanish dominion, Tlatelolco became the last site to fight against the conquerors. The center was promptly assimilated, whereas the periphery became the symbol of resistance and revelry. During the 68, both sites embodied again those tragic characters. Downtown (El Zócalo) epitomized the power of the State, the representation of the institutionalization, the force of the center. On the contrary, Tlatelolco was the resistance of the students, the subversion against the establishment, the revelry of the periphery.
ReplyDeleteThe speculative question here is interesting and makes me think of the potential--for film in particular--to give an event new meaning. Twenty years after October 2, 1968, Rojo amanecer (re)represented Tlatelolco by subsuming previous texts and reproduced them in a way that "processed" the texts and the event itself. The film not only lends new representations of the movement's activists (replacing the militant image with that of the innocent family), it also brings the event into the "now" (pointing towards artistic/cultural renewal, and the turning of images into motion, into the future). While the idea of the "future" is somewhat overwhelming, the intriguing thing here is possibility.
ReplyDeleteI'm haunted by the fact that I grew up living in and visiting Mexico City for so many years without ever hearing of the events in Tlatelolco. Coming from a privileged family on the city's south side, this space, and the memories that reside in it, have been both literally and figuratively out of sight. Growing up, I only heard stories of the '68 Olympics being a time of progress and modernization, a great triumph for Mexico that went off seemingly without a hitch. I feel foolish to have been part of this attempted erasure for so long, but am glad that at least now I have the opportunity to explore the dark, ever-growing shadow of Mexican modernity.
ReplyDeleteIn her social chronicle “The Student Movement of 1968” Elena Poniatowska describes Mexico as young and vibrant. A prosperous image of Mexico (being ahead of the rest of Latin America) was what the government wanted to portray with the Olympic Games coming on October of that year. Tourism was a big industry (95% of tourists were from the United States) and so many of the underrepresented and marginal population issues were covered and silenced under this image of “prosperity”. The corruption and brutality of the ones in power (from president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz to the army officials that were not hesitant to employ their authority against the students and other marginal groups preceding the Tlatelolco massacre) goes without saying to the extreme. The police image in Rojo Amanecer is a clear example of that. Corruption and injustice occurs at all levels.
ReplyDeleteThe erasure of Tlatlolco can also be seen by the censorship that the film Rojo Amanecer had to endure. Even though 20 years had passed since the massacre, the director/writers of the film were not able to obtain permits to film in Tlatelolco. This is one of the reasons why the film takes place mostly inside an apartment, a warehouse they were able to obtain through a friend. They had to change the name to something less explicit and even the actors had to use their own money to complete it. After the movie was finished, they were asked to remove any scenes with the military (and destroy them) that were filmed in secret with the help of the Tlatelolco community. The director removed the scenes, but somehow the complete version was leaked and sold in the "pirate" markets. This is how the complete film reached different audiences and we have the complete award winning film today. I think this anecdote is interesting because the film is not only looking at the massacre 20 years laters, it is also shows the silence/erasure of Tlatelolco. I like to think that Rojo Amanecer is key in breaking the silence surrounding Tlatelolco and making it relevant again in contemporary Mexico.
ReplyDeleteThe reason why Benjamin is so critical of progress is that this notion promises all political possibilities will be fulfilled eventually. If the students at Tlatelolco failed to revolutionize Mexico in their time, no worry, their project would find realization in the post-PRI transition at the century's end. What actually occurred in 1968 was the violent quashing of a radical alternative, an alternative that can never exist now that the police eliminated the protestors and terrorized their surviving allies into silence.
ReplyDeleteSteinberg's reflections about film theory also take a central place in his writing. In terms of 'Trauerarbeit' (mourning work) that exists about the massacre, the movie made and discussed in the article brought in a new nature of mourning, according to the author. While the photograph always is limited to a 'still' statement in a timeless sphere, the moving image of cinema is dependent on the reproduction of the idea of a (neccessary) ending and beginning. Further more Steinberg also brings up the concept of a 'trembling' image. This he not only links to the conceptual confusion of the "long-standing techno-cultural association between cameras and firearms" (Steinberg: Hauntology 10), but also a revival of the intensity of the terrible happenings on the Tlatelolco. A fitting parallel he draws is to Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, that was also able to catch the violent destruction of revolutionary dynamics.
ReplyDeleteThese week’s readings on the 1968 Mexican student movement left me thinking about the political subjectivization of Tlatelolco from which Steinberg contextualizes the events of October 2nd, 1968. The massacre has been known as a symbol of state repression at its worst, yet very little is known about the origins of the student mobilization in the summer of 1968, the coalitions between workers and students, and the miners movement of the 50s, the move to liberate political prisoners---we don’t have an archive of these series of events. Elena Poniatowska’s piece stands as an aberration of this history.
ReplyDeleteMy question is, after working with my summer team on the topic of the Olympics, how did the Olympic committee proceed with the Olympics after a massive violation of human rights against Mexican nationals? How did everything continue to a national sentiment of aqui no pasa nada? The representation of Mexican modernity driven by the literal sacrificing of the mestizo sons and daughters of the Mexican middle class, that's a huge disruption to the ideology of Mexican modernity. All of us who do not belong or do not trace ourselves to the Mexican middle class know that the Mexican state and Mexican modernity has systematically depended on the oppression and subjugation of the indigenous and poor Mexicans. What Tlatelolco represents to me is the state disruption of two types of classes (the rising left middle class and the poor/ indigenous class) who at one point dared to imagine a better life for both types of classes.