Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the '68 Movement 9780520964938

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. City of Palaces
2. Revenge of Dust
3. Urban Logistics and Kinetic Environments
4. Gestures of Hospitality
5. Satellites
6. Mobilization and Mediation
7. Dwellings
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Hotel Mexico

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Hotel Mexico Dwelling on the ’68 Movement

george f. flaherty

University of California Press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Flaherty, George F., author. Title: Hotel Mexico : dwelling on the ’68 Movement / George F. Flaherty. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | “2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016005526 | isbn 9780520291072 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520291065 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520964938 (electronic) Subjects: lcsh: Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexico City, Mexico, 1968. | Public spaces—Social aspects—Mexico—Mexico City. | Student movements—Mexico—Mexico City—History—20th century. | Olympics—Political aspects. | Nineteen sixty-eight, A.D—Social aspects—Mexico—Mexico City. | Olympic Games (19th : 1968 : Mexico City, Mexico) Classification: lcc f1386.4.t597 f55 2016 | ddc 972.08/3—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005526 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Emelina Fuentes, mi querida tata

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Acknowledgments

introduction

xiii 1

1. city of palaces

25

2. revenge of dust

49

3. urban logistics and kinetic environments

70

4. gestures of hospitality

98

5. satellites

133

6. mobilization and mediation

155

7. dwellings

190

Notes

229

Bibliography

269

Index

299

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Illustrations

1. Lecumberri Penitentiary, 1960

28

2. Interior courtyard of vecindad, 1945

56

3. Drawing of Tlatelolco as national-heritage site, ca. 1958

57

4. Film still of Violeta crossing Nonoalco Bridge (from Victimas del pecado, 1951)

62

5. Nonoalco rail yards, ca. 1955–56

65

6. Olympic Center lobby display, 1968

78

7. Mexico 68 information-booth elevations, 1968

80

8. Plan and section of Mexico 68 pavilion for XIV Milan Triennial, 1968

91

9. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Lecumberri Penitentiary, 1960

108

10. Sketch for hotel project proposed by Guillermo Rossell de la Lama (Hotel de México), 1951

113

11. Exterior of the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, 1971

121

12. The March of Humanity on Earth, south wall, Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, ca. 1964–71

123

13. The March of Humanity on Earth, east apex, Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, ca. 1964–71

125

14. From the People to the University, 1956

126

15. Academic building, Zacatenco, ca. 1964

141

16. Aerial view of University City, 1952

143

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Illustrations

17. Mothers march in support of the ’68 Movement, September 1968

149

18. The ’68 Movement’s Silent March, September 1968

151

19. A ’68 Movement graphic showing a gorilla-granadero, 1968

162

20. Bus commandeered by the ’68 Movement serving as platform for protest, September 1968

166

21. Screen print showing dove of peace pierced by bayonet, 1968

170

22. Woodcut print, “Liberty [to] Political Prisoners,” 1968

174

23. Film still of confrontation between the outsiders and Jaime in Los caifanes (1967)

188

24. Participants in the ’68 Movement under arrest, October 1968 25. Military tanks in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, October 1968

192 193

26. View of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, 1964

200

27. Building Type A, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, ca. 1958

203

28. Luxury-apartment interior, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, ca. 1964

216

Abbreviations

AGN AISA ARS BNHUOP CIAM CNDH CNH CNOP COJO CU CUEC EZLN FEMOSPP

Archivo General de la Nación (General Archive of the Nation) Administradora Inmobiliaria, S.A. (Real-Estate Administrator Corporation) Artists Rights Society Banco Nacional Hipotecario Urbano y de Obras Públicas (National Urban Mortgage and Public-Works Bank) Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (National Human-Rights Commission) Consejo Nacional de Huelga (National Strike Council) Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (National Confederation of Popular Organizations) Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada (Organizing Committee of the XIX Olympics) Ciudad Universitaria (University City) Centro de Estudios Universitarios Cinematográficos (University Center for Cinematographic Studies) Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado (Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past) xi

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FNET ICA IFAI

INJM IOC IPN LEAR MIT MUCA MURO NAFTA PAN PRI PRM SAM SEP SOMAAP TGP UNAM WTC

Abbreviations Federación Nacional de Estudiantes Técnicos (National Federation of Technical Students) Ingenieros Civiles Asociados (Associated Civil Engineers) Instituto Federal de Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos (Federal Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection) Instituto Nacional de la Juventud Mexicana (National Institute for Mexican Youth) International Olympic Committee Instituto Politécnico Nacional (National Polytechnic Institute) Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists) Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte (University Museum of Arts and Sciences) Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación (University Movement for Renewed Orientation) North American Free Trade Agreement Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party) Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party) Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution) Sociedad de Arquitectos Mexicanos (Society of Mexican Architects) Secretaría de Educación Pública (Ministry of Public Education) Sociedad Mexicana de Autores de las Artes Plásticas Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Print Workshop) Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico) World Trade Center, Mexico City

Acknowledgments

This book began as a paper for Laurie Monahan’s “Global 1968” seminar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, based on Jeanette Favrot Peterson’s suggestion that I visit the Plaza de las Tres Culturas while on a research trip for Diana Du Pont’s Rufino Tamayo retrospective. It was written in Mexico City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, and many locations in between. In other words, its origins are by no means sui generis but embedded in a dense field of place, collegiality and collaboration, for which I am most grateful. Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeanette’s mentorship throughout my training, centered on intellectual rigor and empathy, ensured that I not only survived but flourished. Thanks are also due to Guisela Latorre, Bruce Robertson, Bhaskar Sarkar, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Christina Venegas. Several members of UCSB’s Subaltern-Popular Workshop offered models for politically committed scholarship: Anjali Arondekar, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Horacio Legras, David Lloyd, and José Rabasa. I continue to learn from my colleagues in Latin-American art, architecture, and cultural studies every day: Luis Castañeda, Mary Coffey, Arden Decker, Deborah Dorotinsky, Jesús Escobar, Leonard Folgarait, Christopher Fraga, Esther Gabara, Néstor García Canclini, Julio García Murillo, Zanna Gilbert, Robin Greeley, Anna Indych-López, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Andrea Noble, James Oles, Kathryn O’Rourke, Mari Carmen Ramírez, Sandra Rozental, Michael Schreffler, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Roberto Tejada, and Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón. Jennifer Josten, in particular, has served as a coconspirator and voice of reason. Various colleagues in Mexico intervened at key junctures; this project would never have come to fruition without them. Louise Noelle accepted my invitation to come to Santa Barbara to speak and agreed to serve as my xiii

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host at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Karen Cordero of the Universidad Iberoamericana helped frame my unwieldy initial plans. UNAM’s Rita Eder and Renato González Mello provided me with an important platform to test my arguments at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC). I am also thankful for the help that I received in my archival investigation, especially from Pilar García and Eloísa Hernández at MUAC, Mónica Montes at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Aurea Ruiz at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco (CCUT), and Salvador Zarco Flores at the Museo de los Ferrocarrileros. Andrea Giunta remains a tremendous inspiration and was pivotal in creating the intellectual community at the University of Texas, Austin, that I immediately felt at home with and hope to carry on. Thanks to the members of UT’s Center for Latin-American Visual Studies (CLAVIS) for their criticality, provocations, and camaraderie: Dorota Biczel, Doris Bravo, Julia Detchon, Cynthia Francica, Cristóbal Andrés Jácome Moreno, Tatiana Reinoza, Mari Rodríguez, Alexis Salas, Rose Salseda, Luis Vargas-Santiago, Sebastian Vidal, and Abigail Winograd. Cristóbal and Dorota provided invaluable assistance with research and image wrangling. My colleagues in UT’s Department of Art and Art History welcomed me warmly and have done nothing but clear the way for this book to go out into the world. Research for this project was supported by various institutions: the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, Society of Architectural Historians, Comisión México–Estados Unidos para el Intercambio Educativo y Cultural, Social Science Research Council, and Getty Foundation. At UT Austin I benefited from a Grace Hill Milam Centennial Fellowship, Summer Research Assignment, Creative Research Summer Stipends, research awards from CLAVIS and the Houston Endowment, pretenure leave and a subvention grant. My manuscript benefited from the curiosity and skepticism of audiences at Dartmouth College, Williams College, City University of New York, University of Texas at San Antonio, CCUT, MUAC, Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, UC Merced, University of Maryland at College Park, and various disciplinary meetings. Thanks also to the students in my graduate seminars and the participants in the “Connecting Art Histories” seminars that Andrea and I organized in Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo, wherein I rehearsed arguments but also explored new ones. At UC Press I would like to thank Kate Marshall, Cindy Fulton, and Zuha Kahn for their generous guidance and patience. Thanks also to cop-

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yeditor Paul Psoinos, who provided the close reading my manuscript needed after so many drafts. I can only begin to thank my parents and grandmother: George, Sr., Mayra, and Emelina Fuentes. If I know anything about unconditional hospitality, one of this book’s organizing metaphors, it is because of the sacrifices that they made to secure my care and education. Finally, Daniel: you are the apple of my eye, my favorite person, and my partner; love always. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was previously published as “Responsive Eyes: Urban Logistics and Kinetic Environments for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics” in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73, no. 3 (September 2014). Portions of chapter 7 were previously published as “Uncanny Tlatelolco, Uncomfortable Juxtapositions/Tlatelolco inquietante, yuxtaposiciones incómodas” in Desafío de la estabilidad: Procesos artísticos en México, 1952–1967/Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967, ed. Rita Eder (Mexico City: Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, 2014).

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Introduction Where did they come from, the three hundred thousand students that came to the Zócalo the day for the Great Silent Demonstration? . . . What became of Lourdes? Who was behind the door of Preparatory 1 on the day of the bazookas? How does a generation manufacture myths? What was on the menu in the Political Sciences cafeteria? What was the ’68 Movement protesting? Where did the Juárez-Loreto bus start its run every morning? . . . Where did they throw our dead? Where, for fuck’s sake, did they throw our dead? —paco ignacio taibo ii, ’68 (1991)

Where were you? And you, where were you? And you were where? Where were you and? Where were you? . . . Where, where, damn, where did you die? Were you on the plaza? Were you in some corridor? Did you live in one of the apartments? Were you coming in from one of the streets? —jorge aguilar mora, Si muero lejos de ti (1979)

At the intersection of Mexico City’s Calle Filadelfia and Avenida de los Insurgentes Sur stands a tall and broad-shouldered office tower with a façade of blue reflective glass. It adjoins a complex that includes a shopping mall, a movie theater, and artist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s last major mural. The World Trade Center Mexico City (WTC) is part of an international association that promotes free trade. The administrative offices for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were once housed there. But in everyday speech and on the placards identifying the destinations of the peseros (microbuses) that crisscross the city the WTC is better known as Hotel de México, a widely publicized hotel project originating in the late 1960s that was never completed. Nonetheless, it left a mark on Mexico City residents’ spatial imaginations, or the ways people dwell physically in cities but also dwell on them imaginatively and discursively. In doing so, residents blur affect, memory, movement, language, and other means of making sense of the urban, whether moving through the city or being moved by it. In the process they leave traces that may be fleeting or remarkably recalcitrant. This book explores the multiple, overlapping, and often competing spatial imaginations of the Long Sixties in Mexico, which run from at least the 1

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late 1950s until today. This periodization allows an investigation of Mexico’s decades-long modernization, led by the state and its allies, the nation’s eventual disillusion with this arrangement, and various transitions identified by scholars but also by citizens: the democratic, the neoliberal, and the narco, among others. Given the dispossession, disenfranchisement, and violence that often accompanies these transitions, space—material, discursive, and imaginative—is the volatile zone where citizens have dwelled at multiple scales: from the corporeal to the symbolic, individual to community, and local to global, in order to make themselves at home. More specifically, this book focuses on the street- and media-savvy prodemocracy movement known as the ’68 Movement.1 Led by mostly middle-class university and high-school students in Mexico City in 1968, the movement sought radical reforms to the country’s authoritarian political system, ranging from freedom of assembly to disbanding the riot police, in order to find a home in—if not fundamentally transform—Mexico’s putative democracy. Mexico City was their chosen medium of communication to fellow citizens and the wider world. The ’68 Movement emerged in response to a routine instance of police brutality against youth that was also, in their estimation, the regular violence of the city’s modernization. Spectacular preparations to host the summer Olympic Games that year highlighted not only how much the physical form of the city had changed since the 1940s, when capitalist urbanization intensified, but also the underlying social relations and fissures. The state used the games as an opportunity to congratulate itself for supervising the country’s swift economic growth since 1940. The so-called Mexican Miracle, however, was a still a leap of faith for most citizens, who did not profit from the expansion and chafed against its authoritarian core.2 For all the government’s claims of urban integration and national unity, Mexicans were governed as distinct populations with differing and delimited social, economic, and political mobility based on class, ethnicity, and gender. Indeed, the ’68 Movement sought to counter systematic—if sometimes obscured or naturalized—estrangement of citizenship that attempted to render Mexicans guests of the state, which was held by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) and its predecessor parties since 1929. This book’s title is a reference to this apparatus: Mexico as hotel in which hospitality is tendered, albeit conditionally and at considerable social cost. With its array of marches, street theater, roving propaganda brigades, and handheld movie cameras, the ’68 Movement proposed alternative ways to experience and move through the city, rerouting how citizens encountered and potentially engaged one another, face to face and

Introduction

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3

virtually. Although the movement was no real threat to the state (for it possessed no military capacity or foreign backers), its spatial imagination— which corresponded with its political imagination—directly challenged the state’s increasingly unsteady claim of legitimacy, which depended on tightly managing flows of people, politics, and capital. For this, the movement was targeted in a massacre on October 2, 1968, ten days before the Olympic opening ceremonies were to announce to the world that Mexico was a thoroughly modern and liberal peer. The massacre took place at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures), in a part of Mexico City known as Tlatelolco. Settled in the fourteenth century by the Mexica (Aztecs), more recently the neighborhood was cleared of its proletarian and often-militant residents and redeveloped as a massive public-housing complex, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco (1964, architect Mario Pani), a headquarters for the foreign ministry (1966, architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez), and a national-heritage site that encompassed pre-Hispanic ruins and a colonial-era monastery. The ’68 Movement gathered there peacefully to map how it would proceed after the government occupied the city’s two major university campuses and escalated its use of force. Organized at the highest levels of the state, the massacre was carried out by presidential-guard snipers and plainclothes paramilitaries who fired on unsuspecting students and bystanders—and on the military called to monitor the meeting. A chain reaction of gunfire resulted in between thirty and three hundred deaths. No final toll is known, as the government denied culpability for decades and no credible official investigation has ever taken place.3 The massacre was not acknowledged by the state until the early 1990s, and the bulk of official documents relating to the events remained classified until 2001. A conventional historical reckoning was not possible until very recently. However, in March 2015 scholarly access to these documents was closed. Nonetheless, the Tlatelolco Massacre, as it is known, remains one of the most public instances of political violence in Mexican history since the country’s Revolution (1910–20). Both champions and critics of Mexico’s democratic transition cite the massacre as a watershed in what has been a slow, uneven, and still-incomplete process. What we know about the ’68 Movement is largely through its representation in literature, poetry, film, and visual art, all part of a collectivememory project piloted by survivors and Mexico’s leftist intelligentsia since the summer of 1968. These Tlatelolco Media, as they are known, have played a prominent role not only in citizens’ remembering the events but also in their seeking justice through official and, more often, unofficial channels

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with regard to 1968 and subsequent cases of state terror. These media situated the students and their supporters as participants in a long struggle for participatory democracy and social justice that began well before 1968 and is ongoing. This struggle had a special resonance in Mexico City. In addition to the establishment of a corporatist political system after the Revolution that isolated groups of citizens, city residents were stripped of their municipal representation in favor of federal regency. Public space was one of the few venues available to residents for expressing their political will (although it was claimed by the state or capital as well). The ’68 Movement and its narration are part of a rise in informal modes of citizenship after 1940, often rooted in the production and consumption of urban culture, to supplement and in some cases substitute for political citizenship in Mexico, which has atrophied in an environment of corrupt institutions and impunity. If the ’68 Movement’s students took to the streets seeking solidarity with fellow citizens in streets, markets, and plazas, then its narrators employed urban space as a mnemonic for collective memory or the social construction and reconstruction of the past. As Jorge Aguilar Mora pleads (above, in the second epigraph to this introduction), “Where were you? And you, where were you?” on the night of the Tlatelolco Massacre, insisting that event and place are inextricably linked. Narrators sought to aid audiences in recalling the events of 1968 months, years, and decades later, so that a visit to or representation of Tlatelolco today may transport audiences to the events of that summer. Urban space also served narrators of the ’68 Movement as an architectonic for collective memory. Mexico City, with its complex social relations and urban flows, offered a ready framework for organizing the multiple and sometimes contradictory fragments of memory that survivors and their supporters put forth in the massacre’s aftermath in the shorter or longer term. Like Mexico City, the corpus that emerged was densely interconnected, constantly changing, and never complete, so as to resist total knowledge or management. The Tlatelolco Media emphasized the recurring nature of violence in Mexico City (and greater Mexico) over the seemingly exceptional violence of the Tlatelolco Massacre. The narrators’ mnemonic and architectonic was aimed toward survivors and contemporaries but also at subsequent generations with few direct links to 1968 but who, they assumed, would still be in struggle given the PRI’s instinct of self-preservation. The publics constituted by Aguilar Mora and other writers and filmmakers were centered on ethically bearing witness to past violence but also the injustices of their own here-and-now. These publics were hailed by phenomenological representation-constructions of the city that mobilized the senses and emotions in uncanny ways, revealing urban histories and political futures denied

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or censored by the state (or capital). The narrators’ call was simultaneously (and perhaps paradoxically) embodied, situated in a particular place and time, and cross-generational, exceeding such specificities. It was also a risky gambit. Circumstances change; interpretations shift; responses are unpredictable; but this call secured the ’68 Movement’s currency—if not its coherence or stability. Representations of the ’68 Movement continue to circulate and influence public sentiment and even politics, yet they do not lead directly to dignity and liberation or to a definitive history of 1968. Rather, the movement’s legacy is a portable and mutable mode of dwelling that approaches the city as a space available for citizens to remake in their own image and hopes, regardless of which party rules or of prevailing economic conditions. Accordingly, this book focuses on the ’68 Movement but also on Mexico City before and after the Tlatelolco Massacre. It argues that the movement’s insurgent tactics as well as the memory work of its narrators cannot be understood without a corresponding analysis of Mexico City’s capitalist urbanization and those actors who sought to claim, manage, and divert this process. Although the modern city was designed to appear overwhelmingly the domain of architects, politicians, real-estate speculators, and media moguls, and a function of planning, law, investment, and mass communications, it was reproduced and potentially transformed on a daily basis by the maneuvers, sentiments, words, and images—physical and figurative modifications major and minor—of its many users.4 Returning to the notion of spatial or spatiopolitical imagination: this book also argues that the memory work of the ’68 Movement’s narrators dovetailed with a wider reevaluation of Mexico’s postrevolutionary condition and modernist techniques of social intervention.5 Several decades of PRI-rule had delivered neither the progressive ideals of the Revolution, which the party appropriated to institutionalize its legitimacy, nor the higher standard of living promised by industrialization and urbanization. Economic expansion continued while an increasing number of citizens expressed feelings of immobilization or, more accurately, of travelling the economy’s circuits without advancing socially or politically. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, several prominent midcentury writers, artists, filmmakers, architects, and designers worked often collaboratively to activate spaces and media that they perceived as formally static or passively received.6 Experimenting with new communications and visualization technologies and a lexicon of flows, energies, and ecologies, they dissolved traditional boundaries between media and built environment aspiring to redefine the relationship between author, object, and spectator in terms of

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reciprocity and continual change. The motivations of these neo-avantgardes were by no means congruent, including utopian politics, creativeprofessional renewal, and managing social unrest. At the same time the state’s claim of monopoly on national culture was weakened by the (stateled) expansion of the market, mass media, and higher education, which multiplied opportunities for cultural production and consumption, especially for the urban middle classes. Such developments both linked to and diverged from the international reevaluation of the modern after a devastating world war and concurrent rise of mass consumerism in the United States. During this time Mexico renegotiated its relationship to the emerging world order, at once increasingly connected to the global economy because of its political stability but a democracy only in outward appearance. In a similar fashion, the ’68 Movement was both connected with and distinct from the global unrest of the 1960s.7 Certainly, conflicts were mass-mediated as never before—especially via television. Given the selfcensorship common among Mexico’s mainstream newspapers and broadcast channels, news reports were more often attuned to foreign events than domestic ones. Mexican audiences were well aware of the general strike in Paris two months before the ’68 Movement emerged and of tensions growing between the Soviet Union and its satellite Czechoslovakia. The Cuban Revolution (1959) reminded many Mexicans that the PRI’s embrace of progressive ideals was merely rhetorical.8 The Vietnam War (1955–75) remained a topic of intense interest.9 As the writer José Emilio Pacheco noted in La Cultura en México months before the student mobilization, because of its mass-mediation “Vietnam has been converted into part of our personal experiences.” Pacheco continued, “Each one of us is simultaneously a victim and part of the drama and horror.”10 This internalization of Vietnam, facilitated by media as well as the rise of transnational consumer and protest cultures, meant that participants in the ’68 Movement already saw themselves as active members in a worldwide network that linked Mexico City to Berkeley, Berlin, Belgrade, Bogotá, Chicago, Los Angeles, Prague, Paris, and São Paulo. The Mexico City Olympics, with their international pageantry, only reinforced this sensibility. John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s Black Power salute during their medal ceremony injected the U.S. civil-rights struggle into Mexico’s national university, site of the Olympic Stadium. The Chicano journalist Rubén Salazar covered the games for the Los Angeles Times, raising questions about economic inequality in Mexico through the lens of Mexican-American activism. Students in Mexico City deployed the vocabulary and iconography of foreign protest movements

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and youth culture selectively, however. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, for example, was jettisoned when the general public perceived references to him as unpatriotic. Gaining the support of fellow citizens was a higher priority for the movement than demonstrating its cosmopolitan character. More recent developments regarding the ’68 Movement also straddle the national and the global. Between 2002 and 2006 a special prosecutor working under the attorney general and appointed by President Vicente Fox, whose election as an opposition candidate in 2000 was celebrated as an irrefutable sign of the country’s democratic transition, failed to convict any of the officials responsible for the Tlatelolco Massacre or the subsequent dirty war waged against dissidents throughout the 1970s and ’80s. Fox’s gesture was largely motivated by a politique desire to establish his international legitimacy after breaking the PRI’s seventy-one-year hold on power. Ongoing revelations of state abuse, especially as related to the transnational drug trade, signal that the de-facto truth and justice seeking modeled by the ’68 Movement’s memory project will continue to be renewed for the foreseeable future and in locales beyond Mexico City. Indeed, the recent anniversary of the 2014 disappearance of forty-three teachers-in-training in Guerrero on their way to the annual Tlatelolco Massacre commemoration in Mexico City led to public demonstrations throughout the country and references to the unfinished business of democratization.

mobilization The Hotel de México was to be the largest and most technologically sophisticated hotel in Latin America, built for the influx of tourists anticipated for the 1968 Olympics. The hotel’s architects and owner envisioned a high-tech architectural machine. It would take advantage of newly built or projected urban infrastructure—from sewage systems to the new subway—that proposed to manage the city’s vast flows of goods, information, and money, linking Mexico City to the rest of the country and the world.11 This infrastructure was also social, including projects like the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex, hospitals, and schools that endeavored to extend state control over everyday life, including the very definition of life, or what today is identified as biopolitics.12 Contrary to the communitarian rhetoric that introduced these networks, they were not installed to facilitate an upsurge of social communication or on-the-ground mobility; rather, they were meant to reinforce the political and economic status quo from above. Similarly, the Olympic organizers circulated images of new buildings and other amenities through film, television, and photographs to create an

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illusion of a modern, technologically sophisticated city for foreign and domestic audiences. In fact, the improvements were few and far between. This sleight of hand took place as doubts about the PRI’s legitimacy and the future of the Mexican Miracle festered at home. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s there were various strikes, the most prominent among them those of railroad workers in 1958–59 and of medical residents in 1964–65, suggesting that an ever-wider spectrum of society questioned both the single-party state and its modernization agenda. Students in 1968 drew inspiration and borrowed protest tactics from these recent labor movements, which also took to city streets, drafting an even more ambitious political roadmap. The ’68 Movement formed in response to police brutality after a disturbance July 22 among youth in Mexico City’s Ciudadela District, including students from several secondary schools.13 The students retreated to their respective schools, where they were bombarded by the city’s granaderos (riot police). They traded tear gas and gunfire for rocks and Molotov cocktails for over a week. On July 29 the army was called in and used a bazooka to burst through the doors of Preparatory School 1. Although the government reported no deaths, many neighborhood residents were not convinced, and activists circulated the names of students believed to be killed or injured. The schools were affiliated with Mexico City’s two major universities, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN). Both institutions had long histories of campus activism and were quickly drawn into the conflict.14 Students from both institutions took part in two July 26 marches, one denouncing the state’s escalation of violence in the Ciudadela, and the second protesting the Vietnam War. The latter also celebrated the anniversary of Fidel Castro’s attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago, Cuba, in 1953. Testimonies from that day vary, but participants in both marches joined together and moved toward the nearby Zócalo, Mexico City’s central plaza, normally reserved for official spectacle. Yet before the protesters reached their destination they were attacked by granaderos who appear to have been expecting such a move. Traffic had already been detoured and government buildings sealed. That evening intelligence-service agents ransacked the office of the Mexican Communist Party and its newspaper was shut down, signaling that the state was eager use the protests to justify a larger assault on Mexico’s politically weak but still symbolically resonant Left. Throughout the events Police Chief Luis Cueto and Secretary of Defense Marcelino García Barragán denied the government’s use of excessive force to the press and suggested that the students were attempting to discredit the government as it prepared to host the Olympics, embarrassing it before the world.

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The students and their supporters moved quickly to organize. Both secondary and university classes were suspended after July 30, and by August 2 students from UNAM and IPN formed the Consejo Nacional de Huelga (CNH, National Strike Council) to coordinate their strike.15 Sympathetic faculty formed the parallel Coalición de Profesores de Enseñanza Media y Superior Pro-Libertades Democráticas (Coalition of Secondary and HigherEducation Teachers for Democratic Liberties), and members of Mexico’s leftist intelligentsia lent support through groups like the Asamblea de Escritores y Artistas (Writers and Artists Assembly). Although most of the mainstream media covered the events cautiously, some publications like La Cultura en México and ¿Por qué? were unrestrained in covering government violence. As word spread, solidarity strikes were held at universities in the provinces throughout Mexico.16 Marches were one of the ’68 Movement’s primary tactics. It traced the city’s thoroughfares to highlight violence against secondary students but also long-standing social fissures that the ubiquitous Olympic publicity could not patch over. After the Mexican Revolution the PRI set up a corporatist political system that isolated the demands of the country’s various constituencies into unions and other official groups. This system depended largely on backroom negotiations and co-option of opponents through patronage—and surveillance, infiltration, and violence when this hospitality was not accepted. Hospitality is a concept that will be used in several ways here, as will be discussed in more detail below, but for now it stands as a metaphor for the complex cultural rules and rituals associated with the encounter between a state and a nation when the former presumes the latter to be its docile guest rather than a full-fledged citizen. The ’68 Movement would go on deliberately and repeatedly to overstep the boundary of accepted political action, making demands that reached well beyond campus and envisioned a more flexible and generous arrangement between host (state) and guests (citizens). In early August the CNH put forward six demands to end confrontations between students and security forces, which by now held most of Mexico City’s (if not the nation’s) attention. In addition to obvious demands such as indemnification to the families of students hurt or killed and the determination of individual responsibility among government officials, they also made more strident ones. These included the resignation of Cueto and his lieutenants Raúl Mendiolea and Armando Frías, the elimination of the granaderos, and the abolition of the social-dissolution articles of the federal penal code (145 and 145 bis), all tools used by the state for thwarting dissent.17 Although the ’68 Movement’s demands may not appear radical in

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comparison with concurrent social movements around the world, the movement’s demands were insurgent, given the state’s claims to represent all Mexicans absolutely and its attempts to create a closed circuit of communication and association among citizens.18 Individuals who joined the ’68 Movement did so for diverse reasons, but they collectively sought political mobility to match the Mexican Miracle’s expansion.19 The ’68 Movement’s tactics echoed their ambition: marches through Mexico City’s major streets and gathering places, buses hijacked and plastered with movement propaganda, 16-mm communiqués that circulated through private cineclubs and abroad. Although the degree of popular support for the movement is difficult to gauge given misinformation and censorship in the mainstream press, images from the period show tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people—not only students—participating in its largest marches. Movement-produced media touched just as many if not more residents. The movement demonstrated an intimate knowledge of Mexico City’s infrastructural projects and of the city as both physical and mediated space. Not unlike the designers and patrons of the Hotel de México and other camera-ready Olympic venues, the ’68 Movement understood the city as a dynamic medium of communication, intervening on how people made sense of their social reality rather than serving as an inert stage. In just over two weeks it appeared that a loose alliance of established university groups with diverse ambitions had morphed into a democratization movement. Not all students or faculty participated in this movement, however, and the CNH was hardly monolithic.20 Student leaders readily acknowledged that the council, which included representatives from each university and each school within a university, barely contained the ideological differences between its mostly leftist factions, who disagreed on the use of violence and whether to negotiate with the government. They described a CNH that was deliberative to the verge of paralysis. Nonetheless, this body was important because of its public performance of plurality and democratic procedure, which stood in contrast to the PRI’s machinations. The council was not a political party and did not seek to seize the state, but its performances made clear that the state did not monopolize national culture or the practice of citizenship. There were also economic interests at stake in the students’ and their supporters’ mobilization. For all the ’68 Movement’s (sometimes satirical) patriotism, the much-publicized Mexican Miracle was beginning to stagnate, with increased economic insecurity for the growing middle classes who attended UNAM and IPN.21 The promise of upward social mobility

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through education looked compromised, an appearance that partly explains why students who seemed comfortable compared with other social sectors were willing to bite the hand that fed them.21 Over the course of the summer the Mexican government moved to delegitimize the ’68 Movement. Although the state was hospitable to exiled revolutionaries and intellectuals throughout the twentieth century, granting visas to Leon Trotsky and Hannes Meyer, among others, it was much less hospitable to homegrown dissidents, refusing even to recognize them as such. Employing a strategy used against labor unions in the 1950s and ’60s, government officials portrayed the ’68 Movement as a cabal of malcontent children, so-called rebels without a cause. The state accused students of failing to recognize its generosity or the tradition of collective sacrifice for the nation as established by the Revolution. At the same time it also portrayed the students as unwitting agents of foreign provocateurs. (Maoists, the Soviet Union’s KGB, and the United States’ CIA were all cited.)22 President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, who brutally put down the railroad workers’ and medical residents’ strikes as interior minister, referred in his 1968 presidential State of the Republic address to “dark, strange forces that seek to sow disorder, anarchy, and chaos in the national order.”23 By refusing to name the ’68 Movement and raising the specter of communism, Díaz Ordaz fueled Cold War panic encouraged by the PRI since the 1940s. Nevertheless, members of the leftist intelligentsia conjured the ’68 Movement repeatedly and in a variety of popular media over the years, ensuring that the prodemocracy movement would haunt Mexico, although not without responding to contemporary circumstances.

past-present-future After the Tlatelolco Massacre the state launched what Raúl Álvarez Garín called “operation amnesia.” The student leader wrote: “First they hide the magnitude of the tragedy, then they minimize the numbers, propagate rumors, denigrate protagonists, and trivialize the events, and in the end there will be those who doubt that the events even took place.”24 Television and major newspapers parroted the government’s claim that the army responded to initial student gunfire and that only a handful of demonstrators and bystanders were killed. And so, in the first two decades following the massacre, collective memory was sustained not by the mainstream press or historians but by novelists, poets, and filmmakers. The most widely circulated stories of the event include cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis’s chronicle Días de guardar (1970), student leader Luis González de Alba’s prison-centered memoir Los días y los años (1971), journalist Elena

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Poniatowska’s cacophonous archive of testimonies La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), and Jorge Fons’s Rojo amanecer (1989), a film that alternates unsettlingly between melodrama and horror.25 These memory makers represent the historical Inferno of the massacre but also aspire to the Paradiso of the ’68 Movement’s political project and its potential futures, even as Mexico’s Left appeared decimated.26 Many of the early narrators—Poniatowska, Monsiváis, González de Alba—published during the presidency of Luis Echeverría (1970–76), minister of the interior at the time of the massacre. Echeverría sought to win back the middle classes, especially the intelligentsia, with his so-called apertura democrática (democratic opening). He pursued a set of policies that increased funding for higher education and the culture industries while also appearing to relax censorship. He granted amnesty to ’68’s political prisoners in 1971, though some were forced into exile abroad. Frequently appearing in public wearing a guayabera, a garment closely associated with populism in Latin America, Echeverría positioned himself as a champion of the Third World. At the same time he initiated a dirty war responsible for torturing and disappearing thousands of dissidents well into the 1980s. At a march that celebrated in part the release of ’68 Movement prisoners on June 10, 1971, several thousand students were attacked by security forces trained after the Tlatelolco Massacre to ensure that they would never organize again. The PRI suppressed official acknowledgment of the ’68 Movement until the early 1990s, when a textbook distributed in public schools nationally referred to the Tlatelolco Massacre for the first time.27 In 1993, on the twentieth-fifth anniversary of the massacre, a memorial stela was erected at Nonoalco-Tlatelolco. Monsiváis and other intellectuals were invited by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to serve on a truth committee. The president was eager to rally support after allegations of a fraudulent election in 1988 and a currency crisis related to the launch of NAFTA.28 These gestures were part of a larger attempt begun by Miguel de la Madrid, one of Salinas de Gortari’s predecessors, and continued by Madrid’s successor, Ernesto Zedillo, to carefully release social pressure that had built up over decades with regard to government corruption, impunity, and a failure to deliver widespread prosperity.29 In the last decade the ’68 Movement has served as locus of intensive political and cultural activity: an annual march on October 2, academic conferences, documentary films, radio programs, exhibitions, countless monographs and articles, and, since 2007, a memorial museum. The currency of the movement in Mexico has risen and fallen over time, driven as much by the circulation of narratives and anniversaries as by more recent events.

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Certainly some of the heroic and romantic story lines associated with the ’68 Movement—as progenitor of Mexican civil society or democracy— have overestimated its significance, anachronistically claiming a direct connection to events that transpired much later. Describing the movement as a watershed moment in Mexican history limits recognition of other participants in democratization and the intermediate gains made before 1968 and in the 1970s and ’80s, especially those made by indigenous communities, women, gays, and lesbians. At the same time, participants in the ’68 Movement also took part in subsequent social movements. As Elaine Carey argues, several women in the movement rebelled specifically against gender norms and eventually contributed to the emergence of the Mexican feminist movement.30 Both Monsiváis and González de Alba would go on to contribute to an emerging gay-rights discourse.31 Anachronistic understandings of the ’68 Movement also fail to account for its contemporary currency and the crucial role of subsequent generations in remembering the events and, potentially, seeking recourse. In 2008 the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, located at Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, staged a Flavio González Mello play as part of the fortieth-anniversary commemoration of the Tlatelolco Massacre. Olimpia ’68 tells the story of both the Olympics and the October 2 massacre to highlight the authoritarian underbelly of the state amid the pageantry of the games. The intended audience for Olimpia ’68 was young people, not veterans of the Sixties. As Luis Mario Moncada wrote in the playbill, nearly 70 percent of the Mexican population was born after 1968. Moncada asked, Why should they remember 1968 over 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, or 2001, the year Fox took office, breaking the PRI’s hold on power?32 By insisting on the memory of the ’68 Movement without also leaving room for dwelling on contemporary events, are we in some ways reiterating the PRI’s monopolistic claim of national culture? This is a difficult question, whether from a political, an ethical, or a historiographical vantage point, and one that should not be answered without considering how collective memory is continually reconstructed. Memory of the ’68 Movement has assumed forms and trajectories that participants could never have anticipated. In 2003, Latin pop-music star Lucero starred in a musical-theater adaptation of Antonio Velasco Piña’s Regina: El 2 de octubre no se olvida (1989, Regina: October 2 Cannot Be Forgotten), one of the most popular but also controversial representations of the massacre.33 The Yo Soy 132 campaign in 2012 adopted some of the ’68 Movement’s visual aesthetic in its social media, inviting others to join them, not unlike ’68 Movement’s narrators’ hailing of subsequent

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generations. The campaign emerged during that year’s presidential election, when Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI’s winning candidate, refused to address student protesters after a speech at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Peña Nieto hid in a campus bathroom until they were dispersed by his security team. Shortly thereafter, the PRI dismissed the critics—131 in attendance—by suggesting that they were paid provocateurs. Just as in 1968, his party refused to recognize a grassroots challenge to the party’s claim of hegemony. Much of the ’68 Movement’s currency has depended on narratives that refer to, borrow from, and repeat one another. Poniatowska borrowed from González de Alba erroneously.34 Fons borrowed from Poniatowska without credit. Luis Spota was forced to revise the second edition of his revengefantasy novel La plaza (1971) after complaints that it borrowed too heavily (and without attribution) from other period sources. Rather than producing an echo chamber, this rhizomatic network of representation was quite successful in circumventing denial, censorship, and impunity.35 No single text could be taken as an absolutely authoritative history of the movement, and this inability also created space for multiple forms of witnessing the events of 1968 not bound by intellectual property or authorial legacy. Hotel Mexico is organized in such a fashion in order to show that the ’68 Movement and its narrators operated with an urban and historical vision that expanded beyond the parameters of the summer of 1968, linear notions of modernization and governance, and traditional definitions of evidence and testimony. In insisting on the role of subsequent generations in collective memory, they left room open for methods of seeking truth and justice not yet imagined and understandings of the ’68 Movement not yet articulated. In order to begin to address this expansiveness in an intellectually generous fashion while still maintaining a critique of the PRI and capitalist modernity, this book adopts dwelling and also hospitality as its organizing and analytical concepts.

hospitality and dwelling The Venezuelan playwright Ignacio Cabrujas, commenting on his country’s oil boom and collapse in the 1970s and ’80s, compared the national territory to an encampment that evolved into an oversized hotel. Within this hotel, citizens are treated as guests, and the state acts as manager, although “in permanent failure when it comes to guaranteeing [their] comfort.” Cabrujas continues:36 To live . . . is to pretend that my actions are translated into something . . . [though not] something that clashes with the rule of the hotel, given

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that when I stay in a hotel, I do not try to transform its accommodations, or to improve them, or to adapt them to my wishes. I simply use them.

A hotel is a compelling metaphor for modernizing authoritarian states like Mexico: although featuring some alluring (if often elusive) amenities, it is never intended to become a home; and so the roles of host and guests are never supposed to be reversed. Hospitality, once offered as a sacred or constitutional obligation, becomes a cunning transaction. As this book explores, the PRI’s claim of self-sufficiency, its presumption to accommodate and represent all citizens with or without their consent, may be thought of as a specious variety of hospitality. Mexican citizens, disenfranchised by a political party with the ambition to be perpetually in power, were guests of the Hotel Mexico, so to speak. The Mexican poet and diplomat Octavio Paz famously called the PRI a “philanthropic ogre.” Paz, writing in 1979 but invoking 1968, argued that “ ‘Civil society’ has almost completely disappeared: nothing and no one exists outside the state.”37 Paradoxically, the PRI’s general failure to provide most citizen-guests with basic liberties and entitlements over the course of the twentieth century was understood not as a reason for regime change but as a justification for its ongoing sovereignty. In the Hotel Mexico, citizen-guests were expected to exercise their political will on a small and carefully monitored stage. Members of Mexico’s middle classes felt this constraint acutely. They were not given formal corporate representation until the 1940s, and when they were, it was as part of a sundry body that diffused their influence. Having supervised the Mexican Miracle, which sought to grow not only the number of factories but also the number consumers, the PRI saw itself as the middle classes’ generous benefactor. In return, the party expected allegiance. Artists and intellectuals were generally granted some liberties of expression, so long as they did not repeatedly or too forcefully point out the PRI’s inadequacies as host.38 Hospitality, although ostensibly a magnanimous gesture, had its limits, as proved by the Tlatelolco Massacre and other violent (if less well-known) events. This book draws on the work of Jacques Derrida, who theorized the politics of hospitality and also the radical possibilities of its more ethical practice. Derrida argues that most hospitality is conditional, hinging on populations and sovereignty, limits and borders, and calculations of risk and management of resources.39 What Derrida calls “unconditional” hospitality, offering what one has to someone without even asking their name, is an impossible ideal but one that societies should strive toward in pursuit

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of universal human rights. Derrida’s work focused on the experience of foreign immigrants and refugees; but how does hospitality apply to citizens estranged in their own homeland? Projects like the Olympics and NonoalcoTlatelolco, which displaced thousands of neighborhood residents and did not reaccommodate them, were highly publicized and photogenic gestures of hospitality, but they did not provide concrete solutions to addressing major urban problems such as decaying housing stock, overcrowding, or worker exploitation. They also, in spite of rhetoric by designers and speculators to the contrary, reinforced capitalistic rather than revolutionary ideals. As Mireille Rosello argues: “A perfectly gracious and generous host may be capitalizing on dark shadows, on ghosts that haunt his land, his house, his social position.”40 If we employ the metaphor of hospitality, the Tlatelolco Massacre can be understood as what Gyanendra Pandey calls “routine violence.” Pandey calls attention not to the stunning and ultimately fleeting violence of a massacre or war but to the everyday, recurring, and often invisible violence of exploitative economic and political structures.41 This routine violence is built into supposedly rational, democratic institutions, with states and economic elites depending on force and, moreover, its obfuscation to maintain the status quo. In other words, violence should be understood as order rather than institutional failure. The notion of conditional hospitality is useful in highlighting the biopolitical aspects of the PRI’s governance, whereby the state and its welfare-security apparatus sought to define and administer human life. In biopolitics the state’s interest in citizens is merely physiological and reproductive rather than political or contemplative. And in spite of biopolitics’ interest in managing life, it privileges certain bodies over others.42 This is not to argue that the encounter between citizen and state, however inequitable, was unilateral. As historians of postwar Mexico have recently emphasized, the PRI was neither a monolithic nor an omnipotent colossus.43 The party negotiated with citizens at all social strata, who resisted the state’s advances out of principle as much as they also cooperated with its policies and programs out of self-interest. Derrida’s interlocutors in gender and postcolonial studies have argued that the relationship between host and guest is more fraught and unstable than it may seem at first.44 The relationship may be asymmetrical, but it is also continually renegotiated as hospitable (and inhospitable) encounter by encounter through customs and rituals normally exercised to secure stability. The state assumed risks by seeking guests for Hotel Mexico. Living at NonoalcoTlatelolco, for example, residents remade these spaces according to their

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own logic, challenging the state’s notion of authority and property. After decades in which Mexico City’s residents were stripped of their political representation at the municipal and national level, participants in the ’68 Movement insisted on their right to the city or the ability to change their sociopolitical situation by changing their city. This was a right not granted by state fiat but claimed through a constellation of everyday actions and imaginaries that could exert considerable force.45 The relationship between the built environment and violence, at the core of this reclamation, is not causal. Buildings can physically register violence; many of the apartment blocks at Nonoalco-Tlatelolco still exhibit damage from October 2. However, the housing complex was not the state’s target, nor did its design facilitate the massacre. Architecture is not merely reflective of violence originating elsewhere in society, as Andrew Herscher argues.46 Rather, the Tlatelolco Massacre revealed that architecture, which embodies social, economic, and political structures, stands on unsteady ground when it is built on routine violence. It continually wavers between displacement and construction even when appearing stable and solid. This irresolution is a hallmark of the ’68 Movement’s narrators’ understanding of the Tlatelolco Massacre as national-historical trauma and the challenges of stimulating collective memory. Knowing the totality of the Tlatelolco Massacre—“what really happened”—is impossible, just as Mexico City is unfathomable in all its complexity. Even for those who experienced the events firsthand, there are limits to human perception and memory, which is partial and prone to forgetting and embellishment. The fundamental lacuna of the massacre is this: How can we know death if we do not live to experience it?47 At the same time, if calls for “Never again!” are to be heeded, the event must somehow be remembered. We are left with representation, based on fragments of memory that are in themselves belated.48 The fields of trauma and affect studies have been helpful in rethinking the belated as a concept for understanding the collective construction of memory over time and the role of representation in this process.49 Fundamentally, trauma is the recurrence of an event that cannot be controlled. This unruly repetition can be put to work to flesh out connections and consequences, especially social ones that could not be appreciated in the flash of violence. It also allows for the incorporation of responses to the event, including those beyond the survivor. The site-specificity of ’68 Movement narrations resonates with theories of collective memory articulated by several scholars.50 They stress how memory, normally understood as individual and hermetic, is developed and sustained as part of a community and in particular spaces. If we accept the fragmentary, belated, and

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collective status of memory and its representation, then their purpose is not participation in historical reconstruction to a point that may be thought conclusive and then subject to neglect.51 The currency of the ’68 Movement depends not on the testimony of survivors or the indifference of courts and archives but on its invocation by subsequent generations.52 The goal of this collective-memory project was never historical dogma or a memorial stela but addressing the unfinished business of democratization and social justice in Mexico. In this respect, memory of the ’68 Movement must be malleable to suit the evolving needs of this greater project. The ’68 Movement’s narrators’ collective-memory project dwelled in Mexico City to dwell on the political and economic conditions of Mexican society. Dwelling suggests physical occupation of space and also lingering in thought.53 Dwelling’s duality allowed narrators to explore not only physical spaces where people protested or were killed but also the social structures, which are less easily observed. To dwell is not to occupy a particular Cartesian coordinate but to move through space and to be able to think about other places and times. A salient feature of several of the ’68 narrations is how the deployment of urban space is not the abstract, exchangeable space of capital, or the grid of modernist architecture, but an embodied category, for author and audience, refusing the dispossession and estrangement characteristic of Mexico’s postrevolutionary modernization. The quotations from Taibo and Aguilar Mora shown as epigraphs at the beginning of this introduction are examples of impassioned narratives of the ’68 Movement that invoke and activate space and place. Taibo asks bigpicture questions about the scope of the movement and its objectives, and he interpolates seemingly banal queries, emphasizing the everyday rather than the exceptional quality of collective memory. Reading Aguilar Mora, on the other hand, one trips over the near-homonyms (where/were), which compel reading these short sentences more closely than usual, and changes their meaning on the basis of “you,” a linguistic shifter that conflates survivor and reader, making witnesses out of the two. The Nonoalco-Tlatelolco apartment where almost all of Rojo amanecer takes place grows increasingly dark, dirty, and eventually bloody, visualizing the violence of the October 2 massacre but also the violence of Tlatelolco’s urban redevelopment. The film’s uncanny effects, driven as much by melodrama as by horror, invite viewers to reconsider the spaces that they presently inhabit and comfortably call home. As some feminist film theorists have provocatively argued, such reorientations have the potential for affective and political mobilization. The bodily response of viewers, whether love or disgust, can exceed expectations or controls even in media that appear complicit with

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dominant structures of power.54 These feelings, mediated and belated like fragments of memory in trauma, are crucial to constructing memory across generations. Narrators of the ’68 Movement invited—if not insisted that— their publics dwell, in all senses of the word, to see themselves as survivors with an ethical obligation to remember and continue to seek justice as part of an unfinished sociopolitical project. They were not alone in deploying this tactic. From multiple points of enunciation in postwar Mexico—La Onda writers’ counterculturalism, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “panic” theater, Juan José Gurrola’s S.nob magazine—and abroad, traditional sensorial and emotional frameworks for spectatorship were hijacked by artists and writers and redirected in ways that did not lead to catharsis or resolution.

architecture of the book Hotel Mexico is organized thematically, each chapter serving as a vector in the spatial dimensions of the ’68 Movement and its afterlives. This entails moving back and forth between 1968 and years before and after, and also among the histories of built environment, art, literature, and film as well as politics and law rhizomatically. This architecture highlights the multiple ways in which the ’68 Movement and its narrators deployed novel ways of seeing and moving through the city, a medium of communication potentially as potent and transformative as government, mass media, and even global capital. It also points to the open-endedness of this project, leaving room for later social movements and also representations of the ’68 Movement. Chapter 1, “City of Palaces,” is centered in the Palacio de Lecumberri, Mexico City’s infamous penitentiary, which is the setting for Luis González de Alba’s Los días y los años and José Revueltas’s El apando (1969). Both were imprisoned in the Black Palace between 1968 and 1971 for their leadership of the ’68 Movement. While González de Alba begins to consolidate the movement’s own narrative and denounce the state for the Tlatelolco Massacre, Revueltas focuses on criticizing the PRI’s phantasmagorical governance, at once demanding to manage the corporeal lives of its citizens while at the same time maintaining a political and legal system that was ungraspable, an optical illusion. González de Alba and Revueltas employ phenomenological and affective narration—emphasizing sight but also smell, touch, sound, and emotion—to dissolve the barriers between everyday life in Lecumberri and that outside. They draw attention to the role of the body in mediating urban experience and memory and also the virtual incarceration of a disenfranchised Mexican society. In the 1980s Lecumberri

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was converted into the Archivo General de la Nación, the national archive. It would eventually house government documents declassified by Fox pertaining to the Tlatelolco Massacre; part of his administration’s push for legitimacy by embracing the strategies of transitional justice and universal human rights. Despite the limitations and failures of these approaches, González de Alba’s and Revueltas’s embodied narrations and critical perspectives propose that justice need not be restricted to or dependent on official archives or juridical institutions. They also outline the ethical role of their readers. From these early narrations it is clear that the ’68 Movement’s collective memory project would engage its historical moment but also make space for future recourse. Such an understanding of history—and a future yet to be articulated— demonstrated by González de Alba and Revueltas was fundamental to Tlatelolco, site of the massacre. It figured prominently in the national imaginary as the transit point for rural migrants displaced by the violence of the Mexican Revolution and modernization. Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was built on ancient Mexica ruins on site and also the remains of the country’s rail hub, once home to encampments of workers and their families. Pani’s modernist housing complex presumed to bring architectural transparency and social hygiene to the neighborhood. As chapter 2, “Revenge of Dust,” demonstrates, the neighborhood’s photographic, cinematic, and literary representations by Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, and Fernando del Paso lingered over its improvised housing, smoke, dust and shadowy overpasses. In producing such representations, these artists and writers explored the Mexican Miracle’s uneven results, both plainly visible and unrecognizable to empirical modes of vision. As a result, by 1968 Tlatelolco was a wellestablished archive for sensorial and palimpsest modes of writing history, available to narrators of the ’68 Movement who sought to elucidate the routine violence of modern Mexico. The ’68 Movement was not alone in its savvy use of street and new media culture. It adopted techniques from previous labor movements and from the PRI, which invested heavily in building up Mexico’s transport and communications infrastructure. Chapter 3, “Urban Logistics and Kinetic Environments,” turns to the preparations for the 1968 Olympics. An interdisciplinary creative team produced a series of urban environments that sought to sell to audiences worldwide, but especially those at home, a convincing image of a completely modernized and socially harmonious Mexico. These temporary and sometimes mobile environments adopted insights from cybernetics, ecology, and Gestalt psychology, as well as Optical and Kinetic Art, also on display at the games. When we compare the official

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environments with concurrent art happenings, including an exhibition of room-scaled experiments by artists in creating active spectators, which were much more open-ended in their goals, the predictive and managerial impulse of Olympic designs comes into focus. At the same time, these official and neo-avant-garde experiments identified the dynamic perceptual and interpretive charges of built environments—space was not an inert stage but continually reproduced—that could be diverted by the ’68 Movement and its narrators. Before we turn to the ’68 Movement’s urban interventions, the dynamic between state and nation in Mexico at midcentury requires further theorization. Citizenship during the so-called Mexican Miracle was practiced not in terms of formal rights and responsibilities but as a conditional form of hospitality granted by the PRI. This hospitality vanished when citizens overstepped their boundaries as its guests. Chapter 4, “Gestures of Hospitality,” returns to the Hotel de México, which tapped into the state’s technological and social infrastructures and served as evidence of its apparent magnanimity. The hotel complex, which included Siqueiros’s immersive mural March of Humanity, was promoted as a model for reconciling the interests of the state and capital as intellectuals increasingly questioned the PRI’s revolutionary credentials. The collaboration between militant Siqueiros, a supporter of the ’68 Movement, and the hotel’s owner, a party loyalist, was narrated as a cosmic communion that should inspire (and placate) the nation. Completed in 1971, after the Tlatelolco Massacre, March of Humanity offered a very different narrative, articulating a critical yet accommodating notion of hospitality that echoed the ’68 Movement’s plural and open-ended vision of political life in Mexico. The PRI may have approached its citizens as guests, with the Hotel de México as a monument to its hopes of managing Mexico City’s flows, but the ’68 Movement’s praxis suggested that other routes and relations were possible, urban and sociopolitical. Chapter 5, “Satellites,” considers the movement’s spatial imagination, which was a function of its participants’ vicarious social, political, and spatial positions in society. In the 1950s and ’60s the state built new showplace campuses for UNAM and IPN at the edges of the city. These new campuses manifested a growing sense that youth’s distinctiveness and vulnerability required official tutelage, treating them as satellites, at a distance but still tethered to the state. As current or future members of Mexico’s middle classes, students were expected to passively consume culture and the city rather than attempt to shape it. The ’68 Movement’s marches and demonstrations point to a deep understanding of the city’s new landscape as well as its participants’ insurgent insistence to

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hijack the city’s new infrastructure as a form of visual, audio, and political self-representation, rejecting the PRI’s corporatism. Taking as a point of departure a car trip through Mexico City in the movie Los caifanes (1967, Juan Ibáñez), chapter 6, “Mobilization and Mediation,” examines the media and representations mobilized by the ’68 Movement, an extensive body that included innumerable graphics and several films, including four communiqués and the documentary El grito (1969). Printmaking, produced by art students in collaboration with faculty, served as an efficient means of counterinformation. Heterogeneous images and messages, borrowing from Mexico’s historical Left as well as contemporary art currents, nimbly saturated the city using its bus system. Similarly, small film crews trained at the new UNAM film school and armed with lightweight cameras sought to disrupt Mexico City’s Olympic representation while at the same time engaging the new cinemas of Europe and the Americas. Cineclubs and other unofficial, sometimes clandestine networks secured distribution. The ’68 Movement created broad media fields that aimed to disrupt and disorient audiences and invite them to participate in their reimaging of the city and society. Chapter 7, “Dwellings,” returns to Tlatelolco. Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was the last in a cluster of housing projects designed by Pani for the state that materialized his patron’s conditional hospitality, especially with regard to the controlled conviviality envisioned among its seventy thousand planned residents. Although built on ruins and promoted as a city apart from the city, Pani’s design both wittingly and unwittingly drew from the informal housing he sought to displace, and residents would eventually restore traditional forms of everyday life as well as introduce new forms that challenged their host. Taking cues from the ’68 Movement’s spatial imagination and fellow narrators’ phenomenological accounts, Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco and Fons’s Rojo amanecer reactivate Tlatelolco’s palimpsest qualities established in the 1950s and ’60s. The October 2 massacre revealed the violent and unjust structures that lay behind the complex’s clean, modern surfaces. Their aim is not simply a defamiliarization of spectatorship but an ethical implication to bear witness regardless of geographic or temporal distance. However, these representations do not compel the audience to do anything else, as that space is for their own making.

hotel de méxico/hotel mexico Construction delays prevented the Hotel de México from opening in time for the Olympics, and the owner eventually ran out of money. The fifty-

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story concrete shell loomed over its low-slung neighborhood for three decades. It was a potent landmark in spite of—or, more likely, because of—its incomplete monumentality. Well into the mid-1970s, travel writers described the Hotel de México’s fabulous amenities, expecting that they would be delivered at any time.55 However, by the 1980s, a series of currency devaluations vanquished any belief in a so-called miraculous economy. Foreign journalists now visited the hotel to report on Mexico’s not quite developed status. The architect hired to ensure that the shell did not collapse was interviewed for one article: “It’s like watching a child grow up. One feels almost duty-bound. [But] this child should have left home by now.”56 Mexican writers were also drawn to the hotel. Adolescents in a Juan Villoro short story cruise by in their car and see a “monument to nothingness. . . . Maybe it was better that way, if the rooms came out looking like the lobby [then] the tackiness would have no limits.”57 More ambivalently Fabrizio Mejía Madrid saw “the tallest shell in the Americas, perpetually on the brink of collapsing or unveiling.”58 Rather than a monument to nothingness, the Hotel de México is a potent symbol, serving to orient citizens as they moved through a city that continued to be transformed by modernization schemes led by the state and business elites. In 1994 the hotel shell was finally retrofitted as the World Trade Center, heralding a new era: a post-NAFTA, neoliberal Mexico. Salinas de Gortari presided over the inauguration. However, by continuing to refer to the building as the Hotel de México rather than the WTC, residents of Mexico City invoke buried histories and also futures that did not come to pass. In doing so, they use spatial imaginations to judge Mexico’s modernization and various transitions while also making a home within this uneven and uncertain terrain. They honor the memory of the ’68 Movement and subsequent prodemocracy and social-justice movements in Mexico as recalcitrant yet contingent forces that continue to disrupt Hotel Mexico’s conditional hospitality.

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1. City of Palaces

Mexico City, City of Palaces. Frequently misattributed to Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist, the appellation was coined by Charles Joseph La Trobe, an Australian colonial official who visited in the 1830s. The city’s core is dense with palaces from the colonial era: the Palacio de Hernán Cortés, Antiguo Palacio del Arzobispado, Palacio de Iturbide, and Palacio de Minería, among others.1 Adapted for new uses after Mexico’s independence from Spain in the nineteenth century and, in some cases, again after the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), these palaces serve as rich records of Mexican architecture, art, and society. Mexico City’s most notorious palace is not one in the conventional sense. The Palacio de Lecumberri was a penitentiary that housed common criminals as well as enemies of the state. In 1913 President Francisco Madero, who had launched the rebellion against Porfirio Díaz’s thirty-six-year dictatorship two years earlier, was assassinated en route to Lecumberri amid a military coup. David Alfaro Siqueiros, the militant artist, was imprisoned from 1960 to 1964 on charges of social dissolution. Leaders of the prodemocracy ’68 Movement arrested in the wake of the Tlatelolco Massacre were dispatched there. When it was built at the turn of the century, the penitentiary’s design and practices incorporated modern notions of crime and punishment. But as decades passed with little investment and much corruption, it became as infamous for its abject living conditions as for its roster of inmates. By the 1960s Lecumberri was a microcosm of Mexico’s degraded democracy and the state’s biopolitics, which ensured the lives of its citizens only nominally. However, it was at the Black Palace, as Lecumberri came to be known, that some of the earliest testimonies of the ’68 Movement and massacre at Tlatelolco were pieced together from fragments of memory exchanged among inmates in the crujía (cellblock), visitors, and later readers of their 25

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narratives.2 The movement leader Luis González de Alba wrote a novelistic memoir, Los días y los años (1971), while imprisoned. José Revueltas, a faculty supporter, wrote many letters and articles as well as the novella El apando (1969) there, solidifying his role as the movement’s political philosopher. Borrowing from the ’68 Movement’s street savvy—and from one another—these writers established urban space as a key instrument for assigning culpability for the massacre and ensuring collective memory of the movement that exceeded the confines of 1968 and the state’s denial and censorship. They partook in the tradition of remaking palaces built by the old regime to suit their present needs. Although the modern penitentiary was intended to enclose and discipline bodies, Lecumberri was quite permeable in practice, with visitors, information, and contraband flowing in and out—a symptom of the state’s failure to care for these bodies even as it claimed to do so. González de Alba and Revueltas, in particular, put forward a sensorial and even visceral experience of space, linking Lecumberri to the rest of the city as a mode of survival but also to question the incarcerated status of all citizens. Indeed, Revueltas offers a specific mode of perception, al nivel de la crujía (at cellblock level), that deconstructs the apparent solidity and immovability of penal as well as political architecture to foreground the social relations that give them form but may also be transformed. The two authors’ phenomenological and also affective techniques—hauntingly visceral description, claustrophobic literary composition—hail their readers, positing memory as an embodied practice. At the same time they posit memory as a collective enterprise occurring in the here and now of the audience, which is treated as a supplemental witness with attendant ethical obligations. As such, the reader serves as a body of knowledge for the events of 1968 in their own right, carrying memory forward in time and space so long as these narratives continue to circulate, whether as text or interpretation (or reinterpretation). In 1976 Lecumberri was decommissioned and retrofitted for the national archive, the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN). It would serve as the repository for government documents pertaining to the ’68 Movement and subsequent state terror against leftist insurgents. These documents served as the foundation of the state’s failed bid to prosecute those responsible in the early 2000s and recent revision to our understanding of the period by journalists and historians. As González de Alba and Revueltas propose, however, there are bodies of knowledge that may exceed or circumvent disciplinary institutions such as the penitentiary, or even the national archive. González de Alba’s and Revueltas’s architectonics for collective memory and recourse is permeable and open-ended

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rather than master-planned or managed, and would serve the narrators of the ’68 Movement well amid the failure of Mexico’s legal and political institutions to pursue justice for those killed by the state and for survivors. This chapter relates four cases in the history of the Black Palace, from the twentieth century’s Lecumberri Penitentiary to the twenty-first’s AGN, that have shaped collective memory of the ’68 Movement and its search for truth and justice that extends beyond the confines of 1968.

black palace i When Lecumberri was inaugurated in 1900 it represented a departure from existing penal institutions in Mexico. Its chief advocate and first warden was Miguel Macedo y Macedo, part of a generation of elites who tied their fortunes to the Porfirian technocracy, calling for modernization based on scientific (and pseudoscientific) principles.3 Macedo y Macedo was a disciple of Gabino Barreda, who introduced August Comte’s theories to Mexico from France. Working with the engineer Antonio Torres Torija, Lecumberri’s architect, he drew from what came to be known as the New York System, piloted at the Auburn State and Sing Sing penitentiaries in the United States. These facilities moved away from constant confinement toward daytime labor groups that promised to rehabilitate prisoners by teaching them work and time and property discipline, all cornerstones of capitalist citizenship. Like Auburn, Lecumberri housed workshops, a clinic, and other welfare facilities, early components in a social-welfare infrastructure that would be expanded after the Revolution to produce such citizens. By the turn of the century Comte’s positivism had been stripped of its (idiosyncratic) spiritual components and more closely resembled Herbert Spencer’s theories of social evolution (i.e., survival of the fittest).4 This shift is evident in other facets of Lecumberri’s design. Perhaps the most striking feature was its watchtower, thirty meters in height, located in the central, circular courtyard (redondel). From this perspective guards could supervise the seven two-story crujías that radiated from the courtyard, with passage between them controlled by a series of gates. The watchtower recalled Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the late eighteenth-century prison prototype that took its name from a hundredeyed monster in Greek mythology. Bentham envisioned a prison monitored by minimal staff using a circular cellblock that backlit prisoners so that a single “inspection house” at its center could observe their movements. The watchman remained invisible to the prisoners, who would be led to believe they might be being supervised at all times. Revueltas

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figure 1. Lecumberri Penitentiary, Mexico City, 1960. (Photo © Héctor García; courtesy of Fundación María y Héctor García, A.C., Mexico City.)

described Lecumberri’s watchtower as “an elevated polygon of iron, built to dominate every angle of the prison from up on high.”5 Studying the shift from public, if not spectacular, forms of punishment to prisons and other spaces that sought to discipline bodies, Michel Foucault understood designs like the Panopticon to enact regimes of “compulsory visibility.”6 The Lecumberri watchtower presumed instant, total, and ceaseless identification and quantification of inmates. This assumption was not limited to Lecumberri but served as a foundation and perpetuation of the postrevolutionary state. The PRI presumed to represent and care for all citizens, with or without their consent. This was the basis of its biopolitical claim of sovereignty. Modernizing states, Mexico included, increasingly turned toward administering life (birth, illness, etc.) in addition to deploying its monopoly on violence.7 In practice, however, the PRI offered monumentally scaled and technologically sophisticated but ultimately partial gestures of “hospitality.” This was a hospitality that welcomed and accommodated citizens not out of virtue or responsibility but as a means of asserting sovereign power. The state also did not rule out the use of violence, although it was normally out of sight of most citizens or so natural-

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ized that they could not recognize it. For all its “compulsory visibility,” the PRI’s sovereignty depended on certain strategic blind spots. After failing to recognize the insurgency of the ’68 Movement or suggesting that it was driven by foreign provocateurs or childish whim, the PRI also refused to see leaders of the movement as political prisoners even as it housed them in a separate crujía. To recognize them as such was not congruent with the image of a modern and liberal democratic Mexico that it promoted at home and abroad, especially during the Olympics.

black palace ii González de Alba’s Los días y los años opens not with the Tlatelolco Massacre but violence inside Lecumberri. A hunger strike launched by the political prisoners in December 1969, attracting international attention, was crushed forty-two days later when inmates from the general population were allowed to invade their crujía. Most of their material possessions were destroyed, including small libraries and writing instruments. Readers are immediately confronted with the unhomeliness of the penitentiary when González de Alba describes their return: “It is a strange spectacle; there were always some doors [of the crujía] open but never before now have we been in the middle of the courtyard looking at all the cells open at once, all plunged into darkness.”8 Readers’ eyes adjust not only to the dim of night but also to the carceral environment. Employing a collective “we” in the first pages that includes fellow prisoners as well as readers, they stand trying to make sense of the event. The attack may have erupted in a flash, but material traces remain: broken glass, lemon peels, books with the covers ripped off, unwound typewriter ribbon—not unlike photographs from Tlatelolco on October 3 that show shoes, purses, and other items abandoned in the massacre’s chaos. The spaces and artifacts presented by González de Alba (and other narrators of the ’68 Movement) aspire to more than straight documentation, literary atmospherics, or even the gritty authenticity of prison memoir. They insist that collective memory is an embodied, shared, everyday process that can override the burst and apparent historical rupture of violence.9 Los días y los años very quickly built a case for the ’68 Movement’s historical significance as well as its moral virtue. Contradicting media reports, González de Alba made it repeatedly clear that the state was at fault for the Tlatelolco Massacre. The movement, he argued, was not the product of a foreign conspiracy “seeking the ruin of souls” but a native and autonomous response to an ossified political system.10 He also identified what he

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saw as the state’s collaborators inside the movement. Most prominent: Sócrates Campos Lemus, who, among other allegations, stole the microphone and convinced the tens of thousands assembled at the Zócalo on August 28 to stay put until President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz agreed to address them in person.11 This impossible demand—Díaz Ordaz would cede jealously guarded authority, in effect—forced a confrontation with the military early the next morning. The president escalated his use of violence against the ’68 Movement thereafter, convinced that the public saw the students and their supporters as unreasonable troublemakers. Los días y los años also offered an insider perspective on the workings of the movement’s coordinating body, the CNH. For González de Alba the meetings were long and boring, if not infuriating, but they corresponded with its democratic intent, in contrast to the PRI’s authoritarianism. Their primary tactic, public demonstrations, offered a modicum of security from the riot police and, moreover, were a means of addressing new supporters, circumventing ambivalent coverage by the press. Well aware that they needed to build alliances beyond campus, the strike coordinating council discussed holding meetings in factories and marches through working-class neighborhoods. González de Alba writes, paraphrasing one of the CNH representatives: “There was our future strength.”12 The CNH was also aware that Mexico City’s socioeconomic geography, which fragmented the city’s residents, was not accidental but a direct result of uneven capitalistic development. Furthermore, cross-class solidarities were also discouraged by the PRI’s corporatist political ecology, channeling demands into unions and other groups controlled by the party. González de Alba also offered an insider perspective on the writing of the ’68 Movement’s history. He recreated several conversations between himself and his fellow prisoners, including Raúl Alvarez Garín, Gilberto Guevara Niebla, and Eduardo Valle.13 They compare notes, correct one another, and even police memory among themselves. Piecing together the details of the movement’s multiple marches:14 Do you remember when we saw the rector [of the UNAM] to ask him to head the manifestation of August 1? Was it Wednesday?—he asked Gilberto. —No, it was Tuesday the 30th of July. —You’re right.

Another voice interjects to sketch another chronology. They went so far as creating a shared document consolidating their experiences to release to the press, although they abandoned it once Campos Lemus signed on, rendering it null to their eyes.15 This process of dwelling in Lecumberri and on the

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events of that summer were a matter of survival for the prisoners as much as the movement’s memory. It reinforced social bonds among them, helping them cope with an unhomely environment. To this end, they continued their studies as best they could, teaching each other and treating it as a space of intellectual exchange and perseverance of political commitments rather than confinement. Eduardo Valle remembers studying music, economics, and history. He saw Lecumberri as a “school of ethics,” an offshoot of the UNAM or IPN to the south and north of the city.16 The prisoners’ efforts were echoed in Lecumberri’s design and function. As a product of late nineteenth-century prisons reform, the penitentiary was already a machine for gathering and storing information. As new inmates entered Lecumberri, officials collected data (physical description, family tree, psychological condition) multiple times, and prisoners were classified and held based on this information.17 In his Lecumberri documentary, El palacio negro (1977), Arturo Ripstein filmed the intake and release of inmates as an elaborate ritual that demarcates the transition from outside world to inside the penitentiary and back again. Although Lecumberri may have been designed to hold prisoners separate from society in order that they might be rehabilitated in a rational, panoptic space, the penitentiary was by no means hermetic. It was a microcosm of Mexico City; with comparable geographic, social, economic, and ethnic continuities and divides. Indeed, prisoners understood Lecumberri’s design in urban terms, referring to the open-air crujías as neighborhoods and the passages in between them as streets. Some prisoners were allowed to travel between the cellblocks to peddle sandwiches and paletas like ambulant vendors downtown. Family members and friends visited some prisoners regularly with food, laundry, and other supplies. Among the regular visitors was Elena Poniatowska, a journalist who although not a participant in the ’68 Movement had reported on it favorably. Poniatowska took part in the early hash-out sessions described by González de Alba and would go on to write La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), which drew in friends and family to this memory work, especially women.18 González de Alba’s spatial imagination, propelled by phenomenological description, further dissolved the boundary between Lecumberri and the rest of Mexico City (and the nation). Sitting in his cell, he describes hearing the sounds of the gears of trucks changing and the smell of their fumes as they pass by, transporting him elsewhere. He already knew the city to be a potent medium of communication. During the August 13 march from the IPN’s Casco de Santo Tomás campus toward the Zócalo, the demonstrators passed through narrow streets of the city’s core. The densely packed

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buildings were the perfect medium for their chants, with their voices bouncing off the facades serving as “a marvelous loudspeaker.”19 After the hunger strike González saw the cells as “holes, secret passages that lead to other jails,” a reference to torture inside Lecumberri but also to Mexico’s wider carceral environment.20 Much of Los días y los años takes place outside Lecumberri, focusing on ordinary middle-class life. By moving freely inside and outside the penitentiary he underlined the continuity rather than opposition of these spaces. As Foucault suggested, spaces of discipline are networked, extending from obviously restrictive ones like prison and asylums to everyday social relations. Perhaps the most striking connection that González de Alba envisioned was to one of Mexico City’s most vilified building types. He compared the cellblock to vecindades, the largely dilapidated and densely populated tenements that housed the urban poor. Originally single-family houses for the Porifirian elite, they were divided into series of one-room apartments organized around a central courtyard, often with shared laundry and lavatory facilities. González de Alba saw “Twine with clothes hanging that someone forgot to pick up, . . . the rectangular patio with doors open to a single, badly illuminated room. . . . Even the life in common, the disappointments, the nicknames, the conversations.”21 Portrayed in the media as impenetrable havens of disease, crime, and sloth, social scientists and modernist planner-architects like Mario Pani studied the vecindades closely, hoping to intervene on the reproduction of labor and citizens there. As much Lecumberri was the object of technocratic surveillance, González de Alba envisioned the vecindades as models of informal conviviality, where not only a memory of the ’68 Movement could be constructed but also, besides, a reminder that memory was an everyday exercise rather than the occasional erection of static monuments. González de Alba’s spatial imagination largely corresponded with that of the ’68 Movement’s protest tactics. Marches, graphics, and films gave new meaning to public spaces as well as creating alternative infrastructures for communication. He wrote: “Upon wrapping up the meeting, we sang the national anthem and walked into an unknown city: our city. . . . It was a spectacle, like a dream.”22 Indeed, the episodic structure of the memoir—a montage of childhood stories, furtive romance, and returns to Mexico City in Bermuda shorts and sandals from a weekend in Cuernavaca—suggests a waking dream, one that cleared room for modes of urban experience that competed with Pani’s or the state’s vision of the city. Even in his concluding pages, which finally address the Tlatelolco Massacre, González de Alba insisted on opening rather than closure. Like

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many others on the night of October 2, González de Alba escaped to one of the thousands of apartments that surround the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. There he found furniture piled in the corners and the floor soaked with blood and sweat. González de Alba switches back and forth between the apartment and his cell at Lecumberri, linking the city’s spaces as he has done throughout the memoir. He closes: “Those are days one later remembers like a scar.”23 The image is representative of his and his comrades’ approach to remembering the ’68 Movement. A scar is bodily yet belated, appearing after injury. It is a sign of regeneration but not of full healing. It is also, in its permanence, a mnemonic that does not document the injury in its totality. González de Alba’s City of Palaces intersects with Revueltas’s writings before and during his imprisonment in Lecumberri. A scar serves as a motif in El apando as well, left on the bodies of Mexico’s most vulnerable citizens, who also occupy the penitentiary. Revueltas not only describes but theorizes the incarcerated status of modern Mexican society, not limiting himself to the middle classes or the specificity of the ’68 Movement. Revueltas writes about seeing the world al nivel de la crujía (at cellblock level). Through this metaphor he clearly articulates a critical means of perception based on carceral space. It is not enough, for critics of the PRI, to merely describe their condition: they use it as a tool to challenge this system and offer it openhandedly to others.

black palace iii In the wake of the Tlatelolco Massacre the government arrested not only student leaders but also faculty supporters of the ’68 Movement. The most prominent were Heberto Castillo and Revueltas, who nurtured the movement’s relationship to Mexico’s established Left. Although politically weak, the Mexican Communist Party retained its intellectual sway. Revueltas, somewhat ambivalent toward the revolutionary potential of the movement—students were not revolutionary workers in his estimation— nonetheless cast the agenda in political-philosophical terms that resonated beyond the historical moment. Revueltas consistently referred to the movement as one of legitimate democratization and not merely a student protest. He also expanded the movement’s borders. The American playwright Arthur Miller, a friend, alerted their colleagues around the world to the Lecumberri hunger strike.24 The word apando in the title of Revueltas’s novella refers to solitary confinement. It was written as a single claustrophobia-inducing paragraph. El apando is not testimony to Revueltas’s specific experience in the ’68

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Movement but a fable of subalterns dehumanized by Lecumberri and Mexican society at large, reduced to the monkeys he describes in its opening line. As in Los días y los años, the penitentiary is a microcosm of degraded democracy and empty biopolitical gesture, reducing citizens to a bare life stripped of political subjectivity.25 Revueltas describes two imprisoned drug traffickers, Polonio and Albino, who attempt to smuggle narcotics into Lecumberri with the help of the mother of a fellow prisoner, El Carajo (To Hell with It), an addict. The prisoners’ plot is thwarted by guards, who isolate Polonio and Albino in one of the gated antechambers between the redondel and a crujía. Their demise is as violent as their everyday existence. The guards push metal poles through the bars to immobilize and ultimately impale them. Revueltas describes the scene as a diabolical incident of the mutilation of space, triangles, trapezoids, parallels, oblique or perpendicular segments, lines and more lines, bars and more bars, until finally obstructing any movement of the gladiators and leaving them crucified upon the monstrous diagram of this colossal defeat of liberty at the hands of geometry.26

For Revueltas the conceit of Lecumberri’s rationality, as manifested in the geometry of its positivist design and rehabilitative ideal, was offensive and unveiled the carceral environment of the nation. Revueltas and his comrades were imprisoned for two years before trial, which was held in the redondel of Lecumberri rather than a courtroom. It was yet another sign for Revueltas of the PRI’s lack of legitimacy and its lack of respect for Mexico’s Constitution. He was immersed in an “unreal world, phantasmagorical world, . . . a world of masks, and gestures, where the only reality is that we are in jail, and that we are jailed because we are political prisoners.”27 Any appearance of law and order in Mexico at midcentury was a false “geometry,” given the impunity of criminals, including the state, who escaped punishment like a phantasm. Revueltas countered this arrangement by corporealizing the state in his writings, making it a body like any other.28 For his legal defense he wrote: “The public prosecutor has an organ with which it sniffs, lurks, watches, spies, listens, and stabilizes the facts [of a case] . . . and touches, squeezes, wounds, twists, hurts people . . . to finally taste it all.”29 This was not an affirmation of the PRI’s humanity but an insistence on its liability and an indictment of its institutional selfpreservation, which it pursued above all else. Revueltas also emphasized the bodies of El apando’s main characters— and of his readers—although to different ends. His graphic descriptions

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exceeded the boundaries of bourgeois realism in order to shock readers out of complacency but also in order to attempt to rewrite the relationship between bodies and governance in a biopolitical state. El Carajo’s mother smuggles the drugs into the penitentiary in her vagina. We smell the disinfectant of a cheap motel where in a flashback Polonio and his girlfriend have intercourse. If we are all inmates in a carceral environment, as Revueltas and González de Alba suggest, then even common criminals in Lecumberri may offer keys to liberation. El Carajo’s wasted body is missing an eye and covered with “barbarous scars,” a stand-in for a wretched postrevolutionary body politic.30 Both Revueltas and González de Alba correct the biopolitical assumption that the body serves merely as an object of knowledge (surveillance, statistics) rather than a carrier of knowledge in and of itself, whether beautiful or grotesque, as El Carajo embodies. As Revueltas argued in his other Lecumberri writings, he and his fellow prisoners lived and saw the world al nivel de la crujía, “at cellblock level.”31 The word crujía comes from religious architecture, cathedrals specifically, naming the passage connecting the chancel and choir. It also colloquially means “suffering.”32 In a short article published in La Cultura de México (the cultural supplement of ¡Siempre!) Revueltas wrote about “prison words” or the differences between the vocabularies of prisoners and the state:33 Officially such words do not exist: crujía, convicts, political prisoners. Bureaucratic language substitutes them for more benign and neutral ones. . . . The crujías are dormitories, prisoners are internees. . . . However, words have not yet substituted things. The crujía is the crujía and prison is prison and we are political prisoners, before and after these rebaptisms: the same walls, the same cells, the same gates.

These words also signal differing modes of perception. As Revueltas highlights, a prison is composed of walls and stones that make up those walls but also the social relations that put those stones into place, keep them there and allow them to be penetrated, if only discursively. Writing al nivel de la crujía means picking apart what architecture and language appear to keep together and unquestioned—the status quo, in other words. Al nivel de la crujía was part of Revueltas’s broader political philosophy. Since 1965 he had worked on the parallel notion of autogestión, a type of cooperative “self-governance” and pedagogy for students of the university based on critical thinking. Actively participating in their education, he argued, created an autonomy that went beyond what the state had granted to UNAM but violated as it saw fit.34 As such, autogestión was another body of knowledge that did not depend on the state’s gestures of hospitality,

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whether autonomy or care. For Revueltas al nivel de la crujía meant finding a critical vocabulary within Lecumberri itself, the institutions used to discipline and punish Mexicans, including but not limited to the survivors of the Tlatelolco Massacre. Although Revueltas did not seek to explicitly narrate the ’68 Movement in El apando, his visceral as well as intellectually cutting analysis resonates with González de Alba’s and subsequent narrators’ phenomenological and affective techniques. Taken together they seek to bear witness not only to the Tlatelolco Massacre but to the ongoing search for democracy and social justice well beyond 1968. This project would continue at Lecumberri even after the penitentiary was closed.

black palace iv On June 18, 2002, President Vicente Fox held a press conference to announce the public availability of close to sixty thousand government files— millions of pages—declassified by executive order a few months earlier. Culled from various agencies within the ministries of interior and national defense, they promised to shed light on massive clandestine intelligence, military, and paramilitary apparatus that maintained Mexico’s outward appearance of social and political stability through decades of state violence and coercion since the 1960s. Historians and activists, including Mexican victims’-rights groups and international nongovernmental organizations, hoped to confirm the state’s role in the illegal arrest, torture, and disappearance of hundreds—if not thousands—of citizens since the Tlatelolco Massacre. The importance of the announcement was underlined by the presence of several members of the cabinet: Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, Interior Minister Santiago Creel Miranda, and Eduardo Medina Mora, head of the civil intelligence service. Creel Miranda read from prepared remarks: “The documentation that the political police generated will never, never, never again be hidden in a basement, its existence denied, and with it the terrible chapters of our recent past.”35 A week earlier Fox approved a new transparency law that required the federal government to promptly respond to citizen requests for information. “Grave” violations of human rights could also not be classified as confidential and thus out of reach of activists. Fox also oversaw some legislative housecleaning. In March Congress finally ratified the United Nations convention, dating from 1968, on the inapplicability of statutory limitations on war crimes and crimes against humanity. Fox was eager to expand freedoms of information, some already covered by the Constitution of 1917, and even more eager to broadcast these changes to Mexico and the wider world.36 Fox’s

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party, the PAN, had broken the PRI’s seventy-one-year grip on the presidency and was attempting to make itself at home. When the former Coca-Cola Company executive was elected in 2000 it appeared, as hailed in the national and international media, that Mexico was finally transitioning toward Euro-American-style (participatory, freemarket) democracy. An important part of this transition was the state’s increased openness about crimes committed under its aegis. That the state systematically violated the human rights of some of its citizens from the 1960s through the 1980s was by now common knowledge, thanks to unofficial groups, including Mexico’s intelligentsia, which circulated competing histories of the period. Less clear at this juncture was whether this deluge of official information would transform the country’s culture of impunity or the de-facto modes of truth and justice seeking that had emerged in the interim. Was Mexico’s so-called transition lining up with the prodemocracy impulses of the ’68 Movement? Would the declassified documents transform the political and cultural status of unofficial narratives, displacing what had become touchstones for leftist opposition and democratization not aligned with capital? In other words, would 1968 remain relevant? Fox’s assumption of office was the first time in modern Mexico that an incumbent president peaceably surrendered office to an elected member of the opposition. The PAN sought to publicly perform its legitimacy and stability to audiences at home and abroad. Throughout his campaign (and after), pollsters and image-management consultants employing sophisticated public-opinion analysis and advertising strategies aided Fox. The overarching message was of wholesale regime change; specific policies would be decided later.37 Addressing the legacy of state terror was an effective category for communicating both regime change and legitimacy. Also, the concept of universal and inalienable human rights was a prevailing legal and political discourse internationally. The emerging field of transitional justice, a collection of juridical and extrajuridical measures meant to redress past human-rights abuses, appeared to give this discourse teeth. The location of Fox’s press conference was not arbitrary: the redondel of Lecumberri (now domed). The penitentiary was decommissioned five years after González de Alba and his colleagues were granted amnesty and released, with some forced into exile in South America. Lecumberri was at first slated for demolition, but these plans were put on hold when a group of architects and historians petitioned President Luis Echeverría for its preservation. They argued that the iron shells that encased many of the cells offered perfect water and fire protection for the AGN, the nation’s primary historical repository. The transfer was completed in 1982. Cells

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that once held prisoners now hold boxes of documents; the crujías accommodate desks for researchers. While the Lecumberri announcement and overdue adoption of the United Nations’ 1968 resolution may easily be dismissed as political theater, especially after the resolution was passed with a proviso that immediately limited its scope, Fox and Macedo de la Concha would soon announce the creation of a special prosecutor’s office to pursue criminal charges against federal officials responsible for state terror. Fox had recently received a sealed report from the Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH, National Human Rights Commission), a product of the PRI’s calculated political liberalization in the 1990s, that outlined the government’s role in the more than five hundred unsettled cases of disappearances. It listed the names of seventy-four officials suspected of involvement, including members of the military, who historically enjoyed exemption from civil investigation.38 It is important to note that neither the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre nor the 1971 Corpus Christi Massacre was originally part of the prosecutor’s purview because of the thirty-year statute of limitations. They were incorporated only when the Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that both events must be investigated by the attorney general after long-languishing petitions submitted by activists in 1998 were reviewed. This was an early indication that Mexico’s transitional-justice process would be replete with reversals, contradictions, and digressions. Slick statecraft at Lecumberri contrasted with discord and false starts within the Fox administration. Fox’s senior advisors disagreed as to the best strategy, juridically and politically. There were two transitional-justice paths, each with particular risks. Foreign Relations Minister Jorge Castañeda and Mexico’s Ambassador to the United Nations (and former National Security Advisor) Adolfo Aguilar Zinsler lobbied for a truth commission modeled on those in Argentina (1983–84), South Africa (1995–2002), and other emergent democracies. These commissions generally exchanged public confession for amnesty, leaving the press and history to judge those guilty. This approach assumed that the airing of information and social consensus about past atrocities serve as a therapeutic catalyst for democratization. Interior Minister Creel Miranda and PAN senior senator Diego Fernández de Cevallo lobbied for a special prosecutor. They wanted to be seen taking public concern seriously and, moreover, affirming the rule of law. Prosecution also, as opposed to the truth commission, delivered outcomes within a narrow set of institutional structures: courts and prisons.39 For reasons still not clear to a historical lens Fox decided on a truth commission in June 2001, but this plan was quickly aborted. Then in November of

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that year he announced the creation of the Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado (FEMOSPP, Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past), headed by the law professor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto. Activists were wary of FEMOSPP after years of pursuing justice independently and through unofficial channels such as popular culture and opinion. Although initially consulted by the Fox administration they were for the most part excluded from Carrillo Prieto’s investigations. Rosario Ibarra de Piedra of Comité Eureka, a nongovernmental organization founded in 1977, was among its most vocal critics. In July 2005, after Carrillo Prieto suffered a series of setbacks, she told the press: “I was not disappointed, because I did not expect anything. . . . For that reason it does not hurt us or take our hope away, because we had no faith in the process or Mexican justice.”40 The attorney general’s office was notorious for its low conviction rate and historically used special prosecutors to fend off politically inconvenient cases. However, not all activists were opposed. The former movement leader and Lecumberri political prisoner Raúl Alvarez Garín, chair of the Comité 68 por Libertades Democráticas (’68 Committee for Democratic Liberty), the main group representing the interests of survivors of the Tlatelolco Massacre, argued that a truth commission would have maintained state impunity.41 FEMOSPP’s staffing and independence raised questions from all sides of the debate. Attorney General Macedo de la Concha blocked several candidates for special prosecutor with experience in complex human-rights and international law.42 Carrillo Prieto was a compromise candidate who, although a respected legal scholar at UNAM, had no direct experience with cases of this type or scale. His office was also situated squarely within Macedo de la Concha’s bureaucracy, which had resisted investigating the Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi massacres until compelled to do so by the Supreme Court. There were also several conflicts of interest and the appearance of partiality. A former army lawyer, Macedo de la Concha worked with Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, head of the federal intelligence service’s secret police between 1964 and 1970 and named in the human-rights commission’s report as a suspect. The FEMOSPP lead investigator for these cases, Américo Meléndez Reyna, was a former police commander in the state of Nuevo León, where he was involved in a cover-up of police brutality in 1998. Red flags were also raised when the public learned that prosecution researcher José Sotelo Marbán had been sanctioned by the attorney general for administrative negligence in his previous post.43 The special prosecutor’s jurisdiction was also limited. Carrillo Prieto was allowed to pursue only federal officials suspected of crimes, leaving aside

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employees at the state and local levels. The military remained in a gray zone but ultimately maintained its exempt status. Trying to work around these limitations, and perhaps sensitive to the politics of prosecuting state terror within the state, Carrillo Prieto employed euphemistic language in his briefs and media appearances. Suspects were charged with “illegal deprivation of liberty” rather than torture and disappearance, for example. As legal scholars pointed out at the time, only an individual acting independently, and not an institution, could be charged with “deprivation of liberty”; thus the charge whether wittingly or unwittingly absolved the state. This is not to say that there were no high-level officials accused, including President Echeverría, who was the only senior official during the Tlatelolco (as interior minister) and Corpus Christi massacres still living. The most widely questioned aspect of the FEMOSPP, however, was its legal strategy. Carrillo Prieto decided to pursue genocide charges, which had little precedence in Mexican law.44 Genocide is generally understood as the calculated and comprehensive killing (or systematic mental harm) of a group of people who share national, ethnic, or religious ties, or all of these. Carrillo Prieto argued that students constituted a “national” group with a specific culture, as dissidents, and asserted that he would prove a systematic campaign by the state. Evidence available at the time, including the AGN documents, led to a case against Echeverría’s role in the Corpus Christi Massacre. In July 2004, Carrillo Prieto filed genocide charges against Echeverría and ten top aides, including Mario Moya Palencia, who served as his interior minister, Luis de la Barreda Moreno, the former head of the federal intelligence service, and his successor Miguel Nazar Haro. FEMOSPP discovery suggested that Echeverría authorized the formation of special security units and received regular updates on their activities. They also found that the military established secret bases in the state of Guerrero, where suspected insurgents were interrogated and tortured. Death flights out of Acapulco disposed of bodies in the Pacific Ocean. Carrillo Prieto failed to make legal headway, however. When Echeverría was deposed in October 2002, he was uncooperative. The judge assigned to the case quickly decided that the former president’s actions did not constitute genocide. Carrillo Prieto appealed, leading to a review by the Supreme Court. In June 2005 it ruled that while the statute of limitations applied to most of the cohort of accused, Echeverría and Moya Palencia could be tried because of the immunity that they enjoyed while holding their high-level government positions. The case was resubmitted to a lower court, but within a month that court ruled that the evidence available did not substantiate genocide, a ruling that could not be appealed. The interests of the students

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assembled that day in 1971, it explained, were too diverse to constitute a national group. Carrillo Prieto then turned to Tlatelolco, for which he had much less admissible evidence. In September 2005, he charged Echeverría and seven others with genocide and kidnapping in connection with the massacre. He succeeded in placing the former president under house arrest.45 The court’s eventual ruling was mixed, though: whereas Echeverría’s associates could not be charged because of the statute of limitations, he could not be charged because there was insufficient evidence of genocide. Carrillo Prieto appealed to the Supreme Court again, but it declined to hear the case, foreclosing any further legal action. In March 2009, Echeverría was absolved from any further prosecution. Carrillo Prieto also failed to make symbolic headway with his cases. Over the course of the Fox administration he too made decisions that compromised the legitimacy of FEMOSPP. Employing Fox’s image-management techniques, he defended his genocide strategy in the press, spending two million pesos in public funds to place stories that attacked both jurists and journalists who criticized him.46 What was worse, subsequent actions appeared politically motivated. In June 2006, two days before national elections in which a PAN candidate was running for president, Carrillo Prieto sought Echeverría’s arrest again (to no avail). Although it is unlikely that the move affected the elections—the party’s candidate, Felipe Calderón, prevailed—public perception of FEMOSPP and the Mexican legal system was further damaged. It is unlikely that there will be any prosecution related to the Tlatelolco Massacre in the future. The working documents of FEMOSPP research teams, who mined the AGN for incriminating information for four years, have found limited airing. They submitted an eight-hundred-page report, which came to be known as the White Book, to Carrillo Prieto in December 2005. It went unpublished for almost a year, at which point a heavily edited version was unceremoniously uploaded to the attorney general’s website, only to be taken down after a few months. This time there was no press conference at Lecumberri. As with the repetitions and borrowings among narrators of the ’68 Movement, some of the researchers anonymously circulated the draft report, expecting that its more serious allegations would be expunged as usual.47 There was reason for some hope, as it appeared that transitional justice reached beyond the borders of the nation-state, at least in a small number of cases. Since the 1990s there has been an expansion of human rights as a political and juridical discourse in Mexico, as elsewhere. Activist groups and NGOs around the world, faced with little official recourse in their home

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countries, have pursued concepts such as universal jurisdiction that do not depend on the willingness of authorities at home to prosecute. During this time Spain’s Audencia Nacional issued warrants for the arrest and extradition of human-rights abusers, with varying success. In perhaps the bestknown case, the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, accused of the torture and disappearance of hundreds of citizens under the military junta of 1976 to 1983, was arrested in London in October 1998, to wide praise. However, after lengthy proceedings, he was neither extradited to Spain, nor was he found guilty of crimes in Chile.48 Conversely, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States in Costa Rica, found the Peruvian government guilty of genocide in March 2001, with the victims’ families eventually compensated financially. Human-rights talk has been a useful instrument for activists but also for regimes, who answer or pretend to answer to international (mainly EuroAmerican) opinion. Human rights is increasingly a category by which industrializing countries are judged, a checkpoint for participation in the global economy or diplomacy. The United States and Canada, Mexico’s partners in the NAFTA (signed 1994), were looking for assurances that Mexico met standards for human rights, for environmental protection, and in other categories. The CNDH, which contributed to Fox’s decision to move forward with transitional justice, was a product of this era, established by President Salinas de Gortari, who championed the trade agreement. For Fox’s announcement of the availability of declassified documents in 2002, his administration invited more foreign journalists than usual to Lecumberri, hoping for international coverage of the move. Accentuating one of his campaign leitmotifs, Fox reminded his audience that the documents represented “a Mexico where nothing is hidden and everything is done open to all citizens.” He added: “This is a requirement of the project of change we are promoting.”49 Although he carefully cultivated the image of an outsider—a norteño straight shooter, corroborated by his wearing cowboy boots and large, shiny belt buckles—Fox was eager to establish the PAN’s lasting credibility. In spite of his party’s upset victory, the PRI still controlled many seats in Congress and most governorships. If he was to push forward the party’s free-market and dogmatic Catholic agenda forward, most of it having little to do with human rights, he would have to work with the PRI. “Change” would happen mostly within existing political and juridical structures, the very governmental structures that had planned, executed, and occulted terror for decades. The PAN’s relationship to the ’68 movement and its legacy was limited, with little to warrant the investment of its new political capital beyond

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what was strategic.50 In general, conservatives in Mexico were ready to bury collective memory of the ’68 Movement, which remains a potent force of political and cultural mobilization against the PAN and the PRI. Fox asserted at Lecumberri:51 We are not chasing ghosts, we are seeking the truth. Let us look at the past with the required serenity and honesty. . . . Let us not discredit the institutions that we have built with such effort. Let us identify responsibilities, but at the same time let us build constructive relations on the differences between the past and present, that will allow us to go forward as a country. Let us move forward unburdened, without malice, toward the horizon of success we have drawn for ourselves.

Echoing the PRI, which frequently defined its sovereignty in terms of a limitless horizon and described opponents as “occult” or “fleeting,” Fox appeared worried by what ghosts the juridical process might conjure. In the global South, transitional justice has often been tied to concurrent political and economic change: decolonization, democratic and neoliberal transition. These transitions generally privilege linear notions of progress and development. The change sought by activists in NGOs, on the other hand, was spectral, insisting that the past need not be buried nor should institutions go unchecked. Fox sought to circumscribe the messiness of this process: only certain historical fragments and social bodies were to be exhumed and preserved by existing institutions for the benefit of the ruling party.52 At the same time that the discourse of universal human rights was adopted by postauthoritarian regimes, new forms of citizenship, not unrelated to democratic and neoliberal transition, continued to emerge. In Mexico, cultural modes of citizenship increasingly substituted for and in some cases replaced political citizenship, which had been dismantled through decades of legal limits and corruption. Historically aggrieved and disenfranchised groups, such as the victims of state terror, were finding that after struggling toward full exercise of citizenship, it has been thoroughly devalued, either by the perpetuation of weak states or by the preeminence of the market. As Mary Kay Vaughan astutely noted: “It is not facile to wager that for the middle and working class in formation in post-1940 Mexico, the act of consumption—or hope to consume, as inspired by state and market discourses—may have substituted to some degree for the practice of formal political rights.”53 Cultural citizenship is not inherently a dead end. However, its effectiveness is ambivalent: at once accepting the loss of the political in the traditional sense but also mapping out new territory for political subjectivity and agency in other spaces.54

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Given Lecumberri’s history of corruption and empty biopolitical gestures, its conversion into the national archive and home of documents pertaining to state terror may read as perverse or a form of “cruel optimism.”55 As Susanna Draper has recently explored, several prisons and torture centers in postdictatorial South America, such as Punta Carretas prison in Montevideo, have been converted into memorials, museums, and even a shopping mall, thereby “leaving behind the prison in architectural form without bringing forth the painful, past specters of this site.”56 Although Lecumberri’s watchtower was dismantled before the AGN opened to researchers, the panoptic quality of the former penitentiary was not entirely jettisoned. As with any archive, the AGN can structure the knowledge produced in and about it, based on the documents that it keeps, how they are organized, and the access provided. For several years the declassified government documents were unavailable while FEMOSPP reviewed them. Once they were available, most researchers agreed that they are partial, with obvious gaps in standard documentation, suggesting that they were vetted before they were transferred to the archive or while held in legal limbo. Furthermore, until 2011 the national intelligence service’s archivist controlled access to the documents at the AGN, and researchers reported difficulties in requesting materials. Sitting at desks placed in the nowcovered crujía (Gallery 1), researchers also reported being observed by security.57 The state’s “compulsory visibility” at the former Lecumberri continued to apply only to those under its purview. In my own experience at the AGN between 2008 and 2009 there were days when aides were available and other times when they were not, even when one was working with the same staff member. More recently, the government has claimed that the privacy of people mentioned in the files was being violated by researchers, leading to restrictions in access. In March 2015, the gallery was closed to the public, without any indication when it may reopen.58 As the state’s initial denial and more recent development make clear, the ’68 Movement presents certain challenges to conventional modes of writing history. Some scholars, having observed the swift rise of memory-based scholarship in the 1990s and the corresponding memory industry, have signaled that memory should now cede way to “objective historical analysis of this period.”59 Even former leaders and scholars sympathetic to the ’68 Movement have called for a higher degree of criticality toward memory. Jorge Volpi ended his intellectual history of 1968 by stating: “The worst thing that can happen to a social movement, as we know from the Mexican and Soviet revolutions, is to convert itself into dogma.”60 In the last ten years there has been a burst of studies based on the AGN documents.61 In

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rare cases, this material has also been supplemented by narrations by those responsible for the Tlatelolco Massacre, including the memoir of President Díaz Ordaz’s secretary of defense.62 Recent archival scholarship has certainly broadened our understanding of the ’68 Movement. For the Tlatelolco Massacre, details have been clarified; actors and a chain of command, identified. Recent scholarship has also pointed to earlier student movements, introduced conservative voices, and at the same time called for more attention to the ludic aspects of the period.63 The call for history echoes the letter but perhaps not the spirit of the socalled archival turn in the Euro-American academy.64 It is based on the unsteady assumption that the archive, as a physical storehouse of documents, can answer all the questions of historians, prosecutors, and citizens alike, so that one day we will finally know what really happened. This call also seeks to sweep aside, to a degree, the ideological baggage of the Long Sixties, as if memory and emotion were necessarily mystifying. One of the productive legacies of this period is the frequent bleeding of politics into culture and vice versa. Although scholars have come to recognize the narrativity of sources and the value of testimonio, which strategically blends individual testimony and literature to produce broader social truths, official documentation retains its priority in the Euro-American academy.65 A factbased narration of 1968 is necessary not only to temper the lionization of the ’68 Movement (and the 1960s) but also to maintain avenues toward justice open, juridical and otherwise. But can the degree of popular support for the ’68 Movement be confirmed by consulting intelligence reports produced for a government that saw the movement as a threat but also refused to acknowledge its insurgency? Whereas these documents can be read “against the grain,” there are limits to what Kristen Weld has called “archival thinking” (and others have called the “fetish” or “fever” of the archive).66 At the same time, recent memory-studies scholarship, propelled by critics of the emerging memory industry, has also begun to more critically weigh the political, economic, and ethical stakes involved, without assuming memory to be an automatic good for scholars or the public.67 These are not abstract concerns. Although he maintains that no final FEMOSPP report was produced, Carrillo Prieto suggested that “in reality, there never is a definitive document, because truth is constructed—historical truth is a construction that is definitive [only] for periods of time, and surely requires revisions, new approaches, new tools, new instruments.”68 If we leave aside his convenient adoption of postmodern historiography, the failed transitionaljustice process stands as an imperative to continue with and further develop alternative modes of truth and justice seeking.

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In recent years scholars have begun to ask whether the Fox administration’s transitional-justice strategy was flawed by design, as a means of finally burying a violent history that continued to galvanize social movements to challenge the state’s legitimacy. FEMOSPP proceeded in ways that protected rather than challenged the juridical apparatus and the state. There was little room, as laws were written and interpreted, for such a project. The office became a lockbox of sorts for activists seeking recourse through official channels, not unlike the PRI’s corporatist political ecology of previous decades. Fox’s strategy echoed the flawed democratization process in Chile in the 1980s, where the military junta dictated the terms of its exit and ensured its own amnesty. In spite of the failure of the Fox transitionaljustice strategy, FEMOSPP, more than any other body, was able to fuse the events of 1968 with the subsequent dirty war of the 1970s and 1980s and with the dictatorial regimes of Central and South America, situating the ’68 Movement in a broader historical and geographic context. In both Chile and Argentina, culture has played an outsized role in seeking the truth and in the reconciliation processes, comparable to the situation in Mexico. This postdictatorial art and literature, much of it imbued with poststructuralist thought and vanguardist experimentation, is helpful in theorizing the relationship between culture and politics in this period, as well as the role of public space and urban intervention in both carving out recourse in the moment and through the afterlives of violence. As Nelly Richard, Alberto Moreiras, and others have shown, artists and writers reimagined urban space in Santiago and Buenos Aires as plural and communicative even as it was being remade by militaries and globalization.69 At the same time, dictatorial regimes and moves toward democratization have intervened on the very notion of memory, forcing critics to strike a balance between the fetishization of trauma and the depoliticization of culture. Memory, as such, is not an end in itself but a means to critical thought. It should not be surprising, then, that there is a resurgence of interest in collective memory and cultural citizenship as tools for de-facto forms of justice among activists and scholars disappointed by the results of transitional justice and neoliberal democratization.70 If González de Alba’s Los días y los años dissolved the walls and grime of the Black Palace with his phenomenological description to link memory of the ’68 Movement to the public in a collective and quotidian manner, then Revueltas’s writings emphasized the penitentiary and its inhabitants’ corporeality to reveal the carceral status of Mexican society at large. The Black Palace, in their spatiopolitical imaginations, is not isolated or autonomous but networked to the rest of Mexico City, giving new meaning to

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Mexico City as a City of Palaces. Both authors offer models for an analytical and testimonial practice that moves beyond the archive as a storehouse of documents that leads to total knowledge and dismissal in turn. If Lecumberri’s use changed with its conversion into the AGN, the political and economic processes that gave it shape have not changed significantly enough. Together these narratives argue for the social truth-value of bodies of knowledge, whether of survivors or the wider community of citizens bearing witness. They make a case for culture’s role in fomenting and redefining the recognition of human rights.71 An intriguing though still underestimated strand of the recent archival turn has emphasized the archive as a heuristic and narrative process over a storehouse, built up by bodily and discursive maneuvers or performances.72 This is a first step toward recognizing actors and lifeworlds that are not the perfect and final monuments of knowledge that can ultimately be forgotten or conveniently gestured to in order to claim a crime or social grievance is settled. The prison (and archive), as Revueltas and González de Alba suggest, is not merely a physical space but the continuous result of embodied interpretive processes. In the 1950s and 1960s architects and artists experimented with selfconsciously interactive environments that invited users of these spaces to participate in their formation and reproduction under various banners: aesthetic play, social management, utopian transformation, and commercial contrivance. These spaces were often conceived in terms of systems, flows, and energies, expansive and dynamic concepts that exceeded the materiality of architecture or the art object but did not discard it entirely. Seeking to estrange users’ visual and spatial acuity, this new materiality was one of networks, whether built or corporeal, and the substance and significance of perception, emotion, and memory. González de Alba’s and Revueltas’s texts point to parallel literary experimentation whereby discursive spaces could be activated through phenomenological mediation to operate on readers viscerally and estrange their everyday environment and civic consciousness. This was an attractive and eventually popular strategy among the ’68 Movement’s narrators, since institutional forms of justice were not always possible in Mexico; it created an archive of state violence available to contemporaries and subsequent generations regardless of whether the state granted or denied access to this past through courts or declassified documents. Mexico City as a City of Palaces suggests that Lecumberri is just one node, and narrators of the ’68 Movement would look to the city as a whole to stoke memory and call for recourse. Tlatelolco, site of the October 2 massacre but also other key junctures in Mexican history, figured strategically

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in this emergent network; it occupies the next chapter. As a hub for the nation’s railroads, Tlatelolco was a transit point for rural Mexicans displaced first by the Revolution and then by failed land and agricultural reforms. It was also a margin to which the city’s poor and disenfranchised were pushed by capitalist urbanization. Together they sought to dwell in Mexico City as best they could, inhabiting buildings abandoned by elites or erecting their own. This shadow city was the object of intense government scrutiny, with architects and other urban experts seeking to cast light on the formation of labor and citizens there. Tlatelolco’s palimpsest history, smoky atmospherics, and self-help housing drew writers, artists, and filmmakers from the 1940s on who instead rendered visible the structural bases and inequities of Mexico’s modern political economy. If Lecumberri offered the state a ready-made national archive, then Tlatelolco offered narrators of the ’68 Movement a place where they could show their audiences that violence could take many forms and that it was routine rather than exceptional.

2. Revenge of Dust “You intellectuals like to kick up dust,” said [Federico] Robles, opening his mouth and blowing smoke. “Here there is only one truth: we make the nation prosperous, or we starve. The choice is between wealth and poverty. And to attain wealth, we have to push toward capitalism and subject everything to that effort: politics, ways of life, styles, laws, economics . . .” —carlos fuentes, La región más transparente (1958)

Octavio Paz’s Posdata (published in English as The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid), is among the titles most frequently cited but also most often criticized regarding the ’68 Movement’s political and historical significance. When he originally delivered the work as a lecture at the University of Texas a little over a year after the Tlatelolco Massacre, Paz was already an established interpreter of Mexican society, having published the widely read El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) in 1950, among other works of prose and poetry. The lyrical Posdata is often read too literally, reduced to one of its many arguments: the October 2 massacre was not an isolated event but part of an unbroken chain of violence that extends from the Mexica (Aztec) Empire to the Spanish colonial enterprise and on to the PRI’s authoritarian state. It was, in Paz’s words, a ritual “sacrifice” and “cosmic catastrophe.” Posdata was widely interpreted as “anti-Mexico,” further tarnishing the country’s image. For others the book was ahistorical, appearing to absolve the PRI of its responsibility for the massacre but also stripping members of the ’68 Movement of their agency, as if the event was predestined.1 Paz, however, seeks a historical and ethical truth that moves beyond the singularity of the Tlatelolco Massacre. It was “simultaneously a negation of what we have wanted to be since the Revolution and an affirmation of what we have been since the Conquest and even earlier.”2 The massacre invalidated the state’s claims of enlightened technocratic sovereignty and the so-called Mexican Miracle, recalling Walter Benjamin’s contention: “There is no document of civilization which is not also at the same time a document of barbarism.”3 Tlatelolco is the ancient place name for a neighborhood that encompasses the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, architect Mario Pani’s Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex and its environs. It is an undeniably palimpsest site, record49

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ing in its pre-Hispanic ruins and colonial and modernist architecture—and the stories that we tell about them—civilization and barbarism but also recalcitrance. The Mexica arrived around 1300 and established two citystates on an island on Lake Texcoco. For a time, Tlatelolco rivaled its neighbor, Tenochtitlan, but it was eventually absorbed. The Mexica’s last stand against the invading Spanish was at Tlatelolco in 1521. Franciscan monks built a monastery on its ruins that housed a library, the first in the Americas, and a school for the children of indigenous elites. In the early nineteenth century the monastery was converted into a military prison, from which General Francisco (Pancho) Villa famously escaped a century later during the Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century. Since the Revolution, Tlatelolco served as a hub for the national railroad network that drove the country’s integration and modernization as well as waves of rural migrants to the city. Many settled in neighborhoods in close proximity. Beginning in the 1950s Tlatelolco became the object of intense scrutiny by the state, which sent a cadre of social experts (epidemiologists, criminologists, planner-architects, et al.) to shed light on the reproduction of labor and citizens there. Filled with dilapidated housing, cantinas, and cheap hotels, as well as persistent smoke and ash from passing locomotives and nearby industry, Tlatelolco was the necessary shadow to modern Mexico City. Tlatelolco’s residents were Mexico City’s “floating reserve army of labor,” fulfilling essential urban functions and yet without rights to the city.4 In the social-scientific as well as literary and journalistic portraits, Tlatelolco was often referred to as an inframundo, which connoted a criminal underworld but also perpetual purgatory. At the same time, popular culture circulated images of Tlatelolco as dangerous, even lethal, and yet alluring. As this book argues, it is unlikely that scholars of 1968 will know the Tlatelolco Massacre in its brutal totality; even survivors of the events have fragmentary knowledge of the events. Perfect transparency cannot be the historiographic goal for scholars. That the events are opaque does not foreclose their investigation, however. Investigating 1968 requires interpretive methods that recognize its complex and even contradictory facets without presuming that they are reducible to any dominant schema (i.e., the modern state, linear time) or are entirely fathomable. As Paz writes, to reduce history to the purely empirical or positivistic is a form of “spiritual mutilation,” a move that reifies rather than problematizes these schemata. Paz did not witness the Tlatelolco Massacre directly; he was not even in Mexico at the time, serving as the country’s ambassador to India in Delhi. However, he was one of the few senior officials to publicly distance himself from the

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state in its wake. It is his geographic but also hermeneutic distance that makes his writings a useful starting point for considering not only the ’68 Movement but also its belated representation and the responsibilities of those who choose to bear witness in its wake. This approach is necessary given the triumphalism of democratic (and neoliberal) transition narratives offered by the state and its allies in Mexico, which treat the ’68 Movement as an anachronistic point of origin. This teleology is offered not out of reverence for history but to end its haunting effects, as the movement continues to serve as a touchstone for social movements that challenge the state.5 Also, this approach diverges from the transparency normally called for by activist groups and nongovernmental organizations, which (as the previous chapter suggested) is increasingly a discourse deployed by the state to buttress its legitimacy rather than pursue justice. Paz framed Posdata as a work of “critical imagination” that sought to make visible what power—not time—has made “secret,” “subterranean,” and “other.” He was referring to the routine political and economic violence at the core of Mexico’s colonization, Revolution, and modernization, which under the PRI was institutionalized through authoritarian governance and unjust social and economic conditions. This was a history that the PRI was not interested in preserving or promoting. The Tlatelolco Massacre, Paz writes, should have “caused every citizen to doubt the meaning of that progress.” To render truths visible without accepting dominant modes of vision, he leaves aside modernization narratives of progress and improvement but also the Hegelian dialectic.6 History is cyclical for Paz, and so the role and responsibility of the intellectual is to be a critic of society and demand “reparation” for victims not only in the present but in the past and future as well. Paz’s understanding of time is bound up with his notion of space. The ruins at Tlatelolco are ancient but at the same time allegories of the current ruined status of Mexican society. He employs the pyramid, the Mesoamerican monument par excellence, as a symbol of the PRI’s mystical yet hierarchical organization, its “petrified” bureaucracy, which fails to serve its citizens. Paz was not alone in insisting on Tlatelolco’s palimpsest qualities. Beginning in the 1950s and through the 1960s writers, photographers, and filmmakers were also drawn to Tlatelolco: Juan Rulfo, Gabriel Figueroa, Fernando del Paso, Carlos Fuentes, among others.7 They dwelled on the site’s characteristic smoke, ash, dust, and shadow, which made it appear simultaneously ghostly and eminently mundane. These atmospherics tested the limits of their chosen media, demanding technical virtuosity to capture the shifting conditions. These atmospherics also stood in for the

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transient and disappeared people who lived there. In many of their novels, photographs, and films there is an emergent sense of recognition and potential justice (or “reparation” per Paz) for people and phenomena that fall outside the frame of recognition offered by master plans, aerial photographs, and other panorama-producing technologies that the state’s urban experts used to deliver “transparency” at Tlatelolco. The neighborhood offered these artists a space for identifying and commenting on the Mexico that fell outside the PRI’s seemingly total tableau of modernity. As members of Mexico’s intelligentsia, with their ambivalent relationship to the state’s conditional hospitality (beneficiaries and critics), these artists identified with the precarious, ghostlike presence-cum-absence of the inhabitants of Tlatelolco. Tlatelolco was a place to lose oneself (escape, forget, die) and reflect on the consequences of the modernization that was being embraced uncritically by the state and economic elites. Looking closely but not necessarily empirically, these artists developed an ethic of opacity in their dwelling on Tlatelolco or a model for recognizing everyday modes of making a home in the city without demanding “transparency,” which by midcentury is so closely associated with modernization—architectural and urban planning in particular—and the state’s biopolitical governance. Alfonso Reyes, the antipositivist chronicler of the Valley of Mexico, provocatively called this dwelling the “revenge of dust.” If the spatial imagination of the ’68 Movement’s narrators is central to its continued currency, as proposed by Luis González de Alba and José Revueltas in their Lecumberri narratives (discussed in the previous chapter), then Tlatelolco was by the 1960s, because of this ethic of opacity, a ready model for embodied, spatial, and recalcitrant modes of testimony and memory that, against the PRI’s official histories, refused to see Tlatelolco and the Tlatelolco Massacre as exceptional violence.

where the air is not so clear Residents of and visitors to the Valley of Mexico—Anáhuac to the Mexica— once marveled at its crisp, crystalline atmosphere. The Spanish poet Bernardo de Balbuena climbed to the top of its volcanic sierra in the early seventeenth century to proclaim la grandeza mexicana (Mexican Greatness), as did painter José María Velasco, whose botanically precise landscapes came to represent Mexico at major international events like the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. Alfonso Reyes’s depiction in “Visión de Anáhuac (1519)” is perhaps the most frequently quoted. Reyes wrote the four-part essay in 1915 while exiled in Madrid, imagining how ancient

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Mexico City might have appeared to Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century. Joining the Spanish on their “discovery,” readers notice that the “air glitters like a mirror” and “the mind deciphers every line and dwells pleasurably on every curve; under the brilliance of that air and in its pervading cool.”8 Reyes describes the life-giving qualities of Lake Texcoco, on which Tenochtitlan was founded. The essay’s epigraph, above all, remains a touchstone of Mexican letters: “Traveler, you have come to the most transparent region of air.” Carlos Fuentes borrowed it for the title of La región más transparente (1958, translated as Where the Air Is Clear), his sprawling and sensory-overloading Mexico City novel. Reyes was a member of the Ateneo de la Juventud, the group of young writers and artists credited with giving the Mexican Revolution a humanistic framework. He conceived of “Visión” as the first chapter of a larger work to be titled En busca del alma nacional (In Search of the National Soul), which would seek in “the brutality of events a spiritual meaning: discover the mission of the Mexican Man on earth, stubbornly questioning all the ghosts and the stones of our graves and monuments.”9Among its diverse interests, the Athenaeum was especially suspicious of the secondwave positivism embraced by the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and his circle of power, known as los científicos, “scientists.”10 In relating Lake Texcoco, Reyes also presented an important assessment of the damage caused by canalization and drainage since the fourteenth century, which was manipulated to meet incessant demand for arable land, eventually leading to miasmic floods and dust storms. An erudite philologist, Reyes fashioned Anáhuac by stitching together vistas written by the conquistadores and subsequent visitors. Of Tlatelolco, Reyes wrote: “The human activity of the marketplace—says Bernal Díaz [del Castillo]—astounds even those who have been to Constantinople and Rome.”11 Putting aside Reyes’s elite presumption to decide the basis for a new national culture, he makes a provocative case for a mode of vision and representation that is not purely empirical. For all his exaltation of the intense limpidity of Anáhuac, his method freely draws from and mixes “scientific” with poetic and fantastic sources. In sum, Reyes invites his readers to appreciate what they (and he) cannot presently observe, the Valley of Mexico in the year 1519. Twenty-five years after he wrote “Visión,” Reyes found it necessary to revise its popular epigraph, compelled by Anáhuac’s continued environmental degradation. In “Palinodia del polvo” (Recantation of the Dust) he asks: “Is this where the air is clear? What have you done, then, to my high metaphysical valley? Why is it cloudy? Why is it yellow?”12 Soil erosion

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and automobile pollution were to blame, he signals, but also the crumbling of postrevolutionary ideals in the name of capitalistic development. Rather than give up on his beautiful valley, Reyes chooses to reconceptualize Anáhuac’s atmosphere. As he sees it, dust held the potential for reversing the new status quo and for redeeming the Revolution’s socially progressive claims, enshrined in Mexico’s Constitution of 1917. He identified dust with the poorest people of the earth; and in his estimation neither dust nor the subaltern will lie low indefinitely. In “Palinodia” Reyes describes a millenarian dust that grasps “hold of the throat, it covers one’s breathing with its hands. It wants to suffocate us and strangle us,” seeking “revenge.” He concluded: “Science has still not granted the dignity that belongs to the powder state [of matter], next to gas, liquid, and solid.” Empirical methods, in other words, cannot fully account for or appreciate the power of dust (or the people) as a transformative force. Reyes turns his readers’ attention to what has been forgotten, erased, or devalued by dominant modes of vision. The mind’s eye has its own potential for limpidity. Reyes’s “Palinodia del polvo” is not a disavowal of science so much as a recognition that important matter falls outside its frame of recognition— not unlike marginalized communities in the eyes of the modern state. It resists what Michel Foucault calls “compulsory visibility,” governance that depends on the state’s apparently seeing all yet is strategically blind to its challengers or its own opacity.13 Postrevolutionary reformers like Alberto Pani (the uncle of the planner-architect Mario) regarded Anáhuac’s dust as an unfortunate Porfirian “inheritance,” a metaphor for unwanted prerevolutionary pasts and lifeworlds that appeared to trammel progress. Writing one of the early postrevolutionary tracts on hygiene, the engineer and statesman proposed that Mexico City’s residents buy vacuum cleaners to address the problem.14 Modern architecture in Mexico, of which Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was perhaps the mature expression, was founded on the adoption of new technologies but also on the aspirations of social hygiene and transparency. In the 1930s Enrique del Moral, Juan O’Gorman, Juan Legarreta, and Enrique Yañez, all members of the Sociedad de Arquitectos Mexicanos (SAM, Society of Mexican Architects), argued for the power of functionalist design to quickly modernize postrevolutionary society.15 O’Gorman and former Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer, who emigrated to Mexico during World War II, saw traditional architecture as a “disguise” over the fundamental structure of buildings.16 It was architects’ professional responsibility, then, to unmask architecture and also dust off traditional society. New materials and construction techniques promised (the illusion) of transpar-

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ent and frictionless surfaces, facilitating hygienic flows of air and light. In many of their buildings, glass appeared to dissolve the wall as a primary structural element. It also appeared to dissolve the traditional distinction between interior and exterior space and thus traditionally private and public domains. This opening accompanied a shift in thinking; architects were increasingly interested not only in physical movement but also in penetrating domestic space the better to manage health, the reproduction of labor, and the transmission of culture. Much of this thinking was built on visualization tools, at first maps and photographs and later more advanced technologies, which promised an overarching and eventually dynamic view of the city. This perspective assumed a society readily available for calculation, classification, and assessment of economic and political value. An advertisement that appeared in Mexico City newspapers in the late 1960s for Vidrio Plano, a plate glass company, depicted two businessmen seated, having a drink, looking out the window of a hotel on Paseo de la Reforma. The ad borrowed its tagline, “In the most transparent region,” from Fuentes’s novel. From their vantage point they could observe the city’s new skyline, including the glass façade of Pani’s Torre Insignia office tower at NonoalcoTlatelolco. The tower housed the state-owned Banco Nacional Hipotecario Urbano y de Obras Públicas (BNHUOP, National Urban Mortgage and Public Works Bank), which financed urban redevelopment.17 As the ad copy attested, glass was “adopted by the visionaries of progress for its qualities of luminescence, cleanliness, visibility, architectonic beauty, and resistance to exterior elements.”18 The modern city, as the dominant architectural discourse claimed, was to be a city without traces, whether smudges, dust, or undesirable populations. Echoing the Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s 1923 dictum “Architecture or Revolution,” the prospectus prepared by BNHUOP to attract foreign investment for Nonoalco-Tlatelolco quoted president Adolfo López Mateos: “A peaceful revolution prevents a violent revolution.”19 The prospectus went on to argue that the complex, while contributing to Mexico City’s beautification, above all “endows economically weak groups with housing they need to maintain a decorous, dignified, and healthy existence.” The magnitude of this “gift” from the government became apparent upon “contemplating photographs of the most miserable houses inhabited by families that inhabited the neighborhood.”20 What the document failed to mention was that thousands of Tlatelolco’s inhabitants were displaced by the project. The massive housing complex was built over Mexica ruins but in addition those of autoconstructed encampments built along rail lines and nearby vecindades (courtyard tenements). They were part of a larger population

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figure 2. Interior courtyard of vecindad, Mexico City, 1945. (Photo: Antonio Reynoso; courtesy of Archivo Antonio Reynoso.)

living in improvised housing throughout the city (colonias proletarias), referred to as “parachutists” by the press.21 These zones posed a legal as well as a social problem for the state, which sought to manage them more closely without recognizing their legal right to live there or guaranteeing them access to the municipal infrastructure. Most of the people and homes displaced were never reaccommodated by Nonoalco-Tlatelolco. Modernist architecture and modernization, as James Holston notes, historically share an aesthetic of erasure and reinscription.22 In Mexico Le Corbusier’s dictum was rewritten as “Architecture and Institutional Revolution.” The palimpsest quality of Tlatelolco was not lost on the Mexican government. It funded archaeological exploration beginning in 1944, although not in earnest until 1960 with the construction of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco. The pre-Hispanic ruins and colonial architecture were to serve as the cultural core of the housing complex, and their legibility as such was carefully managed by Pani and Guillermo Viramontes, head of BNHUOP. While Tlatelolco’s more recent residents were displaced, Pani was eager to promote the ancient character of the site. His office published a diagram that suggested Mexica calpulli (urban units) were being revived by his project. However, very little material of archaeological significance was saved beyond the predetermined perimeter of the plaza. As Francisco González

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figure 3. Drawing of redevelopment plan for Tlatelolco as a national-heritage site (Plaza de las Tres Culturas), ca. 1958. (Drawing: Office of Mario Pani Arquitecto y Asociados.)

Rul, who supervised the final phase of excavation, later protested, it was more a quick salvage job than a proper academic study.23 The objective was not archaeology in its own right but the display of material culture as official national culture. To this end, the architect and archaeologist Ricardo de Robina was hired to oversee the plaza’s didactic program. He performed a similar function for Pedro Ramírez Vázquez’s Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology [1964], with Jorge Campuzano and Rafael Mijares), under construction in Mexico City at the same time. As several preparatory drawings published in the investor prospectus show, de Robina proposed a series of elevated walkways, reflecting pools, and an eternal flame that would turn it into an attractive site if not one rich in archaeological material. He worked in conjunction with Agustín Salvat, minister of tourism, who invited audiovisual experts from Europe to study the findings from the plaza so that they might be integrated into a light-and-sound show, not unlike the kind in use at the Teotihuacan archaeological zone outside Mexico City, already a major

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tourist destination. In addition to drawing visitors, the plaza’s design made a case for the state’s magnanimity in sponsoring the construction not only of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco but also of a modern Mexico out of the raw material of the past. These projects correspond to the state’s larger project of consolidating artifacts and historical understanding at museums and sites that it managed directly, through agencies like the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH, National Institute of Anthropology and History).24 By preserving some facets of the past and bulldozing others, the state created gaps in knowledge and value that only it could fill through its selective preservation and narration. Members of Mexico’s intelligentsia, including Paz, questioned the ideological premise of this project, especially with the construction of the highly publicized anthropology museum. Paz argued that the museum reduced the diversity of the Mesoamerican past into a linear sequence of civilizations leading like stepping stones to a Mexica apogee that was inherited by the modern state.25 In this vein, the Plaza de las Tres Culturas’s dedicatory plaque strategically interpreted the battle between the Mexica and the Spanish at Tlatelolco in 1521 as “neither a triumph nor a defeat [but] the painful birth of the mestizo nation that is Mexico today.” Such an anachronistic interpretation asserted the state’s role as steward of Mexico’s rich past. Its sovereignty was based, in part, on deciding what pain or sacrifices were necessary to preserve the “mestizo nation.”26 As Achille Mbembe argues, the biopolitical state seeks to preserve and manage life but also to determine “who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.”27 In the 1950s and 1960s both residents of Tlatelolco and members of the ’68 Movement were deemed disposable. Not insignificantly, Díaz Ordaz repeatedly defended the state’s use of force in this period by affirming that he represented the nation as a whole, refusing to capitulate to the demands of any one constituency. The light-and-sound show was never installed at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, but as de Robina argued in Arquitectura/México it was the “objective” visibility of the ruins that offered the greatest pedagogic potential.28 The ruins offered irrefutable proof that the integration of cultures proposed by the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (and the dedication plaque’s origin myth) was complete rather than still contested. The national-heritage site negated other possible historical and sociopolitical configurations. Indeed, the magazine Construcción Mexicana called the plaza a perfect “vortex of integration,” signaling that the PRI’s push for national heritage was a whirling phenomenon that could not be escaped.29 This was the lesson for the young people of Mexico especially. Vocacional 7, one of the

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Nonoalco-Tlatelolco schools, was located on the eastern edge of the plaza and offered students a perfect vantage point to observe the “three cultures” as a picturesque scene, a museographic production that sought to erase the marks of its developers’ interests, not unlike the smooth, frictionless surfaces of Vidrio Plano’s plate glass or the transparent Mexico City promised to the state by modernist planner-architects. Spaces that did not correspond with this vision were approached suspiciously by the government and its agents.

“introverted organisms” Mexico City’s capitalist urbanization brought waves of migrants to Tlatelolco, resulting in a housing shortage as well as concerns that housing stock available to these migrants, much of it in poor physical condition, was producing bad citizens. Housing in Tlatelolco and the surrounding areas was perceived as dark and impenetrable—pathologized as “introverted organs” by one technocrat.30 Many of Mexico City’s vecindades were accessed only through a long, narrow vestibule that led to a central courtyard. The state’s urban experts used science and pseudoscience to penetrate these spaces. A 1952 study of housing there conducted by BNHUOP sought to map the relationship between infectious diseases and living conditions, especially poorly lit or poorly ventilated spaces. The study suggested in dramatic fashion that tuberculosis bacteria would survive two months in a dark room without ventilation.31 It is not that agents of the state could not penetrate vecindades; they did so frequently to collect data and make arrests, but they did not have a frame of reference to register what they saw beyond those provided by epidemiology or criminology. These disciplines were deployed largely to recognize these lifeworlds in order to displace them. Bourgeois disdain, too, prevented visitors from seeing life there as having intrinsic value. Indeed, some vecindad vestibules contained an altar intended to protect their residents from the world outside. Beginning in 1956, the government’s Instituto Nacional de Vivienda (National Housing Institute) sponsored a series of studies of Mexico City’s northern neighborhoods. This area was a priority because of its close proximity to areas that the government, planner-architects, and real-estate speculators hoped to redevelop as a central business district. These neighborhoods also stood strategically between this planned district and an increasing number of industrial parks farther north. These studies, besides providing data on living conditions, betray the state’s operating logic when it came to urban redevelopment. In one from 1958, elementary-school

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teachers were enlisted by to collect socioeconomic data on several thousand students’ families using a standardized questionnaire. The profusion of data sought—name, sex, monthly income, rent, and so forth—was intended to add up to a transparent portrait of households, emphasized by the tabular forms employed. The institute also hired photographers to supplement this information with documentary photographs. The final report employed pairs of photographs to make the case for redevelopment clear. In one, an image of a mother and child huddled in a shanty constructed mostly of cardboard is contrasted with an unpopulated image of modern housing built of cinder blocks painted white and neatly decorated living spaces. As with many photographs from these studies, it is the child rather than the adult who returns the camera’s gaze. Hope, such an encounter suggested, was pinned not on the current national body but the next generation. Luis Quintanilla, director of the National Housing Institute, was quoted in the caption accompanying the former: “The person that lives in such lamentable housing conditions does not do so just because . . . they are a victim of economic circumstances that are not contingent on them.”32 The institute’s project was not social justice, however. In text and image contemporary actors were stripped of their agency or victimized in order to justify largescale redevelopment at Tlatelolco, “scientifically” but also morally. Mario Pani did not depend solely on the institute’s reports to explain and justify his project. His office photographed housing of Tlatelolco, especially autoconstructed homes, extensively in preparation for the construction of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco. Several were published in Arquitectura/México, the journal he founded and edited, which joined a stream of professional and popular representations of the area. The perceived “opacity” of housing in Tlatelolco was frequently rivaled by its actual atmosphere. Because of the rail yards and industry, the neighborhood was cloaked in dust and smoke. The writer Mariano Azuela described Tlatelolco in Nueva burguesía (1941), his parody of postrevolutionary society. Emmita, one of his newly rich and naive protagonists, arrives as an enormous snorting locomotive passed, graying the sky with a dense plume of smoke. . . . “There’s only one Mexico City”—Emmita sighed, content with her sky, always turbid with smoke and dust, and stinking of burnt petroleum and oil. She said she was surprised that, with the sky in Guadalajara so full of light, people there had not gone blind.33

Tlatelolco’s atmosphere was also tainted by its reputation. Filled with dilapidated buildings and a floating population, Tlatelolco was seen as a vice zone among Mexico City’s middle classes—a reputation that it helped shape.

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Tlatelolco was often mentioned in novels and nota roja or “red note” journalism, which reveled in as much as it was repulsed by crime and violence, splashing gory photos across its pages.34 Several of the sensational stories were translated to film during Mexican cinema’s Golden Age (mid-1930s to late 1950s). They sought to present not only actors and situations but also mood and intention, with Tlatelolco’s distinct atmosphere playing a central role. This is the case in Victimas del pecado (Victims of Sin) from 1951, a melodrama directed by Emilio Fernández with cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa. Victims of Sin is set amid the neighborhood’s so-called mala-muerte (literally, “bad-death”) nightlife, training its lens on the moral dangers of urbanization, especially with regard to women.35 In Victimas, Violeta (Ninón Sevilla) is a cabaret dancer who rescues a coworker’s unwanted child, dumped in a trash bin near the Monument to the Revolution. Fired from her job, Violeta seeks work at a competing cabaret. Films like this flourished at the same time as Mexico City’s presidentially appointed regent, Ernesto Uruchurtu, launched a heavy-handed campaign to turn the city into a more welcoming place for middle-class families, focusing on beautification and the policing of morality. Traveling to her new job, Violeta crosses Nonoalco Bridge over Tlatelolco’s rail yards in a day turned into night by smoke, almost enveloping her completely. Figueroa’s skillful camera work produces a visually and morally ambivalent allegorical space where the normally invisible or obscured impediments to social mobility are made densely visible for dramatic and also social effect. Writing on the catharsis of nota roja, but equally applicable to films like Víctimas, Carlos Monsiváis noted that: “Criminal violence has periodically set the limits of the protected city, throwing an adventurous light on [our] taste for crime stories, conversation pieces which become the joyous proof that the reader or commentator is still alive, free, and more or less intact.”36 The reality and, moreover, the idea of Tlatelolco offered a space for middle-class audiences to define the limits of the modern city and their own relationship to urbanization. By virtually visiting places they knew existed but would never set foot in—or admit to visiting—they were able to see the economic and political (and patriarchal) structures that made the city that they inhabited possible. Tlatelolco’s opacity, paradoxically, made the dispossession and estrangement of Mexican modernization visible. Dispossession, whether literal or figurative, is a central theme in the work of Juan Rulfo, among Mexico’s most esteemed modernist writers.37 Although Rulfo is generally known as a narrator of Mexico’s rural experience in the twentieth century, based on his novella Pedro Páramo (1955),

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figure 4. Film still of Violeta (Ninón Sevilla) crossing Nonoalco Bridge in Víctimas del pecado (1951; directed by Emilo Fernández with cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa).

the relationship between the provinces and the capital city was symbiotic in his work. Observing the creation of ghost towns as migrants left their villages for opportunities elsewhere, he wrote: “From the ranches the people came down to the villages; the people of the villages went to the cities. In the cities the people got lost, vanished among the people.”38 Railroads played a central role in nation building after the Mexican Revolution, integrating the provinces with Mexico City and facilitating mass migration and resource extraction. The towns that Rulfo specialized in describing were populated by the dead or the living dehumanized, Mexico City included. Rulfo’s often spare language, fragmentary plot structure, and unattributed dialog produce a spectral reality in which haunting is a tactic for negotiating ceaseless progress. Like Figueroa’s noirish Víctimas, Rulfo emphasized cloaking—if not choking—atmosphere over delineated realist detail as a form of cultural commentary. Tlatelolco serves as a way station in “Paso del Norte,” one of several short stories in Rulfo’s Llano en llamas (1953, The Burning Plain). A young man

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asks his father to look after his desperately hungry family while he looks for work away from their village. The title is the original name for Ciudad Juárez, the border town, but it also refers to the passage of migrant workers to the United States. The son passes through Tlatelolco on his way north, briefly earning some money unloading cargo at the rail yards to pay the men who will smuggle him across the border. He is fired after being accused of stealing bananas. This is the least of his troubles. In the United States, immigrationcontrol agents shoot at him and a friend as they cross the border. He eventually returns to his village and describes his experience to his unsympathetic father: “Father, . . . they killed us . . . when we crossed the river. They peppered us with bullets until they killed all of us . . .”39 Rulfo’s use of “us” as well as the series of ellipses renders thin the line between the son and his companion, life and death, narrator and reader. Their relationship is almost circular. In the short story’s ambiguity and bifurcated structure, focused on village and border, smoky and dusty Tlatelolco stands as a way station or purgatory for Mexicans displaced and dispossessed by modernization. Known primarily as a writer, Rulfo was also an accomplished photographer, although little exhibited until recently. Most of his pictures are of the rural landscape and architecture, often taking advantage of the atmospheric qualities of light and shadow.40 One his few urban series focused on Tlatelolco and its surroundings. In 1955 Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México, the national railroad company, invited Roberto Gavaldón to make a film, Terminal del Valle de México (1956), documenting the rail and maintenance yards before they were replaced with facilities elsewhere. Rulfo, who had previously collaborated with Gavadón, was invited to participate as well.41 His photos, taken from the ground but also from the tops of buildings and Nonoalco Bridge, documented the area just before construction of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco began in 1958. Some appeared in Revista Ferronales, a magazine distributed to employees as well as customers.42 Although Rulfo took at least 120 photographs on assignment, they were never published as a substantive set. When they were reproduced, a few at a time, they were cropped, collaged, or otherwise manipulated almost beyond recognition.43 Although there is no record that Rulfo clashed with his patron, the aesthetic that he adopted to document Tlatelolco differed significantly from the streamlined look favored by the company. Revista Ferronales normally featured close-to-the-ground angles that emphasized the grand scale of its facilities and a depth of field that emphasized the linear and seemingly unlimited sweep of infrastructure. More akin to publicity than documentary photography, they make a collective case for rail’s clear future at midcentury, exactly when newer forms of transport and communications

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technology were challenging its primacy. Moreover, the photographs in Revista Ferronales were also largely devoid of militant railroad workers, who clashed with their managers over the years, most prominently (and violently) while on strike from 1958 to 1959, and which the ’68 Movement referred to in its protests as a sign of the state’s authoritarianism. Like his writings, Rulfo’s photographs of Tlatelolco linger on the edges of rail lines and the people who inhabit those margins. In several of Rulfo’s photographs the space between residents and trains and between trains and autoconstructed homes is dangerously tight. Encampments occupied by railroad workers and others, often situated only a meter or two from the rail line, occupy space unused or otherwise surrendered by the railroad, built with scraps of metal, fabric, cardboard, and other scavenged materials. There is little distinguishing these dwellings from other improvised colonias proletarias around the city inhabited by rural migrants—a function of the railroad’s “success” in integrating the nation-state after the Revolution. As if underlining this irony, several of the trains that Rulfo photographs carry scrap metal and other odds and ends rather than finished products. Rulfo endowed the rails and their environs with a contemplative charge: What had modernization achieved? Whom had it failed? When Rulfo did adopt the railroad company’s usual aesthetic, his rails recede only to abruptly end, the horizon obscured by smoke, or branch off in divergent directions. Residents of Tlatelolco, Rulfo shows, were well practiced in crossing the lines to reach work or return home, measuring distances on foot rather than rail or at a human rather than a developmentalist scale. In one of his photographs, known as “Ordeñando una locomotora” (Milking a Locomotive), four women stand in a row at Tacuba Station as a boy looks on. They use the still hot train to heat water for household use, extracting its surplus energy. Officials for the national railroad company euphemistically referred to the encampments at Tlatelolco and Tacuba as “population centers” that “gradually imprisoned” the stations.44 The solution to this problem at Tlatelolco’s replacement in another part of the city was to build tall brick walls topped with barbed wire and a surveillance tower. Rulfo’s photos were severely edited or not published at all, perhaps because they represented the life of Tlatelolco’s residents, including many lower-level railroad workers, too faithfully. Rulfo’s focus on marginality but also adjacency and recalcitrance in his photographs foregrounds the social and spatial relationships that gave Tlatelolco shape. Taken collectively, they gesture to the contradictory social and economic role of the railroads and the capitalist industrialization and urbanization they facilitated. The rails conveyed not only goods but also

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figure 5. Nonoalco rail yards, ca. 1955–56. (Photo: Juan Rulfo, © Clara Aparicio de Rulfo; courtesy of Fundación Juan Rulfo, A.C., Mexico City.)

people and their attendant social mobilities and immobilities. Residents of Tlatelolco may have made up part of Mexico City’s floating reserve army of labor, hovering as “ghosts,” but they had their own means of dwelling in the city. This was the “revenge of dust” envisioned by Reyes. Rulfo hoped to go further than documenting mere existence, though. He saw the potential to bring the dead or dehumanized back to life through his stories.45 Even after the construction of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco and the displacement of many of the area’s residents, the Mexican intelligentsia continued to dwell on Tlatelolco, further cementing its place in the middle-class imagination as a fragmented and palimpsest place rather than a “vortex of integration.” Tlatelolco was a place where competing narratives of Mexican modernity, of civility and barbarity, could be conjured.

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specters The idea of palimpsest Tlatelolco is further developed in two major novels from the period, Fernando del Paso’s José Trigo (1966) and Fuentes’s La región más transparente (1958). Both authors employ Nonoalco Bridge as a threshold between life and death in modern Mexico City, where ghosts become visible, if only temporarily. These include migrant workers, the poor, or the economic and political phenomena that brought them to places like Tlatelolco. Building on the spectral tradition of storytelling and photographing established by Rulfo and others, del Paso and Fuentes treat Nonoalco Bridge as a ruin outside the bounds of official archaeology or museography, meant to evoke people, histories, and political trajectories without reducing them to dominant schemata marshaled by the state. Set in the railroad-worker encampments, del Paso’s José Trigo is literary imagining of the strike led by Demetrio Vallejo and Valentín Campa in 1958–59 that the ’68 Movement frequently cited. Del Paso was moved to write the novel after crossing Nonoalco Bridge in the 1960s. An image stayed with him, he said in an interview in 1992, “of a more or less tall man who carried on his shoulders a small white box, the coffin of a child, walking along the abandoned rails, and behind them was a pregnant woman cutting some sunflowers the grew in the llanos.”46 Uninterested in linear emplotment, del Paso uses flashbacks, ellipses, and nonsequiturs to produce a landscape wherein time and space are not clearly delineated. His writing style echoes this indeterminacy, ranging from poetic prose to the technical language of a train-engineering manual. The reader is invited to search not for any one person or social movement but for his or her own subjectivity as a witness. What holds this difficult- if not impossible-to-map world together is a spectral presence—or rather an absence. The narrator, along with other characters, searches for the eponymous Trigo, who seems to be everywhere and nowhere and can be read as a stand-in for Vallejo, who was imprisoned at Lecumberri until 1971. The mark Trigo leaves on denizens of the encampments is at once indelible and fleeting: Trigo is definitely short and just as definitely tall, dark-skinned, and light, blue-eyed, and brown. “They will tell you the story,” is one of the many phrases repeated in the novel, as one voice morphs into another unannounced in the text. That Trigo appears and disappears is unremarkable in the “forgotten llanos” of Tlatelolco, where migrant workers disappear all the time, their departures and deaths going unrecorded. The novel’s first edition included a fragment from the 1960 Guía Roji, a commercial map of Mexico City. A hand-drawn box delineates

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the boundaries of Tlatelolco, and within that box the worker encampments and the area’s principal arteries are glossed. By including this fragment, the novel marks the tension between Tlatelolco as a physical place and as a literary landscape. If perception is subjective and a map is abstract, then which is the “real” Tlatelolco? This is a question del Paso leaves open. That a map is provided at all, whether ironic or not, suggests that it is a strange and estranging locale even though it sits just a few kilometers from Mexico’s core. Specters are not simply dead or missing people; they are social figures, as Avery Gordon argues.47 Haunting is a social condition, collective and public. Within empirical heuristics, the spectral is often perceived as a cognitive failure, an inability to see “properly.” However, modes of social analysis and technocratic administration associated with the modern state have routinely failed to recognize many aspects of human existence and agency, even as they touted their technological prowess. A spectral approach, on the other hand, because it eschews cognitive certainties and historicist flows, can render visible lifeworlds and histories that are excluded from the state’s frame of recognition or are brutally put down, as both the railroad strike and the ’68 Movement were by the state. The novel’s final chapter is set in 1964, the year Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was inaugurated. Whereas before the area seemed to be perpetually shrouded in smoke and dust, now the view from Nonoalco Bridge is blocked by the apartment buildings, which look like “concrete cliffs.” The narrator climbs to the top of the bridge to contemplate the change in atmosphere. Del Paso writes:48 Yes, come men, come men that install premixed concrete factories that produce 1,580 cubic meters daily. . . . Yes, have them bring their mixing trucks. . . . We all, together, build the new City of Nonoalco[Tlatelolco], . . . 72,000 sedentary inhabitants: so that they live, so that they cohabitate, so that they will never know (I saw him) that José Trigo ever existed.

Rather than come to a unifying conclusion about the railroad strike or the construction of the housing complex, he proceeds to “disremember” and “disimagine” everything that he has seen—yet parenthetically insist that he did see Trigo. Del Paso continues to cloud the transparency of empirical vision, one of several inheritors of Reyes’s antipositivism at midcentury. Fuentes’s La región más transparente, published seven years earlier, also ends at Nonoalco Bridge. The novel travels across Mexico City and flashes back and forth between the Mexican revolutions of the 1910s and 1950s to tell a loosely connected set of stories that begin to account for Mexico’s

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transformation from a prerevolutionary capital to a city of capital.49 To tell them, Fuentes employs a ghostly narrator, Ixca Cienfuengos, who “floats on noise and shadow, on blur,” and whose thoughts by the end of the novel flow in and out of the voices and memories of all those whom he has encountered.50 Cienfuegos serves as a medium for the ghosts that haunt everyone in the novel, from the real-estate speculator whose empire is about to topple to the writer who must make peace with the cowardice of his father during the Revolution. Impending financial ruin forces Federico Robles, a nouveau-riche real-estate speculator, to reflect on how he attained his wealth. Early in his career he killed a man as a favor for a revolutionary general. Robles was rewarded with his first property, the basis of his subsequent holdings. Financial troubles force him to reckon with this violent moment of original accumulation. Dust is a motif in La región más transparente. For Robles it is a physical manifestation of the past, which returns in spite of his desire to forget. His waking dreams are haunted by ghosts “caked with dust,” the kind abhorred by Alberto Pani. In the novel’s last scene, Gladys García, a cabaret worker, stands on Nonoalco Bridge. She sees the shack where she grew up. As she did at the beginning of the novel, she took a breath and lit the night’s last cigarette and let the match drop on tin roofs and breathed in the city’s dawn, the steam of locomotives, somnolence of flesh, wisps of gasoline and alcohol and the voice of Ixca Cienfuegos which passed, with the tumultuous silence of all memories, through the city dust and wished to touch Gladys García’s fingers and say to her, only say to her: Here we bide. What are we going to do about it. Where the air is clear.51

The air is not, as we have seen, so clear from Nonoalco Bridge. Fuentes’s irony is tinged with hope, though. It is hope based not on transparency but on a landscape in which we “see” not only spectral Ixca Cienfuegos but also the social relations and urban processes that he mediates. The Plaza de las Tres Culturas heritage site was a metonym of the Mexican government’s seemingly inescapable “vortex of integration,” its claim of sovereignty and biopolitical governance, which could integrate the rest of Tlatelolco only as a shadow to be made transparent and ultimately disappeared by the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex. Rulfo, del Paso, and Fuentes, among others, established Tlatelolco as counter–heritage site in the 1950s and 1960s through their ethic of opacity, suggesting that greater social truth might be achieved by dwelling on what the state or the capital failed or refused to recognize. If intellectuals like to kick up dust, as Robles asserts in this chapter’s epigraph, then they do so in order to perceive with greater acuity the routine violence of Mexican modernity.

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Since the 1980s transparency has taken on a somewhat but not entirely different meaning with the rise of universal-human-rights and transitionaljustice discourses in Mexico. Although “transparency” is a term deployed by activists to call for official accountability, the state has worked to co-opt the concept for its own reproduction rather than offer justice to victims of its terror. Once again, the government has relied on urban rebaptism to naturalize this sleight of hand. Two subway stops in Mexico City were recently renamed to indicate that they are the location of offices for its human-rights bureaucracy. The Viveros stop was renamed Derechos Humanos (Human Rights), and the Etiopía stop was renamed Plaza de Transparencia (Plaza of Transparency), both on the pea-green line that links UNAM’s main campus with Tlatelolco and points north. The local offices of the Instituto Federal de Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos (IFAI, Federal Institute for Access of Information and Data Protection), a product of President Fox’s transparency reforms in 2002, is located at Etiopía. Although the IFAI has made strides, its response times have been slow; a quarter of the queries asked of it by citizens cannot be addressed, and it favors digital queries, although access to the Internet is by no means universal.52 The state’s performance of transparency can obscure other forms of opacity, such as Mexico’s failed truth-and-reconciliation scheme between 2002 and 2006 (detailed in chapter 1). We must proceed with caution. Even when prepared to recognize the opaque or spectral on its own terms—and heed the revenge of dust—it is no guarantee that state terror, such as the Tlatelolco Massacre, or citizens’ forms of resistance, will be “transparent” to narrators or scholars. As later chapters will posit, writing the history of the ’68 Movement entails developing methods that allow for histories obscured, indeterminate, belated, and even unfathomable. These conditions redefine evidence and testimony for Mexico’s displaced, dispossessed, and disappeared, now and in the future. The next chapter looks at the preparations for the Mexico City Olympics, which included the creation of several environments designed by organizers to operate on human perception as if it were a transparent and easily influenced faculty. At stake were the perception of Mexico as a thoroughly modern and liberal country—not only to foreign audiences but also to domestic ones—and besides the status of modernist planner-architects as key mediators of this illusion. An exhibition of kinetic art during the games, part of the accompanying Cultural Olympiad, suggested that the relationship between producer and consumer of these spaces and images—feedback, in other words—was by no means a closed circuit.

3. Urban Logistics and Kinetic Environments

In contrast to the two previous summer Olympics, in Rome (1960) and Tokyo (1964), there was no single zone where competitions and related activities were centered for the 1968 Mexico City Games. Mexico 68, as the games were branded by the designer Lance Wyman in his now-iconic Op Art–inspired logo (see figs. 6–8), took place at more than twenty venues throughout the city. From October 12 to October 27, tens of thousands of athletes, officials, journalists, and spectators traveled between the venues, in addition to the millions of resident commuters who traversed the city most days. Such a busy arrangement, in part because of the use of preexisting as well as new facilities, required efficient means of communication. Eduardo Terrazas, head of urban design for the Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada (COJO, Organizing Committee of the XIX Olympic Games), oversaw the creation of a network of color-coded routes carved from Mexico City’s major streets and highways, many recently expanded as part of a municipal reorganization of the infrastructure. Terrazas’s team also designed an aesthetically cohesive array of street furniture and decorations (information kiosks, trash bins, banners).1 Art was an important component of the Mexico 68 landscape. In addition to the athletic competitions, the organizers staged the Cultural Olympiad, a year-long program of exhibitions, performances, and conferences. The artist Mathias Goeritz invited colleagues from participating nations to submit designs for a series of monumental abstract sculptures for the Ruta de Amistad, the Route of Friendship, which connected Olympic venues in the south of the city. Homes and businesses adjacent to the official routes were given cans of paint and flowerpots to tidy up the edges of neighborhoods not reached by the COJO’s beautification efforts. Such places did not match the image—or rather, the complex of images, spaces, and sounds—of a thoroughly modernized Mexico circulated by the committee before the games. 70

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Although its bid was championed by former president Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64), Mexico City was not expected to succeed in being chosen to host the 1968 Olympics. Detroit, seeming to be the metropolis of the future in 1963, was the favorite. But the games were increasingly becoming an opportunity for a country to announce its arrival (or return) to the world stage, on which a spectacular performance signaled participation in the global economic order. Mexico had experienced nearly three decades of favorable macroeconomic indicators, the so-called Mexican Miracle. Two years passed before the COJO began its operations in earnest, however, and so the construction of venues and preparations would extend to the last minute. The fact that Mexico, the first Latin-American host, was deemed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to be sufficiently industrialized did not deter global powers from expressing, often in neocolonial terms, their discomfort with an apparent shift in the world order in the wake of World War II. The Euro-American press was quick to air doubts as to whether the COJO could deliver the technically and logistically complex mega-event on time.2 Way finding and image management were communication concerns for the COJO but so too was conveying the Olympic proceedings to audiences throughout Mexico and abroad. Mexico 68 was broadcast largely live and in color around the world, thanks to recent advances in satellite technology, garnering an unprecedented audience of nearly six hundred million. The committee not only aimed to move participants and visitors around dispersed venues, nor to circulate evidence of material improvements in the capital indicating preparedness for the games, but aimed also to persuade audiences to view Mexico City as an equal partner of design, art, and technology hubs such as New York and Milan. The COJO did so by demonstrating fluency in aesthetics and discourses with global trends: principally Op Art (or optical art) and also cybernetics, ecology, and Gestalt psychology. Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, the PRI-aligned architect and chair of COJO, recalled President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz giving him his charge: “The first challenge is to rescue confidence in our ability to do it, and it must be demonstrated immediately.” The architect added: “We had to produce an image that immediately provoked surprise, an effective image.”3 Terrazas, in collaboration with Wyman, Beatrice Trueblood (head of publications), and others, created street furniture, office interiors, and displays for international events in Mexico City and Milan, the site of a major international design triennial. These temporary—and in some cases modular and portable—“kinetic” environments employed coordinated aesthetic schemata that integrated architecture, visual communication, and designed

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objects. These spaces marshaled movement, whether from the material components or users, and also the intention to act upon or “move” audiences psychologically or physiologically. Audiences ranging from international tastemakers to casual passersby were invited to immerse themselves and interact with the identity program in experiences not unlike happenings and other artistic experiments of the period. The effectiveness of the COJO environments often turned on interrupting passive or distracted audience reception and altering guests’ visual and spatial perceptions. Mexico 68 demanded a “responsive eye,” to borrow the title of a major exhibition of Op Art at New York’s Museum of Modern Art seen by Wyman and Terrazas in 1965. Coordinating this integration and mobilization of design—with its various professionals, disciplinary perspectives, technologies, and publics—required project and traffic management skills, or what an American art critic following the Olympic preparations identified as “urban logistics.”4 Whereas the politics of Mexico’s unexpected selection as host and the attendant press coverage are well known to scholars, as are analyses of the COJO’s tremendous graphic output, which remains a touchstone for global design history, less is known regarding the kinetic environments created.5 They were spaces of self-conscious experimentation for architects and allied designers renegotiating their professional status in the postwar period, including a reevaluation of the legacy of the Mexican Revolution and modernist utopias. Although the COJO’s preparations for the Olympics began years before the student-led democratization movement crystallized in 1968, the two events should not be considered separately. The committee’s kinetic environments highlight the professional but also economic and political stakes of larger government claims of social and spatial integration. The ’68 Movement operated in a context where urban space was visualized and activated to serve as a controlled environment by the state and its agents. The Olympics took this to a new level in Mexico, attempting to operate specifically on human perception. Comparing these environments to exhibitions of kinetic art and art happenings from the period, this chapter locates and analyzes the dynamics of power and rhetoric in these carefully designed, ostensibly seamless spaces and their political as well as visual sense of representation. The very technologies and strategies COJO employed invited feedback— within narrow parameters, of course—contributing to a dynamic field that the ’68 Movement’s street- and media-savvy protest tactics would seek to harness for their own purposes.

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apertures Responding to foreign doubts about Mexico’s preparedness, the COJO circulated a nearly constant flow of publicity prior to opening of the Olympics, detailing the construction of venues as well as upcoming cultural events and depicting an urbanized, technologically up-to-date society. Not able to question Mexico City’s modernity, the press turned its attention to its high altitude, a natural “deficiency” that could not be overcome, no matter how thoroughly it modernized or how quickly it built stadia. Sitting in a volcanic basin, Mexico City is almost twenty-five hundred meters (1.5 miles) above sea level. The city’s location also makes it difficult for pollution to escape. It was believed that this combination would adversely affect athletes’ performance and health in the long term. Although medical evidence showed that there was little risk, it was the more pessimistic predictions that made headlines. But journalists arriving in early August and late September encountered breathing difficulties of an entirely different sort: thick clouds of tear gas used by riot police to disperse striking students and faculty seeking refuge inside Mexico City schools and universities. Views of gleaming hotel towers competed with images of protesters, military deployments, and student parodies of the COJO brand. Mexico 68’s design sought to offer a holistic image of Mexico at exactly the moment when social and political fractures were most visible. An everwidening spectrum of citizens questioned the lack of political liberalization to accompany economic expansion and the state’s use of authoritarian measures to guarantee foreign investor-friendly stability. The students were only the latest in a series of protests against state policies. When Adolfo López Mateos, who served as the original chairman of the COJO, fell ill in 1966, Ramírez Vázquez stepped in. The architect was selected for his extensive experience in managing complex public-education and cultural projects and, moreover, for his close association with the ruling regime. In the architecture journal Calli, Terrazas told his colleagues: “The life of the city should not be detained, for the realization of an occasional activity, but rather . . . this activity should sow conditions that permit the improvement of living conditions in the city. The signage and street furniture that we have designed are media that serve as a base for a total urban organization.”6 COJO contributed to a longer-term redevelopment of Mexico City according to the logic of the state and allied business interests. The streets that the committee set its eyes on were some of the few spaces of civic encounter and engagement left relatively open to the average person in 1968.

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Architects such as Ramírez Vázquez and Mario Pani sought to play a supervisory role as the city grew rapidly in population, footprint, and economic output.7 In the 1920s and 1930s, modernist architects had expanded their professional purchase, claiming expertise by adopting urban planning’s overarching and pattern-identifying modes of social vision. The emergence and consolidation of modern architecture in Mexico, as elsewhere, were tied to architects’ claims of seeing the city as a whole and representing it as a complex system of inputs and outputs (flows of people, goods, electricity, waste, and so forth). At midcentury, architectural expertise was further refined in light of technological advances in communication and computation. For example, cybernetics, which explored feedback loops and continual self-regulation, inspired new ways of dynamically visualizing urban form and experience, what Mark Wigley referred to as the period’s “network fever.”8 These developments, originating in the sciences but also in the arts, expressly called for closer collaboration and exchange among professions and disciplines. As in Europe, such developments also renewed debates from earlier in the century over the integration of modern art and architecture. Goeritz, for example, was in the forefront of artists attempting to envision how greater collaboration between the two fields might work and its consequences for the look and feel of cities.9 Like the planner-architects, he envisioned the urban environment as a capacious milieu for intervention that could invite increased participation on the part of its user-beholders. This is not to say that COJO’s kinetic environments and staged social encounters remained untransformed by their audiences, despite being treated more or less as controlled experiments. A committee-sponsored exhibition of kinetic art hosted by Goeritz in 1968 drew from new technologies but offered—especially as framed by the sculptor-critic’s catalog essay and previous writings—an open-ended experience that did not presume to move a viewer’s perceptions in any predetermined direction. As this exhibit and kinetic environments by others made clear, consumption was not a passive, unilateral experience; the vagaries of audience reception could frustrate (if not hijack or shut down) carefully laid plans and seemingly self-sufficient environments. Mexico 68 encapsulated the evolving exchange between architects, artists, and the state as Mexico’s economy was reoriented for rapid expansion. Although neither the first Olympics to be broadcast via satellite in color (Tokyo) nor the first to emerge from a centrally coordinated urban redevelopment (Rome), Mexico 68 offered an early case study in the complex nexus of design, art, and technology required by the modern Olympic

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movement.10 It also signaled the shifting professional stakes for architects who participated in this transition. Modernist architects had already collaborated with one another and with colleagues in related fields in the construction of large-scale projects such as the Ciudad Universitaria (1952, Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral as supervising architects). The new university campus, collaboratively designed, incorporated local materials and “Mexican” (indigenous and popular) decoration with modernist form. It was promoted as a showplace manifesting the cooperation between its various contributors to produce a modernity that was recognized abroad but that retained its national distinction.11 The Eighth Pan-American Congress of Architects, which attracted close to two thousand professionals from across the Americas, was held on the campus in 1952 to preview the accomplishment. In a guide to contemporary Mexican architecture published for congress participants, the architecture critic Richard Grove wrote: “Especially worthy of note are the many cases in which painters and sculptors have collaborated with the architects. This creative partnership is one of the aspects most suggestive to foreign observers.”12 In addition to offering a much larger audience, Mexico 68 was an opportunity for Terrazas and his colleagues to cement their role as expert mediators—between Mexico City and state, architecture and art, Mexico and the wider world—or the modernist architect as mediator in a networked world. This enhanced professionalization of modern architecture in Mexico not only coincided but intersected with a broader international reevaluation of various kinds of modernism after World War II and emerging interest in phenomenological approaches to architecture and place making. Networks of architects, artists, and intellectuals, critical of the objectives and methods of modernist groups like the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM, International Congress of Modern Architecture) or the militarization of scientific research during wartime, embraced an interdisciplinary, collaborative approach as the solution to perceived professional and social ills. At the same time, they aspired to renew established modernist techniques, including concepts of encompassment and estrangement (“surprise” per Ramírez Vázquez) as tools for the transformation of society. Terrazas is a key figure in analyzing Mexican architects’ relationship to this reevaluation of modernism. After studying architecture in Mexico and the United States, he assembled an array of international apprenticeships, including with Team X collective architect Shadrach Woods in Paris and industrial designer George Nelson in New York, which sought to revise modernist planning. Terrazas and Nelson also corresponded with György

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Kepes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), all subscribing to this ethos of renewal, albeit from differing vantage points.13 If one looks closely at this enmeshing of networks, several less-than-utopian or lessthan-democratic aspects of this “second modernism,” as some architecture historians have recently called it, come into view.14 With the COJO’s kinetic environments and network thinking executed under the auspices of the state in an authoritarian sociopolitical context, the notions of hierarchies and controls, and the cult of technical expertise inherent in ostensibly neutral fields such as cybernetics, behavioral sciences, or cognitive psychology, complicate the appearance of optimism (and the presumed nobility) of this new wave.

integrated design A day after the parade of athletes at the opening ceremonies, the New York Times reported: “The biggest Olympic ‘team’ here is representing neither the Soviet Union (401 athletes), the United States (393) nor Mexico (327). It’s the 464-member squad of the American Broadcasting Company.”15 Camera crews roved the competitions, and several of the purpose-built venues were designed to prioritize the technical as well as the photogenic requirements of the mass media. The COJO’s Palacio de Deportes, the result of collaboration between architects Félix Candela, Antonio Peyri, and Enrique Castañeda Tamborrel, was arguably the most formally striking. Candela and his colleagues devised a superstructure of intersecting steel rods anchored to piers. Its dome-and-pier system recalled Annibale Vitellozzi and Pier Luigi Nervi’s Palazetto dello Sport at the Rome Olympics.16 In Mexico City, copper-plated wood panels hung from rods to reflect the sun. The committee carefully tracked its construction, especially its dome, publishing countless photographs of its dazzling effect. By the early 1960s, photographic reproduction was such an important factor for the Olympics that the architect Mauricio Gómez Mayorga complained of the camera’s tendency to dramatize and ultimately to trivialize architecture’s functionality, with buildings judged only for their looks. The polemical architect complained in a leading art magazine: “Our present buildings are very ‘photogenic,’ a quality that often distracts us from their real significance. . . . Buildings are not façades and even less photographs of façades; they are logical and organize orchestrations of habitable interiors through the course of time.”17 The systems of the Palacio de Deportes, not immediately visible, were perhaps more important to the COJO’s identity program, extending Gómez Mayorga’s notion of functionality. The lack of

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interior supports provided unimpeded camera sight lines, and the acoustics were calibrated to improve audio recording.18 The Sports Palace was as much a broadcast station as a basketball arena. On a preview tour of the venues, President Díaz Ordaz boasted to the press that Mexico was building on “the scientific and technological advances that are constantly being produced in the world.”19 By formally quoting the Palazetto yet integrating eight years’ worth of developments in structural engineering and broadcast-communication technologies since the Roman Olympic structure was built, the Palacio implied that techno-economic exchange between Mexico and the world was by no means unreciprocated. Even Wyman’s Op Art–inspired logo, with its concentric black lines, which served as the graphic basis for the COJO’s identity program, appeared to radiate such cosmopolitan ambitions. The designer applied the radiating motif to a commemorative stamp featuring a drawing of Candela’s Sports Palace, which made visible its normally imperceptible broadcast capabilities. In the two years leading up to Mexico 68, the COJO not only produced photogenic architecture such as the Palacio de Deportes but also experimented with the potential to connect directly with audiences in Mexico City and sites where international tastemakers gathered. Among the earliest of these environments in the Mexican capital was the Olympic Center, an administrative and hospitality building with a lobby open to the public.20 The slender twelve-story curtain-walled tower on Paseo de la Reforma was situated close to Chapultepec Park and the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Museo Nacional de Antropología, both overseen by Ramírez Vázquez (and others) and completed in 1964. The tree- and monumentlined boulevard that linked the city’s historic core to upper-class residential neighborhoods was lined with chic shops, cafés, and corporate offices, including several other blue-green-glass high-rises that also linked Mexico City to New York and Chicago. Whereas the façade may have appeared contemporary but increasingly commonplace by the 1960s, the center’s lobby was intended to astound visitors by blurring boundaries between architecture, signage, and city. Resembling art galleries or design showrooms nearby, the Olympic Center’s lobby shared artists’ and retailers’ emergent interest in creating environments that offered objects not only for contemplation or sale but also for staging perceptual, affective, or communicative experiences. These spaces recognized that the spectators were mobile human beings participating in the utilization of these spaces through their responses. Visitors entered though a small patio off the boulevard into an ample public lobby that included a reception desk and exhibition space, a small restaurant, and

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figure 6. Olympic Center lobby display, Paseo de la Reforma 455, Mexico City, 1968. (Designed by Eduardo Terrazas and Beatrice Trueblood; courtesy of Eduardo Terrazas Architect Archive, Mexico City.)

a boutique selling COJO-licensed merchandise. The various zones were linked by a burnt-orange-and-magenta color scheme used throughout, with only minimal use of conventional partition walls. Transparent acrylic panels were used to permit sunlight to penetrate the space and allow visitors to inhabit particular zones while apprehending the lobby as a whole and perceiving the correspondences between its parts.21 A visitor’s field of vision was obstructed only by posters, brochures, and newsletters affixed to the clear panels, sharing in the job of forming the interior. At the same time, the transparent panels appeared to dematerialize that very form. Clear plastic globes resembling beach balls embossed with the Op Art logo clustered on the floor made a similar case for the plasticity of visual communication and the graphic quality of designed modular objects. There were several artists and designers working in this vein at the same time. The Olympic Center’s open-yet-unified lobby recalled other projects supervised by Ramírez Vázquez for the Mexican government. At the Seattle World’s Fair (1962), where the organizers standardized the space allotted to exhibitors, the designer Iker Larrauri used large panels with superimposed photographs of Mexican monuments to produce a distinctive architectural entrance.22 The lobby also paralleled contemporary corporate

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work-space design, such as Hermann Miller’s “Action Office” (Robert Propst with George Nelson).23 The Mexico 68 beach balls recalled the inflatable, polyvinyl-chloride furniture of Quasar Khanh in Paris and studio De Pas, D’Urbino, Lomazzi in Milan. Although Terrazas and Trueblood did not explicitly acknowledge these affinities, they were clearly demonstrating their familiarity with global aesthetic currents, both vanguard and commercial, a key reason Ramírez Vázquez had hired them. As much as the lobby’s design encouraged visitors to linger, taking time to inspect the publications and other products, it also invited them to look through the floorto-ceiling windows onto the street. Like the globes, several of the windows were embossed with the Mexico 68 logo, linking the showroom to the city. The logo’s radiating concentric lines suggested that anything that appeared in this frame was trademarked by the COJO. This integrative yet expansive approach was not limited to interiors. Peter Murdoch was contracted to create portable environments to inform audiences about the Olympics and reinforce COJO’s approach to design as communication (and vice versa). The British industrial designer had come to international prominence with a chair design that used a single piece of die-cut and folded card stock. The idea of shipping modular parts of a display or even a building was not new, but for Mexico 68 Murdoch employed the recently introduced flat-pack design to create modular exhibition and information displays. The folding and stackable cubic aluminum frames, quickly and inexpensively shipped to Mexican embassies and international events, supported panels printed with Mexico 68 pictograms to inform the public of the sport competitions and cultural events. Three to five cubes could be stacked to create towers, guaranteeing their visibility on busy streets or in exhibition halls (tabletop versions were constructed of cardboard). The towers were often arranged in clusters that resembled a cityscape. Murdoch and his colleagues readily adjusted the scale and material of their projects, understanding design as a spectrum of platforms rather than a series of discrete disciplines. This flexibility asserted the mobility and networked status of design and, moreover, cosmopolitan designers. Flat-pack principles were also applied to larger information kiosks that housed multilingual attendants and were set up throughout Mexico City to aid visitors and residents. The relatively small-scale and ready-to-assemble (or disassemble) construction of the kiosks allowed them to be easily delivered via truck, efficiently responding to organizers’ needs. The exteriors of both towers and kiosks were saturated with instantly identifiable Mexico 68 pictograms that could be used to supplement the attendant’s verbal guidance. As at the Tokyo Olympics four years earlier, where designers worked

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figure 7. Mexico 68 information-booth elevations, 1968. (Designed by Peter Murdoch.)

to overcome the country’s perceived “foreignness,” the COJO aspired to universal communication by blurring the boundaries of built environment and visual communication. The committee reported that “hundreds of words in dozens of languages were superseded by graphic symbols representing services and facilities for participants and visitors.”24 The COJO’s impulse toward integration was amplified by the scale and scope of its production and distribution—and its own representation of these networks. It meticulously inventoried its technological wherewithal in the pages of its numerous publications. Maps showing overlapping and interlocking networks (routes, microwave relays, flight paths) were another motif, suggesting the omnipresent and potent reach of the committee and the Mexican government, even if an infrastructure such as depicted was still under construction or only proposed. This did not preclude the COJO from bombastically claiming in its final report to the International Olympic Committee that “time and space have been conquered. Events and their

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transmission by means of symbols, images and words have become nearly simultaneous.”25 The committee’s claims of sublime technological omnipotence, seamless urban tableaux, and unfettered communication should not be taken at face value. The COJO’s interventions confirmed a robust but unresolved debate among Mexican architects, designers, and artists and sought to fill in, often hyperbolically, the unevenness of the government’s modernization project. Their interventions responded to the requirements of hosting the mega–media event but also involved Mexico’s capitalist urbanization, which was still very much under construction (and contested). The ensuing negotiations by a variety of interested parties included architects as well as the audiences invited to (re)produce these spaces through movement, perception, and participation. In addition to building new competition venues COJO took advantage of existing facilities located throughout the city, requiring that participants and spectators navigate among them. Mexico City had grown tremendously since the 1940s, both in population and in its physical boundaries, but without much planning. Major infrastructure was still under construction. The result was a city highly fragmented physically but also culturally and administratively “extended until [traveling] between its parts became difficult and the overall image evaporated,” as Néstor García Canclini described it.26 In this “city of travelers,” visitors were provided skeleton maps to navigate but showing only official routes. The Red Route (Avenida de los Insurgentes), for example, linked the athletes’ housing to the press hotel. The art critic John Canaday noted that “in Mexico City this fall you . . . can be illiterate in all languages, so long as you are not color blind.” However, Rubén Salazar of the Los Angeles Times, who witnessed the displacement of Mexican and African-American communities by development in southern California, pointed out: “Wherever the visitor looks all is color . . . shocking pink, purple, and yellow—temporarily hiding the misery.”27 Vast swaths of Mexico City did not benefit from the state’s modernization efforts or architects’ integrative experiments. The military also set up cordones de protección on the routes to restrict vehicle and foot traffic, part of the Olympic security plan but also a militarization of Mexico City’s core in response to ’68 Movement protest.28 Urban flows and their management played a major role in architects’ professionalization in Mexico. Carlos Contreras and José Luis Cuevas (architect not artist), Ramírez Vázquez’s mentors at UNAM, were among the earliest adopters of urban planning methods, calling for the rationalization of Mexico City’s transport infrastructure as the first and foremost step toward modernization. Like their counterparts in Europe, planner-architects saw

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traffic (vialidad) as a mediating category for housing, work, and recreation, with the greatest potential to effect social transformation throughout the city. This vision assumed the city to be transparent, its complex system of inputs and outputs available for mapping and diversion. To achieve this overarching panorama, architects employed visualization technologies available to them, including aerial photography.29 An urban-planning perspective transformed the previously architectural image of Mexico City’s land and structures into an infrastructural one: a city composed of plans, charts, diagrams, and photographs. In sum, aspects of an urban experience that had previously been understood as disparate and incommensurable, if not unfathomable, appeared as a sequential, logically related, and ultimately manageable pattern. It was by assembling a vast array of representations and claiming a larger field of intervention that modernist planner-architects came into contact with other professionals also seeking to expand their professionalsocial domain. The integración plástica debates in Mexico highlight how architects and other professionals negotiated the integration impulse. Originating in the 1930s, “plastic integration” was redefined in the 1950s in light of new technologies as well the state’s shifting spending priorities.30 Mexico came to world prominence after its Revolution with the murals of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and other artists, many commissioned by the new federal government. Murals quickly became closely associated with the state’s cultural-nationalism project, which sought to suture a society shattered by violence. The subject matter of many of these works sought to narrate the popular basis of the war and promote the new regime’s progressive and integrative credentials. As architects began in the 1930s to successfully propose to the state modernist designs for schools and hospitals, they also sought out the participation of artists. Pani worked with several artists, including José Clemente Orozco and Carlos Mérida, for his series of mass-housing projects (multifamiliares) of the 1940s through the 1960s. Ramírez Vázquez also invited several artists to create works specifically for the Museo Nacional de Antropología, including Goeritz. The participation of artists went beyond merely superficial “Mexicanization” of modernist architecture through the use of local materials and decoration, however; it was not intended to be an equitable collaboration. Plastic integration, as Pani and Ramírez Vázquez deployed it, was a practice for explaining and endorsing the emerging role of the architect as expert manager, able to make sense of urban complexity and marshal new technology and a multidisciplinary team to posit solutions. As the state shifted its patronage toward large-scale infrastructural

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projects, the expanded professional and social domain claimed by the planner-architect appeared increasingly justified. It also meant that artists like Goeritz and Siqueiros, albeit for different reasons, increasingly sought out collaborations with architects and conceived of their works on an architectural if not an urban scale. The COJO was not simply shielding visitors from the less visually appealing parts of Mexico City with its beautification. Residents could not be blamed for consulting the information kiosks themselves. Mexico City had recently emerged from the first major reorganization of its transport infrastructure, which promised more efficient movement throughout the city. Ernesto Uruchurtu, the presidentially appointed regent, pushed through long-proposed plans to elongate and widen several of the city’s busiest streets, including the Paseo de la Reforma (1960–64), and to build new highways, such as the Anillo Periférico (1961–67). This reorganization of transport flows resulted in the demolition of historically significant buildings and the division of poor neighborhoods (Morelos, Tepito, Guerrero) and the displacement of thousands of residents. The “rationalization” of such infrastructure projects complemented recent efforts by architects aligned with the state and business interests to move the poor, small merchants, and ambulant vendors out of the city center to the periphery, freeing large parcels for higher-economic-value redevelopment.31 Not unlike Goeritz’s Ruta de Amistad, Murdoch’s designs for the COJO as well as Terrazas’s street furniture offered new landmarks for a city transformed—if not estranged— by high-speed urbanization and real-estate speculation. The architectural and graphic way-finding devices attempted to supplement or fill in the gaps left by this partial and incomplete process of modernization.32 In its attempt to create a domestic audience for Mexico 68’s televised presentation and smooth over some of these gaps, the COJO designed what it called Mobile TV Units. This fleet of customized Ford trucks was outfitted with equipment to project television transmission onto large screens or, lacking those, city walls. They delivered the COJO’s continuity-edited perspective to residents of the city who had been immobilized by economic and political aspects of the very modernity that the Olympics celebrated. The trucks were first deployed during the Third International Sports Competition in 1967, a practice run for the Olympics, traveling to Mexico City’s poorer and peripheral zones and stopping at factories and schools. A decade after television’s introduction, TV-set ownership was still not universal. Nonetheless, after taking a laissez-faire approach to the medium, the government increasingly approached television as a powerful medium for communicating with citizens.

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The Mobile TV Units promised to transform television from a medium consumed primarily at home into a public activity. It literally projected onto undeveloped or unevenly developed neighborhoods the tableau of modernity and democracy promoted by the PRI for the games. Writing for a COJO publication distributed internationally, José Revueltas described the Mobile TV Units’ effect on the cityscape: “The giant screen breaks with domestic space to widen its action over a large group of people, transforming television into an informational, cultural and dramatic vehicle.”33 Revueltas’s description, dramatic in its own right, pointed to the medium’s potential for intervening on perception. Television created a deep psychological connection with its viewers through the simultaneity of image and sound, according to the COJO. Its power to transport viewers virtually, however, required careful management. Schools were an important venue for managing this communicative potential. In preparation for the Olympics, the COJO partnered with the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP, Ministry of Public Education) to install more than eight hundred television sets in sixty schools in Mexico City. It also created a series of programs to keep students informed of Olympic developments while advancing notions of physical improvement and “healthy” competition. Television was also an opportunity to standardize the delivery of a national pedagogy. As the COJO assured its readers, television would not replace teachers but would serve as an “auxiliary agent that facilitates student comprehension and abbreviates lapses in learning, in particular with regard to materials that by their very nature are more objective than speculative.”34 The “speculative,” however, should be read as lessons improvised or contrary to the curriculum. Revueltas argued that television created a collective psychological state ever more prone to assimilation. This receptiveness might be transferred later, from a phase of simple passive disposition that only contemplates spectacle, to a more extensive and profound phase, an active disposition of science and culture, and ultimately a critical attitude that discerns and judges from raw information.35

Considering that Revueltas would eventually abandon his work for the COJO because of his support for the ’68 Movement, the “receptiveness” of consumption appeared to be a liberating possibility rather than a dangerous consequence. Television, like other new communications technologies introduced or popularized in the period, was an inherently open-ended process for consumers.

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urban logistics The COJO’s all-encompassing design strategy did not go unnoticed by the international press once concerns about Mexico’s “preparedness” were allayed. John Canaday, art critic for the New York Times, took particular interest in the identity program, which resonated with his own interests, and visited Mexico City at the end of 1967. Having covered the New York World’s Fair (1964–65), he argued that design was now an “all-permeating” aspect of international events, functioning as another arena where countries (and corporations) could compete with one another. There could be successes and failures. “Good” (modern) design, not unlike sports, had emerged as a universal endeavor with humanistic if not democratic qualities. While Canaday praised Montreal’s Expo 67, he faulted New York’s recent fair for its “debased and chaotic” design, reflecting “everything that is tawdry and frustrating in our city.”36 He was struck by the COJO’s general avoidance of images typically deployed by “developing” countries to announce their modernity to the world: “Mexico is not to be presented in the usual way of photomontage murals of factories, engineering projects, glass-walled office buildings, and pretty children sitting in brand-new schools.”37 Canaday was most impressed by the diversity, ubiquity, and aesthetic cohesiveness of the COJO’s designs, which suggested an ability to “control” many dynamic factors—a clear mark of technical sophistication from his metropolitan perspective. He wrote that “design, when the Mexicans took a good look at the problem, went beyond the business of posters, programs, advertisements and other self-contained visual material and impinged on the area of urban logistics.” For the art critic, Mexico represented a purer, cleaner version of modernism, with the crassness of commercialism brushed out of view by a strong hand.38 Although only tangentially connected to Mexico’s design culture and somewhat backhanded in his appraisal, Canaday pointed to the tangle of new technologies, discourses, and shifting modes of vision that informed the COJO’s integrated approach, especially the tension between communication and control and managerial impulse that still permeated modernist design amid its wider reevaluation. By the 1960s, architects regularly expressed disillusion with urban planning as a universal remedy, especially with its inability to cut through the ostensible chaos or entropy of postwar life.39 Although urban planning aimed to pierce through the complexity of cities, it could not respond in a timely fashion to the ever-shifting actors and processes that gave cities their shape. An increasing number of architects looked to theories that proposed to provide

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feedback in order to be able to respond dynamically to systems as complex as cities. Extrapolating from advances in computing and communication as well as rethinking relations between human beings and machines and their environment, urban planning’s mode of vision was shifted to compensate for these blind spots. If the city was now understood as infrastructural, its flows were tracked unidirectionally, with the planner-architect unable to respond dynamically. Although personal computers were still years from wide use, increases in computing capacity encouraged urbanists to work with greater amounts of data, which might more thoroughly account for the cities’ ever-changing flows. Moreover, this technology advanced such thinking about feedback in several scientific and professional fields. Several theorists around the world, including Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Shadrach Woods, and Georges Candilis, continued to transform CIAM theories of traffic movement into thinking about networks of all sorts. Terrazas, who had worked for Woods, applied this ethos to his design practice, using the Mexico City Olympics as a place to put theory into practice. He eventually wrote about these experiments for an anthology edited by György Kepes, a champion of collaboration between the arts and the sciences.40 Cybernetics, which explored feedback loops and continual self-regulation (toward homeostasis), was especially enlightening to architects with interests in urban systems. Norbert Wiener, who coined the term in 1948, was arguably the most influential proponent at the time. A mathematician at MIT, Wiener worked with colleagues in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Mexico, including the neurophysiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, to figure out how a network might integrate not only historical but also real-time data to form a feedback loop to regulate itself continuously.41 The network would also have to distinguish important information from background noise inherent to the process. This technical problem had philosophical implications for Wiener. Disillusioned by the recent World War, he argued that people sent messages within a system in an effort to familiarize themselves with and control their environment in the face of entropy.42 If this view were to be taken to its logical end, networks would become an extension of our bodies, and vice versa. Of course, although this theory sought to produce networks capable of change, these remained limited to situations wherein a node or user must respect a system’s hierarchy of communication, leaving it ill equipped to respond to inputs not already preconceived as part of its range. Although the basic research in cybernetics was the result of wartime interests, defense was not its only output.43 Kepes, also at MIT, explored the human-machine environmental nexus as well. He directed the university’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies,

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which in addition to serving as a hub for artists and scholars also sponsored large-scale, multisensory artworks incorporating processes in nature and accepting “the participation of ‘spectators’ in such a way that art becomes a confluence rather than a dialogue.”44 Before coming to Cambridge in 1945, Kepes published Language of Vision, in which he the studied the effects of visual elements, especially line and overall form, on human consciousness. He saw design as a universal language not in the abstract sense but in specific terms of place and encounter. Kepes was influenced by Gestalt psychologists investigating perceptual experience, whom he worked with in Berlin prior to coming to the United States. They held that the human eye sees an object in its totality before perceiving its constitutive parts, with the relationship between figure and ground allowing the eyes to make sense of objects amid visual noise. Gestalt theorists also held, not unlike cyberneticists, that the mind’s eye mediated between internal (bodily) and external (worldly) stimuli. Drawing examples from contemporary graphic design and advertising, he explained: “Just as the letters of the alphabet can be put together in innumerable ways to form words to convey meanings, so the optical measures and qualities can be brought together, . . . and each particular relationship generates a different sensation of space.”45 Working in collaboration with Kevin Lynch, also at MIT, Kepes further developed his interest in situatedness, both spatial and perceptual. Lynch published a beginning vocabulary for describing the city’s “imageability” (nodes, paths, edges, districts, landmarks)—in other words, criteria for conceiving, communicating, and controlling a perceived environment holistically.46 Drawing a much thinner line between body and environment than his colleagues in Berlin, Kepes did not jettison Gestalt psychology’s sense of discernment of pattern or hierarchy. Kepes, like Wiener, aspired to address broader social issues through his research to confront what he saw as an impending ecological crisis.47 In appreciating the sublime aspects of human beings’ future on earth, he also sought to grant the arts the social agency that had been reserved for the sciences. Perhaps the most concrete expression of this aim was “Vision + Value,” a series of books that he edited between 1965 and 1972 based on interdisciplinary seminars at MIT. He invited scientists, artists, and humanists to contribute, and he illustrated his books with images (such as electron micrographs) derived from scientific investigations that superseded conventional views of the world. This interdisciplinary and technologically enhanced mode of vision would, in Kepes’s estimation, lead to a new environment in the total sense of the word. Socially minded artists and

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architects were increasingly recognizing the environment—urban environments in particular—as an “expanded field” of engagement.48 In an essay published four years after Mexico 68, Kepes asked Terrazas to reflect on his design strategies for the Olympics. The text appeared in Arts of the Environment (1972), the final installment of the “Vision + Value” series, by which time there was a critical mass of artists working in this expanded field, including Robert Smithson and the art collective Pulsa, who also contributed essays to the anthology. Terrazas’s essay utilized several concepts shared by this diverse, tenuous network of architects, artists, and theorists reevaluating modernism.49 Terrazas explained that his brief as COJO chief of urban design was twofold: first, “inform the people of Mexico and the rest of the world of the progress and spirit of the preparations” and second, “create the kind of physical setting that would function well and communicate an organized, festive, modern Mexican spirit.”50 He also understood Mexico City as an environment shaped by more than just the built environment or traffic. “Of the many means of establishing and communicating an environment,” he wrote, “we chose the creation of spaces, objects, and printed matter.”51 Terrazas’s and other Mexican architects’ use of the word “space” in this period, as opposed to “architecture” or “city,” is not insignificant. In addition to resonating with Kepes’s (and Goeritz’s) expanded field of intervention, the term in effect created space for discussion and solution of ideas and challenges bigger and smaller than formalism, morphology, or any other discipline-specific vocabulary. Terrazas, not unlike his colleagues, was especially interested in the correct scaling of urban-design elements for Mexico 68. On the one hand, scale signaled that the appropriate medium for each aim or message was specifically chosen. So if the aim was ubiquity, and the message was Everything Is Possible in Peace (one of Mexico 68’s slogans), then placing the logo with an abstract dove on bumper stickers was the correct “scale.” On the other hand, it allowed a graduated spectrum of design choices, with various design disciplines integrated to create environments. It also signaled the architect’s role in determining the relationship between representation itself and what he sought to represent—the architect as mediator not only in the design of structures but even in perception.52 Terrazas’s essay points to problems of planning and communication but also to the more general problem of mediating between the overarching structure of the design scheme (whole) and the individual (part), whether an object or a person. In order to move people intellectually and emotionally, he sought out a strategy of “unity and variety,” or a means of allowing multiple teams to work independently without compromising the identity

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program (the overarching structure). Terrazas wrote: “A framework had to be created within which each individual could find his own expression, while at the same time maintaining a unified image. . . . For the success of our program, each person [designer] had to create but also to respect, merge with, relate to, and integrate with the whole, in order to achieve a united Mexico 68 environment.”53 Such a strategy assumed the existence of an overarching pattern or order, determined by a designer (or patron), that allowed room for maneuverability within predetermined parameters. Not unlike Wiener’s first wave of cybernetics, or Kepes’s and Lynch’s “image of the city,” Terrazas maintained a renewed hope of holistic apprehension and continuity. For modernist architecture and planning this meant that the city could be fine-tuned toward an efficient and manageable whole as a product of visual and material syntax.54 The reevaluation of modernism via new technologies and the modes of spatial-environmental and collaborative thinking that they facilitated did not mean that some of its central concepts (pattern, control, expertise) were automatically abandoned or that the process was entirely disinterested. Ricardo Legoretta, who emerged as a leading young architect in the 1960s with his design for the Hotel Camino Real (1968), argued in Arquitectura/ México that “architects are a species of man-orchestra, in that we not only solve architectonic problems per se, but we have also seen ourselves converted into structural and electrical engineers; into contractors, administrators, land sellers, business promoters, etc.”55 The kinetic environments put forth by COJO architects generally reinforced the architect’s role as manager rather than distributed his responsibilities among others. Terrazas would synthesize this scattered network of ideas and the COJO’s various briefs most fully, if only temporarily, for the committee’s display for the Fourteenth Milan Triennial, held in 1968. Like the Olympic Center, the Milan display housed evidence of COJO’s creative output and also appeared to give it physical shape: visitors walked into a three-dimensional version of Wyman’s Mexico 68 logo.

responsive eyes Located on the ground floor of Milan’s Palazzo dell’Arte, not far from the main entrance, Terrazas’s display hailed visitors to the busy fair with a footto-ceiling reproduction of the Mexico 68 logo. It was at least double the height of its nearest neighbor, a display by the Italian designer Marcello Nizzoli, known for his work for Olivetti, which furnished the Mexico 68 press centers.56 Visitors entered through a narrow aperturelike passage in

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the wall to find themselves immersed in a three-dimensional version of the very logo they just saw. The rectangular perimeter of the exhibition space was modified to echo the sans-serif curves of the logo, and the logo’s alternating black and white lines were applied not only to the walls and halfwalls but also to the floor and ceiling. Terrazas described the exhibit: “Mexico 68 literally became the environment one entered, becoming absorbed into the radiating black and white waves.”57 Because the black and white lines were the same width, they continually altered the relationship between figure and ground, appearing to activate a small and static space. Moving or shifting one’s gaze only intensified this effect. At the same time, for visitors well versed in global design, the architecturally hermetic display opened to a wide network of references to design theory and practice. The dynamic lines gestured to Kepes’s Gestalt understanding of line in Language of Vision and to Op Art but also to Gae Aulenti’s interior for Centro-Fly, a well-known furniture showroom in Milan. The display also made the leap from architecture to film and fashion, referring to the interplay of white and black in filmmaker William Klein’s Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (1966), which parodied the excesses of the culture industries. As the Milan display made abundantly clear, COJO’s integrated-design approach was meant to link Mexico to the wider world through its location in Milan in front of design professionals and through its knowing references to contemporary trends, wherein aesthetics migrated back and forth between vanguard and commercial circuits at an ever-faster rate. The 1968 Milan Triennial featured both individual designers and collectives, including Kepes and Woods, as well as national displays.58 A committee led by the Italian architect Giancarlo de Carlo, a member of the Team X collective, organized the Triennial. De Carlo and his committee encouraged members of Team X to create exhibits and organized the exhibits thematically. The fair’s overarching theme was Il Grande Numero (The Great Number), a gesture to mass production’s and mass consumption’s roles in shaping modern societies. Although an industry event, it gestured to design’s failure to benefit the wider world. At the same time, it offered hope for renewal through interdisciplinary collaboration and an expanded (largely urban) field of intervention. This expansion included inviting the nonprofessional public to the Triennial. As the title of Woods’s and artist Joachim Pfeuffer’s display proposed, Urbanism Is Everybody’s Business. Although designed to surprise or even disorient visitors, the labyrinthine Mexico 68 exhibit also included an element alerting them to the purposeful activation of the space: a photograph of a crowd at a sporting event blown up to fit an entire wall. The spectators look past the camera’s gaze,

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figure 8. Plan and section of Mexico 68 pavilion for XIV Milan Triennial, 1968. (Designed by Eduardo Terrazas; courtesy of Eduardo Terrazas Architect Archive, Mexico City.)

except for one person whose knowing smile alerts visitors to their own uneasy spectatorship, literally inhabiting Mexico 68 yet disconnected from their normal visual and spatial habits and primed to adjust their perception, although not necessarily on their own terms. To what end this gentle perceptive coercion was evinced was not entirely clear. The Triennial’s organizers’ appeal to openness elicited a response—although not exactly as intended, bringing to light the fundamental unpredictability of this strategy. Social unrest interrupted this total environment in Mexico. On the day of the Triennial’s inauguration, more than one hundred students, artists, and intellectuals protested in front of the Palazzo dell’Arte. De Carlo, determined to prove that the Triennial’s theme not superficial, invited the protesters inside to hear their position. The protesters quickly occupied the hall, resulting in its closure. While the group’s demands were diverse, they generally criticized the organizing collective’s continued embrace of design as a universal and ultimately perfectible solution to the world’s social problems.59 They were also skeptical of invitations by professional designers to participate in the design or to serve as “active” participants in staged encounters. A leaflet distributed by some of the protesters included excerpts from the last chapter of the American critic Harold Rosenberg’s anthology The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (1964). In this text (and others), Rosenberg explored with skepticism the dilemma of participatory

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art in a highly mediated consumer society. In his view, such an exchange between artist and audience was infiltrated by psychological manipulation and conformist bureaucracies. He wrote: “What can be foreseen about creation is not its [finished] products but some of the conditions under which it will take place.”60 On June 8, the police forcibly removed the protesters, against De Carlo’s wishes. In light of Rosenberg’s citation by the protesters, What were the conditions of the COJO display’s production and consumption? The COJO’s interpretation of Il Grande Numero fell short of what De Carlo and his colleagues envisioned when they invited the public to commune with designers. The Mexican writer Juan Vicente Melo explained in a pamphlet publicizing the Milan display, “Me, you, him and her, we all form ‘The Great Number,’ that family that endeavors, always and in every moment, to come closer to, and identify with each other beyond all barriers imposed by language, geographic distance or any kind of belief.”61 The COJO’s aim of exhibiting at Milan was not to make a case for Mexico leading the developed world in design but rather to argue that it was in line with countries considered peers. The COJO spoke an ostensibly universal language, because Mexico saw itself as part of the international “family.” Melo noted that Mexico 68 was the product not of just one man but of many architects, designers, builders, writers, and translators: a multidisciplinary team working in the spirit of collaboration—albeit centrally coordinated by the COJO. While the designer’s responsibility to the masses was debated in Milan, the function of the designer as a mediator was not questioned but reinforced. Network thinking did not necessarily equalize social hierarchies. None of the COJO’s photographs or published reports gave any indication of the unexpected disturbances in Milan, just as they remained silent on the 1968 student movement. This unexpected development back home, with apparent beneficiaries of the Mexican Miracle protesting in the streets before the eyes of the world, was not part of the plan. The social conditions and contradictions of Terrazas’s display in Milan come into clear focus when compared with another COJO-sponsored exhibition in Mexico City. What these experimental exhibitions show is that participation could be staged in more open-ended ways than those offered by the COJO’s environments. In 1968, as part of the Cultural Olympiad, Goeritz hosted Cinetismo: Esculturas electrónicas en situaciones ambientales (Kineticism: Systems Sculpture in Environmental Situations) on a national university campus at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, or MUCA, at UNAM.62 Organized by the curator and video artist Willoughby Sharp, who was based in the United States, Cinetismo con-

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sisted of eighteen rooms featuring the work of kinetic and mixed-media artists from around the world. Goeritz, who had arrived in Mexico in 1949 with extensive international contacts, played a leading role in the globalization of Mexico’s art and architecture and stoked interest in the environment as a forum for intervention. Goeritz co-edited the arts supplement to Pani’s architectural journal Arquitectura/México with art historian and critic Ida Rodríguez Prampolini. The couple (married at the time) championed artists such as André Bloc, the French engineer-artist and editor of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, who fused sculpture and architecture.63 In his own sculptoarchitectural work, Goeritz turned away from galleryscaled objects in favor of staging interventions that are most fully appreciated from a sidewalk or a moving car. Goeritz collaborated in 1957 with the architect Luis Barragán on a set of monumentally scaled prismatic reinforcedconcrete towers, Torres de Satélite, which announced the entrance to Ciudad Satélite (Satellite City), a new bedroom community outside Mexico City master-planned by Pani. Barragán called the Torres, which were used in advertisements for the subdivision, besides serving as a backdrop for fotonovelas and fashion photo shoots.64 In addition to the Torres de Satélite and Ruta de Amistad, Goeritz designed Museo Experimental El Eco, a privately run Kunsthalle. With this project, opened in 1953, he launched an antirationalist, antirealist project of “emotional architecture,” meant to arouse if not overwhelm the emotions of visitors through its happenings and disorienting design. Goeritz was not entirely convinced of integración plástica’s potential, though. It was only in an irregular and seemingly unfinished space, where professional and aesthetic hierarchies were blurred, and art and architecture startlingly juxtaposed, that the spiritual synthesis of the arts that he (and others) envisioned could be housed.65 Goeritz’s opening remarks at the International Meeting of Sculptors in Mexico City in 1968 mapped a shifting landscape for his peers, one in which urban concentration and new technologies were upending the old aesthetic order and creating visual chaos. Goeritz bemoaned the isolation of art from society: “Artists, instead of being invited to collaborate with urban planners, architects and engineers, stand apart and produce only for a minority that visits art galleries and museums. . . . Artistic work will have to leave its environment of art for art’s sake and establish contact with the masses by means of total planning.”66 Goeritz’s artistic and rhetorical proposals linked integración plástica in Mexico to the concurrent reevaluation of monumental sculpture-architecture in Europe and the United States. Both artists and architects looked to large-scale forms and emotive color as a way to invest civic spaces with spiritual meaning after wartime destruction, as in

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the “New Monumentality” advocated by Siegfried Giedion, José Luis Sert, and others.67 If monumental scale was key to Giedion and associates, then the artists assembled for Cinetismo operated on a more intimate scale. As visitors moved through Sharp and Goeritz’s mazelike installation, they interacted with the installations of Julio Le Parc’s hanging movable aluminum strips set in motion and Lucio Fontana’s spatial environment of looping neon as they walked through. In Les Levine’s “Energy” room, electrified bars emitted a mild shock when touched. The projects were multisensory and extended beyond the art object itself to occupy the entire room and involve the viewer by shifting his perception or inviting him to touch, smell, and the like. These installation artists were part of a neo-avant-garde, taking up and reforming experiments first made by the European vanguards of the 1920s and 1930s.68 These works were also related to the happenings and assemblage art of the 1960s, proposing a new participatory relationship between an increasingly dematerialized object and an “empowered” viewer. Goeritz wrote in the foreword to the exhibition’s catalog: “Art has invaded the fields of natural energy and technology. Air, water, and fire, accompanied by electric and magnetic power, gas, and other modern technical forces, have expanded the horizon of the artist to establish a total environment in which man acts no longer as a spectator but as a participant in the work of art.”69 Since 1952 Goeritz had been increasingly critical of modern architecture, and cinetismo promised to activate and reenergize its interior and exterior spaces. Kinetic environments created by these artistic interventions also proposed that space was not an inert stage but was energized by viewers and reciprocally, forcefully communicative.70 It was this forcefulness, verging on violence, of the energy at the moment of expression that would send shock waves throughout the art world. It was only by allowing artists to collaborate with artists and user-spectators that this vision could be fully realized. This forcefulness was amplified by the exhibition’s location. MUCA, headed by the installation artist–curator Helen Escobedo, exhibited the work of neo-vanguards, including sound sculptures by François and Bernard Baschet from France and Gelsen Gas from Mexico. MUCA was also located on UNAM’s main esplanade, where members of the ’68 Movement met regularly, holding demonstrations and festivals. During these festivals, artists affiliated with Mexico’s vanguard scene, who either were students or supported the movement, collaboratively painted what they called Mural Efímero (Ephemeral Mural). The artists, including José Luis Cuevas (no relation to the aforementioned architect), Benito

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Messeguer, Fanny Rabel, Manuel Felguérez, Lilia Carrillo, Alfredo Cardona Chacón, and Roberto Denís, painted on a corrugated metal shed erected over the ruins of a statue of former president Miguel Alemán, the target of student displeasure at demonstrations in 1960 and again in 1966. Alemán had inaugurated the new campus with great fanfare in 1954 as a showplace of modernist architecture and art, documented extensively in the domestic and international press. The 1968 mural’s title referred to the assumption of its creators that it would not permanently remain, but it also related to the socalled Mexican School of painting’s influence. The murals of Rivera, Siqueiros, and others were perceived to have a dampening effect on artistic experimentation in Mexico. Francisco Icaza painted a caricature of Siqueiros with a caption that read “President of the Zona Rosa,” naming the fashionable neighborhood now saturated with middle-class youth and no longer cutting-edge. Cuevas would publish an ironic short story in 1958 describing the situation as living behind a “cactus curtain.”71 Rejecting this curtain, the Ephemeral Mural offered no coherent composition or subject matter but a collage of subjects and styles that estranged the expectations of the seemingly hegemonic genre. Felguérez recalled: “There was no composition, there was nothing, it was about being present painting.”72 As the art critic Raquel Tibol noted: “The whole thing looked like a collage of paintings, some of which made no reference to the events that were growing increasingly tragic with every day, although some did depict those events in an eloquent way. [Gustavo] Arias Marueta, for example, hung a torn-up doll with colored string hanging from its stomach; this little object paid homage to a young girl who had died with her guts exposed on August 28, during an act of repression [against the ’68 Movement] in the Zócalo.”73 Le Parc, whose work was also the subject of a solo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes a month earlier, told Mexico City journalists that spectators of kinetic art “stopped being unconscious accomplices to the status quo and rediscovered their capacity to produce, create.”74 Goeritz and Le Parc’s gestures to kinetic and participatory art’s revolutionary potential did not foreclose other uses and receptions. Art critics and historians have commented extensively on the instability of optical and kinetic art’s visual dynamism as well as its politics, frustrating any interpretation presuming to be singular. Only a year earlier young Cuevas, who was establishing himself as an artistic provocateur, revealed an “Ephemeral Mural” at the corner of Genova and Londres streets in the Zona Rosa. Cuevas unveiled a rented billboard before the eyes of the media he had carefully cultivated, and anyone else who would attend, that prominently featured a self-portrait and his signature and was scheduled for obsolescence a month later. The

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ephemeral and ambiguous nature of Cuevas’s project—at once a critique of the art scene and self-promotion—highlighted the fundamental instability of kinetic and participatory encounters from the production side, which under the banner of the COJO had been treated as controlled experiments.75 The challenges of hosting a technically and logistically complex international mega–media event like the modern Olympics required what the American art critic Canaday identified as “urban logistics,” or the ability to integrate and mobilize various design disciplines to produce a seamless and competitive image of a nation’s technological modernity for worldwide consumption.76 The COJO’s Olympic Center lobby, modular and portable information towers and kiosks, and the immersive logo at the Milan Triennial most clearly demonstrate this logistical but also rhetorical impulse. These environments, designed by Terrazas and his colleagues, cited global design, art, and technology, whether explicitly acknowledged or not, to overcome the lingering perception that Mexico, a still-modernizing country and the first Latin-American host, was ill prepared to execute the Olympics. The design strategies “surprised” user-beholders with an immersive and interactive environment that estranged visual and spatial perceptions and invited participation in completing or transforming the space, staging a kinetic experience that could intervene on perception of the space but also make the COJO’s case for Mexico’s networked contemporaneity. As architectural historians using mostly Euro-American examples have argued, the transition from modernism to postmodernism was not sudden—a matter of disillusionment leading directly to abandonment. Modernism was reevaluated and in many cases renewed through the adoption of (and continued hope in) technological progress and social improvement. Scientific investigation, technology, and the modes of vision offered by these advances, some the products of wartime research, were utilized by architects and artists in what might be called a “second modernism.” In Mexico, because of the historical enmeshing between modernist architects, the state, and business interests, this shift was not so much a moment of crisis as an opportunity to expand the range of modern architecture’s professional and its social domain, despite technological change and challenges to the country’s political stability. A close look at the COJO’s kinetic environments reveals that notions of interdisciplinary collaboration, gestalt wholeness, ecological interconnectivity, and cybernetic responsiveness also exhibited frameworks of hierarchy, management, and the cult of expertise. Global networks did not deliver unfettered flows of information and technology so much as serve as a compelling metaphor for reinforcing the authority of key professional mediators who helped to define its circuits. At the same time, these kinetic environments

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and the technologies they drew from were inherently open-ended and ultimately unstable. However much the organizers of Mexico 68 staged encounters and structured participation, they could not predetermine outcomes. In fact, they highlighted the ways that the city as well as perception could be intervened upon by putting words, images, and bodies into motion, through temporary spaces and actions—tactics also deployed by the ’68 Movement. Students and their supporters drew from the Olympic spectacle but also from the everyday experience of living in a rapidly modernizing city, their alienation from official politics, and from previous social movements, especially the labor movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Before turning to an analysis of these tactics, it will be useful to map the relationship between the state and the nation, highlighting the ways that citizenship was practiced not in terms of formal rights and responsibilities but as a conditional hospitality granted by the PRI. The next chapter, which focuses on the Hotel de México as well as Siqueiros’s last major mural, proposes—as did the ’68 Movement—that this hospitality was not so stable and intractable as it appeared and that the “responsive eyes” courted by Olympic organizers could reimagine the nation-state that it sought to structure.

4. Gestures of Hospitality The Olympic Games celebrated here must be a festival for all nations, but it must also be marked with the seal of the house in which it is celebrated. —Mexican Olympic Organizing Committee

With the foreign and even the domestic press airing doubts regarding Mexico’s readiness for the Olympic Games, COJO chair Pedro Ramírez Vázquez held a press conference at Chicago’s LaSalle Hotel in January 1967. In addition to outlining recent milestones in completing competition venues and other essential preparations, Ramírez Vázquez discussed Mexico’s role as host in practical as well as philosophical terms. His countrymen, he told the journalists assembled, recognized their vital obligation to receive Olympic guests with open arms. Mexico City would have more than enough hotel rooms to accommodate the tens of thousands of expected tourists. Three major properties were either recently completed or under construction: the María Isabel (1962, architects José Villagrán García and Juan Sordo Madaleno), Camino Real (1968, architect Ricardo Legorreta), and the Hotel de México. Guillermo Rossell de la Lama, architect of the Hotel de México, promised the country’s tallest, largest, and technologically most sophisticated property, positing it as a nerve center for an increasingly networked city. The hotel project, which combined public and private investment, also included an adjacent cultural center, the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, which was covered inside and out with a mural that combined painting and sculpture by David Alfaro Siqueiros. With Mexico welcoming the first Olympics in Latin America, Ramírez Vázquez also suggested that more cities outside the United States and Europe should be given the opportunity to host. However, as he warned: “A good host should start by receiving and accommodating only up to the limits of its capacity.”1 Building a massive number of hotel rooms for little over two weeks’ maximum occupancy was hardly a fiscally or morally responsible endeavor, especially for “developing” countries. Ramírez Vázquez’s comments sounded eminently pragmatic and oriented toward foreign visitors and the IOC. However, they also aligned with 98

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the interests of his patron, the PRI, and its partners in the business class. They jointly profited from Mexico’s rapid but uneven modernization, the so-called Mexican Miracle. Tourism was a cornerstone of this expansion. Since the 1940s the state invested heavily in what it promoted to Mexicans as the “industry without smokestacks,” albeit with little regard for its social and environmental consequences. As Ramírez Vázqeuz indicated, in spite of an overarching message of hospitality for all and without stipulation, calculations of capacity, resources, costs, and benefits—economic and political— bound its practice. This contradiction between what Jacques Derrida has called “unconditional” and “conditional” hospitality is at the crux of the asymmetrical and increasingly unstable relations between the Mexican state and nation in the 1950s and 1960s. In these decades the government deployed a social-welfare infrastructure (partially) and rhetoric of magnanimity (wholly) while at the same time systematically it disenfranchised most citizens politically and pursued economic policies that depended on the displacement and appropriation of people, property, and traditions. In this chapter the design and promotion of Rossell’s Hotel de México serves as a case study for what was truly Mexico’s largest hotel: a single-party authoritarian state that claimed the role of absolute host and treated most of its citizens as mere guests, with only limited rights and few alternatives. This Hotel Mexico presumed to accommodate all Mexicans—just as the state presumed to represent all Mexicans and care for them biopolitically— with or without their consent. Observing this arrangement in colonial Latin America, the historian Richard Morse described it as a “hierarchical system in which each person or group serves a purpose larger than any one of them can encompass. Social unity is architectonic, deriving from faith in the larger corpus mysticum.”2 For all its claims of modern rationality and secularism, the PRI depended on this “mystical body” to mediate and, furthermore, to obscure the unjust social relations that made the Miracle possible. In a similar fashion, this book understands hospitality as a set of culturally specific spaces and performances that seek to smooth over inequalities with as little social friction as possible, not unlike the relationship between state and nation. Hospitality is at once a highly structured exchange, with customs and rituals, and a precarious edifice that is continually renegotiated at each encounter between host and guest. If the state demanded transparency of its citizens in order to classify and manage them as populations at Tlatelolco (as discussed in chapter 2), then its conditional hospitality was meant to be as opaque as that of a luxury hotel, where administrative and commercial functions are to remain out of sight—although not without a significant

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cost. In fact, the vast majority of Mexico’s citizen-guests, including the emergent middle classes, were to be satisfied with only the state’s gestures of hospitality, a handful of monumentally scaled and much-hyped urban development and welfare projects, such as Hotel de México and NonoalcoTlatelolco, that rarely resolved fundamental economic and political disparities. These projects were promoted as concrete evidence of the state’s and the business class’s generosity and, moreover, as loci for the flights of rhetoric and symbolic suturing required to maintain the disconnect between the grandiose aspirations of the Miracle and its deficient reality. The rhetorical maneuvers of the PRI and its allies only intensified as some members of Mexico’s intelligentsia openly questioned the party’s professed revolutionary ideology as it increasingly participated in capitalist dealings. Rossell, who was closely aligned with the PRI, employed the platitudes of postwar neohumanism—global communication and fraternity as universal salve—to promote the Hotel de México and the vision of a Mexico that it represented: the revolution and capitalism reconciled. At the center of his publicity campaign was an unlikely collaboration between Siqueiros, the famous leftist dissident, and the hotel’s wealthy owner, Manuel Suárez y Suárez, a PRI loyalist, to produce the Polyforum. Given that the state’s legitimacy depended on the vagaries of the corpus mysticum, it is perhaps not surprising that Rossell framed this collaboration as a “cosmic communion.” This communion, however, was imperfect; more telling of the volatility of hospitable encounters than of Mexican kinship or destiny. After a string of delays the Hotel de México failed to open, and its fiftyone-story shell loomed over the city for decades. Only the Polyforum, with its immersive sculptomural, La marcha de la humanidad en la tierra y hacia el cosmos (The March of Humanity on Earth and toward the Cosmos), was completed, a little over three years after the Tlatelolco Massacre. The mural offered an iconographic and narrative program that diverged sharply from Rossell’s cosmic vision and the PRI’s hospitable (or inhospitable) gestures. Siqueiros, a vocal supporter of the prodemocracy ’68 Movement, created a dark and menacing work that can be read as a eulogy to the progressive promises of the Mexican Revolution, to the ’68 Movement—and to the artist’s hope for the country’s unceasing march toward democracy and social justice, with or without the PRI. If my analysis underscores how the PRI’s hospitality was conditional, a set of empty gestures employed to cling to the state, then I read The March of Humanity as housing a repertoire of critical if not combative gestures available to guests of Hotel Mexico to respond to this arrangement and envision alternatives, including those available to the ’68 Movement. The March of Humanity was also a final

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attempt by Siqueiros, who would die in 1974, to deliver on the promise of muralism as a revolutionary mass medium, a task that had preoccupied him since the 1930s. This chapter traces the development and reception of the Hotel de México project, with special attention paid to Siqueiros’s and Rossell’s participation in Mexico’s architectural culture and contemporary art scene, especially its overlapping debates regarding the integration of art, architecture, and other media. Before turning to the Hotel de México, however, we will examine two encounters between the state and the ’68 Movement on August 1, 1968, that highlight the threshold of hospitality in Mexico and the political stakes that would inform The March of Humanity as well the ’68 Movement’s protest tactics.

outstretched hand On August 1, Javier Barros Sierra, UNAM’s rector, led a march of students and faculty in commemoration of the students killed and injured the month prior. They planned to walk from the Ciudad Universitaria, at the southern edge of Mexico City, to the Zócalo, its center. Standing by the UNAM flagpole Barros Sierra spoke before the march: “We need to demonstrate to the Mexican people that we are a responsible community, [and] that we deserve autonomy. . . . We know how to act forcefully, although always within the frame of the law, so many times violated [by the state].”3 Although formally granted by the state and enshrined in its name, UNAM’s autonomy was not inalienable. The state consistently infiltrated student activities and paid thugs (porros) to intervene when it saw fit. By choosing the Zócalo as their destination, a space normally reserved for official spectacle, the ’68 Movement consciously overstepped the narrow room normally granted to social and labor movements yet again. The movement was deliberately stretching the meaning of autonomy to encompass broader political concerns, not simply academic issues as in previous student-protest movements. In Guadalajara on the evening of August 1, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz spoke to remind the public of his expectations for political participation, not unlike a father reminding his children to remember their manners. The speech was broadcast nationally, excerpted in major newspapers the following day, and eventually published in a pamphlet that noted prolonged bouts of applause and cries of ¡Viva! from his audience. Without referring to the ’68 Movement directly, Díaz Ordaz called for restraint and compromise. He did so with full knowledge that the march was rerouted, circling back to campus upon observing the police and military’s overwhelming show of

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force on the Avenida de los Insurgentes Sur, just south of the Hotel de México’s construction site. Díaz Ordaz’s comments were organized around the eminently hospitable image of his hand reaching out for others’:4 A hand is extended: it is the hand of a man who through the short history of his life has shown that he knows loyalty. Mexicans will decide if that hand will stay outstretched in the air or that hand, according to Mexican tradition—in the tradition of the true, genuine, authentic Mexican—is seen accompanied by millions of hands of Mexicans who, together, want to restore peace and tranquillity of conscience.

Díaz Ordaz poignantly added that he was personally hurt by the developments in the streets of Mexico City, which stood in contrast to the “great material and spiritual richness we have been accumulating, [and] that allows us to progress rapidly in the economic order and . . . the spiritual order.”5 In deploying the inviting and mystical “outstretched hand,” he attempted to suture this most recent and serious fissure in the PRI’s corpus mysticum with a gesture of mass-mediated intimacy. It was his role, as president and paternal figure in chief, to take into account the needs and wants of the Mexican people as a whole, in contrast to what he presented as the narrow and isolated interests of the ’68 Movement. To accept this hand was to recognize the sovereignty of the state and, moreover, to submit.6 Mexico City’s mainstream press quickly praised the speech for its generosity and grace. An editorial in ¡Siempre!, a magazine normally supportive of the ’68 Movement, was titled “The Hand Invites; Let’s All Go!” It argued that that president’s call for sacrifice should be heeded; this was the only reasonable solution to what it euphemistically referred to as the “crisis of Mexican unity” that led to the “negative cultivation of resentment, of affirmation of self-love [amor propio], and minuscule and egotistical vanity.”7 Not all were in accord. Professor Heberto Castillo criticized Díaz Ordaz in a column published a few days later in ¿Por qué? by noting that the men who stood and interrupted the president with applause—ninety times, by his count—were the same ones who had most profited from the country’s exploitative modernization.8 On September 18 the state invalidated even the appearance of university autonomy when ten thousand army troops invaded, arresting hundreds of students and occupying UNAM’s main campus until September 30. The army would also occupy the IPN from September 20 until October 29. Members of the ’68 Movement quickly parodied Díaz Ordaz’s outstretched hand, filling in the perceived emptiness of his gesture with their

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own message. Students at the Zócalo, channeling an incredulous Saint Thomas, chanted for the president to appear on the balcony of the national palace to show them the hand in the flesh. Posters displayed a hand gripping a gun or asserted that “the dead cannot shake hands.” They also parodied the PRI’s conditional hospitality. Not without irony, students charged with security for movement events were referred to as accommodation brigades. One flyer from the student-strike council, the CNH, titled “Invitation to the People of Mexico,” reminded residents, as well as visitors, of violence against youth that contradicted the image of social peace circulated by the Olympic organizers, which included a Dove of Peace logo that appeared on billboards and bumper stickers.9 The PRI’s claim of sovereignty—the party as absolute host—depended on gestures of hospitality. They were not invitations to express doubt regarding its agenda of modernization, however. As the Tlatelolco Massacre and other less well-known events proved, the outstretched hand could also easily become a clenched fist. Hospitality and hostility could be one and the same. Simply defined, hospitality seeks to provide bodily shelter, nourishment, and other household services. Although originating in the West with Greek Stoic and Judeo-Christian thought, the concept evolved as global travel and communication grew. What once was a sacred act, testing the moral fiber of the faithful through sacrifice, now was also provided as a commercial service and factored into macroeconomic calculations. As several cultural critics in the early twentieth century observed, the expansion of capitalist social organization—urbanization in particular—contributed to a growing sense of defamiliarization: a city of strangers. Several of these critics dwelled on the hotel as an archetypal building that appeared to house the many contradictions of modernity’s “transcendental homelessness,” both comfortably and uncomfortably.10 The modern hotel is a public (or semipublic) and private space, democratically accessible and tightly managed, of high-density occupation and anonymous, a site of leisure and display but also of labor and its invisibility. Although it presumes to satisfy the needs and wants of all its guests, such satisfaction takes place out either of sight (housekeeping, maintenance) or at the hands of uniformed personnel who make guests conscious of their bodily and domestic requirements. Whereas the guests are mobile, the workers tend to be anchored by low wages and fixed social status. The modern hotel mimics older forms of hospitality in order to smooth the transition from religious motivation to economic transaction. Guests accrue charges over their stay, to be paid upon departure, so as not to exchange money with staff. Bars, restaurants, and salons are spaces for civil debate but also for illicit

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affairs, signaling the hotel’s ambivalent location within yet also without local laws and customs. This is especially the case for local elites who use the hotel, whether discreetly or for conspicuous consumption. The modern hotel may have created a cosseted space amid the tumult of the globalized city, but one does not stay in business very long by maintaining homeostasis. The hotel must extract something from both guests and workers in order to reproduce itself. Hotels are necessarily unstable spaces, not unlike the cities and nation-states they were called to stand in for by the elites that built and patronized them as habitable symbols of modernity. In two years of preparations for the 1968 Olympics, organizers repeatedly referred to the nation’s “traditional hospitality” when discussing the role that Mexico City’s residents would play in welcoming visitors. It was a turn of phrase with origins not in folklore but in the tourist trade, which touted Mexico as ancient and exotic but with all the modern conveniences. In spite of traditional hospitality’s supposedly historical basis, cajoling on COJO’s part was required to (as one journalist put it) “awaken the natural hospitality of Mexicans” in order to create an “Olympic conscience.”11 Mexico’s normal social order was not collapsed for this “invented tradition.”12 The popular classes required the most instruction, whereas elites, assumed to be arbiters of good taste and conduct, were not directly addressed. Abel Quezada, a cartoonist with a popular following, was contracted to produce a series of posters that were put up throughout Mexico City. Although their subject matter varied overall, they suggested that city and nation were one big, familial home. At the base of each poster the COJO made its prerogative doubly clear: “In offering and providing friendship to all the people of the world, Mexico expects the collaboration and traditional hospitality of all Mexicans for the best achievement of the Games.” This campaign, along with others, thematized hospitality as a moral responsibility and even a sacrifice that required submission to the greater good—as defined by the committee.13 Even when residents chose not to follow through on these expectations, the COJO suggested otherwise in its communications with journalists. Ramírez Vázquez and other officials insisted that even if the hotels under construction did not meet demand, Mexico City’s residents had already offered to host visitors, unprompted and without accepting compensation, apparently.14 The notion of traditional hospitality stemmed from a larger and longerterm managerial impulse in Mexican public life. By the 1960s, tourism was a well-established industry, second in strategic importance only to petroleum, and was thought of by leaders as the “connective tissue” between state, capital, and citizens as they navigated postrevolutionary reconstruc-

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tion, bringing one closer to the other. Transportation and communications infrastructures, built after armed combat ended around 1920, served the dual purpose of national integration and development of the tourism industry. Tourism was also a leading source of direct investment and foreign exchange for the fledgling state.15 The Hotel de México’s owner, Suárez, was a close friend of President Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946–52), who championed tourism, among other modernizing (and self-enriching) pursuits.16 Díaz Ordaz continued this trend; describing tourism as a more authentic and longer-lasting way of engaging foreigners than even music or cinema.17 Recent theorizations of the politics as well as the ethics of hospitality suggest that the host-guest relationship is much more unsettled than COJO or Diaz Ordaz’s rhetoric claimed. Derrida, in order to deconstruct what is both a culturally specific and generally altruistic concept, distinguishes between what he calls “unconditional” and “conditional” hospitality. This dichotomy is a conceit, he admits, since unconditional hospitality is impossible, requiring the host give up his home to the stranger. In unconditional hospitality everything is offered without even asking the stranger’s name. “Name,” for Derrida, refers not only to individual identity but to the state’s governance, or the quantifying and managing of citizens as populations and the erection and protection of territorial boundaries.18 Derrida’s thinking is organized principally around the status of the refugee or undocumented worker in the global North, but it can be supplemented to take into account the estranged status of citizen-guests in Mexico (and other points in the global South). The state’s hospitality was exercised primarily through its social-welfare infrastructure (housing, schools, hospitals), which welcomed citizens as guests in exchange for closer surveillance and supervision of their everyday lives. Mexico’s corporatist political system may also be thought of as an exercise in conditional hospitality: unions and other corporate bodies absorbed citizens’ dissatisfaction and transformed it into evidence of the need for the PRI’s continuing stewardship rather than of its ineptitude. Although it may appear magnanimous, conditional hospitality is an assertion of the host’s identity, property, and authority. To welcome citizen-guests is for the state to assert that it is already “at home.” Furthermore, the sensuousness of hospitality, its focus on bodily comfort, can obscure inhospitable social, political, and economic structures, such as the displacement and dispossession characteristic of Mexico’s capitalist modernization. Siegfried Kracauer’s meditation on the hotel lobby, from a 1922 text on the genre of the detective novel, offers insights into the hospitable affinities and duplicities of the modern state’s corpus mysticum. The German cultural

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critic compared the lobby to a church, the former an “inverted image of the house of God.” For Kracauer, the church is defined by the relationship between believers and faith rather than among believers. As God is sublimely unfathomable, followers go there to meet no one, not even their “host.” The labor of commercial hospitality is likewise meant to be as unobtrusive as possible, so as not to break the illusion of private domesticity. Guests encounter agents of the host, the hotel owner, but not the host himself. Kracauer’s metaphor highlights the ways that hotels—and the modern state—bring multiple populations together without necessarily unifying them: aggregation without true communion. The lobby offers only simulacra of unity and reconciliation.19 In the Hotel Mexico, analogous calls for social integration and peace, such as the “outstretched hand” or “traditional hospitality,” were more often tools of governance than the will of the people. Hospitality, whether conditional or unconditional, is not a one-sided phenomenon, though. As Derrida’s interlocutors in postcolonial and gender studies have argued, to claim citizen-guests (as the biopolitical state must) necessarily introduces instability.20 The guest may overstay his welcome, overuse the resources provided, and even usurp the host, reversing what appear to be formalized roles and ritualized performances. While a hotel may seek to extract money and labor from its guests and workers, the openendedness of all encounters can produce unexpected conflicts and surpluses—inside the spaces claimed by the host. Accordingly, hospitality serves as a sufficiently generous metaphor for describing the negotiation between unequal parties and social relations obscured by custom, ritual, statecraft, or capitalist social organization.

plastic exercise Siqueiros’s March of Humanity began as another mural for another hotel. In the fall of 1964 Siqueiros signed a contract to produce one for Suárez’s Casino de la Selva in Cuernavaca. The impresario was remodeling the hotel, built in the 1930s. The agreed-upon theme, “industry and countryside,” would have resonated for Mexico City elites who frequented the resort town, located an hour’s drive from the capital. The commission came at an opportune time for the sixty-eight-year old Siqueiros, the last surviving member of the so-called Greats of Mexican Muralism (with Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and later Rufino Tamayo). Siqueiros was released from Lecumberri Penitentiary only a few months earlier, after serving almost half of an eight-year sentence. He was arrested in August 1960, presumably for inciting a riot among members of Mexico City’s teachers’

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union, and was charged with “social dissolution.” More likely, he was arrested for comments made abroad at the expense of President Adolfo López Mateos. Like the Virgin of Guadalupe, the leader of the republic was sacrosanct in public discourse. Perversely, Siqueiros, while calling attention to Mexico’s unacknowledged political prisoners, became one. When arrested, he was also in the middle of a large mural for the Museo Nacional de Historia in Chapultepec Castle, a major government commission after many years without one. Siqueiros’s residency at Lecumberri did not curtail his creative output or his ability to make headlines. He continued to work and was regularly visited by members of the press, including Elena Poniatowska and her frequent collaborator, the photojournalist Héctor García. Siqueiros told the New York Times that imprisonment drove him to easel painting, the bourgeois medium he publicly loathed (but also profited from).21 Siqueiros began testing titles—Mexico from Jail, for example, and Mexico in Jail— for an exhibition of his work there, which he signed with his name but also with in jail and cell 36, to distinguish it from his other production, an act of protest but also of commodification.22 As befitted his generous ego, he produced a series of Christ figures and landscapes etched with geological and atomic catastrophe, among other works. Siqueiros also continued to attend to his public image while in Lecumberri. In 1960 the photojournalist García took what would become an iconic photograph of the muralist standing in one of the Lecumberri’s radiating crujías with his left hand raised and punching through the gate to the central patio. A stern gaze meets the camera. His right hand is hidden in his pants pocket for greater visual impact. García angled the camera just above Siqueiros’s head, so that his left arm was dramatically foreshortened, making the distance between his hand and face appear minimal. This photograph and a few others from this collaboration circulated widely and were used to rally international support for his freedom. It was a defiant image, although in many of the other images from that day he appears tired if not defeated. Although some sources suggest that Suárez, with his political influence, negotiated Siqueiros’s expedited release, it is more likely that the artist was granted amnesty as a gesture of state hospitality. It was the end of the six-year election cycle (sexenio), typically a time for presidential liberality as well as premature inaugurations of public-works projects in order to acknowledge their patron. Upon his release, Siqueiros went back to creating murals for Chapultepec Palace and Suárez. Although Siqueiros had prominent defenders abroad, including Pablo Neruda and Norman Mailer, he had limited support from his colleagues at

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figure 9. David Alfaro Siqueiros in Lecumberri Penitentiary, 1960. (Photo © Héctor García; courtesy of Fundación María y Héctor Garcia, A.C., Mexico City.)

home. In addition to his frequently inflammatory remarks in the press, many still remembered his 1945 diatribe, No hay más ruta que la nuestra (There Is No Road but Ours). Siqueiros ungenerously argued that murals were the only truly revolutionary art form and thus the “only route forward” for Mexican artists, a position he would continue to reiterate seeking to stoke the progressive ideals of the Revolution.23 In 1966 Siqueiros dou-

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bled down in his contempt for contemporary aesthetics, abstraction in particular, harshly criticizing the work submitted to a competition sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts.24 He repeated his criticism the following year for a young artists’ show at Mexico City’s new Museum of Modern Art. In spite of Siqueiros’s best efforts, muralism had become by the 1960s a medium more popular with tourists and foreign collectors than with fellow artists. Siqueiros was fighting an anachronistic battle, of realism versus abstraction, that younger artists had already moved beyond. Collaboration and borrowings across creative disciplines (and their techniques and materials) were the norm, as Siqueiros’s own work exhibited. The real change under way was over artists’ new location in this changing landscape, not only in terms of technique but also in terms of patronage. The government shifted much of its spending toward large-scale social-welfare projects. The parallel rise of private galleries meant that artists also increasingly operated in the market. Siqueiros did so as well, embracing new methods and patrons, although without abandoning muralism, which if not en vogue offered him a degree of moral authority (or cover). With the Casino de la Selva convention hall still under construction Siqueiros decided to produce the mural on portable panels that could be installed once it was complete. Suárez built Siqueiros a workshop in Cuernavaca, which the men called La Tallera, where the artist could produce his work as efficiently as possible as well as adhere to a schedule. Throughout his career Siqueiros had dropped commissions to follow his political passions, including fighting for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), a habit that worried Suárez. In order to work on the panels at eye level and dispense with awkward scaffolding, the panels were hoisted using electric derricks over pits dug into the ground, not unlike the pits at a mechanic’s shop. La Tallera also included equipment dedicated for machining metal and mixing the industrial paints that Siqueiros preferred. Leveraging his international reputation, Siqueiros invited professionals from around the world to collaborate on the mural. The team included painters but also metalworkers, chemists, and engineers. The workshop’s technology and foreign apprentices were more than an investment of capital; they signaled a postwar renewal of muralism and, to some degree, of Siqueiros himself. A year into work on the Cuernavaca mural, Suárez received approval to build a hotel in Mexico City, on the site of a park on the Avenida de Los Insurgentes Sur. It was a plan that Rossell had shopped around for over a decade. In a gesture to neighbors, who were losing the little public green space available, permission to build the hotel was granted with the caveat that a cultural center of some sort must be included as part of the project.25

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This was an easy compromise for Suárez, as the center would also have commercial appeal in an era of national culture as tourist draw (and of citizens as virtual tourists). The organizers of Mexico 68 would soon demonstrate with their Op Art–inspired branding and kinetic environments that art and advanced technology were increasingly selling points for cities that presumed to operate globally. (See the previous chapter.) Siqueiros also recognized the potential value of the new site. Insurgentes Sur offered a greater visibility for the mural, to be situated on one of Mexico City’s busiest streets, with countless cars and pedestrians passing by on a daily basis. Mass audiences were an aspiration of earlier phases of Mexican Muralism, which emerged inside government offices and elite schools inaccessible to the wider public. The change in sites and team was also facilitated by the fact that Siqueiros and Rossell already knew each other quite well. Siqueiros had served on the editorial board and had written for the first issue of Espacios: Revista Integral de Planificiación, Arquitectura y Artes Plásticas (Spaces: Integral Magazine of Planning, Architecture and Plastic Arts). Rossell and Lorenzo Carrasco founded the magazine in 1948 while architecture students at UNAM.26 The integration of modern architecture and muralism offered another advantage: working as a senior member of a multidisciplinary creative team. Not unlike planner-architects, Siqueiros sought to reinforce his professional and social purchase during the tumult of the Miracle by seeking collaborations.27 Siqueiros, although a committed muralist, was also committed to reinventing the medium. This was a project that he began in the 1930s, when socially progressive artists first began to think through the possibility of mass audiences, only a decade after the postrevolutionary state began to fund murals. Two major issues remained unresolved for Siqueiros. The first was whether social revolution would (or could) be carried out by the current regime. The second was whether muralism, using artisanal fresco techniques originating in the Italian Renaissance or pre-Hispanic Americas, could appeal to the masses. Early muralism, as practiced by Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro in the 1920s, appeared no different than bespoke and bourgeois easel painting. As Siqueiros argued: “It is not possible to produce revolutionary music, psychologically subversive, with the organ of a church.”28 Muralism’s mode of address appeared decorative, mystical—if not counterrevolutionary, especially when compared with more recently developed media.29 Photography and cinema, in contrast, were highly reproducible, circulated with relative ease, and seemed to duplicate more readily the pleasurable and painful shocks of modernity that would pierce the veil of audiences’ alienation.30

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Even before muralism’s decline as a vanguard medium, Siqueiros was ceaseless in his experimentation. Industry’s technological innovations could help renew muralism even if it was still largely in the hands of capitalists. Siqueiros was alone among the muralists in adopting industrial pigments, including proxylin (cellulose nitrate), a quick-drying plastic-based lacquer made by the DuPont Company normally used on automobile assembly lines. Applied with an airbrush, it produces glossy and flowing surfaces, even more than oil paint does and certainly more than fresco, which absorbs light. Siqueiros was fascinated by petrochemistry in particular, which promised stronger, more flexible, and even electroconductive materials for the making of art that he championed in Espacios.31 Siqueiros also looked to highly reproducible media to activate muralism. He worked with photographs, using them as source material, and photographic projection, to replace preliminary drawings or to introduce distortions in perspective. 32 He also worked with film. As Mari Carmen Ramírez shows, Siqueiros began as early as the 1930s to develop a vocabulary for the synthesis of painting and cinema: “filmable art,” “pictorial cinematographic art.”33 This vocabulary emerged out of collaborations with artists and filmmakers. In Buenos Aires, he worked with a group of Argentine painters (Antonio Berni, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Juan Carlos Castagnino, Enrique Lázaro) to produce his first all-over mural, Ejercicio plástico (1933, ThreeDimensional Exercise). They used a projector to produce exaggerated (and sexually frank) female bodies on the curving walls, floor, and ceiling of a small room in the basement of a private home. Treating art and architecture as continuous surfaces, the mural’s form and subject matter sought to replicate the immersive and urgent quality of cinema.34 Two years earlier in Taxco, a small town outside Mexico City where Siqueiros was under house arrest, he met Sergei Eisenstein. The Soviet filmmaker, a fellow political vanguardist, was there to shoot scenes for his (never-finished) ¡Que Viva Mexico! Through their conversations about revolutionary form, Siqueiros came to think more rigorously about the psychology and affects of the mass spectator.35 Eisenstein had already moved beyond the mere shock of montage in his films to make specific intellectual appeals and employing the technique.36 If Siqueiros was to renew muralism and the Revolution, then he would have to adopt ever–more sophisticated means. Arguably Siqueiros’s most methodical experiment in technical experimentation and collaboration prior to the Hotel de México project was his partnership with Josep Renau, the exiled former head of propaganda for the Spanish Republican army.37 They worked together in 1939 on an antifascist mural, Retrato de la burguesía (Portrait of the Bourgeoisie), for the central

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stairwell of the headquarters of the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate. Retrato de la burguesía is fundamentally a revolutionary montage, a function of Renau’s established practice of photomontage and Siqueiros’s engagement with Eisenstein’s theories. The superimposition of images (several gleaned from photographs published in illustrated magazines such as Life) and the spectator’s movement through the stairwell attempted to mimic certain aspects of cinematic consumption. As envisioned by the artists, the montage slowed spectators down with close-ups and juxtapositions, working on their perceptions in a space that would normally be traveled through hurriedly and distractedly. Siqueiros was not alone in his intermedial experiments. Since the 1930s Mexican architects and artists debated the synthesis of the arts known as integración plástica, as did their peers abroad.38 This global discourse, which called for deep collaboration between both parties, was reenergized in the 1950s and 1960s by new technologies that dissolved rather than erected barriers among disciplines and media. Espacios, edited by Rossell and Carrasco, was a major forum for partisans of plastic integration. Siqueiros wrote in Espacios that he assumed that the spectator was not a “statue or a robot who turns on a fixed axis but is a being who moves in a topography and a course corresponding to that topography, infinite in nature.”39 The physical, perceptual, intellectual, and emotional mobility of the spectator was seen as vital to activating staid muralism. Siqueiros coined the term poliangularidad (polyangular perspective) to account for this mobility.40 Also vital was a three-dimensional composition that encouraged the mobility of the spectator through the use of distortions and multiple perspective points, for example. Siqueiros also increasingly combined sculpture and painting, producing works in relief, on curving surfaces or architectonic panels, as with The March of Humanity. In the 1960s the utopias of the 1930s were up for revision. Artists and architects in Mexico and abroad experimented with new ways of responding to the dynamism of life in their work. They did not, however, abandon aspirations of inciting social transformation, whether progressive or conservative in their politics. Siqueiros was convinced that in the near future stand-alone buildings “would cease to exist” and in their place would appear massive cultural complexes including schools, hospitals, museums, stadiums, theaters, and historical monuments that broadcast a “new social life.”41 Like architects, artists such as Siqueiros began to think at an urban scale and beyond. The Hotel de México project promised to be such a “universal” if not transcendental complex. Before Suárez acquired the project or the idea of the Polyforum was introduced, Siqueiros produced a sketch for

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figure 10. Sketch for the hotel project proposed by Guillermo Rossell de la Lama (eventually the Hotel de México), 1951. (Drawing: David Alfaro Siqueiros; © 2015 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / Sociedad Mexicana de Autores de las Artes Plásticas [SOMAAP], Mexico City; courtesy of Francisco Kochen.)

Rossell’s prospectus. Siqueiros imagined a propeller-shaped hotel sitting on a triangular base. Jagged lines all around suggest crowds, electricity, or seismically unstable ground, all transformative forces.42 The dynamism of the drawing resonated with his vision for muralism as a dynamic medium ready to respond to current social and aesthetic concerns (and his later apocalyptic landscapes from Lecumberri). Although Rossell publicized the working relationship between Siqueiros and Suárez, the “cosmic communion,” it was really the collaboration between the muralist and the architect that was most fruitful. In Rossell, Siqueiros found an ambitious, media-savvy champion. Studying with Mario Pani, among others at UNAM, Rossell saw Mexico City transformed by automobile traffic and other urban flows. The city could no longer be thought of as an island. He wrote: “In our day, no city can be understood if it is not situated among its regional relations, its interdependence with the nation, and the interrelation of that nation with the rest of the world.”43 To this matrix he added advertising and other forms of promotion, which gave the city dense

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yet malleable shape through circulation and repetition of words and images. Rossell gained early professional experience working on Jardines del Pedregal, architects Luis Barragán and Francisco Artigas’s luxury residential subdivision, hosting a live television series in 1953 to market the project. The show supplemented the already-unprecedented print-advertising campaign, based on black-and-white photographs by Armando Salas Portugal, which sold El Pedregal as the epitome of modern luxury in the automobile age.44 This work led to a job at the Ministry of Communications and Public Works publicizing its projects from 1952 to 1958, where he reported to Carlos Lazo, another champion of the city and nation as a socially charged network. In Siqueiros, Rossell found a controversial but well-known artist, a brand name, who shared his formal interests and who would immediately stoke the curiosity of the press. Both men recognized that producing a context and a driving interpretation, including trafficking in ambitious narratives, could be as meaningful as producing monumental or avant-garde work. The Hotel de México was a national allegory above all else: indeed, because it was never completed as designed, it existed most fully as an array of words and images oriented toward persuasion. It offered economic elites and the PRI a “black box” where inputs, whether electricity or civic demands, could be differentiated, prioritized, and even disappeared under a shiny, technological, seemingly liberal and democratic façade. Such opacity was central to the Mexican state’s corporatism and corpus mysticum.

corpus mysticum Construction of the Hotel de México complex began in December 1966. The final plans were Rossell’s, in collaboration with architects Ramón Miquelajauregui and Joaquín Alvarez Ordoñez. (Heberto Castillo, who would be jailed for his participation in the ’68 Movement, served as structural engineer.) The 207-meter hotel tower was a rectangular prism, its skeleton composed of reinforced concrete. It was to feature 1,512 guestrooms, seven restaurants, thirteen bars, six reception halls, a shopping mall, gym, pool, and parking for two thousand cars. The Camino Real Hotel, under construction at the same time, had less than half as many guest rooms. Behind the scenes, underground driveways, moving sidewalks, pneumatic tubes, and closed-circuit television cameras promised to quickly process people, automobiles, information, and images in constant motion. The newspaper El Universal estimated that if all the hotel systems were fully functional, there could potentially be “one thousand people entering the hotel every fifteen minutes.”45 Although only a few meters taller than Mexico City’s

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tallest existing building, the relatively slender Torre Latinoamericana (1956), promotional materials made the hotel appear conspicuously taller. Its height and bulk made it an immediate landmark. Looking over the city from the revolving restaurant planned for the top floor, visitors could be led to believe that the chaotic city could indeed be tamed and orchestrated. Gesturing to the integrated-design impulse of the postwar period as well as to Rossell’s specific interest in urban planning, the Hotel de México was promoted as a high-tech machine for communication and conviviality at potentially any scale, from the local to the universal.46 An exhibition consisting of a scale model, drawings, and photographs of the hotel traveled to Paris, Madrid, and New York in 1971. In Paris, Rossell, accompanied by Siqueiros and former president (now Tourism Minister) Alemán, made a presentation to Franco-Mexican diplomats at the Grand Palais. He positioned the hotel as a “vehicle” for fraternity and reconciling ethnic, linguistic, and geopolitical differences after World War II.47 Rossell also claimed it would do the same for Mexico City’s frayed urban fabric, uniting its various material and social threads after uneven modernization.48 Not unlike the all-encompassing yet conditional nature of PRI’s hospitality, the hotel’s design suggested that there was no need or want that it could not satisfy. This was, of course, as long as those desires were recognized by the Hotel de México as urban machine—and did not disrupt its own reproduction. The modern hotel, as argued, was not a producer of homeostasis; it was extractive of both guests and workers. Optimizing flows was a recurrent theme in Rossell’s architectural practice. At the Eighth Pan-American Congress of Architects, held in Mexico City in 1952 and convened by his mentor Lazo, Rossell and Carrasco presented a paper titled “Tourism as a Font of Energy in Urban Planning.” Its argument corresponded with Minister Lazo’s advocacy of tourism as means of building infrastructures in the interest of the nation. That plannerarchitects like Lazo and their business partners profited handsomely was never mentioned in these plans.49 The presentation also built on Rossell’s 1949 UNAM architecture thesis. For his degree he produced a master plan for Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, a northern border town relocated to build a dam along the Río Grande. The new Guerrero was organized around a “civic-administrative nucleus” (municipal hall) that included a variety of welfare, leisure, and consumption facilities: museum, theater, hotel, school, and church.50 For Rossell, as for other leading Mexican planner-architects, infrastructures and networks were not rhizomatic, with energy ebbing and flowing freely; it was to be channeled through defined hubs and spokes, higher authorities, and existing logics.

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The Hotel de México was not the first modern hotel to have been promoted as a great, hopeful synthesizer. Building a large international tourist hotel is a capital-intensive enterprise; usually incorporating advanced technologies and requiring government subsidies, directly or indirectly.51 Welcoming not only foreign guests but also local elites, it signaled the city’s and the nation’s receptiveness to capitalist modernity. Boosters of such hotels (and industrialization in general) were often business people who conflated public good with personal profit. In 1937, the statesman Alberto Pani published a book introducing his Hotel Reforma, which opened for business the year before and for which his nephew Mario was credited as architect.52 He presented the Reforma as a “typical case” illustrating how the interests of the state and capital could be reconciled, or what he called the “revolutionary function of capital.” Pani benefited from Mexico’s postrevolutionary infrastructure boom and from suspiciously priced real-estate deals in and out of public office. What distinguished his legally nebulous taking of public goods from the robber barons of the Porfiriato was, as he argued, its conscience. He saw himself also practicing misericordia, the Christian notion of mercy and compassion toward others in his business dealings. In Alberto’s usage, though, it amounted to conditional hospitality (and feudal fealty), whereby elites decided for the body politic what was in its best interest. As the state adopted a more outwardly capitalistic orientation after the 1940s, it appeared to violate the Mexican Revolution’s image as a popular and socially progressive uprising—an image the PRI had carefully created to solidify its legitimacy. The institutionalization of the PRI (into a singleparty state) and of the Revolution went hand in hand, thanks to a robust cultural-nationalism project that involved the construction of schools and museums, consolidation of histories and heroes, and the cooperation of economic elites and the national media. At the same time this apparatus made the case for an ongoing or permanent revolution under the vigilant stewardship of the state. Maintaining these multiple contradictions (revolutionary yet institutional, capitalist yet revolutionary) required not only physical intervention on the PRI’s part, whether social-welfare infrastructure or violence, but also an excess of explanation and justification.

cosmic communion Rossell narrated Siqueiros and Suárez’s working relationship on the Hotel de México project as a cosmic communion. Such a narrative proposed that revolutionary ideals and capitalism could continue to coexist in Mexico and that any conflict that might emerge from this process not only could be

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smoothed over but could facilitate even greater social integration and satisfaction. That the communion was cosmic suggested that the material concerns of citizens about the project or their government and its allies should be put aside, as they operated on an elevated and unfathomable plane. At the cosmic scale their concerns were trivial and temporary. Rossell’s narrative, not unlike the PRI’s corpus mysticum, drew attention away from scattered and obscured workings of power on the ground and toward a politically and economically convenient mystery. Both Suárez and Siqueiros had the appropriate credentials to serve as protagonists in this story, more or less. Suárez, a Spanish emigrant, began his career as a grain wholesaler, eventually moving into other businesses, including sugar, cement, and asbestos. He supposedly served in Francisco Villa’s army during the Revolution, although his very sympathetic biographer suggested the relationship more likely involved selling grain to the general rather than combat.53 By the 1960s he was one of Mexico’s top businessmen and counted several presidents of the Republic as friends. Siqueiros’s credentials were appropriately more radical. As a student at the Academia de San Carlos, he led a strike in 1911 protesting the art school’s conservative pedagogy just as Porfirio Díaz’s rule was crumbling and civil war was about to break out. Two years later he joined Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutional Army to defeat Victoriano Huerta, who seized the state in a coup d’etat. He did not return to art study until 1919, and by 1937 Siqueiros enlisted with the antifascist forces in Spain. Most important, Siqueiros and Suárez were both experienced media provocateurs, ready with imaginative stories and pithy quotes to market them. Their cosmic communion was framed mostly in neohumanistic terms. This evolving discourse had circulated in Mexico since the Revolution. Several Mexican politicians and cultural critics championed the “fraternity” of neohumanism in order to bring about national consciousness if not integration, including Alfonso Reyes, José Vasconcelos (Cosmic Race, 1925), Samuel Ramos (Toward a Neo-Humanism, 1940; reissued 1962), and Octavio Paz.54 Neohumanism was revived globally in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the moral and philosophical reckoning after World War II. In addition to reconstruction there was considerable reflection on human goodness and how future international conflict might be prevented.55 Notions of global communication and conviviality were proposed as transcendent solutions and were used to validate phenomena as diverse as universal design and the Mexico City Olympics. The recent circulation of images of Earth from outer space, which fascinated many artists, confirmed this new sublime. As a pamphlet for the Hotel de México announced:56

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We must be aware of the constant traveling of modern man on the surface of this planet in his search for new values, new sensations, and new interests different from those he is used to at home. . . . Let us make tourism an even more important form of expression; let us make it grow by means of art and philosophy, and above all, let us develop it as our best means of getting to know, understand, and appreciate our fellow man on this earth.

Although heterogeneous in motivations and agendas, this neohumanism generally approached humanity monolithically, smoothing over differences and injustices in favor of commonalities. Although Mexico did not play a highly visible role in World War II, this approach certainly resonated with economic elites eager to maintain social peace. In spite of the technologically aided, near-industrial destruction of the war, the benefits of large-scale “development” were once again emphasized. Continued modernization and attendant social displacement (euphemistically “the constant traveling of modern man”) were sold to citizens as not only a national but also a universal good. Neohumanism was not a purely philosophical discourse; it was manifested in diplomacy, cultural policy, and investment. Neohumanism was also part of Siqueiros’s vocabulary, albeit informed by his leftist politics. It figured prominently in his technology-driven renewal of muralism over the decades. In the 1940s Siqueiros argued for a “neorealistic, neohumanistic [nuevo humanismo] art of the present and future,” breaking free of the earlier, seemingly apolitical humanism of Renaissance murals that served as his colleagues’ (distant and indirect) original source.57 Siqueiros’s position was different from the neohumanistic discourse used to contextualize Mexico’s Nueva Presencia (New Image) art of early 1960s, or informalism before that. New Image artists, including Arnold Belkin, Francisco Icaza, and José Luis Cuevas (who later disassociated himself from the group), explored the concept of an isolated postwar human set against the traumas of the century. Their approach, although neither apolitical nor asocial, did not necessarily subscribe to historical materialism. Siqueiros’s position also stood apart from the individualistic neohumanism of Rufino Tamayo’s mural for the Camino Real Hotel. Hombre frente al infinito (1967, Man Facing the Infinite) depicted a lone figure in silhouette with an arm raised toward nothing in particular against an outer-spacescape.58 In the 1950s Siqueiros created three tesserae-mosaic murals for the UNAM rector’s office tower at Ciudad Universitaria, El pueblo a la Universidad, la Universidad al pueblo: Por una cultura nacional neohumanista de profundidad universal (1956, From the People to the University, the University to the People: Toward a Neohumanistic National

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Culture with Universal Depth). Two of the murals, visible from Avenida de los Insurgentes Sur, used human forms with elongated arms and hands to suggest a collective struggle toward knowledge and the betterment of society, a struggle that Siqueiros’s title suggested was universal. By the 1960s, Siqueiros’s neohumanism joined other critical reevaluations of the human condition, spurred by the end of war but also the Cuban Revolution (1953–59) and its geopolitical impact. Che Guevara’s writings on “the New Man and Woman” argued that individuality would not be abolished by the revolutionary state but would remain in tension with the masses. At the same time Guevara argued that the individual was, under capitalism, incomplete.59 Art, as part of a broader revolutionary culture, would parallel the emergent and open-ended status of the individual. At the same time Rafael Squirru, the Argentine art critic and cultural broker for the United States–based Organization of American States (OAS), proposed an alternative “new” man, based in Christian humanism, who pursued capitalism’s chronology: continual development and the reproduction of capital. The OAS sponsored a muscular visual-arts program that championed abstraction as a sign of freedoms under democracy and free markets, dovetailing with the United States’ diplomacy as well as the international art market.60 Neohumanism served transcendent and mundane needs simultaneously. In addition to reconciling institutionalized revolution and capitalism in Mexico, Rossell’s cosmic-communion narrative was also trying to do a bit of damage control, as it became clear that the Hotel de México project would not open in time for the Mexico City Olympics. In characteristic fashion, Rossell used the failure to meet the set deadline to further hype the project but also to prop up its legitimacy (and his own). He reminded observers that the Ciudad Universitaria, which was the architectural showplace of the previous decades, once seemed a white elephant because it was built at a capacity much larger than enrollment at the time. It was now bursting with students. Likewise, the Hotel de México was oriented toward the country’s future. The hotel, Rossell wrote, was an “act of faith,” insisting that average citizens must assume their roles as grateful, patient, and obedient guests.61 According to his logic the magnitude and the arc of Mexican national development was sublime, comprehended only by elite experts like himself. There were limits to communion, even at a cosmic scale. The large and flexible rhetorical carapace that Rossell built could not cover the fact that Siqueiros and Suárez were repeatedly at odds. In letters and memos shuttled between the two and their associates they disagreed over expenses, personnel issues, and the mural’s subject matter.62

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This was not a new issue. As much as Siqueiros advocated integración plástica, there were limits to collaboration too. Jennifer Jolly notes that, in spite of their shared commitment to collectivism as an antidote to capitalist individualism, the partnership between Siqueiros and Renau for the Electricians’ Syndicate eventually broke down, as Siqueiros refused to abandon a supervisory role.63 In the end Renau finished the mural without Siqueiros, who was forced to leave Mexico for a time after being accused of participating in a failed assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky.64 At La Tallera, Suárez installed a surveillance tower, not unlike the one at Lecumberri, from which he tracked the muralist’s progress. Relations between Suárez and the PRI elite also grew strained. As the Hotel de México project faltered, the state refused to offer completion loans on attractive terms. The Hotel de México’s status as a monument to the state’s enlightened sovereignty—and as a black box that could efficiently manage urban flows, social tensions, and political decisions away from public scrutiny—was in question. Siqueiros’s provocative March of Humanity, which was moving forward, contributed to the uncertainty.

open siqueirian hands With 4,600 square meters of painted surface area, The March of Humanity is an ambitious mural that is also sculpture and architecture. Siqueiros’s choice of name for the site, Polyforum, meaning “many” and “meeting place,” highlighted its complex design, an octagonal main hall nested within a twelve-sided polygonal (dodecahedral) superstructure standing four stories (half below grade). The Polyforum engaged Rossell’s ambitions for a heady nexus of art and architecture at the Hotel de México and a forwardlooking Mexico. But even as Siqueiros embraced some of the possibilities presented by technological progress, he criticized Mexico’s political stasis and the unfinished business of the Mexican Revolution with regard to social justice. When compared with the muralist’s larger body of work and political commitments, the Polyforum offered a critical vision of Mexico’s past and future that challenged President Díaz Ordaz’s “outstretched hand” and the PRI’s conditional hospitality, which called for submission and complacency. Although Rossell suggested that the architectural concept for the Polyforum came to Suárez in a dream—a dazzling diamond—its complex geometric envelope had more mundane origins. Rossell had already used polygonal pavilions in several projects, most recently for the commercial space of Centro Residencial Morelos, a housing complex in Mexico City. He

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figure 11. Exterior of the Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, with the Hotel de México in the background, 1971. (Photo © 2015 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / Sociedad Mexicana de Autores de las Artes Plásticas [SOMAAP], Mexico City.)

also could observe the various environments built for the Olympics, which employed novel forms to draw cameras and tourists, seeking to shape perceptions. The Polyforum echoed the Palacio de Deportes (1968) of Félix Candela and his collaborators. It also resonated with Peter Murdoch’s modular, flat-pack information towers for the games. The exterior murals of the Polyforum were painted on prefabricated asbestos-cement panels and held in place by the steel superstructure. They were painted at La Tallera using Carboline-brand acrylic paint and then coated with a synthetic resin. Metal sheets were machined and screwed into the panels to create relief effects.

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A roof constructed out of opaque fiberglass panels spanned the Foro Universal (Universal Forum), the Polyforum’s main hall, where the mural program continued on the inside. Suárez did get to leave his personal stamp. The panels were produced by one of his companies, Eureka, its logo visible on the roof of the Polyforum. Siqueiros’s iconographic and narrative program for the mural is as complex as its architecture, drawing from career-long motifs and preoccupations, aesthetic and political. Outside, the building’s twelve bays are covered with murals that depict a variety of human tensions: ecological degradation and regeneration, spectacle and culture, war and peace, law and disorder, scientific innovation and cataclysm, among others. This organization produces not the continuous narrative of cosmic communion so much as a series of dialectical crossroads in human history. The synthesis of these “theses” and “antitheses” is left unresolved—it may also be thought of as a filmic montage—drawing curious visitors from the street into a sunlit but low-ceilinged and subdued vestibule. The Universal Forum, where the mural continues, is located on the top floor and accessed through two sets of spiral staircases or else elevators. The dark, chapellike Universal Forum is at once cavernous, with booming acoustics, and womblike, with its gently curving walls that produce an ovoid space. With the exception of the floor, all the surfaces are covered with mural panels. Gaps between them were filled with epoxy and talcum to produce a seamless effect. Tiered registers (seven in all) run horizontally across the hemisphere, appearing to converge with and diverge from two polar points. In accordance with Siqueiros’s theory of poliangularidad, the mural can be viewed from multiple spots, with no obvious vantage point preferred. Visitors circumambulate to begin to make sense of a mural that offers no easy interpretation. The lower registers on both sides of the hall, north and south, represent a dense crush of bodies.65 It appears to be a mass migration—whether forced or voluntary is unclear, although their movement is treated as if historical in nature, registering subsistence, struggle, and insecurity. The human forms are highly attenuated, suggesting movement but also the body vulnerable and near the breaking point. Such yearning figures appear throughout Siqueiros’s oeuvre, including his murals for the rector’s tower at the Ciudad Universitaria. The desolate land that the Polyforum’s figures traverse also resembles Siqueiros’s catastrophic landscapes from the period, all its resources extracted or exploded. Normally bombastic, Siqueiros was reticent when discussing the iconography of The March of Humanity, especially after the Tlatelolco Massacre. He did identify four zones: “The March of Humanity toward Democratic

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figure 12. The March of Humanity on Earth and toward the Cosmos, south wall, Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, Mexico City, ca. 1964–71. (David Alfaro Siqueiros; © 2015 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / Sociedad Mexicana de Autores de las Artes Plásticas [SOMAAP], Mexico City. Author photograph.)

Bourgeois Revolution” (lower south wall), “The March of Humanity toward the Revolution of the Future” (lower north), “Peace, Culture and Harmony” (upper south), and “Science and Technology” (upper north). For Siqueiros, neohumanism was an assessment of modernity to date and encompassed an ambivalence toward technology rather than a vague idealistic embrace of its fraternal and communicative potential after World War II à la Rossell. Interspersed throughout The March of Humanity are signs of modernity’s regression or detour: a lynched African-American figure and a “false prophet.” Signs of progress, such as a rocket and space exploration, float above the scene, presiding but disconnected. Marking this distance, upper registers are painted more abstractly. Siqueiros appears not to reject progress: his political beliefs led him to notions of universal history, but he sees it as a slow, painful, and indirect path toward liberating consciousness. Although long unconvinced of the progressive results of the Mexican Revolution, Siqueiros’s doubts grew as he traveled throughout Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s. Mexico appeared to give birth to the first

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great popular upheaval of the twentieth century, but it had not achieved what he saw as the transcendence of the Cuban Revolution. Just as he sought to renew muralism’s revolutionary credentials, Siqueiros sought to renew Mexico’s historical arc. For the murals at Ciudad Universitaria, he included a cartouche on the north mural that included a series of dates that referred to Mexican history: 1520 (the fall of the Aztec Empire), 1810 (independence from Spain), 1857 (the first liberal Constitution), and 1910 (the outbreak of the Revolution). Siqueiros also included “19??,” making it clear that he expected further social transformation before the century’s end. (See fig. 14.) This thinking was obviously of concern to those already enmeshed in the PRI’s institutionalized and presumably unimpeachable revolution. The south side of the Universal Forum, which is of the revolution to come according to Siqueiros, is doubly infernal and can be interpreted as a reference to the Tlatelolco Massacre—Siqueiros was a public supporter of the ’68 Movement—although allegorical allusion is favored over straightforward documentation throughout the mural. The ’68 Movement was a mass movement whose expansive political consciousness rendered it a marauding mob in the eyes of the PRI. The visual-political volatility of The March of Humanity was apparent to outside power brokers as well. Squirru, reviewing the mural in the OAS magazine Américas, understood that “the tyrannical scale of this work produces a sense of visual aggression, . . . as if the unchained crowd could crush us in its furious movement.”66 For Squirru, the alienated masses represented in the mural could easily become the mob that would derail Latin America’s development. Siqueiros’s interest in the crush of bodies comes into sharper focus when we look at the western and eastern poles of the Universal Forum. Two heavily outlined but largely featureless bodies with much-foreshortened arms appear to reach out into (west) and receive from (east) the void of the Universal Forum. Fields of red, orange, and yellow extending from the bodies suggest sunrise, sunset, or some other form of energy. The fields extend to the ceiling, connecting the two figures, suggesting thrust but also reciprocity. The hands also reach out to and receive from Siqueiros’s politicoaesthetic preoccupations. The hand, usually as a clenched fist raised in the air but also in other configurations, was an important feature of leftist iconography in Mexico, as in Europe and the Americas from the early twentieth century. On both sides of the Atlantic, it dramatized resistance to fascism and other evils. It appeared in countless prints by artists associated with the antifascist Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR, League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers) and the later, socially conscious Taller Gráfica Popular

figure 13. The March of Humanity on Earth and toward the Cosmos, east apex, Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, Mexico City, ca. 1964–71. (David Alfaro Siqueiros; © 2015 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / Sociedad Mexicana de Autores de las Artes Plásticas [SOMAAP], Mexico City. Author photograph.)

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figure 14. From the People to the University, the University to the People: Toward a Neohumanistic National Culture with Universal Depth, 1956. (David Alfaro Siqueiros; © 2015 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York / Sociedad Mexicana de Autores de las Artes Plásticas [SOMAAP], Mexico City. Author photograph.)

(TGP, Popular Graphics Workshop). In Leopoldo Méndez’s El gran obstáculo (1936, The Great Obstacle), for example, a colossal fist emerges (surreally or divinely) from the barren earth to present an insurmountable obstacle to a tank driven by men wearing hats decorated with the Nazi swastika, the emblem of a right-wing Mexican political party, and the American dollar sign. The hand also maintained a specific set of meanings in Siqueiros’s oeuvre. In Nuestra imágen actual (1947, Our Present Image), a nude male body, the face obscured by a sack (or stone-faced), is constrained by the picture frame as he thrusts out his open yet tightly cupped (or bound) palms. They move from the darkness of the background into light in the foreground, the fingers spread until they almost reach the frame as well. The work’s title and multiple devices of constraint invite audiences to read it as an allegory of authoritarian Mexico (or a helpless world) and caused a stir upon exhibition.67 Siqueiros’s 1945 self-portrait, El Coronelazo (The Great Colonel), also featured a dramatically foreshortened and highlighted

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partly clenched fist. In this canvas the hand unnaturally emerges from his trunk, almost as if a prosthetic, and appears as if it may break through the canvas into life.68 The painting triumphantly commemorates his participation in the Spanish Republican Army, where he reached the rank of colonel, although it was painted upon his return from exile in Chile after being accused of taking part in an assassination plot against Leon Trotsky. The self-portrait serves as an image of militaristic as well as artistic autoheroism and self-mythologization. Héctor García’s Lecumberri portrait of Siqueiros fifteen years later was an echo. For Siqueiros the hand served as an index of artistic creativity, craftsmanship, and authorship (authority) at the same time as he experimented with new technologies or claimed fields such as urban space that distanced him from traditional artistic production.69 The hand signaled not only resistance, whether to fascism or the PRI’s inadequacies, but also his artistic leadership and his legacy. At the same time, several prominent intellectuals were considering the Mexican Revolution’s legacy and, moreover, its future. In 1946, as part of its postwar reorientation, the PRI, previously operating as the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution) adopted its current name. The following year Alemán Váldes was elected as postrevolutionary Mexico’s first nonmilitary president. Daniel Cosío Villegas’s essay “La crisis de México” (1947) and Alfonso Reyes’s earlier “Palinodia del polvo” (1940) questioned the state’s revolutionary credentials as it leaped headlong into modernization with the election of Alemán.70 By midcentury, the hands of the claustrophobic Our Present Image—very similar to the set of receiving hands in The March of Humanity—gestured as much to lack, uncertainty, questioning, and even beseechment as to leftist or antifascist mobilization. Noticing The March of Humanity’s dissident hand motif, Rossell sought to guide its interpretation even before the mural was completed. He described the Polyforum in 1970 as welcoming visitors with “open Siqueirian hands” that aspired to serve as an “active and permanent platform of communication between those who visit us and those who are interested in analyzing, studying, and discussing everyday problems . . . trying to find what can and should unite, and postponing, surpassing, or discarding that which divides us.”71 Rossell appropriated Siqueiros’s dissident and authorial hands, transforming them into gestures of hospitality, albeit the conditional hospitality of Hotel Mexico, privileging integration and stability over criticality and reciprocity. Rossell perhaps also remembered Díaz’s Ordaz’s paternalistic “outstretched hand” speech to the ’68 Movement and the general public, given its wide dissemination. Siqueiros’s dissident hands had grown only more

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threatening with the Tlatelolco Massacre, in spite of the state’s brutal repression. In a letter from Rossell to Suárez from the end of 1970, the publicistarchitect sought reassurance that a brighter, happier future was on offer by the mural. Rossell asked specifically about the figure of a “sage” man that was to be included (it is not discernible) that would “resolve contemporary social contradictions with the support of science and industrialization.”72 Of course, it was not just the hands in The March of Humanity that presented a problem of interpretation for Rossell. The whole work was dense with iconography and narrative that could be read by its mobile spectators in a variety of ways, including Siqueiros’s more politically strident vision of history and the future. A light-and-sound show was added to the Universal Forum in order to guide visitors’ interpretations. This addition was in spite of Siqueiros’s avowed theory of poliangularidad. Siqueiros told an American journalist: “I want it to be like walking into an immersive environment [caja plástica]. People will become part of the walls and the floor, which will in turn become part of the people.”73 After paying for admission visitors went to the Universal Forum, where they were seated on a rotating platform. Lights were dimmed, and a prerecorded narrative guided the audience through the mural with the help of spotlights. Tomás Segovia, a prominent member of Mexico’s literary scene, was commissioned to write a poem that would serve as the basis for the show. The poem he delivered, however, was deemed too pessimistic a vision of the future, even by Siqueiros. The muralist wrote the script in the end. He also read the first line of the recording, before turning it over to a chorus of men and women: “Forward. . . . Forward on this road, which is the great adventure of our lives. . . . The March of Humanity is a total motion, driven by the tremendous desire to excel.”74 Was this a call to search for a brighter future? Or to forget the past? “Our revolution is not a closed one,” one of the voices says. As a whole, Siqueiros’s script paints a picture of longue-durée human struggle that echoes the mural’s formal characteristics. The apexes of the interior mural, the disembodied receiving and offering hands at each pole, suggest that humanity’s “total motion” toward democracy or social justice may be guided by various helping hands. When we take into account not only The March of Humanity but also Siqueiros’s larger body of work and his dissatisfied politics, those hands may represent the state or future insurgent movements. Three years after the whole of the Hotel de México complex was to be unveiled to receive guests for the Mexico City Olympics, only the Polyforum was inaugurated in 1971. The March of Humanity appeared to capture the national mood, wavering between mournful resignation and

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tentative struggle forward.75 The inauguration was attended by dignitaries and covered by the news media. It was a final opportunity for Siqueiros, Rossell, and Suárez to frame the project’s national significance after so many disappointments and detours. Siqueiros was in an especially uncomfortable position. He and his wife were in a meeting with then–Interior Minister Luis Echeverría on the evening of the October 2 massacre, which attempted to decimate the ’68 Movement. Only a month earlier, in a speech to Mexico’s Congress, Siqueiros called for the end of the “social dissolution” clause of the federal criminal code, reiterating one of the key demands of the student-led prodemocracy movement. Sitting on a dais under an image of the Mexican national seal, it was difficult even for Siqueiros to break out of the constraints of the state’s hospitality. According to media reports, Siqueiros and Echeverría, now president, exchanged an effusive hug. The seventy-fouryear old artist struck a conciliatory tone rather than expressing outrage. He did so out of either fatigue or fear of reprisal. Rossell, the practiced publicist, stayed on message: the Hotel de México as the site of a cosmic communion between Siqueiros and Suárez, housing the contradictions of institutionalized revolution and capital. Addressing the president directly in his welcoming speech, Rossell redoubled his mystical metaphor: “We want to tell you, Mr. President, that this project has vibrated and continues to vibrate with an elevated mysticism of labor, and fervent desire, and emotion for serving a superior cause.”76 He continued that the thousands of laborers involved have worked as a team, . . . overcoming their respective philosophical and political differences, in a choral act of unity and creative dialog, all articulating their confidence in Mexico and its institutions, in the search for and consolidation of our values, in peace and with eloquent respect for the rights of others.77

The architect testified to the Polyforum’s status as a monument that would stand the test of time. He emphasized evolution—time at an epic scale, minimizing historical rupture or even specificity. Suárez echoed Rossell’s assessment of the project’s monumentality and reiterated the complex’s ability to meet Mexican expectations regardless of its partial completion: “ If this work comes in the least close to the dimension of the Mexican that we want and that already exists,” he said, “then we are satisfied.”78 In the state-run Hotel Mexico citizens were to be satisfied regardless of whether care or comfort ever materialized. The connection between the Polyforum as part of the incomplete Hotel de México and the PRI’s Hotel Mexico was clear enough that Echeverría

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assumed the role of armchair art critic in order to guide its reception as well. If Rossell sought to stretch out time, minimizing the Tlatelolco Massacre, then the president sought to erase history altogether. Echeverría proposed in his speech a purely formal interpretation of The March of Humanity, avoiding any comment on subject matter, theme, or context. “I am not a specialist in artistic matters,” he told his audience, “but I consider this work to be full, profound, fecund, and projecting toward the future.”79 He reiterated one of the PRI’s founding operating principles, that citizens’ satisfaction (and even salvation) lay in the party’s perpetual sovereignty. Such an amnesiac approach suited Echeverría’s administration. Within six months of his assuming office at the end of 1970, the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo Leon in Monterrey was shut down by students protesting encroachments on university autonomy by the state governor. On June 10 in Mexico City protesters assembled in solidarity with the students in Monterrey and also to mark the release of ’68 Movement prisoners, who were granted amnesty by Echeverría as part of his “democratic aperture.” Paramilitaries trained to prevent another ’68 Movement from forming attacked the demonstration, leaving approximately twenty-five dead. At the same time Echeverría oversaw a clandestine war against leftist insurgents, including some radicalized by the Tlatelolco Massacre. Mexico’s arts community approached the Polyforum ambivalently at best. Several critics, including Raquel Tibol and Federico Silva, openly questioned its merits in the press.80 In keeping with a general hostility toward muralism and the creative straitjacket that it now stood for, the Polyforum was interpreted as a tomb for the long-abandoned notion of a single School of Mexican Painting headed by Siqueiros or Rivera.81 Such criticism was a function of Siqueiros’s heated rhetoric and frayed relations over the years but was also a function of a shifting artistic vanguard that, not unlike Mexico’s architectural culture, underwent significant changes from the 1940s on. Such changes involved questioning the status of modernist techniques and the social purchase for their work. It was less a “rupture” between realists and abstractionists, as previously historicized.82 The arts community was now more outwardly and uniformly cosmopolitan (although not without abandoning nationalist tendencies in some camps). In contact with peers abroad, artists experimented with new visual, spatial, and bodily media (kinetic, performance, and mail art). There were many routes available to Mexican artists, even if government and the market lagged in recognizing them.83 As José Luis Cuevas argued in 1958, the Mexican art world needed “broad highways leading out to the rest of the world, rather than narrow trails connecting one adobe village with another.”84

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Comparing Díaz Ordaz’s “outstretched hand” and Echeverría’s armchair criticism with the hand as sign in Siqueiros’s murals and paintings—and their place in broader visual and spatial culture—highlights the aesthetic but also the political and economic stakes of human encounter and conviviality, asymmetries of power, and the stories told about them that may buttress or challenge these structures and rituals. Gestures depend not only on hands but also on communities to interpret them; both are bodies in motion. In many of Siqueiros’s works, hands are an ambivalent sign, but they invite (if not demand) response nonetheless. The hands of Siqueiros may be informed by hyperbole, self-interest, and ego, but they do not veil (paternal) authority or, worse yet, violence. Events such as the Tlatelolco Massacre, but more so the routine violence of Mexico’s modernization and the PRI’s authoritarianism, suggest a sociopolitical logic contrary to most definitions of the human or most revivals of the humanistic. The unfinished Hotel de México, skeletal embodiment of the PRI’s conditional hospitality, cannot be read without The March of Humanity’s image of pleading, reaching, bound, punching, warning, exhausted hands as well. These hands invite and clear room for competing notions of social organization, history, and the future. In a historically indirect but evocative manner, “open, Siqueirian hands” may be understood as a belated gesture of the ’68 Movement’s struggle to navigate a modernized Mexico City, make sense of it, and appeal to the public. As Ramírez Vázquez reminded the world during his 1967 Chicago press conference: “The Olympic Games celebrated here must be a festival for all nations but must also be marked with the seal of the house in which they are celebrated.”85 In order to assert its sovereign status, the host must seek guests; it must leave its seal on the house for all to read and recognize. The encounter between host and guest is governed by rituals and other orderly performances meant to smooth the transition and obscure asymmetries of power and wealth. However, even conditional hospitality entails risks: that the house (or homeland) may be claimed or contested by guests and new orders of conviviality established. In its most spectacular forms, such as the Hotel de México, conditional hospitality produces an excess of maneuvers and meanings that destabilize what once appeared to be so rigid a structure. The tremendous throughput advertised—bodies, information, money, provisions, cosmic energies—produced surpluses in spite of any logic of capitalistic management and extraction. Rossell, in a speech given in 1971, acknowledged as much: the Hotel de México was not disconnected from “that floating population that day by day grows in every corner of our globe and that moves, disorderly, unhinging [city] services and provoking

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anarchy.”86 The most disruptive guest of all may be the one, like the ’68 Movement, that rejects the host’s hospitality and notions of satisfaction outright, while maintaining a toehold in the home. The PRI’s calculated distribution of equality and inequality, its cost-benefit approach to citizenship over formal right and responsibility, created a space of continual negotiation between the party and the populations it sought to govern.87 In other words, it created a space that the ’68 Movement, and previous and subsequent social and labor movements, could inhabit and remake according to their own spatiopolitical imaginations. The ’68 Movement, as will be described in the next two chapters, refused to be satisfied with the political status quo. With its street- and mediasavvy praxis, which sought to expose the inner workings of the PRI and its partnership with national elites, the ’68 Movement sought to hijack and divert buses and traffic, the city’s flows, but also the leaps of faith required by Mexico’s uneven Miracle and the corpus mysticum of corporatist and illegitimate politics at an operational level. To harness existing infrastructures, rhetoric, and iconography was to clearly demonstrate that transformation could originate from inside and that seeds of change did not lie outside the nation or in the ether—through cosmic communion or messianic salvation—but on the ground: by winning the street—or ganar la calle, as a popular movement slogan called for.

5. Satellites If there is any hope that . . . states will be renewed in order to promote the public interest . . . we will find that hope mainly in civil society. The little that has been accomplished recently in the key task of . . . questioning the absolutism of the market has come from civil society. However, who can say today what should be understood by “civil society”? —néstor garcía canclini, “A Modernization That Delays” (1994)

For the 1968 Mexico City Olympics the organizers and government worked to produce an alluring, cohesive, and easily consumable image of Mexico. This project consisted of small pockets of formally novel, photogenic architecture and urban beautification scattered throughout the city that stood in for a country not yet thoroughly modernized or democratic. These sites were linked physically and visually via manicured roads framed through automobile windshields and, for most audiences, the continuity editing of film and television. Such editing smoothed over the discontinuity inherent in moving among disparate sites and likewise the disconnect between this carefully crafted moving image and the lived reality of most residents. Artfully constructed, employing advanced architectural and communication technologies, the urban tableau offered by Mexico 68 was not without physical seams and social fissures. Everyday Mexico City was a collage of distinct neighborhoods and residents with delimited and unequal rights to move through the city and society based on economic and political status (as well as gender and ethnicity). The ’68 Movement’s tactics stressed this contradiction between the mediated boundlessness of the Olympics and the limited mobility of everyday life. One of the movement’s key slogans was GANAR LA CALLE (Win the Street). This was more than an appealing and memorable turn of phrase. The street was the connective tissue of the city, which had grown swiftly though unevenly over the decades. Clogged with pedestrians, automobiles, and advertisements, it figured prominently in the imaginations of planner-architects who aspired to manage what they perceived as illogical and inefficient urban flows, as well as in the fancy of government officials who found it threatening. In “miraculous” but authoritarian Mexico, the street remained more or less accessible as public space and, moreover, unpredictable. Observing the preparations for the Olympics 133

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and drawing from its participants’ own urban experience, the ’68 Movement developed an array of marches, demonstrations, songs, graphics, and films that traveled through these same circuits but exceeded their officially programmed capacities, connections, and cultural codes. The secondary and university students who made up the core of ’68 Movement participants experienced Mexico City in a particular way: as part of Mexico’s expanded middle classes. Many of the students at the IPN and affiliated schools were not uniformly middle-class in the Euro-North American sense, however; they aspired to this status through their studies, expectations of professional jobs, and participation in consumer culture. The middle classes occupied a unique position in the uneven landscape of the city and the nation. Because they did not form a critical social mass until after 1940, they were not part of Mexico’s postrevolutionary pact between state, peasants, urban workers, and the military in the 1920s. That pact eventually delivered political stability but at the cost of full-fledged democracy, including a weak civil society. Although granted more room for maneuver by the state than most constituencies, given their important role in driving Mexico’s modernization through skilled labor and consumption, many in the middle classes found themselves lacking recourse in the corporatist political system established.1 Every citizen, community, and industry—including students—presumably had a place and was “represented” by unions, confederations, and other official groups. However, this system largely insulated the state by absorbing constituent demands and grew more insular as the PRI sought to institutionalize its hold on power. Several of these groups were presided over by corrupt bosses who sought to either co-opt or eradicate dissidence within their ranks. The social movements that the state responded most violently to in the 1950s and 1960s— medics, teachers, railroad, electrical and telegraph workers—were those that not only sought wage increases and other economic concessions but also called attention to corporatism’s cronyism and de-facto disenfranchisement of citizens.2 In addition, since the 1930s Mexico City’s residents had had their municipal representation diluted in favor of the Federal District, managed by the state.3 Further complicating matters, by the 1960s the Mexican economic Miracle was beginning to wane, and students were less secure in assuming or maintaining a middle-class status. Although the rhetoric of citizenship in Mexico, as in many nation-states, turns on claims of community and universality, its practice is differentiated by a variety of factors. Put another way, the PRI’s corporatism integrated the body politic—pretending to represent every citizen, accommodate every interest—yet at the same time differentiated within it by privileging

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certain groups over others or playing them against one another.4 In her recent study of the middle classes in postwar Mexico, Louise Walker argues that the relationship between the PRI and these constituents, some 20 to 30 percent of the population by 1968, was mutually beneficial but not without conflict.5 In his 1968 State of the Republic speech, less than a month before the Tlatelolco Massacre, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz spoke to the ’68 Movement but also to the middle classes: “Care should be taken to make clear that no single individual, no single group, no single social class, as rich or powerful as they are or claim to be, is master of Mexico’s destiny.”6 The mostly middle-class ’68 Movement, which in the PRI’s view owed its vitality if not its very existence to the state, was unwilling to go with the official flow. Integrative differentiation was an impulse of the Mexican state’s governance but also of the country’s capitalist urbanization, led by the politicians, urban experts, and investors, often working in concert. The vision of Mexico City advanced by planner-architect-speculator Mario Pani and his colleagues was one in which various populations—although disproportionately the poor, small merchants, ambulant vendors, and students—would be pushed out of the urban core and into the periphery in order to clear room for higher-value land uses that would spur further urban and economic development. Such displacement was also an opportunity to rationalize the city’s transportation system, facilitating (mostly automobile) movement between the core and peripheral developments, such as Ciudad Satélite (Satellite City), for which Pani authored the master plan in 1954. Indeed, Pani’s vision may be thought of as a process of satellitization, by which populations not valued highly by the state and its allies were dispersed and meant to orbit around the core. The campuses built for Mexico’s two major universities in the 1950s and 1960s at the southern and northern edges of Mexico City should be thought of as satellite cities. The Zacatenco campus for IPN and the Ciudad Universitaria (CU) for UNAM were laboratories for producing a modern labor force—productive and acquisitive—and showplaces for the Mexican government’s magnanimity, ensuring that PRI’s modernization plans were realized and that the party’s agents remained its stewards. The campuses also appeared to confirm the status of students as satellites in Mexican society. Over the same period youth was reconstructed as a social category by the government, market, academia, and young people themselves. The importance of youth to national economic development paradoxically required their marginalization and special scrutiny and supervision. Although more privileged than most other populations, students experienced satellitization firsthand: displaced to peripheral campuses, removed

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from centers of power and influence, and subject to an undependable and at times dangerous public-transit system. As the previous chapter argued, the Mexican state practiced a conditional hospitality, offering citizens gestures of welfare and liberality so long as they played their predetermined, narrowly defined roles (guests, satellites) while reinforcing its sovereignty. At the same time, the postrevolutionary state’s robust cultural nationalism, manifest in arts patronage, schools, museums, and national-heritage sites, of which higher education was an important component, highlighted the tremendous power exercised in producing and consuming culture, a giveand-take that was by no means unilateral.7 After outlining the reconstruction of youth as a social category at midcentury and the spatial and cultural properties of the university students’ satellitization, this chapter focuses on the ’68 Movement’s mobilization through various marches and occupations of public space. The street—and more widely Mexico City—was central to the ’68 Movement’s spatiopolitical imagination: a city continually remade by its formal and informal use and a civil society continually in formation, with many routes to modernization as well as to greater democracy.

satellite cities On October 10, 1968, the “youth of Mexico welcomed the youth of the world” at the Zócalo. This was not a spontaneous event but a spectacle organized for the benefit of the press, which had already arrived en masse to cover the impending Olympics. Thousands of young men dressed in white leotards and slippers fanned across the immense plaza, settling into precise rows and columns. For forty minutes they performed synchronized calisthenics and chants. The streets adjacent to the plaza were closed to traffic, and ethnic Tlaxcaltecans created a hundred-meter-long carpet of flower petals and tinted sawdust on the pavement in an indigenous design. The event, in addition to displaying athletic virtuosity and folkloric detail, had an eerily martial quality—especially as coming only eight days after the Tlatelolco Massacre. As the organizing committee chair, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, told the New York Times: “There are only two occasions when we see the youth of the world parading in uniform: when they go to war, and at the Olympics.”8 Mexico City’s historic center had evolved into a militarized zone since the emergence of the ’68 Movement in July. The welcome event offered a choreographed performance of youth at the very moment when the social category was undergoing an unwieldy transformation. The COJO proudly noted in its final report to the IOC that there were more Mexican citizens under the age of seventeen in 1967 than any other

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demographic grouping. At the same time, as the report also acknowledged: “The high proportion of youth presents a very complex problem for educational authorities.”9 Ramírez Vázquez told Olympic boosters in a speech earlier in the summer that the games would “stimulate youth to carry out the old and sage proverb that with a healthy body one achieves a healthy mind.” Alluding to the social unrest of the 1960s, especially among youth, he added: “healthy minds not so that they might become unhinged by the traumas provoked by uncertainty and fear but so that they unfold the superior creative powers of the spirit for the moral elevation of society.”10 His views were not idiosyncratic. In July 1968, before students mobilized, President Díaz Ordaz addressed the issue of “liberty with responsibility” for what he called a “privileged youth,” a population that should already be satisfied with their situation and would appear ungrateful otherwise.11 Throughout the summer the ’68 Movement was accused of being not only ungrateful but also naive and selfish. Youth were suspicious, with officials from the rank of president on down referring to the dark and occult origins of the movement, suggesting that it was directed by outside provocateurs, which allegedly ranged from foreign intelligence agencies (CIA, KGB) to communist revolutionaries (Maoists, Trotskyites). In addition to playing on Cold War anticommunist anxieties, such charges also implied that dissidence could not originate authentically from inside Mexico.12 Although the family was still the primary domain of children and young adults, with parents legally and morally responsible for their children, the state increasingly sought greater involvement in their socialization. During this time it undertook new educational and cultural programs, including a kindergarten movement and the distribution of standardized textbooks. These were coordinated by the Instituto Nacional de la Juventud Mexicana (INJM, National Institute for Mexican Youth), founded in 1950. The institute’s programming was inherently contradictory. On the one hand it approached youth as key actors in a national narrative of progress that deemphasized social differences and challenges, or the bildungsroman of Mexico’s modernization. At the same time they were neither fully adults nor citizens and required intensive tutelage by the state’s social-welfare infrastructure. The voting age in 1968 was twenty-one for single people, eighteen for those who were married. This did not change until 1970, when the age was lowered to eighteen regardless of marital status. Even as the INJM sought to encompass all youth, it targeted urban youth, drawing from an emerging social-scientific discourse that emphasized their susceptibility to negative external factors. In 1953 the UNAM criminologist Mariano Ruíz-Funes presented an environmental argument

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for the rise in juvenile delinquency in Mexico City. He identified specific neighborhoods in the capital, particularly where poor housing, unhygienic conditions, and “promiscuity” predominated.13 Expanding on his research, the UNAM sociologist Héctor Solís Quiroga argued that most delinquency was committed by minors who spent a majority of their time on the street, which was loosely defined as any space outside the family home or school.14 The middle classes were not exempt from this conclusion, as the mainstream media gradually employed the trope of youth crisis for all young people.15 Just as the state sought greater involvement, business interests also sought to capitalize on the growth of youth as prodigious creators and consumers of music, literature, and fashion.16 Zona Rosa, with its abundance of shops, cafes, and art galleries, was one of the main gathering spaces for middle-class youth in the 1950s and 1960s. Especially popular were the cafés cantantes, coffee shops that also hosted live music. Such informal conviviality and mobility among youth attracted the attention of the Mexico City regent Ernesto Uruchurtu (1952–66). The police kept close tabs on these spaces, forcing several cafés cantantes to close. In these experts’ view, strict management of the street led directly to social peace. This was a view shared by planner-architects, most prominently Mario Pani, who supervised the design of several components of the social infrastructure, including CU. It was clear that the street, broadly defined, remained relatively open and less manageable as compared with other public spaces. In other words, the state did not even presume to control it. At the same time, the mass mediation of publics and spaces, even though virtual, was proving just as worrisome to officials. Although the Mexican government was prodevelopment, this is not to say that the interests of state and capital were always congruent. The party increasingly perceived film and television less as instruments for national integration and more often as exercising a direct and powerful influence over viewers for producers’ and advertisers’ benefit. A whole genre of youth melodramas, often centered on the street and juvenile delinquency, emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, including Juventud desenfrenada (1956, Unbridled Youth, directed by José Díaz Morales), Juventud rebelde (1961, Rebel Youth, directed by Julián Soler), and the most popular, Los caifanes (1967, The Outsiders, directed by Juan Ibáñez).17 In Los caifanes, which will be discussed in the following chapter, the street (and the car) offer the possibility not only of transport but even of perceptual and social liberation. The sociologist Solís Quiroga would go on to suggest that the film industry tended to glorify street life without delineating the personal and social costs. Several

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legislators were led to believe that familial controls over media consumption were proving insufficient. In the 1960s the government reasserted its presumed monopoly on national culture, strengthening laws pertaining to radio to grant it mandatory television airtime and censorship privileges, among others.18 Several high-profile instances of censorship resulted, including when Alejandro Jodorowsky’s countercultural Fando y Lis stirred a riot at the Acapulco Film Festival in 1968 and was promptly banned. Mexico City’s two new university campuses—promoted heavily in the press and major government investments involving the country’s leading modernist architects—made manifest the official anxieties over youth crisis concretely and symbolically, among more general concerns and ambitions for modernization. UNAM’s CU was completed in 1952, and the Zacatenco campus for the IPN in 1964. Both institutions played vital roles in the formation of the middle classes necessary to continue the so-called Mexican Miracle, producing professionals and skilled technicians. Press coverage for the most part celebrated the skillful integration of modern art and architecture, as well as international and national aesthetics. Architects and planners who participated in these projects were also eager to reinforce their roles as expert mediators. This claim of expertise extended to society at large and thus to the unresolved status of youth who were expected to lead Mexico forward. The campuses were located at the edges of Mexico City, giving the universities and students the room required to grow. The architects and planners also succeeded in moving students farther away from the nation’s centers of political and economic power, where they would be less likely to disrupt their flows. Conflicts between the Mexican government and student groups, and among liberal and conservative student groups were not uncommon, leading to protests both on campus and beyond. The state regularly infiltrated campuses, directly using agents and indirectly using patronage and other forms of conditional hospitality.19 Both CU and Zacatenco were designed as self-sufficient units that could thrive with few links to the rest of the city. Nevertheless, they were promoted as conduits for Mexico’s continued modernization as well as spaces for spontaneous and healthy conviviality—although closely stage-managed by the state. The new campuses proposed, rather forcefully, a new relationship between student body and urban fabric, and put forward to youth the terms of citizenship under the PRI: integrated yet differentiated, peripheral yet tethered. The IPN was founded in 1936, consolidating various existing technical and vocational institutes in Mexico City at its Casco de Santo Tomás campus, near Tlatelolco. By the 1950s this campus was deemed too small and technologically inadequate to satisfy Mexico’s modernization plans, and thus construction on

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the supplemental Zacatenco campus began in 1957. In addition to its location nearer to new industrial parks built in Mexico City’s north, architect Reinaldo Pérez Rayón’s design exhibited the government’s aspirations of boundless technoeconomic expansion. As the city’s master planner from 1950 to 1960, Pérez Rayón was well aware of the consequences of the city’s unchecked growth as well as the state’s desire to coordinate it more closely. The main academic buildings at Zacatenco, which housed classrooms, laboratories, and offices, were laid out in a row according to an orthogonal plan. The buildings’ interiors were modular, consisting of prefabricated walls and floor and ceiling panels, so that they could be reconfigured as needs for space changed. The three-to-four-story buildings stood on piers that created breezeways allowing students and faculty to see clear across the campus at ground level.20 These design choices also implied that the institution could grow as the economy grew, in a logical, lockstep progression of volumes and configurations. Such an arrangement recalled a factory assembly line or rail lines: an orderly future into an endless horizon. However, Zacatenco’s architecture was more a promise than concrete evidence of a full-blown transformation of Mexican society or even of the construction industry. Although the design suggested industrial production, the surplus of unskilled labor in Mexico and the expense of imported technology ensured that construction remained relatively artisanal. This did not prevent a celebratory catalog published on the occasion of Zacatenco’s inauguration attesting to Mexico’s wholesale industrialization and the promise that the IPN would lead the proletariat into new middle classes, a promise that the state struggled to keep.21 UNAM CU’s design and reception were also framed in terms of optimistic national transformation. The symbolism of CU was more significant given its proximity and architectural reference to southern Mexico City’s ancient lava fields: the technologically aided imposition of modernity on wasteland (páramo). Furthermore, dozens of teams of Mexican architects, engineers, and artists participated in this taming of nature and history, making it a collective enterprise that would extend to its students. Supervising architects Pani and Enrique del Moral envisioned the “creation of physical, moral, and pedagogical unity that permits the easy communication among the diverse schools and, accordingly, the conviviality of students, professors, and researchers.”22 Domestic and foreign journalists were eager audiences, covering the project repeatedly and enthusiastically for the most part.23 But what of these claims of unity? Conviviality, a term with a democratic aura among modernist architects, signaled chance encounter, jovial companionship, and unmeasured hospitality; but for whom, by whom, and to what end at CU?

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figure 15. Academic building, Zacatenco campus, Instituto Nacional Politécnico, Mexico City, ca. 1964. (Photo: Guillermo Zamora.)

Until CU’s completion, UNAM was located in central Mexico City, blocks from the Zócalo. Beginning in the 1940s leaders inside and outside the university began to call for a modern campus befitting Mexico’s most prestigious university, which was distributed among former palaces, convents, and hospitals. Practical reasons were given for the move, including outdated technology and rising enrollment; however, there was also a sociomoral case made. This argument came from the pages of Arquitectura/ México, Pani’s bully pulpit. Old laboratories and cramped lecture halls were problematic but so too were apparently corrosive urban pastimes and associations. In the barrio universitario used-book stores, food stands, cantinas, and pool halls dotted the core’s narrow streets. The historian and critic

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Antonio Acevedo Escobedo, a frequent contributor to Arquitectura/México, contended that such amenities divided the student body rather than integrated it. Although UNAM was located in the city’s (if not the nation’s) hub for transport, commerce, and sociability, Acevedo Escobedo only saw “dispersion” and a lack of esprit de corps among the students of various disciplines.24 Conversations, consumption, and recreation took place in the street—“promiscuously,” in his view—rather than in dedicated and supervised spaces. This led to “collisions” with passersby that could potentially lead to larger disturbances and even criminal acts. What he meant was that the students disrupted the flows of the city that planner-architects and the state presumed to manage. As much as the colonial- and independence-era buildings were beautiful and testaments to the country’s architectural traditions, he acknowledged, they would have to be abandoned (with the exception of the UNAM-affiliated art school, which did not move to CU). What Acevedo Escobedo’s article did not mention was that Pani was a longtime champion of redevelopment in central Mexico City. Pani envisioned a core that accommodated office buildings, hotels, and high-end retail. Poorer residents and small merchants displaced by these plans were to be organized in ostensibly self-sufficient células urbanas, urban cells. These took shape as large apartment complexes, such as Pani-designed multifamiliares (various from 1949 to 1966), or more loosely defined bedroom communities, such as Ciudad Satélite. A schema published in Arquitectura/ México in 1961 along with plans for Nonoalco-Tlatelolco showed the city progressively broken into smaller units that would orbit around the core.25 The schema glided over Pani’s and his associates’ call to widen downtown streets to speed up public transit, much of which passed through the core, by demolishing historical buildings. The plan was abandoned only when the city’s political and business elites could not reconcile their competing interests.26 The master plan for CU, built in a part of Mexico City groomed for automobile-dependent development, tested several theories of urban mobility popular in this period. Pani was especially fond of the theories of Hermann Herrey. An architect and stage designer, Herrey emigrated to the United States at the behest of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in 1940 and published several articles on traffic congestion.27 He proposed eschewing intersections, with traffic theoretically proceeding without full stops and with minimal delays. At CU cars circulate through a network of looping one-way streets. This was not simply a matter of providing picturesque windshield vistas. Street corners were eliminated, the traditional spaces of informal encounter and conviviality, and sites of on-the-ground orientation

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figure 16. Aerial view of University City, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, 1952. (Photo: Compañía Mexicana Aerofoto; © Fundación ICA, A.C., Mexico City.)

and navigation. Writing in 1959, Pani argued that it was architects’ responsibility to repatriate public spaces that had been “hijacked” by unintended or unauthorized uses such as informal assembly, housing, and commerce.28 In a later series of articles on “urban problems” published in 1973, Pani distilled his own and his modernist colleagues’ ambitions for the street as a means of communication but also of management. Perhaps fortified by memory of the ’68 Movement, Pani wrote: “It is obvious that the criteria for a street should change radically; it should be dedicated exclusively to high-speed vehicles, eliminating from it pedestrians, who should reconquer the rest of [city] space. . . . The street should convert itself into an urban highway.”29 Mexico City students’ status as satellites was directly and repeatedly experienced through their commute to campus on such “urban highways.” Besides private cars, buses and trolleys were the only ways to reach remote CU and Zacatenco.30 Transit was a lightning rod for student protest throughout the 1960s. This situation had to do with the impracticalities of travel (cost, safety, schedule) and arose because this system was yet another

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manifestation of Mexico’s state-sanctioned cronyism. Buses were controlled by the Alianza de Camioneros, a group of owners with close ties to the federal government. Throughout his regency Uruchurtu used the system to earn and spend political capital. Beginning in the late 1950s he regularized routes and fares through a governing body that invested in street improvements but generally reduced competition by granting exclusive operating licenses. Likewise, students used buses as their own bargaining chips. On April 7, 1968, thirty-one buses were commandeered from the Insurgentes-Lindavista line, which ran from the north of the city, near the IPN, to the south, near UNAM. They were not returned until two hundred fifty thousand pesos were granted to the family of a student from a UNAM preparatory school who was negligently run over by a driver. When nine days later a student from another preparatory school was killed in a bus accident, his classmates commandeered ten buses. By the time the ’68 Movement crystallized, in late July, it was clear that the street was the most visible, accessible, malleable (physically and virtually) space for political self-representation. It was essential to ganar la calle.

winning the street In early August the CNH broke from existing student organizations at the UNAM and IPN. This was both a practical and a symbolic maneuver. For one thing, the strike council could not depend on the Federación Nacional de Estudiantes Técnicos (FNET, National Federation of Technical Studies) or the Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación (MURO, University Movement of Renovated Orientation), groups linked to the state and to the political right, respectively, to serve its needs and not to report its plans to the authorities. Such autonomy initiated a process of self-representation that allowed it to challenge the PRI’s projection of hegemony: not all citizens consented to its single-party rule. It was also a first step toward seeking solidarity with other sectors of Mexican society dissatisfied with the status quo. Possible alliances would not be routed through a political system that was designed to misdirect connections among communities in spite of its rhetoric of national communion. The PRI’s false assumption of communion, and the ’68 Movement’s refusal of its cunning hospitality, drove the state to insist that the prodemocracy movement either did not exist or was a foreign plot. The state could recognize the CNH only as an unlawful body and its members as criminals. Accordingly, the strike council operated as an insurgency, to demonstrate to both the state and fellow citizens that it acted methodically and deliberately.

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The CNH was also careful to attract as many supporters under its banner without submitting to or reproducing the PRI’s logic, compromising its budding legitimacy. The ’68 Movement’s public demands to disband the riot police (granaderos), to grant liberty for political prisoners (denied by the state to exist), and to repeal the criminal code’s social-dissolution articles (145 and 145 bis) brought to light the obverse of hospitality. Coercion, unjust imprisonment, and violence lurked behind the state’s accommodation and patronage. The ’68 Movement asserted that it was neither criminal nor inadvertent. To achieve this goal the ’68 Movement operated or at least appeared to operate collectively, publicly, and, in a nod to the state and to the Olympics’ organizers, aspiring to the largest audience possible. The CNH set dates, times, and locations for their actions and advertised them widely. The council also demanded that any dialog with the state be broadcast on radio and television. Back-channel negotiations, a strategy preferred by the PRI for co-opting challengers, were refused. Certainly some factions of the movement—as well as government proxies posing as students—committed unlawful acts. However, the movement’s alleged crimes of violence and property were most often a matter of aggressively appropriating and manipulating the signs of authority and legitimacy (visual, linguistic, affective) normally wielded by the state. Nevertheless, as voracious consumers of culture and the nation’s best students, the CNH was well prepared to redeploy this language for its own purposes (as will be discussed below, in chapter 6).31 Public space was one of the few arenas for political engagement and agency available to Mexican citizens. The PRI, by sapping political citizenship of its agency, made these spaces all the more potent. Streets, plazas, markets, monuments, and bus routes mattered because many elections were noncompetitive, because government officials were inaccessible, and because civil society was weak. In Mexico City, by not allowing residents to vote for mayor and administering the city as a federal district, the party effectively converted what were once municipal issues into national ones. When Mexico City–based social and labor movements took to the streets, they took to a national stage, with corresponding press coverage and heightened visibility. And as the kinetic environments of the Olympic organizers and the urban interventions of resident and visiting artists made clear, this stage was by no means inert. (See chapter 3.) With classes and extracurricular events canceled with the general strike, CU and IPN served as hubs for the ’68 Movement’s organizing. Students quickly occupied and transformed these institutional spaces, offered to Mexicans as proof of the state’s modernizing magnanimity only a decade

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earlier, into showplaces of their own. Walls were plastered with posters produced by movement propaganda brigades as well as those brought to Mexico from throughout the Americas but especially Cuba, announcing Revolution Is Victory and claiming solidarity with the people of Vietnam. The modernist buildings’ modular windows and panels were ideal frames for movement slogans, allowing each letter or word framed to stand out from a distance. Classrooms were renamed, using handwritten signs, after movement heroes and incendiary figures: Arturo Gámiz García, a rural teacher and rebel martyr who died attacking an army base in Chihuahua on September 23, 1965; Camilo Torres Restrepo, an insurgent priest and sociologist in Colombia who preached liberation theology; and Mao Tsetung, the Chinese Communist revolutionary.32 Bathrooms, conversely, were named in dishonor of the president and his wife. If sometimes sophomoric, these actions suggested that these spaces were endowed with official significance—excessively so, requiring immediate and unambiguous recoding if they were to serve as bases of operation. Participants in the ’68 Movement consciously made themselves at home in spaces that the state had used to assert its role as absolute host to the nation. As the IPN students Jaime García Reyes and Edward Vega later reported, the campuses were transformed from educational-administrative to domestic space.33 Students ate, slept, and bathed there. CU and Zacatenco also substituted for their other usual haunts, which grew increasingly inhospitable with the militarization of the city core. On several Sundays the universities hosted parallel festivals featuring music, art, and food. This was more than a compensatory gesture; it reiterated the movement’s resolve to interpolate the participants’ own modes of citizenship (and conviviality) into spaces normally controlled or influenced by the state. Although these actions were mostly temporary, they spoke of a specific spatiopolitical imagination: Mexico City, not even official Mexico, was not the exclusive domain of the state or capital. Marches were one of the ’68 Movement’s key tactics, satisfying insurgency’s necessary collectivity, publicity, and active recoding of signs of authority. Assembling to march through major streets or departing from and arriving at national landmarks they interrupted urban flows. On August 27 the CNH organized a march from west to east, beginning at the new National Anthropology Museum and ending at the Zócalo. The central plaza was an established civic site, and the museum, completed in 1964, had recently emerged as a site of touristic pilgrimage. Walking on the Paseo de la Reforma movement participants gave new tenor to a corridor lined with ostensible evidence of Mexico City’s modernity, its hotels, shops, and cor-

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porate offices. Participants did not go to the Zócalo for presidential veneration, however, shouting epithets and slogans like “Come out to the balcony, Traitor [Hocicón].” Professor Heberto Castillo addressed the massive crowd that day, underlining the political import of their urban mobility and what the state disapprovingly deemed the movement’s “exhibitionism”:34 We find ourselves here having walked our convictions through the streets of Mexico City. We’ve arrived with [fellow] people, students, and teachers to express through this mass assembly our will. . . . Let it be known that public dialog, which we have insisted on since the beginning, can bring only benefits to the nation. In sum, recognizing the supreme authority of the people is inevitable, now and forever.

On August 27 the relatively disciplined CNH lost control of the demonstration, though. Sócrates Campos Lemus, a movement leader, took the microphone and without consulting his colleagues asked the crowd if they wanted to stay in the plaza until Díaz Ordaz addressed them, satisfying the strike council’s demand for dialog. That night the bells of the adjacent cathedral were rung by the students (with the permission of the resident priest), and the anarchocommunist red-and-black flag was raised on the Zócalo’s flagpole. Campos Lemus, whether wittingly or unwittingly—and he would later be accused of working for the state, which he denies35—set the movement on a path toward direct confrontation with the military. At sunrise the state forcibly ejected the demonstrators using troops and light tanks, beating them and chasing them into the surrounding streets. This operation signaled an across-the-board escalation of the use of violence against the ’68 Movement. As Díaz Ordaz would later obliquely explain in his State of the Republic speech on September 1, they had “taken advantage” of his generosity. They had crossed the invisible line known to most citizens: “There is a limit to everything,” the president asserted to applause. That morning PRI agents beat Professor Castillo in front of his home for his neighbors to see. Those arrested were sent not to the municipal jail but army headquarters. The police intercepted busloads of latecomers to the Zócalo, unaware of the expulsion, using tear gas. Overnight, carrying ’68 Movement propaganda became an arrestable offense. As General Marcelino García Barragán, the army general in charge at the Tlatelolco Massacre, would later assert (as posthumously published in 1999), the state sought to suffocate the movement, which it treated but could not recognize as a rebellion.36 The army, according to García Barragán, carefully planned its movements through the city streets, calculating how it could flush students in particular directions to entrap them. A counterdemonstration for the Zócalo had also been planned overnight. Government employees were

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rounded up to reinstall the national flag. Many were there against their will and reportedly bleated like sheep to signal their compulsory attendance.37 Circumventing downtown’s militarization, the’68 Movement worked to build links between UNAM and IPN and to as much of Mexico City as possible. After the August 1 march from CU, which drew mostly UNAM students as well as a heavy show of force from the state, UNAM and IPN students joined to march together on August 5. Although their student bodies drew from different ends of the middle-class spectrum, this show of unity was important following Díaz Ordaz’s “outstretched hand” speech, which disguised the state’s authoritarianism with the image of a unifying gesture of hospitality. As the student leader Luis González de Alba described CNH meetings, these repeatedly discussed outreach to the city’s proletarian periphery and the nation’s provinces—fellow satellites.38 The public performance of solidarity was a first step toward deeper ties between communities and causes isolated by corporatism. The ’68 Movement followed on August 15 with another march from Casco de Santo Tomás, this time with the explicit destination of the Zócalo, moving from the proletarian north, areas such as Tlatelolco, toward the city’s (and nation’s) core, and complementing marches from CU and the more prosperous south. The CNH took into account route, marchers’ stamina, traffic, and other potential obstacles, including the police and military. They carried posters and banners, many identifying various social groups beyond students, and burned effigies, chanted slogans, and shouted epithets. They traveled on major thoroughfares, which guaranteed visibility for security’s sake and for reaching the greatest possible audience, the way an advertiser might pick a top-rated television channel. In spite of the movement’s aspirations of solidarity, the students and their supporters did not march from the east, the home of many of Mexico City’s informal housing settlements. Connections between the colonias proletarias and the modern city were limited, and there were also limits to the movement’s middle-class sense of security and comfort. There were also challenges to reaching beyond Mexico City. The CNH sought solidarities with rural communities through shared grievances. Both residents of the city and those who traveled to the city from towns and villages at its edges depended on buses that were part of a politically powerful oligopoly for transport. In one case, San Miguel Topilejo, a village on the road from Mexico City to Xochimilco, was the site of a bus accident on September 3, leaving seven dead and more than twenty injured. The bus ownership did not want to pay adequate indemnities for its negligence. Students joined surviving victims to protest, detaining buses from the company, winning them additional monies as well as repairs to the road. They

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figure 17. Mothers march in support of the ’68 Movement, September 30, 1968, Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City. The sign in the left foreground reads, “The National Union of Mexican Mothers: Talks, Yes! Bayonets, No!” (Photo: S. J.; © Associated Press.)

left in place at the home of a village resident a brigade that they named Quinta Rosa Luxemburgo, after the revolutionary intellectual. Back in Mexico City, a banner at the UNAM campus put up by the CNH borrowed but modified Che Guevara’s stirring slogan of 1967 on Vietnam: Create Two, Three, Many Topilejos! In making its insurgent claims the ’68 Movement leveraged fledgling alliances and envisioned solidarities even when they did not already (or would likely soon) exist. Considering the political isolation enforced by Mexico’s corporatist system (among other barriers), imaginative tactics like these were utterly pragmatic. Surveying the country’s depleted democracy in 1965, the sociologist Pablo González Casanova argued that any widespread political mobilization would need to be based largely on hope.39 The ’68 Movement’s approach was, of course, speculative and not disinterested. It cannot be segregated from the PRI’s expansive sovereign claims. Nevertheless, the movement’s imagination proposed a competing notion of national integration, carving out space in Mexico’s political system, however limited or fleeting. This opening would remain visible to subsequent social and labor movements, or to any collective that chooses to remember the events of 1968.

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The ’68 Movement also situated itself in the expanse of Mexican history and utopian politics. It borrowed tactics from recent labor movements that exposed the authoritarian basis of Mexico’s modernization and the tenuousness of the Miracle’s gains. Just as they deployed Guevara’s words and image to signal insurgency they also called upon Demetrio Vallejo and Valentín Campa, leaders of the 1958–59 railroad strike, who were still being held at Lecumberri, the infamous penitentiary. For the ’68 Movement Vallejo and Campa were corporeal (if disappeared) proof of the PRI’s illegitimacy. Their defiant faces appeared on posters and banners, and letters from Vallejo were read aloud at CNH meetings and public demonstrations. The 1964–65 medical residents’ strike was also a touchstone. Medics’ protesting wage compression was a clear sign that the middle classes were increasingly unable to keep up appearances. The Miracle was faltering rather than reaching new heights, despite what the Olympic celebrations suggested.40 The railroaders were famous for blocking rail lines and assembling at the Monument of the Revolution carrying torches that reproduced the smoke and ash of their locomotives. The doctors-in-training marched through the city’s main thoroughfares wearing their white laboratory coats, a conspicuous sign of their professional and thus middle-class status. Photographs of these demonstrations published in mainstream newspapers supplemented incomplete or censored reports.41 The ’68 Movement adopted some of these attention-grabbing tactics; collective visibility was insurgency in the PRI’s closed circuit. Participants also adapted such tactics to meet the current situation. The movement’s final major march, on September 13, is known as the Silent March. Participants walked mutely, some with their mouths covered with tape or handkerchiefs in order to signal their misrepresentation in the mainstream press and legislators’ silence, and to rejoin allegations that they were provoking security forces. Although a permit to march was requested, traffic was not diverted; the state would not concede any more urban space that day or subsequently. The march highlighted the resounding communication of thousands of bodies moving through the city in a coordinated fashion, whether they were carrying posters and banners or not. Photographs taken by Héctor García, shot with a longer-than-normal exposure time from a balcony above the plaza, showed a seemingly endless flow of people stretching back block upon block, spilling over and obscuring the urban grid. Some members of the ’68 Movement were quite hopeful about this civic boundlessness. González de Alba described leaving one of the demonstrations and walking into the city after the government shut off the electricity:42

figure 18. The ’68 Movement’s Silent March, September 13, 1968, Zócalo, Mexico City. (Photo © Héctor García; courtesy of Fundación María y Héctor García, A.C., Mexico City.)

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We sang the national anthem and headed into a unknown city; our city. . . . It was out of a dream; we walked along Avenida Juárez and Paseo de la Reforma as if they were suburban lanes. . . . From all the intersections came people with flags; guys and girls held on to banners and posters; buses [were] crammed with students who returned to their schools to keep watch on the roofs, [or] to the café to eat a sandwich.

To the CNH leader’s eyes, the movement appeared to succeed in refamiliarizing a city that had been estranged by the state and capital, rerouting its flows and recoding its signs in the movement’s favor. Mexico City was available for the movement to fill with its hopes. Paco Ignacio Taibo II, who participated in the ’68 Movement but left the country before the Tlatelolco Massacre, would take a more circumspect point of view. Taibo wrote, with both self-criticism and irony:43 We dwelled in a smaller city within a vast megalopolis. . . . We were masters of [the middle-class neighborhoods] Del Valle and Narvarte (even more so since José Agustín had reinvented them in his novels), of San Rafael and Santa María, of Condesa and Roma. . . . All other neighborhoods were foreign to us: places you might pass through, but where you never lingered.

Neighborhoods beyond this central cluster were terra incognita to his comrades, “places you might pass through but where you never lingered.” His reference to Agustín, an Onda writer best known for his countercultural novella La tumba (The Tomb, 1964), was double-edged, blurring the boundary between the material and the discursive city while a favorite of Mexico City’s accommodated classes. Taibo poked holes into the bourgeois (and male) privilege of González de Alba’s territorial breadth.44 He recognized the limitations of the ’68 Movement’s imagination and attempted to map a more complex landscape of belonging and Otherness. Participants in the ’68 Movement moved about a city that, as a result of its capitalist urbanization, was designed as an object of passive consumption. The cafés cantantes, bookshops, and art galleries in the Zona Rosa, which raised the suspicions of police and moral crusaders, were not automatically spaces of reciprocity and freedom. They had to be activated. González de Alba understood this, asserting that consuming the city involved perceiving it but also reimagining it. In its urban tactics—and narrations like González de Alba’s Los días y los años—the ’68 Movement valorized the possibility of communication over the presumption of total environment or cultural hegemony, two notions held dear by the state. Although not without certain social privileges, ganar la calle did not mean control of the streets or accumulating

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territory so much as politics (and utopia) practiced outside corporatist channels and alienated franchise. The ’68 Movement sought not to exchange satellite status for absolute centrality but to provincialize the PRI.45 The Silent March spoke loudly enough that the army was sent to occupy both CU and IPN on September 18 and September 23, respectively. In a city where the state invested, fiscally and politically, in infrastructures of all kinds that sought to manage flows of people, information, and, ultimately, power, the ’68 Movement appeared quite threatening, suggesting alternative circuits among symbolic sites and, moreover, citizens. González de Alba described the aftermath of the IPN takeover, emphasizing the physical scars left on the campus and the surrounding neighborhood: “blackened walls, broken windows; streets covered in rocks, bottles, sticks, and all other sorts of projectiles, . . . stone and plaster torsos torn by bullets.”46 He also reported that the occupation was effective to a degree: the CNH had no central meeting place, and some leaders went into hiding or maintained a lower profile than before. Brigades of a dozen or fewer members organized along functional lines (propaganda, security, fundraising) continued to operate, although more clandestinely than before. Returning to Canclini’s question in this chapter’s epigraph: What, then, of civil society in later twentieth-century Latin America?47 Looking through the prism of the ’68 Movement (and its afterlives), it would appear that culture, and especially urban culture, is a key instrument in this nebulous public space where the interests of the state, the market, and citizens are mediated. This is especially the case where government institutions are economically or morally bankrupt, or never developed in the first place. On the one hand, cultural citizenship opens up new arenas for political engagement and agency, for an expansion of the political beyond elections and parliamentary procedure. On the other, it perhaps sanctifies the state’s sapping of the franchise and feeds into the logic of capitalism, whereby all needs and wants are subsumed to the market. One is a hopeful vision of the power of culture, and the other more pessimistic; and they need not be reconciled. Urban culture is at its most potent, and threatening to the status quo, when it mobilizes ideas and bodies, and keeps them moving in such ways that mediation is not so much an obstacle to searching and knowing as it is a catalyst. Civil society in Mexico, as current events continue to remind us, is still in formation. The next chapter looks at another facet of the ’68 Movement’s selfrepresentation, focusing on its graphic and film campaigns. Its propaganda brigades, which often brought together students and faculty, borrowed

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strategically from the words and images of the PRI’s rhetoric and of Mexico’s historical Left. They also engaged contemporary printmaking and the new cinemas of Europe and the Americas. This production, and the distribution networks that the propaganda brigades employed or created, suggested that Mexico City was not an inert stage, nor a photogenic object, but a medium of communication.

6. Mobilization and Mediation

In Los caifanes (1967), writer-director Juan Ibáñez’s road movie–cumbildungsroman, the characters Jaime and his fiancée, Paloma, hitch a ride home with a band of mechanics, the self-proclaimed caifanes, “outsiders.” Capitán Gato, their leader, discovers the couple in his car after they take refuge during a sudden rain. It was a risk worth taking, according the film’s opening scene. The couple is at a party in upscale Polanco. A young man holding a microphone interviews Paloma (Julia Isabel de Llano Macedo, known as Julissa). “This has nothing to do with offering definitions or concepts,” he explains; “simply express yourself.” A small group awaits an answer to a question the film audience is not privy to. “Careful, Paloma,” he urges ironically; “this [audio] tape is for posterity.” In spite of their disposable income and leisure time, they wrestle with how to live more passionately. Polanco was distinct from the rest of Mexico City in terms of its concentrated wealth and its resistance to connecting with citywide transport networks. It was also far from the countercultural movements of the period that promised freedom and purity of expression in Mexico’s rural provinces and its urban peripheries.1 Before heading home, the unlikely carmates go on an all-night detour of the city’s demimonde, crossing neighborhoods with relative ease but colliding with the boundaries of class and gender. One of the most popular Mexican films of the 1960s, Los caifanes is an allegory of the Miraculous Mexico out of which the ’68 Movement emerged: the social and political mobility that should have accompanied economic expansion was limited and slow-moving, especially for the middle-class audiences that were drawn to the film. Young people, as our previous chapter argued, were satellites of Mexico’s modernization, ostensibly liberated by consumerism yet tethered by a growing sense among authorities that youth required special supervision and 155

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tutelage. Their ambivalent status was embodied by the new university campuses built by the government at the edges of Mexico City. However, through their carefully planned marches through the city and transformative occupation of their showplace campuses, the ’68 Movement insurgently claimed a more direct and self-determining role in Mexican public life. This chapter maps the ’68 Movement’s other trajectories through Mexico City and beyond: the assemblage of graphics that saturated the city, competing with Olympic propaganda for ubiquity, and the cinema that roved its streets documenting state violence against the movement but also the students’ ludic conviviality. It was through this dense and dissonant array of communications—bodily motions, visual and verbal messages, and the networks that they traveled—that the ’68 Movement proposed that the city was itself a medium capable of being harnessed to challenge the PRI’s illegitimate sovereignty. (As our final chapter will argue, narrators of the ’68 Movement would take this proposal seriously in service of stoking memory of the movement and the larger project of democratization in Mexico.) That the caifanes and their unexpected guests rode around town a private car was not insignificant. The increase in automobile ownership across a broad spectrum of Mexican society, subsidized by domestic petroleum production, was a key component of the state’s import-substitution industrialization, which depended on the building of factories and on a robust consumer market. Bedroom communities such as Jardines del Pedregal and Ciudad Satélite were built outside Mexico City, linked to it via high-speed roads. Urban planning was increasingly oriented toward easing traffic congestion. Mario Pani’s Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was as much a housing project as an opportunity to rationalize the urban road network to facilitate more industrialization. The caifanes, in their late-night shenanigans, which included a brawl at an outré cabaret and abandoning a stolen hearse in the Zócalo, created a very different map of Mexico City than did Eduardo Terrazas’s official-route network for the Olympics, or the Olympic cinema department, which filmed only photogenic sites and stage-managed events, offering a continuity-edited vision of a thoroughly modern and socially integrated Mexico. Los caifanes also suggested another map for the Mexican film industry. After decades of critical and commercial success, it was losing audiences to Hollywood, which refocused on international markets after wartime. A first generation of academically trained filmmakers, largely excluded from the national cinema by a guildlike union, looked to their new-cinema peers in the Americas and Europe to claim a foothold at the industry’s margins, part of a larger creative and professional reevaluation of the modern in the postwar period, and especially in the 1960s.

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Although most locations used in Los caifanes would have been familiar to audiences, the twenty-eight-year-old writer-director Ibáñez persistently charged them with dramatic and comedic tension between the upper-class couple and the lower-class caifanes. Jaime (Enrique Alvarez Félix), an architect and self-appointed urban expert, attempts to determine the evening’s route but is ignored by the mechanics. So too are his attempts to assert his authority over Paloma, who takes an almost ethnographic interest in the caifanes and their “natural habitats.” She is surprised that they claim Mexico City as home—certainly not her Mexico City. As Jaime persistently reminds her, it is he who is responsible, he who represents her parents when they are not present. Paloma, member of an elite but also a woman, appears most sensitive to the uneven social terrain of the city. Her class but also her gender disqualify her for the “intensity” that she seeks. She is a caged bird and a peacemaker, as her name suggests (meaning “Dove”), diffusing the more overt conflicts between the men. Middle-class audiences, who occupied a vicarious position in Mexico’s single-party politics could identify with Paloma’s ambivalent status, at once privileged yet with Jaime and others seeking to mediate her. The power of mediation, which encompasses technologies and social functions of mass media and representation more generally, was central to the mobilization and spatiopolitical imagination of the ’68 Movement.2 Mexico’s single-party state presumed to wholly and exclusively represent its citizens politically—a claim it made with or without their consent. Such a presumption of hegemony relied as much on control of the political system as on control of the means of mediation, which the state maintained through censorship but also through its cozy relations with the national-media elite. Throughout the summer of 1968 the student-led democratization movement received at best ambivalent coverage from Mexico City’s major newspapers and television channels. Many of the state’s most violent acts against the ’68 Movement were not reported by the mainstream press while at the same time its participants were accused of juvenile delinquency and more serious criminal acts. The movement sought to take ownership of its mediation in order to reach a larger public but also because it represented self-determination, both visually and politically. However, recognizing the state’s authoritarianism, the movement explored means of representation that did not presume hegemony and that invited and at times insisted on the participation of audiences in the production of its meaning and significance yet did not assume its submissive consent. In addition to marches and occupations that recoded the city’s official public spaces to call for a more participatory democracy, as well as alerting citizens that these spaces remained available for further reinscription by their

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many users, a key tactic for the ’68 Movement was its counterinformation campaign. Propaganda brigades, which ranged in size from two to about a dozen members, produced a multitude of graphic and filmed communications and distributed them through the city. Some of these communications, such as the ’68 Movement–produced documentary El grito (1969, The Cry) continue to circulate to this day. Joining the movement’s marches and other reroutings of urban flows, these media hoped to mobilize audiences to join the students’ insurgency. They also thematized an entanglement of individual and built environments in ways that suggested urban experience was central to a sense of collective subjectivity and political agency. If the city could be seen in new ways, so too, then, the nation. At the core of these dense “media fields” was an open-ended invitation by the artist or filmmaker to take notice of unjust or exploitative social conditions and be moved to participate in remaking that field.3 The ’68 Movement’s propaganda brigades did not operate in a vacuum. They drew from Mexico’s leading art schools and new film school, students and faculty alike, who brought with them equipment and supplies but also the aesthetic and critical debates of their respective media to their productions. Many in this self-consciously new generation gave serious consideration to role of the audience in making meaning, whether by shocking the passive spectators of national cinema awake or by actively courting (and channeling) their emotional and intellectual responses in hopes of raising their political consciousness, not unlike what Siqueiros hoped for in his renewal of muralism. (See chapter 5.) As Professor Heberto Castillo remarked in his speech at the August 27 Zócalo demonstration: “We have broken the levees of shame erected by the [mainstream] press. . . . A new press has arisen, the press of leaflets, the press of buses. Radio and television have been replaced by the hundreds and hundreds of brigades of students and teachers who have gone to dialog openly with the people.”4 Even if a perfectly transparent dialog between the ’68 Movement and “the people” should not be assumed, the movement certainly sought to engage as many fellow citizens as possible through its graphics and cinema, and it put forward to anyone who encountered these media that Mexico City, including its official spaces and representations, could serve as a conduit for social communication. The city offered a framework for an expanded civil society.

mediating mobilization Graphics displayed in public spaces and other forms of counterinformation were critical to the ’68 Movement’s conveying its messages of democratic

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reform. In addition to publishing a newspaperlike bulletin, propaganda brigades composed of students and faculty made posters, leaflets, stickers, and other ephemera. In both production and distribution the propaganda brigades served the ’68 Movement’s insurgent claim of collectivity and deliberate challenge to the state, actively recoding that state’s signs of authority for their own purposes. Easily concealed under a coat or in a bag and rarely signed by their author (or authors) in order to evade retribution, they circulated mainly with the assistance of the city’s buses and aimed to mimic the saturation techniques of the Mexican Olympic organizing committee or COJO. Their subject matter was also moving, strategically drawing from and supplementing established repertoires of rhetoric and iconography, ranging from Mexico’s revolutionary Left to the Olympic Op Art aesthetic. Well versed in the rites of consumption, supporters of the ’68 Movement understood how persuasive messages traveled communications networks throughout the city and beyond in search of audiences. The brigades were quite savvy regarding these networks, understanding that there was no single point of contact or terminus. A global arena like Mexico City— chaotic and cacophonous—required repetition, redundancy, and dynamism in messaging. Some graphics stood for only minutes, censored by security forces, neighborhood residents, or bad weather; others stood long after the Tlatelolco Massacre. With a corpus likely numbering in the tens of thousands—only hundreds have been documented—the movement’s critical charge lay not in the specificities of any one image but in collective resonances and, moreover, in the suggestion that existing urban networks (streets, transit systems) and regimes of spatial integration and differentiation (property, public versus private) could be hijacked and converted into new circuits of communication, undermining any government claims of urban authority or sovereign representation. Many of the printmakers were part of Mexico City’s two major art academies, the UNAM-affiliated Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National School of Plastic Arts), better known as Academia de San Carlos, and the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking), more commonly referred to as La Esmeralda. Both schools were primed technically, formally, and ideologically for the ’68 Movement. Jorge Pérezvega, a student at San Carlos who served as its representative to the CNH, the ’68 Movement’s coordinating council, described the schools as “factories of production.”5 Several students were also part of a contemporary revival in printmaking. Well versed in Mexican postrevolutionary and antifascist graphics of the 1930s and after and more recent Euro-American trends, they had already begun to distinguish

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themselves by working in both traditions. The appropriation and often the parody of these archives, as well as resignification of streets and other public space, envisioned a city that was available for remaking by any citizen, even with the humblest of materials. With little opportunity to steer mainstream media coverage or formal political deliberation, printmaking offered the ’68 Movement a quick, inexpensive, highly reproducible mode of counterinformation. Multiple techniques were employed, with the most accessible and technically forgiving ones being favored. Linocut printing, which involved cutting designs into linoleum mounted on blocks of wood, was especially popular. So was the mimeograph machine, which forced ink through a stencil onto paper and was more widely available than photocopiers at the time. The speed of the propaganda brigades’ production allowed them to comment on events that had happened a day or even a few hours before, granting their work unusual rhetorical punch. Graphics also corresponded with one another—or filled a gap when taken down or painted over by officials. In addition to paper, the propaganda brigades also printed on card stock, cloth, and recycled newspaper. This last surface was especially potent, since it allowed for pointed juxtapositions of news reported in the mainstream press and the ’68 Movement’s messages. In one case, the San Carlos professor Francisco Becerril indicted an entire news outlet, El Sol de México, by printing a serigraph (silkscreen) of a gorilla’s head in silhouette on its front page of August11. Becceril went one step further by circling the surprising headline that day: “The Movement Is No Longer a Student One; It is Now Public.” The editors of the far-right paper may have meant a lurking menace, but for supporters of the ’68 Movement this was a development worth celebrating. The public and repeated character of their tactics made it clear to residents that they were insurgent, not criminal. As was also taking place at the main university campuses, the propaganda brigades remade their institutional spaces as a first step toward remaking Mexico City. Given the rhythm of production, for many the art schools became a second home. The limited number of scholarships available meant that the academy was a first home or that students took many years to complete their studies and so would participate in various cycles of protest. They participated in what one student, Arnulfo Aquino, described as “community life,” the unsupervised conviviality villainized by proponents of UNAM’s Ciudad Universitaria, which was strategically located far away from the city’s “corrupting” core.6 In contrast to painting or drawing, printmaking is preeminently a workshop practice. The tools employed are rarely owned by an individual but are found in either a shared academic or

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a commercial space. The shared workshops of San Carlos and La Esmeralda facilitated collaboration and cross-fertilization of ideas among printmakers, as there was no central coordination of the campaign from the CNH, which prided itself on its meandering (and at times maddening) democratic procedure. Although their production was visually heterogeneous, and its ephemeral nature precludes a comprehensive inventory, certain tropes in iconography and rhetoric tell us about the ’68 Movement’s approach to persuasion and political positions. Through its counterinformation campaign the ’68 Movement sought to highlight the contradictions between the PRI’s claim that Mexico was a modern liberal democracy and its use of violence toward the movement, and between the progressive rights enshrined in the country’ postrevolutionary Constitution and the party’s conditional hospitality toward most citizens. The movement did not seek revolution; rather, it sought to disqualify the PRI (and its agents) for rule. To this end, movement’s propaganda brigades frequently represented politicians and security forces as animals—dogs, bats, and gorillas (among others)—and thus devoid of the prerequisite humanity and sense of civic duty required to govern. The Mexican president and the granaderos at his disposal were the most popular subject of the propaganda brigades, and the gorilla their most potent metaphor. In one graphic, a gorilla-granadero standing on the Mexican Constitution wields a studded club in one hand, his helmet pulled too far down for him to see. Sitting in the other hand is a small man, whose eyeglasses identify him as President Díaz Ordaz, awarding him an Olympic medal. In another such graphic a gorilla-granadero, also standing on the Constitution, hulks over a lifeless IPN student, blood dripping from his baton. The accompanying text reads: “A stimulating incorporation of an eighteen-year-old to the political life of the nation.” The frisson produced by a cartoonlike but brutal image of a gorilla or a cheery but sardonic caption was meant to wedge into the minds of viewers an ever-greater chasm between the PRI’s claims of enlightened technocratic governance its and brutish authoritarianism. The gorilla stood for a physically violent but also an unevolved or devolved individual.7 To be or to act as an ape was to follow instructions blindly, in a way opposite to the ’68 Movement’s participatory call and plural tactics. In Becceril’s Exigimos deslinde de responsabilidades, taken from the CNH demand to relieve of their duties officials responsible for student deaths and injuries, a grotesque caricature of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz is layered over a gorilla-granadero in silhouette, suggesting the conflation of political power and violence in Mexico. The gorilla-granadero may also

figure 19. A ’68 Movement graphic showing a gorilla-granadero (riot-police officer) standing on the Mexican Constitution, 1968. (Anonymous; originally published in Grupo Mira’s La gráfica del 68: Homenaje al movimiento estudiantil, 1982.)

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be read as the product of the estranging and exploitative political and economic structures naturalized by the PRI for its own self-perpetuating benefit: a fellow citizen dehumanized. The brigades’ repeated use of silhouette and layering rendered visible the transmogrification that they pretended to assume security forces underwent in order to attack their compatriots. It is important to note that the students’ use of the gorilla also betrayed elitism in the ’68 Movement, as the security forces were generally from a lower class and less educated than the movement’s mostly middleclass participants. The ’68 Movement’s counterinformation campaign also worked to chip away at the PRI’s long-standing cultural-nationalism project, which was just as forceful as the police or military in sustaining the party’s claim of sovereignty. In one propaganda brigade graphic, a giant boot is about to stomp on an UNAM student as he sings the national hymn. A relevant if ironic excerpt from its first stanza is included: “Think, O beloved Motherland, that heaven gave you a soldier in each son.” As with the ’68 Movement’s singing of the national hymn at meetings and its appropriation of other rituals and symbols, the students vacillated between patriotism as blind devotion to one’s country and patriotism as devoted autocritique. In moving back and forth between the two notions of national belonging, they called into question the PRI’s monopolistic cultural nationalism. Such maneuvers also worked to establish the students’ autonomy, as the state-funded expansion in higher education was a cornerstone of this project. It also established their credibility among fellow citizens by demonstrating fluency in this shared national culture rather than jettisoning it. It is difficult to measure exactly how many bodies were mobilized by the propaganda brigades’ production, but it is safe to say that their mode of address clearly sought to rouse participants and potential supporters. Many of the leaflets distributed hailed their readers as el pueblo (the people) or the more intimate “Mexican brother [or: “sister”],” both well-known greetings to consumers of the PRI’s communitarian rhetoric, which the propaganda brigades borrowed either in earnest or else ironically. The brigades also focused on specific events, whether recent clashes with granaderos or upcoming demonstrations that suggested a regular, progressive development of the movement toward reform. In syntax and diction they maintained a breathless, hot-off-the-presses tone and suggested that each leaflet was part of a mass of communication—“up until the moment of printing, this information had not been confirmed . . .”—and potential connection with audiences. Although at times discordant, with crosstalk and errors, they avoided the voice-of-God consistency of the PRI or the

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Olympic organizers. The ’68 Movement’s call for mass mobilization and its sense of urgency also resonated with the by-now-famous posters sponsored by Cuba’s revolutionary government, which was a beacon for leftist causes globally.8 However, given ’68 Movement’s accelerated tempo of production and distribution, they were not as fully elaborated as their Cuban cousins. Many of the propaganda brigade’s prints depended on a concise slogan and a graphic punch to quickly—and at times cheaply—build an emphatic connection with viewers. Quick comprehension was desirable in an increasingly militarized environment where lingering on the street was suspect. Some prints called for indemnification for the families of victims of injury or death (another CNH demand), with Pietà-like images of mothers mourning their children. One graphic showed an oven labeled “Number 3” burning a corpse as if it were garbage. The oven’s number intimated the magnitude of killing whereas the text—“What dead?”—pointed to municipal authorities’ cooperation in the disappearance of evidence incriminating the state. Prints like this also corresponded, directly and indirectly, with photographs published in alternative magazines such as ¿Por qué? that documented unrestrained violence against the ’68 Movement and bystanders.9 The ’68 Movement’s graphics were shaped and gave shape to its loose political philosophy. In contrast to the at-times poetic approach of protesters in Paris months earlier, in Mexico denunciation was a major goal.10 Given the PRI’s history of denial, censorship, and co-option, the ’68 Movement found it essential to declare publicly that the state was using illegitimate violence. As Jorge Pérezvega reports, many prints sought to establish that the political violence taking place in Mexico City was not exceptional but rather was the everyday experience of repression. A bayonet-equipped soldier on a downtown street was a figure not of public safety but of the failure of the political and legal systems.11 In addition to condemning violence, the brigades explicitly named those responsible, including high officials like the chief of police, Luis Cueto. Identifying specific actors who were unlikely to be held responsible by Mexico’s mainstream press made it more difficult for the regime to absorb and diffuse such charges. Propaganda-brigade graphics highlighted how, in spite of the PRI’s communitarian rhetoric, illegitimate violence had become a regular form of communication in Mexico’s political system. In one graphic, which circulated widely, an image of a tank was combined with the statement We Don’t Understand This Type of Dialog. Other prints reminded citizens of their rights in a city that had been disenfranchised by the PRI. These included one that quoted constitutional restrictions on the military’s jurisdiction. These graphics pointed to a legit-

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imate mode of civic communication—the Constitution—that the state willfully ignored in both letter and spirit. Complementing marches throughout the city, the ’68 Movement’s counterinformation campaign was another opportunity to build, or at least claim, solidarity with existing and potential allies. Banners were created that identified specific groups of city residents participating (mothers, family members, residents of a particular neighborhood or housing complex). The aim was to suggest a broad patchwork coalition that contradicted the PRI’s assertions that the movement was small, isolated, or self-interested. To this end, in spite of many participants’ allegiance to or familiarity with Marxist critique, the language of class struggle was largely left out of most graphics. Even though the middle-class character of the movement’s participants certainly informed their political subjectivity, it was downplayed in favor of a familiar and ostensibly neutral outreach: the collectivity of nationalism, which in the hands of printmakers vacillated between sincere and mocking appropriation. There was a certain naïveté to calls like ¡ÚNETE, PUEBLO! (People, Unite!), which assumed that differences among constituencies could be reconciled or at least temporarily subsumed through shared or parallel goals. These constituencies were not recurring participants in CNH’s planning or administration. The visual and rhetorical content of the ’68 Movement’s graphics was significant, but so too were the distribution networks. The propaganda brigades entered into but also redirected the communication flows of the city, establishing circuits independent of mass media or state surveillance with little advance planning or expense. Both San Carlos and La Esmeralda were located in Mexico City’s historic core, which was also its transportation hub. Many of the city’s buses and trolleys transited through the area, allowing the brigades to efficiently reach almost every neighborhood. They traveled to post materials but also to hand them out personally, using them as an opportunity to engage others. Luis González de Alba described the brigades as the “student press,” because they disseminated information and also gathered it, listening to anecdotes and polling public sentiment, which was fed back into the graphic workshops and CNH.12 Although propaganda brigades formally stood under the banner of the CNH, they were largely autonomous. With two main sites of production and infinite paths for distribution, it was unlikely that all communications could be shut down by the government at any given moment. The propaganda brigades traveled through Mexico City largely by bus. As discussed in the previous chapter, buses were a mode of transportation but also played an outsized role in Mexico City’s urban and political

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figure 20. Bus commandeered by the ’68 Movement, taken to the Zócalo, and serving as a platform for protest, September 28, 1968, Mexico City. (Photo: Jesús Díaz; © Associated Press.)

imaginary. Offering one of the few public links to the new UNAM and IPN campuses, buses were a sign of students’ satellite status in Mexican society. In addition to being undependably run and poorly maintained, the bus system was presided over by a group of owners with close ties to the state, which also made it a sign of the corrupt alliance between the PRI and economic elites. As during previous conflicts between bus owners and student passengers, the ’68 Movement commandeered private and universityowned buses not only for the practical purpose of transportation but, further, in order to signal a rejection of this alliance. To commandeer a bus was to acquire and spend established political currency in Mexico City. The propaganda brigades, well aware of this compound significance, converted several of the commandeered buses into moving billboards by plastering graphics on their exteriors, granting the graphics both mobility and a specific rhetorical context: the politics of public transit (and satellitization). In this way the brigades also competed with the hundreds of buses and trucks emblazoned with the Mexico 68 logo that circulated throughout the city at the same time. Buses were also used as platforms for giving speeches in plazas and as barricades in streets to stop the advance of security forces; they were also set ablaze, sending a more aggressive message to the government.

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The ’68 Movement’s messages, whether understated or less so, did not go unanswered. Although not occupied by the military like the CU or Zacatenco, San Carlos was the regular object of state surveillance, and the printmaking workshops were raided on a few occasions. On September 2 an unmarked car, carrying either paramilitaries or paid provocateurs according to student reports, drove by the school and fired bullets at its façade. The government also attacked the movement with its own propaganda, through proxies such as MURO, the right-wing student organization, and dummy organizations such as the Uniones y Sociedades de Padres de Familia (Parent Unions and Societies) at UNAM and IPN.13 They mostly reiterated the PRI’s characterization of the ’68 Movement as the function of a global communist conspiracy and outside agitators. Often, parents of youth were addressed directly in such messages. Some warned of property damage; others cautioned that the movement’s marches would lead to an attack on the U.S. Embassy, causing an international incident. “What type of student movement is this that prefers to ‘agitate in the streets’ instead of responsibly attending class?” one asked leadingly, calling upon mothers and fathers to “defend your home,” conflating domestic space and national territory. These groups also sought to reproduce the broadcasting techniques of the propaganda brigades (and COJO), instructing readers of one leaflet “If this sounds interesting, make ten copies and mail them to ten friends.” The government also depended on the mainstream press, which it pressured to publish photos of burned buses as proof of the ’68 Movement’s childish atavism. Throughout the summer the PRI alleged that the ’68 Movement, in order to embarrass the nation, was unfairly taking advantage of the global attention that the Olympics focused on Mexico. Though the movement did see in the games an opportunity to address national and international audiences, it approached them in much the same way it did the bus system, as a practical instrument and as a symbol of the contradictions of Mexico’s modernization ripe for recoding. In advance of the games the artist Manuel Felguérez recalls that Mexico City underwent a “clean-up” (limpiada), which cleared streets of ambulant vendors, semipermanent stalls, trash, and other everyday occupants and ornaments.14 On this ostensible clean slate the COJO produced an unprecedented and spectacular array of official communications that saturated only small parts of central Mexico City but were broadcast to suggest that the whole city was the domain of Olympic spirit and state supervision. Whereas Mexico 68 circulated an apparently seamless official image of Mexico, the brigades emphasized lived experience, democracy or lack thereof, in everyday practice. They marred the

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veneer of a limpiada, bringing to the surface the fundamental availability of the city to its inhabitants in spite of some parts’ being cordoned off by the Olympics and security forces (or the mediated city’s being cut off by censorship in the mainstream press). The brigades distributed countless graphics throughout the city, including zones of the city ignored by the organizers. The ’68 Movement borrowed from the Olympic organizers’ communications strategies, learning lessons in saturation and persuasion; and at the same time the movement called attention to how the state perfidiously constructed its image of a modern, democratic Mexico. The ’68 Movement also took cues from COJO’s consistency across media to produce a sense of immersive, participatory, collective identity. The image and idea of the gorilla was put to work in this way. On a stairwell to the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, where its new name as a national-heritage site was inscribed, graffiti renamed the ancient plaza yet again in “honor” of President Díaz Ordaz, Interior Minister Luis Echeverría, and Police Chief Cueto: “The Three Gorillas.” On several occasions, effigies of Cueto as an ape, often adorned with the Olympic rings, were burned during demonstrations, part of the movement’s street theater, which also included “pall bearers” carrying a casket with the word “Constitution” written on its side. Propaganda brigades treated the Olympics as an extension of the state’s cultural nationalism, in which students and faculty were well versed, making small but numerous incisions in what the participating printmaker Arnulfo Aquino later mocked as the grandeza Mexicana (Mexican greatness) on display, casting doubt on the state’s presumed monopoly on national culture.15 Most of these interventions were temporary, however; they implied that the seemingly permanent and pervasive official culture could be repurposed quite quickly and made to serve another master altogether. Mexico’s national culture, thanks to the aggressive expansion of the country’s tourism industry in the decades prior to the Olympics, was well known to audiences abroad. Repurposing this culture during the games was also an opportunity to alert these audiences of Mexico’s less alluring political reality. Although the majority of graphics produced by the propaganda brigades addressed fellow Mexicans in Spanish, they also produced texts in English and French, the official languages of the Olympics. As with the Spanish-language production, they publicized the authoritarian basis of what appeared. from outside the country, as political stability. In one of these graphics, echoing the solicitude of the national tourist ministry, visitors were asked if they would like to get to know more of Mexico. The accompanying map showed the Mexican territory studded not with archaeological sites or beaches but with jails. Such graphics were picked up by the

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visiting foreign press, which circulated them well beyond Mexico City after the Tlatelolco Massacre, as shorthand for the PRI’s authoritarianism, now spectacularly unveiled. In addition to appropriating Mexico 68’s advertising techniques and audiences, the ’68 Movement also engaged with its imagery and slogans to situate itself within an international context of not only protest but also human rights. The best example of this transference is a screen print by Jesús Martínez of a dove pierced by a bayonet. The Olympic slogan Everything Is Possible in Peace often appeared accompanied by a semiabstract white-dove logo on billboards, banners, and bumper stickers throughout the city. The logo was itself an uncredited appropriation of Pablo Picasso’s line drawing of a dove, adopted as a global sign of peace after wartime at the World Congress of Advocates of Peace in Paris in 1949. Martínez, as a San Carlos student, was quick to pinpoint how hollow the Olympic logo’s aspiration of postwar (and Christian) amity was as security forces clashed with the ’68 Movement in the very streets where the logo appeared with anesthetizing ubiquity. Already an experienced printmaker by 1968, Martínez also referred to a well-known photomontage by the German artist John Heartfield, which memorialized a deadly police attack on protesters at the League of Nations Palace in Geneva in 1932.16 Heartfield composed his image juxtaposing photographs of a bayoneted dove and the palace’s façade, the former appearing to be the latter’s gruesome flag. Martínez took the subversion of photomontage, its ability to take fragments of mass and dominant culture, and translated it to his preferred medium. In doing so he situated the ’68 Movement in the global arenas of antiauthoritarian struggle and the satirical estrangement of familiar or seemingly benign imagery. The propaganda brigades’ sense of satire also resonated with a rich tradition of political cartooning in Mexico City. And this tradition resonated with another: the direct and indirect censorship of the press by the Mexican government, which meant that independent journalists and artists finetuned their strategies for commenting on Mexican society with deflecting humor and irony. Abel Quezada, dean of the city’s cartoonists, was an expert in striking a balance between compliance and critique. Lampooning the Olympic limpiada as well as organizers’ insecurities, he personified Mexico looking at itself in the mirror for the June 4, 1967, issue of Excélsior. His caption read, “Look: Mexico, as setting for the Olympic Games, has nothing bad: beautiful scenery, good weather, fine strolls. But, oh, tragedy! The stage is full of chubby Mexicans, without ties and with mustaches.” Quezada, however, became less playful as violence against the ’68 Movement grew. In the September 30, 1968, issue of Excélsior, two days

figure 21. A ’68 Movement screen print of a dove of peace pierced by a bayonet, 1968. (Designed by Jesús Martínez.)

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after the ’68 Movement was ejected from the Zócalo by the military, a woman standing in the university looks at herself in the mirror: sporting a black eye, she wonders, “Let’s see if this goes away by October 12,” the date of the Olympic inauguration.17 As the title of the cartoon archly asserted, “Everything Is Possible in Peace,” an ironic recycling of the Olympics organizers’ empty neohumanistic slogan.18 As Anne Rubenstein argues, print comics as well as other popular media in postrevolutionary Mexico provided an informal space of mediation at the confluence of family, market, and state that could supplement a weak civil society.19 The ’68 Movement’s propaganda brigades also borrowed from recent leftist causes in Mexico, more so than had revolutionary-era heroes such as Emiliano Zapata, who were ensconced in the state’s pantheon of national culture and who amounted to another empty slogan among the PRI’s critics. Perhaps the heroes most frequently cited by the brigades were Demetrio Vallejo and Valentín Campa. These two were household names because of heavy press coverage of the 1958–59 railroad strike, which was a brief success for workers challenging unions controlled by the PRI in spite of their imprisonment. In graphics they appeared cloaked in the chiaroscuro of Lecumberri Penitentiary, the Dark Palace, defiantly confronting the viewers’ gaze from behind prison bars.20 Their portraits were frequently accompanied with the message Liberty to [All] Political Prisoners. Broad and encompassing, the caption fashioned them into potential global icons of protest, along the lines of the revolutionary hero Che Guevara, who trespassed across national (and historical) boundaries just as the ’68 Movement hoped to. Student participants in the ’68 Movement were among the first generation in Mexico to grow up watching television news, which collapsed time and space in ways that facilitated such a permeable imaginary.21 In addition to citing the Vietnam War in speeches and graphics, Arnulfo Aquino noted that he and his colleagues at San Carlos saw correspondences between their struggle, the Cuban Revolution, and the black and Chicano civil-rights movements in the United States.22 For the CNH’s own selfpresentation before the media, the strike council appropriated the emerging televisual aesthetic. After the manner of government and corporate press conferences they made sure that their full name and logo were visible to the cameras aimed at their dais. Although the ’68 Movement is often regarded as a spontaneous and independent mobilization, and decades later seen as a historical watershed, the propaganda brigades production shows that participants drew from existing personal relationships, political debates, and aesthetic concerns. The events of 1968 catalyzed rather than created these currents. More than

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television, student members of the propaganda brigades drew from studying and collaborating with art-school faculty. Francisco Moreno Capedavila, Alfredo Mexiac, and Francisco Becerril were all artist-activists who transmitted to their students their firsthand knowledge of Mexico’s leading progressive printmaking collectives, Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR, League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), active in the early 1930s, and the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP, The People’s Print Workshop), active since 1937. Mexiac, who was a member of the TGP in the 1950s, allowed students to reinterpret his earlier print of a young indigenous man gagged by a chain and lock. He originally created the image (with no text) in solidarity with Maya communities in Chiapas in 1954, where he lived for two years and was able to observe the state’s repression of that indigenous population.23 The lock keeping the chain in place is pointedly Made in the U.S.A. Mexiac’s students reproduced the image as a whole, only, adding the gloss Freedom of Expression and the Olympic Op Art logo. This very light reinterpretation preserved the image’s heritage (for those familiar with it) and suggested how easily symbols used by or associated with the regime could be recoded for a critique, contradicting the PRI’s cultural nationalism which claimed that such symbols were natural and permanent representations of the Mexican nation. San Carlos and La Esmeralda were politicized spaces well before 1968, with several active liberal and conservative student groups as at UNAM or IPN. In April 1966, a strike sparked by a fee for special examinations began at UNAM’s Ciudad Universitaria; it reached San Carlos in May of that year. By that time the art students redirected the conflict to reiterate their call for a more experimental curriculum and pedagogy. They asked for a broader liberal-arts education to complement their technical studies and—significant for the ’68 Movement—workshops with ample supplies open to students at all hours without formal enrollment. San Carlos was occupied by students or three months, until the director of the academy was ousted and several of the students’ demands were met. Although by no means an aesthetically radical institution at this time, San Carlos did diversify, with Arnulfo Aquino reporting that he was able to attend a workshop on Pop and Opt Art, unheard of prior to the strike. Although the production of the ’68 Movement propaganda brigades is normally treated altogether separately from the contemporary art scene, it is clear that the artists-in-training were in dialog with developments in the emerging market. Like established artists (Alberto Gironella, Vicente Rojo, Jose Luis Cuevas), students drew more explicit links to peers outside Mexico, participating directly or inserting themselves remotely in an

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increasingly global (though by no means) horizontal field. At the art schools, students circulated foreign art journals among themselves and formed cineclubs. These clubs, private or institutionally affiliated screening groups popular from the 1950s on, focused on small-format noncommercial or foreign films and became hotbeds for film education and criticism. At San Carlos two cineclubs showed films by Jean-Luc Godard, the Italian Neorealists, and Norman McLaren, partly sponsored with loans from foreign embassies in Mexico City.24 Established artists also visited the schools. In 1963 the courtyard of San Carlos hosted one of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s chaotic happenings, known as Efímero pánico (Ephemeral Panic), which exploded the imaginary fourth wall of proscenium theater and alerted students to techniques and situations that invited spectators’ participation. The Cultural Olympiad, which accompanied the athletic competitions in 1968, also brought an unprecedented number of foreign artists and works to Mexico City, especially for the large-scale Solar exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Although the show was boycotted by several of Mexico’s leading artists because it failed to thoroughly integrate them and maintained an anachronistic system of academic recognition and rewards, it continued the internationalization of Mexican art.25 Jorge Pérezvega, who employed abstracted figures along with more didactic elements in his prints for the ’68 Movement, cited as stimuli the North American Leonard Baskin and the Italo-American Rico Lebrun, to whom he had been introduced by Capedavila. The printmakers specialized in archaic and moralistic woodcuts and in brooding rather than lyrical figurative abstraction, respectively. Drawing from this milieu, Pérezvega approached the issue of political prisoners in Mexico from a different angle than the interpreters of Vallejo and Campa, though he still aspired to link the ’68 Movement to a broader, international struggle for human rights. His woodcut depicts a faceless or hooded silhouette of a man or woman, the body modeled and at the same time scarred if not disfigured by irregular cross-hatching. Standing in a minimally articulated space of confinement, Pérezvega’s woodcut represents Lecumberri’s apando and solitary imprisonment anywhere. As Daniel Librado Luna Cárdenas documents in his oral history of San Carlos, in addition to serving as a hotbed of political activism, the institution was home to a revival in printmaking. In the 1950s and 1960s several artists-in-training at San Carlos were moving away from the overtly didactic messages of the LEAR and TGP, printmaking collectives of the early postrevolutionary period. In 1965 a group of about ten printmaking students began to exhibit together. They framed their work as responses to what they saw as the aesthetic “immobilization” of the medium after the

figure 22. A ’68 Movement woodcut print calling for “Liberty [to] political prisoners,” 1968. (Designed by Jorge Pérezvega; originally published in Grupo Mira’s La gráfica del 68: Homenaje al movimiento estudiantil, 1982.)

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earlier collectives, taking advantage of a more welcoming climate toward abstraction at the academy.26 They first exhibited at San Carlos and then in 1967 at Casa del Lago, a cultural space in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park. Their group, which included Jesús Martínez and Arnulfo Aquino, came to be known as the Nuevos Grabadores, the title of their second show. Observing this more expressionistic, less figurative, globally savvy printmaking, the art critic Raquel Tibol coined the term neográfica (neographics), which drew these explorations closer to the neo-avant-gardes operating around the world.27 A 1960s boom in printmaking in the 1960s, especially in the United States and Europe, positioned graphics not only as a highly reproducible medium but also as an experimental and even conceptual one.28 During the ’68 Movement, which may seem a moment when form was necessarily supplanted by primacy of message, there was a looser, more abstract handling among the printmakers than in earlier collectives, especially in the work of Martínez and Pérezvega. The printmaking revival began before 1968 and continued after, although not unchanged. Several artists who worked in the propaganda brigades were convinced by their experience that the city was the ideal medium for their politico-aesthetic concerns. In the 1970s and 1980s a cluster of artistic collectives emerged in Mexico City that came to be known as Los Grupos. These included Grupo Mira, formed by Arnulfo Aquino, Rebeca Hidalgo, and Malecio Galván, as well as Arte Otro, Grupo Suma, Proceso Pentágono, and Grupo Marco.29 They largely deemphasized the materiality and durability of the art object, preferring found objects and ephemeral interventions, mostly in Mexico City but in rural areas also.30 Not unlike the ’68 Movement (and midcentury planner-architects), they understood public space as a key site seek audiences in hopes to operate on their senses and perception. Grupo Marco, for example, asked pedestrians to create “urban poems” on sidewalks using a cache of words printed on cards, suggesting a city that could be rewritten daily if not minute by minute. As Hersúa (Manuel Suárez Hernández), who trained at San Carlos in the 1960s and was a founder of an early Grupo, Arte Otro, summed it up: the public could now be expected to serve as coauthor in his art.31 Los Grupos also increasingly understood their field of intervention as not only Mexican but Latin American and global. Proceso Pentágono, for example, integrated references to the disappearance of dissidents in Mexico and the dictatorships of South America in an installation exhibited at the 1977 Paris Youth Biennial.32 Collective production, alternative distribution channels, and references to historical and contemporary currents, both political and aesthetic, were

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all characteristic of the ’68 Movement’s graphic workshops. Some tactics were invented in the middle of mobilization, but most originated in preexisting formal tendencies and critical debates. They were adopted for a variety of reasons, as shown, but they were ultimately directed at hailing audiences to participate in the prodemocracy movement. Innumerable images and messages were circulated, but some were paramount: despite the PRI’s rhetoric, Mexico was not a liberal democracy; the economic Miracle did not benefit the whole nation; Mexico City was not the exclusive domain of the state or capital; and the city was available for reinscription on a daily basis with even the most basic of materials. The ’68 Movement also used film as part of its urban counterinformation campaign. The cinema brigades shared the printmakers’ interests and objectives, albeit from an audiovisual perspective. The rise of academic, independent, and other self-consciously new approaches to cinema in Mexico and abroad helped further underline Hersúa’s notion that audiences were now invited (and in some cases expected) by artists to serve as coauthors. The cinema brigades went a few steps further, inviting audiences to serve as the ’68 Movement’s coconspirators and stewards, in 1968 and after.

mobilizing mediation The propaganda brigades that produced the ’68 Movement’s cinema commandeered the equipment they needed but also the debates that engrossed Mexico City’s recently established film school. Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (CUEC, University Center for Cinematographic Studies), affiliated with the UNAM, was already a nucleus for a group of aesthetically and intellectually curious filmmakers. Recent advances in technology, such as smaller-gauge cameras, allowed for much smaller crews and greater mobility than was possible for commercial productions. Like the graphic brigades, these crews, consisting sometimes of just one or two brigadiers, entered into the flows of Mexico City, cameras in hand (or carried clandestinely), treating the city as a medium of communication and hoping to disrupt the status quo, intervening visually in order to intervene politically. They focused on shaking audiences out of mainstream habits of spectatorship: breaking any illusion of suture between film and spectator, and estranging their surroundings, whether the theater, the classroom, or the city at large. The CUEC brigades produced communiqués that served as counterinformation during the ’68 Movement and, after the Tlatelolco Massacre, stitched together fragments of film into its first documentary, El grito.

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Although more expensive and cumbersome to produce than graphics, the audio-visuals of film promised the ’68Movement an even greater degree of immediacy in engaging existing and would-be supporters. If directors and critics in this period increasingly discussed the alienation of the camera as a mediating and thus distancing device or the passivity of audiences of commercial film, then they also experimented with compensatory techniques, both visual and narrative. The cinema brigades were quite adept at switching between established and emerging styles—documentary, cinéma vérité, and unclassifiably experimental—to create a montage map of Mexico City that competed with the smooth, continuity-edited routes offered by the Olympic organizers or by broadcast television. Not only did audiences see students taking up official and institutional spaces in Mexico City, but that space was given new meaning in the process. This new and at times estranging map was also made possible by unofficial networks of exhibition, like cineclubs, that would continue well beyond 1968. Taken together, the brigades alerted viewers to their spectatorship and participatory role in the production of cinematic meaning—consumption as production—essential to the ’68 Movement and to its afterlives besides. Contributing to this search for immediacy, recently developed technologies moved filmmaking away from closed studios and closer to everyday life. CUEC students carried Arriflex and Bolex motion-picture cameras with 16-mm or 8-mm formats. These sizes, smaller than the 35-mm professional standard, allowed for more compact and relatively inexpensive equipment that was also easier to use, inviting amateurs and professionalsin-training. Film stock for Super 8, sold by Kodak beginning in 1965, came in cartridges that required no threading and could easily be loaded and unloaded. The American experimental filmmaker George Kuchar famously argued around that same time that despite its “puny” size, Super 8 was a “tool of defense.”33 Indeed, a camera in the street in Mexico, not in the hands of the mainstream media, was intensely political. It asserted that citizens had their eyes on public space and a reproducible means of representation, normally claimed exclusively by the PRI and its allies in mass media. The CNH recognized the political potential of cinema and regularly forwarded its agenda to CUEC students. The young filmmakers went well beyond recording meetings, though, going out into the markets and plazas of Mexico City. CUEC students were already experimenting a with outdoor filming and vérité and “gonzo” approaches. As Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón first described, in May and June of 1968 a group led by the student director Alfredo Joskowicz conducted a series of on-the-street interviews with

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students from various departments and schools regarding violence at UNAM, incited by a recent bus accident.34 Formally dressed and with microphone in hand, looking the part of a professional television journalist, Joskowicz proceeded with general questions. Then he suddenly asked if violence was a justified response, unsettling his interlocutors. Abandoning his journalist persona—calm, measured, “objective”—Joskowicz adamantly disagreed with those who answered yes. His aggressive pointing and shouting shattered the orderly unfolding of ideas and arguments normally associated with documentary filmmaking. The mobilization of the ’68 Movement in late July interrupted Joskowicz’s filming, but projects such as this one, as well as those produced by the CUEC brigades, located the “intensity” that Paloma and her friends in Ibáñez’s Los caifanes search for. Filming in public spaces meant uncontrolled environments and technical imperfection but also improvisation and a certain claim of authenticity or truth value for the ’68 Movement. The CUEC brigades produced four comunicados (communiqués) to serve as counternewsreels chronicling student protest and the government’s response.35 They were the work of Paul Leduc, Rafael Corkidi, Rafael Castanedo, and Felipe Cazals, all simultaneously serving as collaborating assistant directors on the COJO cinema department’s four-hour feature documentary, Olimpiada en México (1968), directed by Alberto Isaac. The comunicados were passed from university to university (and secondary schools and community centers) in Mexico City and beyond, from person to person, employing or building upon an existing network of cineclubs and foreign contacts as well. Though they circulated independently, collectively the comunicados presented a particular narrative arc that served the CNH’s insurgent (and tactical) requirements. They documented state aggression, the movement’s public response, and both the successes and the failures of its protests. The first comunicado, released on August 17, presented to “national and foreign press proof of the [state’s] brutal aggression,” as the title shot established. What followed was a series of images that documented a profusion of aggressions by the state toward the movement, with a preponderance of visual evidence. At this early stage, when the cinema brigades were just beginning to shoot footage, this evidence was more likely to be photographic than cinematic. Furthermore, in the 1960s it was photography rather than film that was more closely identified with a tradition of social denunciation in Mexico.36 In the first comunicado photographs are displayed in such a way as to avoid producing a seamless sequence of images that filled the entire screen. Rather, students were filmed holding the pho-

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tos in their hands. The hands serve as frames within the film’s frame, introducing another layer of sensuousness to the comunicados, which set up a series of emotionally impactful encounters between filmmaker and presumed audience. In Mexico the word comunicado is normally associated with official announcements made by government agencies. This publicity amounted to an endless stream of declarations, often without any materialization of public good. The ’68 Movement’s comunicados hijacked the genre’s formality and authority, introducing consequence and a haptic humanity. Some images were repeated for emphasis: a photograph of an elementary-school student being grabbed by an undercover policeman, appealing to viewers’ sympathy for the young boy. Most of the sound in this comunicado is extradiegetic, music borrowed from old film scores that, although perhaps not native to the subject matter, grant the film and thus the images a vague familiarity. (Later comunicados would use protest songs and sound recorded while on location.) Such rhetorical hauntings—the repeating photograph and uncanny sound—matched the ’68 Movement’s (and its narrators’) arguments that political and economic violence in Mexico was a recurring experience for citizens outside the circuits of power. It was important to the ’68 Movement to denounce the state and its illegitimate and routine violence to audiences at home and abroad, and it was just as important to claim legitimacy as a social movement. The second comunicado, titled La respuesta (The Response), argued that the student response to escalating state violence was neither criminal nor accidental but in the conscious public service of the nation. It opens with a series of shots of crowds at movement events. Each shot builds on the last, showing an ever-larger crowd, an irrefutable mass of supporters. Although the composition of the ’68 Movement is difficult to ascertain beyond the core support of students, faculty, and intelligentsia, it was very careful to court but also claim a broader coalition in its communications, which ranged from marches and graphics to the comunicados. In the second comunicado an unattributed poem is presented to this effect:37 And the most important thing of all: We continue to struggle. And if our concerns were Initially Within a student framework . . . We have managed to launch [ourselves] Within a [larger] social framework And its true character: The character of popular struggle.

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Such a mode of address also spoke of Neorealist currents in international cinema. The urgency of the comunicados gestured to recent films such as The Battle of Algiers (1966), which depicted the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). Employing nonprofessional actors and shooting on location, the director, Gillo Pontecorvo, repurposed the conventions of the newsreel, which not unlike a comunicado parroted official or mainstream perspectives to moviegoers, to represent the war from the insurgent point of view. The ’68 Movement’s comunicados stood in contrast to the films produced by the COJO’s cinema department, which were screened in movie houses during previews and on television throughout Mexico in the years leading up to the games. The Olympic shorts (along with the feature film directed by Alberto Isaac) claimed a holistic image of Mexico City. In Saludos de México (Greetings from Mexico), the audience followed Enriqueta Basilio, a track-and-field athlete, on a promenade architecturale of the city. The tour begins in the stadium that will host the opening ceremonies and where Basilio will make history as the first woman to light the Olympic cauldron, substantiating the liberality that the state had claimed as host to the games. “This is the . . . heart of the Olympic Games,” she tells her audience. “The scenes that you are about to see are very brief glances of Mexico City.”38 Basilio and her audience travel to other venues of competition, recent modernist buildings, and large-scale infrastructure projects, interspersed with historical monuments. Heightening some senses (vision; sound to a lesser degree) while unable to engage others (touch, smell, taste), the mobile, virtual gaze of Saludos takes visitors through a preapproved circuit of the Mexican Miracle’s greatest hits.39 With its “very brief glances” it adopts the gaze not of the resident or citizen but of the tourist: constantly in motion, distracted while seeking out spectacle. This promenade, the film implies through helicopter and crane shots, is best taken without having to come into close contact with locals or the untidy details of urban life.40 The CNH’s third comunicado parodied COJO’s swooping, eliding mode of vision and its hope that audiences would ignore the social fissures of the PRI’s modernization agenda. Satirizing the incessant developmentalism associated with both Saludos desde México and capitalist modernization, the comunicado opened with a close-up image of a No Turns traffic sign, implying that no alternative route was available. The sign is quickly followed by a series of scenes shot from moving cars, followed by panoramas of construction projects, including Ciudad Universitaria. If the images appear familiar, the stock footage of the COJO and the tourism industry, the sound is deliberately discordant. We hear Mexico City’s residents call in

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to a radio show to affirm their support of the ’68 Movement. This is overlaid with audio from speeches made at movement demonstrations. The CUEC brigades appropriated the COJO’s gaze, gesturing to the recent transformation of Mexico City’s urban space into official spectacle. At the same time they mixed layers of sound to estrange that gaze. The comunicados proposed that, despite the PRI’s repeated rhetoric of national unity and sacrifice, other routes to political and economic fulfillment were possible. They embodied the ’68 Movement’s and young filmmakers’ desire to mobilize mediation, moving the camera into the street in order move their audiences emotionally and intellectually. Founded in 1953, CUEC remained a bit of a guerilla operation by 1968. The school’s faculty and curriculum were still in flux, and it had not found an easy rapport with the film industry. The school was founded in part by Manuel González Casanova, the art critic and cineclub programmer. González Casanova played a prominent role in the reevaluation of Mexico’s national cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, after its so-called Golden Age. Mexico’s once-dominant position in Latin America, along with Brazil and Argentina, was challenged by a refocused postwar Hollywood that saturated markets and could afford to lose money in order to gain a lasting market share. This reevaluation took place at the same time as other new cinemas emerged on account of a variety of factors (French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Cinema Novo), but it generally combined formal innovation and varying degrees of social investigation. In Latin America many of these vanguards were closely linked to social movements.41 Instead of stimulating greater creativity, commercial producers in Mexico chose to finance formulaic genre films—including youth comedies and melodramas—so cheaply and quickly that they came to be known as churros, after the fried dough, filling but ultimately not satisfying. The distribution of film was also changing, with a consolidation in the exhibition circuit, increased censorship, and, eventually, a steep decrease in governmental production subsidies.42 One film, Julio Bracho’s La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Tyrant, 1960), became a symbol of a sense of crisis among cineasts. Although produced within the national cinema, it was censored for decades because of its critique of the institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution. If Mexico was to have a new cinema, then it would have to emerge at the margins of the industry, which included not only filmmakers but also audiences. Middle-class audiences, which had grown tremendously since the Golden Age, were underrepresented in the national cinema. As the cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis argued:43

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Socially and culturally what happens in this [new] cinema is a clear product of the demands of the middle class to find reflected their problems and their desire for access to universality, to cosmopolitanism in the face of the excesses of a cultural nationalism that has lost its force and dynamism and has become a series of grotesque formulae.

Compared with routine depictions of contented poor and inspiring elites, or their caricatured opposites, the middle classes remained largely invisible, especially relative to the other forms of cultural capital that they now wielded, including higher education and disposable income. Golden Age themes of national solidarity, individual sacrifice, and blind satisfaction also rang increasingly hollow as the PRI failed to deliver on its promises of social and political mobility. If the middle classes were not seeing themselves in the national cinema, then they began to make their presence known through an expanding film discourse in Mexico City’s newspapers, which included Monsiváis (who had a cameo as a drunken Santa Claus in Los caifanes).44 While the professed renovators of the Mexican national cinema were not so radical as their counterparts in Latin America, Leftidentified critics and directors certainly questioned the once-powerhouse industry in print, and they began to build institutions that expanded the borders of the industry. In January 1961 a group of cineasts consisting of directors, screenwriters, and critics, published a manifesto. They came to be known as Grupo Nuevo Cine. They included Manuel González Casanova, Carlos Monsiváis, and Alberto Isaac (later director of COJO’s cinema department), Jomi (José Miguel) García Ascot, Rafael Corkidi, and Jorge Fons (production coordinator for Los caifanes).45 The collective solidified its presence with Nuevo Cine, its journal published for seven issues between 1961 and 1962. The Grupo Nuevo Cine criticized what they saw as the poor quality of the Mexican national cinema as well as the hermetic nature of the industry that produced it and, implicitly, the government that financed and sanctioned it.46 Their most durable proposal was the creation of film schools such as CUEC, specialist publications, cineclubs, and archives that would produce waves of future filmmakers but also critics and informed spectators, all poised to challenge the industry’s conventions and limitations. To this end, the journal regularly featured excerpts from roundtable discussions, featuring contrasting viewpoints and criticism of film criticism. Droll discernment was the preferred editorial voice. Grupo Nuevo Cine also advocated for greater collaboration between directors and writers to counterbalance repetitive churro scripts. Los caifanes, for example, was cowritten by Juan Ibáñez and Carlos Fuentes, who came to global attention as part of Latin

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America’s literary boom in the 1960s and 1970s along with Argentina’s Julio Cortazár and Colombia’s Gabriel García Marquez. Responding to Grupo Nuevo Cine and to declining box-office receipts, the film industry began to create supplemental spaces for emerging professionals and their methods. The industry’s primary union, closely aligned with the PRI like most corporate bodies in Mexico, hosted a series of experimental short-film competitions for students beginning in 1965. However, as the film scholar Israel Rodríguez argues, this gesture of integration of was largely superficial.47 The union remained largely closed to CEUC graduates, locking them out of feature-length film production.48 Full integration with the film industry, however, was not Grupo Nuevo Cine’s ambition. Although inhabiting a variety of industry roles, they privileged that of the critic, meaning both the professional who writes about film but also the critical spectator. The first film to emerge under the Grupo’s aegis was En el balcón vacío (On the Empty Balcony, 1962). Directed by Jomi García Ascot, it is a 16-mm meditation on the lost youth and veiled memories of Gabriela, an exiled Spanish Civil War orphan living in Mexico. García Ascot, who admired the French auteur-centered critic André Bazin, described the film in Nuevo Cine as the “expression of the incommunicable” or the aporia of individual memory.49 Although perhaps a contradiction in terms, inexpressible expression, a young critic, Jorge Ayala Blanco, became a champion of En el balcón vacío. Ayala Blanco, who would go on to write several histories of Mexican cinema, perceived a distinct “expression of subjectivity” that was not present in mainstream production.50 This subjectivity was of the Spanish orphan but also of Mexico’s middle classes. Like Gabriela (and Paloma in Los caifanes) they were society’s orphans or satellites, at once benefiting from capitalist modernization, proceeding as voracious consumers and producers of culture, yet without significant formal political agency. As Ayala Blanco argued, perhaps the most significant outcome of this period was a new middle-class spectator in Mexico—informed, proactive, demanding, even snobbish—but an active participant in the production of the film’s meaning.51 It was through this critical mode of reception that film might express the incommunicable, including the traumas of the period, such as Jorge Fons’s Rojo amanecer (1989), the first narrative film to address the Tlatelolco Massacre directly. No comunicados were produced after August 27. The escalation of violence by the state and the militarization of central Mexico City, further complicated by the army’s occupation of UNAM and IPN in mid- and late September, made filming in public nearly impossible. The ’68 Movement would continue to produce and distribute films, but it would make do with

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materials already assembled. Foreshadowing the clandestine methods used by the movement to continue making cinema, the occupation of Ciudad Universitaria was documented by a CUEC brigade led by Roberto Sánchez. They drove up and down the Avenida de los Insurgentes, which bisects the campus, with a camera hidden inside the trunk of their Volkswagen Beetle, located on the front of the car and serving as a makeshift dolly. The last film to come directly out of the ’68 Movement is El grito. The title cites “the cry” (or “the call”) for colonial independence in the nineteenth century and the ’68 Movement’s own protest. The documentary combined 16-mm footage, around eight hours total, from at least nineteen different cameramen, recorded over the course of the summer and fall of 1968. None of its footage was shot with the intention of assembling it into a cohesive film.52 El grito was an early attempt at synthesizing both the triumphant and the traumatic events of 1968. Like several early narrations of the ’68 Movement, it echoed the movement’s tactics, proposing a model for its public memory: site-specific, collective, and open-ended. El grito’s production and distribution took advantage of established and emerging aesthetics and networks in Mexico City and beyond, as did the ’68 Movement’s graphics and comunicados. Moreover, it made the case for what can be called an ethical “infrastructure,” a way of experiencing the city and its representation oriented toward eventual justice for victims of the Tlatelolco Massacre and wider social justice for Mexico. El grito was a mnemonic for the events, a way of recalling the past, and an architectonic for memory, a framework for patching those fragments together; but the actual process of bearing witness (and responding, if one chose) lay with the critical spectator whom new cinema (and neográfica) in Mexico exhorted. Responding to their historical moment as well as developing an interest in formal and narrative experimentation as political act, CUEC students made this cinema their own and, by necessity, ours. If none of the footage used was shot with El grito in mind, then its assembly was self-consciously collaborative and meditative. Leobardo López Aretche, a CUEC representative to the CNH, was selected by his peers to edit the material in the months following the Tlatelolco Massacre and the state’s denial of culpability, which had made such a film necessary. He worked with Ramón Aupart and Alfredo Joskowicz. Oriana Fallaci, an Italian journalist injured at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas on October 2, collaborated on the narration with the CNH. The script was read by Rolando de Castro and Mágda Vizcaino, with Rodolfo Sánchez Alvarado supervising sound. Working part-time and clandestinely, the editors took almost a year to complete their cut. Given the political climate in 1969, El grito’s first public projection was delayed for two more years. It was finally screened on

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the UNAM and IPN campuses and continued to circulate through their cineclubs and in pirated versions.53 A similar tactic was used for Óscar Menéndez’s quasi-newsreel, ¡Únete, pueblo! (1968), which traced the movement between July 26 and August 27. The CNH paid for multiple copies to circulate before the Tlatelolco Massacre in order to reach a larger audience but also to continue even if some copies were confiscated by authorities or lost. El grito was broadcast on Mexican television in 2000 and is now widely available in DVD format and streamed online. The documentary opens black, followed by an epigraph from Romain Rolland: To free men of all nations, that struggle, that suffer but win. The French writer and dramatist was widely read in Mexico from the 1920s on and best known as a pacifist and a promoter of popular theater, open to the masses and democratic in aspiration. Following the epigraph, we hear jubilant singing before we see bodies. The location is not a triumphant march but a densely packed sidewalk. The frame is tight, so that this is not a particular place in Mexico City but la calle in general. Throughout the documentary, scenes of street life serve as intertitles between more narrative episodes: a free clinic run by medical interns, students reading ¿Por qué? magazine. The street is where the various strands of the ’68 Movement, the various stories about it and the stories it told itself, come together. At the same time, disrupting this utopia, though, the editors repeatedly cut to shots of helicopters in the sky. These appear with increasing frequency as the film proceeds, foreshadowing a helicopter’s role in signaling the start of the Tlatelolco Massacre. Shots of young people looking up, which begin to appear in the second half of the film, suggest a growing awareness of the state’s surveillance and its threat of violence. Most of the footage was taken hand-held, without a tripod. It was also taken without audio. Layered audio tracks flow in and out of synchronicity with the visual field. Added during editing, they range from snippets of extemporaneous speeches by movement leaders to Fallaci’s script, and from the descriptive to the self-reflexive. El grito is divided into four chapters by month, from July to October. The August chapter documents the ’68 Movement’s graphic production. Propaganda brigades are shown handing out flyers to passing cars and painting the exterior of the Ford Motor Company’s factory gate. We also see and hear an interview with Heberto Castillo, given from his hospital bed after he was beaten by government proxies. September focuses on the Díaz Ordaz administration and Mexico’s corporatist political system. The Tlatelolco Massacre, the October chapter, is mostly a series of blurry stills and the sounds of chaos: soldiers, young men stripped of their clothes, bloodied corpses.

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While a general chronological order is respected in El grito’s organization, each chapter works to loosely define not so much a narrative as an interpretive field for survivors of the events and also subsequent generations. Fallaci’s script provides some structure, but it is by no means exclusive in organizing the material. The audience is reminded of its own spectatorship with repeated shots of city residents standing on rooftops and balconies to observe the movement. As seen by the camera, the ’68 Movement’s marches were organic, with multiple branches and digressions even while moving in the same general direction. In accordance with the third comunicado’s critique of the PRI’s one-track modernization, the street is deployed in El grito as a framework for making sense of the city (and the nation), but it is not entirely straightforward or the only route possible. The film’s stream of images—still and moving, literally and semantically unsteady—as well as the frequently dissonant audio means that the spectator is often disoriented, attempting to make sense of the film, even when very familiar with the ’68 Movement’s trajectory from mobilization to the Tlatelolco Massacre. There are no captions or other on-screen indicators of place, person, or context. Short sequences, jump cuts, and the rough grain of the 16-mm film stock produce an impressionistic, atmospheric environment. During a scene showing one of the massive demonstrations at the Zócalo, we hear a mother asking the audience the whereabouts of their elected representatives. She invites these so-called representatives to take leave of watching television at home to take a closer look at what they regarded as empty spectacle at the plaza. Indeed, El grito invites one more move, from mobilization to massacre to mediation—and the crucial role of its audience in this process. At the end of the October chapter, El grito’s audience is transported to the Olympic opening ceremonies, ten days after the Tlatelolco Massacre. Elegiac music transforms the tone of the celebration: marching athletes become a funerary procession, the Olympic cauldron a memorial flame. However, El grito interrupts the ’68 Movement’s own mourning. The soundtrack is punctuated by blasts of jubilant music. It is unclear whether the aim is to parody the triumphalism of the Olympics and its patron, the state, or to celebrate the survivors of the massacre and offer hope to its survivors. What is clear is that any nascent habit of spectatorship established by the documentary, however loose and flexible, is up for disturbance; nothing is dogmatic or sacred. The filmmaker and critic Sergio García, enrolled at CUEC in 1968, later described El grito as using “images to impede the momentary victors from writing History.”54 The state, in other words, would be impeded. There were

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other lessons. The responsibility for writing histories of 1968 lies with the stirring spectator, and even sounds and images derived from official sources could be employed. While not a Grupo Nuevo Cine film, improvisational and open-ended El grito gestures to the new cinemas that collectively unveiled social truth to power in unconventional ways, out of either practical necessity or studied aesthetic. The ’68 Movement’s propaganda brigades produced and distributed still and moving images that sought to move their audiences to see the city and the relationship between nation and state in a new way. They moved literally and virtually through Mexico City, rendering visible (and audible) its multiple, overlapping, competing realities while at the same time estranging what was sold to the Mexican people by the PRI as the natural order of things. Through its marches, occupations, and counterinformation campaign, the ’68 Movement crossed over some of the city’s social, political, and economic boundaries. More important, it also called attention to the cultural and technological sutures put in place to maintain the status quo and offer citizens false hope. In 1965 the critic and filmmaker Manuel Michel, writing in Revista de Bellas Artes, defined documentary as a “a marginal cinema.” Referring to its usual screening before or after a feature narrative film, it was also “a cinema to fill up space.” However, because of the rise of formulaic churros, documentary had grown as an unsuspected means of disseminating a “realistic image of Mexico,” he wrote.55 Its marginality granted it expressive latitude, including visions of Mexico that were usually censored (“incommunicable”) within the national cinema. The ’68 Movement’s comunicados and El grito filled that empty space with searing pictures and narratives but also invited and left room for spectators to consume these films critically, creating media fields hospitable to public memory but also divergence from the sounds and images on offer. The final shots of El grito, interspersed between the credits, are close-ups of a young child’s face and hand. His hand switches back and forth between covering his mouth and flashing the V sign for VENCEREMOS (We Shall Overcome). The premature knowing (or innocent mimicry) of the child’s gesture suggests that the project of remembering the ’68 Movement will be carried forward by subsequent generations, those who were too young to fully understand but must make sense of the events nonetheless. Per Rolland, quoted at the beginning of the documentary, winning and suffering are tied together, with the former not always immediately apparent.56 El grito, based on ad-hoc material shot with a multitude of intentions and perspectives and converted into flashes of collective memory, can be assembled but cannot fully synthesize the ’68 Movement and the Tlatelolco

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figure 23. Film still of a confrontation between the outsiders and Jaime (Enrique Álvarez Félix), with Paloma (Julissa) to left. From Los caifanes (1967; directed by Juan Ibáñez).

Massacre. The audience is left with not a conclusion but confusion, discomfort, a process of making sense still under way. These are as much the tropes of new cinema as they are the realities and complexities of the mediation and interpretation of violence, especially with regard to trauma, which is necessarily belated, incomplete, and yet essential to locating truth and justice. Jorge Ayala Blanco would criticize El grito in 1974 for its apparent lack of analysis of the historical period, questioning its political value.57 But an indeterminate gesture, like that of the child (or of Siqueiros’s March of Humanity), can morph into a knowing or hopeful one, and back again, or a gesture not yet anticipated. This was an encounter and exchange closer to the ideal of unconditional hospitality than the condition-laden hospitality of the Mexican government. Although not a member of Grupo Nuevo Cine, the director of Los caifanes, Juan Ibáñez, shared many of their preoccupations. His short Un alma pura (1965, A Pure Soul) shared third prize at the film industry’s first experimental-cinema competition. Los caifanes effectively staged the ambivalent space of middle-class insecurities and notions of cultural distinction. Throughout the film, Ibáñez’s camera zigzags through the city

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trailing his characters, tracing the city’s geographic boundaries to reveal restless social relations that lie behind concrete façades and photogenic tableaus in a series of episodic chapters. Although unplanned, their wanderings are by no means unproductive. By sunrise the architect, Jaime, has had enough of his fellow travelers and decides to hail a taxi, expecting that his fiancée, Paloma, will join him. She begins to, her interest in Mexico City’s margins dimmed, but instead she hails her own taxi. Breaking with Jaime, she chooses an uncertain future over the preordained stability of matrimony and domesticity. She also rejects the social integration that normally punctuates the road movie and bildungsroman. The camera stays with Paloma as Jaime, framed by the taxi’s rear window, disappears into the distance. Having spent the night tracing the edge of intensity but never piercing it, Ibáñez leaves the door open not to Jaime but to Paloma and the vicarious middle-class audience’s imagination. Social locations that were so firmly fixed as the evening began are unexpectedly wobbling by dawn. Paloma is ready to take a yet-unmapped route. The ’68 Movement harnessed the city as a potent space for political subjectivity and agency, and for middle-class self-representation in particular. Appropriating existing transportation and creative networks and creating new ones, the movement’s graphics and cinema approached the city as a medium of communication, albeit a changeable one, with room for routes to democracy and social justice not yet articulated.

7. Dwellings What is at stake is not only the thinking of hospitality, but thinking as hospitality. —heidrun friese, “Spaces of Hospitality” (2004)

By October 2 the student-led democratization movement that emerged in Mexico City nearly three months earlier had reached an impasse. The opening ceremony for the Olympics was ten days away, an event that the state had framed as a celebration of Mexico’s modernity and liberality. However, underlying these categories was the state’s absolute sovereignty. Hosting the Olympics was an opportunity for the state to spectacularly assert its status as host not only to the tens of thousands of visitors but to the nation. Contradicting this congratulatory stance, since late August it had exhibited a willingness to attack the movement directly even if the whole world was proverbially watching. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz sent the army to occupy the campuses of the nation’s two largest universities, the UNAM on September 18 and IPN on September 24, the latter quite violently and spilling over into the surrounding neighborhoods. The ’68 Movement’s next step was not clear. Official avenues for public dialog—let alone the reforms that the movement was proposing—remained limited. The strike council had refused attempts at backchannel talks, which normally led to co-option by the state. Inside the CNH there were also rumblings that fire must be fought with fire. Students and supporters chose to meet on October 2 at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in the heart of the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex, which witnessed some of the fiercest fighting of the police and the army against the movement over the summer. On several occasions the middle-class residents of the complex came to the students’ aid, hiding them in their apartments or tossing garbage out of windows in order to distract the authorities. The Tlatelolco meeting would reemphasize the ’68 Movement’s solidarities with a wider base of support, despite its shortcomings in this regard over the previous months, and would underscore the movement’s tactical references to preceding labor move190

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ments and to social unrest around the world. It was an opportunity to highlight connections—and the potential for connection—that exceeded the PRI’s characterization of the movement as small, selfish, and criminal. Meeting at Tlatelolco also further highlighted a political system that isolated and sought to channel the demands of citizens rather than allow them to flow as desired. The October 2 meeting represented, perhaps more forcefully than its massive demonstrations at the Zócalo, a generous spatiopolitical imagination that aspired to inclusivity and plurality. To the PRI, it was dangerously generous. The army surrounded the Plaza de las Tres Culturas that drizzly evening. It was a show of force, mustering several hundred troops and armored vehicles, to the like of which the students and their supporters had grown accustomed. Movement leaders addressed the crowd from an open-air landing of the Chihuahua Building, an apartment block adjacent to the plaza. A few minutes after 6:00 p.m., a helicopter hovering overhead dropped a flare. It was a signal not to the troops on the ground but to members of the presidential guard and the Olympia Battalion, a group of paramilitaries trained to provide security for the Olympics, who were also present but in plainclothes. They were to undertake an independent operation planned at the highest levels of the state, including Díaz Ordaz and Interior Minister Luis Echeverría. This Operation Galeana sought to decapitate the movement by arresting its leadership amid a chaotic rain of bullets. Snipers positioned on the tops of buildings around the plaza shot at the army below, causing a chain reaction of gunfire. Thousands of civilians fled, taking refuge wherever they could, including amid the thousands of apartments that surround the plaza. Well into the early morning they were methodically searched to flush out those hiding and those who were harboring them. Nearly a thousand people were arrested overnight and transported to the army base Campo Militar Número Uno. At dawn municipal employees cleaned the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, collecting shoes and purses that had been left behind. If Mexico City’s mainstream press was any indication, news of the massacre was sanitized as well. The front page of Novedades read Shots Exchanged by [Student] Sharpshooters and the Army in Ciudad Tlatelolco. El Sol de Mexico, the capital’s most conservative newspaper, would turn its back on the events completely, looking abroad: Foreign Interlopers Attempt to Damage Mexico’s National Image. The state would argue that participants in the ’68 Movement fired first, with the army responding in self-defense and to secure order. Díaz Ordaz loyalists would go so far as to suggest that he saved the nation that night from foreign invasion (another chain reaction,

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figure 24. Participants in the ’68 Movement arrested in the lobby of a Nonoalco-Tlatelolco apartment building, October 2–3, 1968, Mexico City. (Photo: Manuel Gutiérrez Paredes; © Associated Press.)

this time fantastical, involving the United States).1 Security forces were stationed at the plaza for weeks after the massacre in an attempt to preempt any public mourning, which might produce martyrs and further instability. Although many of its leaders were arrested that night and in subsequent weeks, the CNH continued operating. Before the Olympic opening ceremonies it formally named the government as the party responsible for the Tlatelolco Massacre. It also sought the release of comrades imprisoned at Lecumberri Penitentiary. Sixty-three had been released, but 165 remained. In an act of defiance, students voted to continue their strike on November 4, refusing to return to their satellite campuses. The government, however, refused any public dialog. Perhaps most immobilizing for the ’68 Movement, Mexico City’s streets, its locus of communication, appeared closed indefi-

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figure 25. Military tanks occupy the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in front of the Chihuahua Building after the Tlatelolco Massacre, October 3, 1968, Mexico City. (Photo: Raymond Depardon; © Magnum Photos.)

nitely. There would no more marches, no circulation of propaganda brigades. On December 6, after 130 days of striking, the CNH dissolved. At the same time as the government was putting pressure on the mass media to disappear news of the Tlatelolco Massacre, it compulsively documented the event for its own archive. Manuel Gutiérrez Paredes, Echeverría’s staff photographer, took photos of movement leaders beaten and stripped of their clothes in the stairwells and lobby of the Chihuahua Building. (See fig. 24.) At the Campo Militar photographs were used to identify members of the CNH among those arrested to select them for further questioning and, in some cases, torture. In 2007 Servando González Hernández, a filmmaker who worked for the PRI in the 1950s and 1960s, revealed that he had been hired to capture the massacre. He developed the footage and delivered it to his contact, presumably a government or military agent, whom he never saw again.2 Although only around forty deaths have been independently confirmed in subsequent years, narrators of the Tlatelolco Massacre as well as foreign journalists have been more apt to claim hundreds of deaths. Three hundred is the number most frequently cited, accounting for the fact that family and friends of victims recognized they put their own lives in danger if they tried to claim their loved ones.

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Regardless of the total, the massacre remains a flash point in contemporary politics and public culture, carried forward by an ebb and flow of literary, poetic, cinematic, and theatrical representations, reactivated and transformed by subsequent events, from the state’s calculated periods of liberalization (PRI and PAN) to the ongoing narcoterror. How does one bear witness to a massacre, one of the most violent events in a nation’s modern history? What if that barbarism is not exceptional but routine, the massacre a symptom of a society’s structural failings? Who testifies then, and how? What is the ethical obligation of survivors in the immediate aftermath and in subsequent generations—or today? A defining feature of the ’68 Movement’s multiple afterlives is the activation of urban space through phenomenological and emotional modes of place making (description, mise-en-scène, genre, allegory) as a means of denouncing the state for its culpability. Its narrators treat Mexico City as a palimpsest, an uncanny place where, in spite of the state’s and the capital’s territorial logics, both specific and general histories of violence can be recalled to inform the continued struggle toward a more just society. Mexico City, they suggest, is not an inert stage set up by politicians, planner-architects, and real-estate speculators but is highly volatile, continually reproduced through its everyday use. This use is material, discursive, and imaginative. The city is known and moved through in multiple ways—landmarks, bus routes, cognitive mapping, interpersonal relationships, among others—with both ephemeral and lasting consequences. Indeed, for the Tlatelolco Massacre, long denied officially, literary and cinematic representation has secured its public memory over nearly five decades. Representation continues to animate the seeking of justice after institutional methods, such as the 2002–6 government special prosecutor during the Vicente Fox administration, have failed. This chapter examines the best-known narratives to employ this spatial method: Elena Poniatowska’s archive of testimonies, La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), and Jorge Fons’s melodrama Rojo amanecer (1989). NonoalcoTlatelolco looms large in both representations of the ’68 Movement. Indeed, the housing complex figured prominently in the spatial imagination of many Mexico City residents. Colossal in scale and publicized extensively by the state, it could not be ignored. Yet Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was built in a part of the city that had long served as the shadow to the modern Mexico City celebrated by the ’68 Olympics. It was a neighborhood occupied by rural migrants and urban poor, who were granted little social or political agency despite the fact that their cheap labor was essential to the capitalist functioning of the city. Regardless of the removal of these shadow residents prior to construction, the complex’s

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architecture continued to embody, wittingly and unwittingly, many of the injustices of Mexico’s modernization. The mostly middle-class residents who arrived at Nonoalco-Tlatelolco were even more closely tied to the state’s conditional hospitality, which simultaneously accommodated and subordinated citizens. They were all residents of the Hotel Mexico, though. Hotel Mexico is a metaphor for analyzing the asymmetrical relationship between the PRI and most citizens in midcentury Mexico, in which the former, installing itself as host, treated the latter as mere guests. Over the course of the Mexican Miracle, the PRI made ever-grander hospitable gestures to assert its sovereignty as its legitimacy declined. These gestures were spectacular in appearance, like Nonoalco-Tlatelolco or the Olympics, but ultimately empty in content, refusing to grant citizens suitable room for social, political, or economic mobility and seeking to distract from the widespread displacement and dispossession of Mexico’s capitalist modernization. The Tlatelolco Massacre was not an atypical event; rather, it was a moment when the routine violence of the Miracle was rendered acutely visible. Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s design, financing, and construction informed and were informed by modernization’s dual impulse: creation and destruction. The complex was erected over razed encampments and vecindades. Apartments that were advertised as the epitome of modern domestic hygiene were quickly turned into smoke-filled, flooded, bloodied holding cells on October 2. However, as the ’68 Movement demonstrated repeatedly and through various channels, Mexico City (and the Hotel Mexico) could be harnessed as a medium of communication despite its appearance as the exclusive domain of the state and capital. Poniatowska and Fons, in turn, demonstrate that Nonoalco-Tlatelolco can serve as the locus for truth seeking and denunciation regarding the massacre, or creation from destruction. The encounter between host and guest is much more fraught than the protocols and pleasantries of hospitality may make it seem, rendering the Hotel Mexico an unsteady edifice. In seeking guests a host must clear some space within its claims of authority and property, however limited and safeguarded. Poniatowska’s text positions Nonoalco-Tlatelolco as a place of popular resistance, notwithstanding the complex’s status as a calculated and controlling gesture of hospitality by the state. It is an unofficial and often passionate archive of the guests’ dwelling in and on the complex and the Miracle. Fons’s film, building on Poniatowska’s recalcitrant vision of the complex, invites audiences to respond to the Tlatelolco Massacre in a way that is not closed by the release and relief of catharsis but continues to exceed, as in melodrama, the bounds of any one traumatic event or any one representation of that event. The social function of the archive is not

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storage but interpretation, the reader moving through historical fragments, just as the power of melodrama lies in viewers’ being moved by the source material. Poniatowska and Fons call for collective memory to address the historical injustice perpetrated by the state against the ’68 Movement but also, because of the intellectual generosity of their projects, present-day injustices in Mexico. They suggest that the legacy of the movement is not as a turning point in Mexico’s democratization but as a portable and mutable mode of dwelling in and on the Hotel Mexico that allows it to be remade as a more ethical and generative space. Just as the Tlatelolco Massacre was not an exceptional event, the work of democracy and social justice is not bound by a particular time or place. Before turning to Poniatowska and Fons, we can glean Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s multivalent status in Mexico City’s urban imaginary by studying its design and use by early residents.

nonoalco-tlatelolco Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, located a few kilometers northwest of the Zócalo, was inaugurated in 1964 and inhabited two years later. It is officially named Conjunto Urbano Presidente López Mateos, after its patron. The housing complex was designed by a team led by the planner-architect Mario Pani. The construction of a new Buenavista passenger station nearby and railroad cargo and maintenance yards farther afield in the 1950s released a large parcel of land located strategically between the centro and growing residential and industrial satellite cities to the north. At the core of the complex are Mexica ruins and a Spanish colonial-era monastery and church that were simultaneously developed as a national-heritage site. Adjacent to the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, as the site was baptized, is an office tower that served as headquarters for Mexico’s Foreign Ministry (1966, architects Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Rafael Mijares). Although promoted by Pani and his patrons as a “city apart from the city,” Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was inextricably part of the long-term capitalist urbanization of Mexico City. Beginning in the 1940s, the state intensified its sponsorship of largescale welfare and transportation projects that were meant to thoroughly modernize and integrate the nation. As the country’s political, economic, and cultural hub, this fundamentally altered Mexico City’s urban fabric, both material and social. Journalists dubbed the various projects and related displacement of buildings (some historically significant) and people (mostly poor) El Proyectazo, “Mega-Project.” It was a descriptor situated between awe and veiled disapproval. While these public works set out to address specific problems—housing shortage, traffic congestion, flooding—they

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also served as an exaggerated and ultimately empty gesture of the state’s magnanimity and enlightened stewardship at a moment when its speculative transformation of Mexico City into a city of capital was producing an ever-greater number of shadow cities around its periphery. The success of these projects, which included Ciudad Universitaria and the Zacatenco campus of the IPN, depended as much on managing perceptions of the PRI’s developmentalist agenda as on any verifiable and sustainable improvement of Mexico’s infrastructures and standard of living. In other words, the state hailed a particular mode of urban experience that invited the public to perceive continual progress and improvement and not to perceive rising socioeconomic inequality or its suffocation of civil society and political opposition. This larger project assumed that its citizens would only enter, observe, and be satisfied with these spaces and social arrangements rather than participate in their construction or improvement. The state offered a modicum of accommodation, whether housing or a semblance of democracy, in exchange for political privation. This was one of the major conditions of its hospitality. Between 1940 and 1970 planner-architects closely aligned with the PRI articulated many of these grand gestures. Mario Pani was arguably the most prominent, along with Pedro Ramírez Vázquez. Pani’s array of buildings, editorship of Arquitectura/México, public-policy advocacy, and realestate investments redefined architecture’s professional and social domain. The modern architecture of the Mexican Miracle involved further integrating architecture, planning, and other design disciplines, adopting the latest materials and construction techniques and deploying authoritative modes of technological visualization. By the 1950s and 1960s, this latter component meant identifying, tracking, and dynamically managing the city’s complex flows—an infrastructural understanding of the city. Mexico City’s rapid population growth during this period, instigated by the state’s industrialization policies, was proving to be a problem not just of limited resources (land, water, jobs, housing) but also of governance. A series of social and labor movements rose up in the same period, contesting not only their share of the economy but the political system itself. The cadre of urban experts whom the state patronized deemed Mexico City unmanageable, in spite of the state’s push to absorb municipal functions and residents’ political franchise, justifying the invasive surgery that planner-architects carried out. Pani and his colleagues offered a set of tools that purported to pierce through the obstinately dense and unfathomable city life to see and manage its inner workings (except when it came to the state’s machinations). Basing their ideas on this assumption of a simultaneously panoramic

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and penetrating vision, planner-architects designed environments that seemed to account for any contingency—or challenge—urban or political. The planner-architects positioned themselves as indispensable mediators between the state, the market, and the private sphere, obscuring their competing interests under the banner of public good. Pani convinced the government of the financial and social expediency of high-density, multifamily housing complexes, which he called multifamiliares. Pani proposed not just individual apartment buildings but “urban cells” (células urbanas), not unlike Lucio Costa’s superquadras for Brasilia. These were meant to be selfsufficient yet linked to one another through a series of circulation networks. These networks sought to expedite but also to regulate the traffic of pedestrians and automobiles. However, their logic was scalable, potentially extending to any facet of life. These complexes attempted to erode longheld distinctions between the public and the private sphere in Mexico, shining unprecedented light on the reproduction of labor and citizens. Domestic space was traditionally the domain of family and remained largely opaque to urban experts, who saw it as inefficiently managed, decadent, or worse. There were also economic incentives in this search for transparency. The Centro Urbano Presidente Alemán (1949), the first of the multifamiliares, served as a catalyst for Mexico’s construction industry, leading to the formation of companies like Ingenieros Civiles Asociados (ICA, Associated Civil Engineers), which capitalized on this new government spending and eventually would play a largely unchecked role in guiding and profiting from urban redevelopment in Mexico. The profusion of advertising in Arquitectura/México over the years suggests that Pani and his peers reaped the rewards of this expansion as well. Pani frequently represented both public and private interests. Pani ran a think tank, the Taller de Planificación y Urbanismo (Planning and Urbanism Workshop), funded by a real-estate investment bank that built a business out of working with politically connected architects.3 He was also a leading proponent and developer of condominiums, using his influence to change Mexico’s property laws to accommodate them.4 Although never elected to public office the planner-architects—along with Ernesto Uruchurtu, who presided over several of these projects as Mexico City’s presidentially appointed regent from 1952 to 1966—acted as power brokers across elections and economic cycles, inserting themselves into the vacuum left by a civil society smothered by the state. Modernist architecture in Mexico entered a bureaucratic phase while in much of the global North it was seriously questioned and, in some cases, abandoned outright.5 Neither did Pani and his associates abandon the modernist technique of estrangement,

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shocking citizens with unfamiliar spaces and social arrangements in order to encourage (or force) society to conform to their vision of the city and society. Civic estrangement was another condition of the PRI’s hospitality. Massive in scale and monumental in form, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco is the most conspicuous example of this bureaucratization and defamiliarization. The complex consists of 102 low- to high-rise buildings, many with geometric designs on their façades, situated orthogonally on three superblocks. (More were planned but never completed.) Its northern and southern perimeters are Manuel González and Nonoalco (now Flores Magón) avenues, and to the west and east are Avenida de los Insurgentes Norte and Paseo de la Reforma. Most of the residents were government employees and their families. In addition to nearly twelve thousand one-, two-, or three bedroom apartments organized into fourteen building types, Pani and his associates endowed Nonoalco-Tlatelolco with extensive leisure, consumption, and welfare facilities, ranging from schools and clinics to sports clubs and a movie theater.6 Infrastructural needs were also addressed, including a water purifying plant, a garbage incinerator, and a telephone exchange. It was Pani’s expectation that the complex would satisfy any resident’s wants or needs. As people who lived in the complex in its first years attest, there was no other housing like it in Mexico; living there was otherworldly.7 When the complex was inaugurated, many structures were clad in black-and-white panels machined smooth to give them a futuristic appearance. (Seismic buttressing was added in the 1980s.) Pani employed Hermann Herrey’s theories of traffic control, as he had at Ciudad Universitaria in the 1950s, separating cars and pedestrians and eschewing intersections. As if to underscore NonoalcoTlatelolco’s general estrangement, a children’s slide in the shape of a rocket ship was included in one of the playgrounds. By the time planning for Nonoalco-Tlatelolco began, in the mid-1950s, Pani had already articulated an extensive theory of urban rationalization. For Pani, modernization hinged on the harmonization of Mexico City’s communications networks, which encompassed roads, mass media, and even social relations among residents.8 His theory drew upon the work of European modernist architects who participated in the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM, 1928–59), a series of meetings and a professional network that promoted functional planning as a means of addressing the challenges of industrialization and urbanization. Pani went one step further, though, calling for greater scale and speed to address what he saw as the limited resources and socially needy circumstances of postrevolutionary Mexico. With Nonoalco-Tlatelolco Pani hoped to finally insert into Mexico City’s fabric a project that encompassed all his

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figure 26. View of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco from the Insignia Tower, 1964. (Photo © Armando Salas Portugal.)

thinking about cities, especially regarding infrastructure serving transport and social-welfare functions. In his writings Pani envisioned a city in which not only would cars flow more freely but families would shuffle through apartments as their sizes and lifestyles changed. This process, presumably overseen by urban experts like Pani, would continually shift residents “upward” into newer housing stock, multifamiliares, so that the oldest housing stock and the land on which it sat could be retired. According to Pani this benefited Mexico City’s poorest residents but also real-estate speculators, who were not explicitly mentioned in his plans.9 Mauricio Gómez Mayorga, a member of Pani’s think tank, went so far as to hypothesize that the city would become an “interpolis,” where buildings would become more like automobiles, suggesting that no thing (or person) would remain stationary but all would be continuously in motion, as orchestrated by planner-architects.10 Such radical definitions of urban place and domestic attachment were necessary, in Pani’s estimation, given the city’s state of emergency. He perceived some troubling frictions: Mexico City’s sprawl, traffic, and poor urban planning were causing familial and social bonds to break down. Addressing his colleagues at the Sociedad de Arquitectos Mexicanos in 1957, Pani

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argued: “If anything characterizes our time, it is the dramatic effort that man makes to live together. . . . The basic element of human conviviality is the city. . . . The circumstance of man is his city. In it and its destiny lies his victory or defeat.”11 Again, the unspoken subtext was that such plans also corresponded with modernization plans that buttressed the state and enriched allies in business. Conviviality, for Pani and other modernists, was an eminently democratic and even ecstatic terms, used to gloss over the complexities of life at an everyday micro scale. However, at NonoalcoTlatelolco, as in the rest of Mexico City, not everyone belonged in the same way, despite promotional materials suggesting that all were welcome. It was not all untrammeled flows at Nonoalco-Tlatelolco. Pani understood the housing complex as a field of “centripetal” force within Mexico City, in contrast to the rest of the city’s centrifugal nature. Whereas male residents of the complex were expected to travel outside to work, women and children were expected to satisfy their everyday needs and wants within the complex exclusively.12 Schools and clinics were magnets for the children and shops for the women, all touted as healthy and secure environments.13 Shared corridors, parks, and other facilities at NonoalcoTlatelolco—the minimization of private space in favor of “public” space— were presented as spontaneous and plural even though they emerged from an architectural thinking that understood the public as a stage for social discipline and surveillance. Not unlike the city’s Lecumberri Penitentiary or its new university campuses, the transparency of these spaces to government or expert vision was expected. As Pani later told an interviewer: “Tlatelolco is characterized by having every necessity at hand. People do not have to go elsewhere. The idea was to create familiarity, a community of identical ideals so that no one can get lost.”14 Pani’s state-sponsored conviviality was unable or else refused to recognize lifeworlds outside the frame it built. In addition to the reduction of intersections, traditional loci for informal street life, the large, similar-looking apartment blocks and towers had no point of reference in Mexico City, making Nonoalco-Tlatelolco a difficult place to navigate for residents as well as for visitors. The everyday encounters and entanglements of urban life to be found elsewhere were discouraged. Not only did life at Nonoalco-Tlatelolco look and feel strange to its inhabitants—as well as exciting and desirous—it was the product of a political and economic system that made strangers of citizens, requiring their reincorporation by the state as guests. This involved the physical displacement of urbanization and the visual and rhetorical displacement of representation. In their preparations for Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, Pani’s office, along

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with various government agencies, documented the inhabitants of the neighborhood zone, home to thousands of workers who lived in encampments along rail lines and in vecindades. They were documented not to be preserved but to be disappeared. Most of the displaced residents were not reaccommodated by the housing complex. Pani, like many plannerarchitects of his generation, employed images as a tool to explain but also to justify his often quite radical proposals for urban redevelopment. Photographs taken by his office emphasized the abject poverty of the living conditions, focusing on the housing itself and the children who lived there. These images, while claiming the “objectivity” of the camera, also sought to arouse sympathy. The multifamiliares delivered youth from ruin and coincided with the state’s reconstruction of youth as a social category that required special tutelage. Youths were perhaps the ideal residents for these estranging projects, more open to their proposals with fewer attachments to traditional lifeworlds. Adults were not ignored, though, and were also subject to sentimental appeal. An advertisement for Nonoalco-Tlatelolco in El Universal, one of many published in the 1960s, promoted the complex’s schools: “Only at Tlatelolco City do you find gathered together so many and such valuable services: schooling from kindergarten to technical preparatory.”15 Below the text appeared an illustration of children seated at their desks in a classroom facing the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. Through the window they could observe firsthand the state’s orchestration of Mexico’s indigenous and colonial past under the banner of the modern, the three cultures in harmony. National and international audiences were not ignored, either. Pani circulated photography by Armando Salas Portugal of a largely barren complex, with no residents to interfere with the planner-architect’s vision of integrated design and governance. These images complied with the conventions of Euro–North American architectural photography while making the bold claim that Mexican planner-architects would carry the torch of modernism forward after World War II, bigger and brighter than before. Pani and his associates drew from multiple architectural models in developing the multifamiliares. Le Corbusier’s unrealized Cité Radieuse of the 1920s and his 1952 unité d’habitation in Marseilles were obvious touchstones, with Pani exhibiting his knowledge and respect for the Swiss architect’s vision in Arquitectura/México on several occasions. However, Pani’s domestic sources, which he did not cite as often, are just as significant, if not more so. After graduating with a degree in architecture from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1932, Pani worked on hospitality projects for his uncle, the statesman Alberto Pani. Young

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figure 27. Plan and elevation of Building Type A, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, ca. 1958. (Drawing: Office of Mario Pani Arquitecto y Asociados.)

Pani took over the construction of Hotel Reforma (1936) and Hotel Prado (1946), among Mexico’s earliest international-tourist properties. Hotels introduced Mario to the problem of high-density, technically complex design.16 New technologies and techniques were often adopted for these capital-intensive projects. At the same time fellow modernist architects were experimenting with worker housing as Mexico shifted from a rural nation to an urban one. Just as Pani was returning from Paris, Carlos Obregón Santacilia hosted a competition for “minimal” worker housing. The architectural brief was to design inexpensively built and easily reproduced plans, model spaces for the efficient reproduction of labor. As Obregón Santacilia described Juan Legoretta’s winning design: “It had only one floor, a living room, a dining room–kitchen, an alcove for the parents and two for children of each sex: a bathroom, closet, wash patio; they were [all] well distributed, well aired, well lit, and beautiful.”17 Although many of these experiments had intellectual origins in leftist collectivism, they were eventually absorbed by the Mexican government’s biopolitics, whereby

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subsistence took priority over facilitating a full human existence, especially political forms of being that might challenge the state’s sovereignty. Pani proposed a similar minimalism for residents of his multifamiliares, arguing in 1949 that Mexico City’s urban problems were not the fault of the state (or of experts like himself) but of residents who chose to live in “garbage” because they were incapable of saving money and had a “minimal sense of responsibility.”18 Pani and associates attempted to disappear Mexico City’s poor to the periphery, but it was the very vecindades and other forms of improvised housing that informed Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s design. The multifamiliares reproduced many aspects of their spatial and social organization, either directly or through their absolute negation. If the vecindades were dark, poorly ventilated, and “promiscuously” overcrowded, then the multifamiliares were sunlit, well ventilated, and with all domestic activities zoned. However, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s emphasis on public over private space echoed the tension between conviviality and the lack of privacy in shared washing and cooking facilities in the courtyards of vecindades. Plans produced by Pani’s office specifically indicated the placement of beds—only inside bedrooms, male and female children segregated, children sleeping separately from parents—in strict opposition to the lurid image of singleroom apartments perpetuated by novels such as Héctor Raúl Almanza’s Candelaria de los patos (1952) and ethnographies like Oscar Lewis’s Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (translated into Spanish in 1964). In Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s apartment blocks, white-tile and enamel-painted kitchens were outfited with louvered windows rather than those that could be operated at the residents’ discretion, insisting on illumination but also domestic transparency not unfamiliar to the residents of vecindades. Other features, such as garbage-disposal chutes, aspired to bourgeois tidiness but also tacitly acknowledged the government’s erratic garbage collection. Multifamiliares allayed anxieties stoked by pseudoscientific and pop-cultural representations of collective living while at the same time retaining their shared facilities and lack of privacy. Vecindades were a spectral presence at the complex, just as the histories and cultural meanings ascribed to the Mexica ruins and the colonial monastery at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas exceeded their consolidation as a national heritage by the state. One of Pani’s justifications for multifamiliares as preferred over smallerscale development was the promise of a less-rigid class hierarchy. However, the planner-architect’s design suggested class distinctions made in the buildings’ locations, heights, façades, layouts, and finishes—almost in every

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way possible. Most of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s apartments were organized in squat blocks. The twenty-two- and fourteen-story towers were reserved for higher-end units and generally located near parks and other recreation facilities. They were less densely arranged on the superblock and communicated better with the rest of the city. Elevators provided access to the units and balconies commanding views. Parquet flooring replaced linoleum. The tension between Pani’s rhetoric and his design choices further highlighted the contradictions at the core of bureaucratic modernism and the state’s claim of sovereignty. Both called for integration, whether of the body politic or of design disciplines, while pursuing differentiation and management. If avant-garde writers and artists came to Tlatelolco in the years before the complex’s construction to dwell on the abject social consequences of modernization by considering the neighborhood’s smoky, dusty opacity (see chapter 2), then Pani rendered their allegorical conclusions plain with his integrate-to-differentiate design. The logic of Mexico City’s capitalist urbanization was also maintained in Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s finance and property regime. Pani assembled a group of investors that included the Banco Nacional Hipotecario Urbano y de Obras Públicas (BNHUOP, National Urban Mortgage and Public Works Bank), the federal employees’ social-security and health-care administration (which financed sixteen buildings for its employees), and Aseguradora Mexicana, a state-owned insurance company (which financed one building for its employees). With domestic capital for such a massive project limited, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was built in three phases, each phase funding the next. In addition, more expensive units were sold to subsidize more affordable rental units as well as social-welfare services on site. Economic fluctuations midway through construction led to a sudden drop in government funds. Pani and his associates were forced to seek foreign financing, which they found with the Alliance for Progress and the Inter-American Development Bank, which used investment as an instrument of U.S. diplomacy throughout Latin America. The American president John F. Kennedy visited the construction site as part of a state visit to Mexico in 1962. Kennedy’s cachet, however, was not enough to spur sluggish sales of the more expensively finished “investment apartments.” Sale prices were lowered and, in order to salvage the complex’s welfare services, a greater number of units was made available for sale rather than for rent, further squeezing out lower-income residents.19 Over the years Pani paternalistically advocated ownership as way of teaching citizens responsibility and guaranteeing the upkeep of the multifamiliares. However, the property regime established at Nonoalco-Tlatelolco

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ensured the opposite. Buyers were granted no deeds or condominium shares but instead what were called Certificates of Real-Estate Participation.20 These could be renewed after ninety-nine years but could not be easily sold or bought on the open market. Pani’s contradictory logic corresponded with the prevailing logic of capitalist modernization, especially as experienced in domestic spaces. Reflecting on the transformations of nineteenth-century Paris, Walter Benjamin referred to middle-class homes as the “universe of the private citizen” but also a “phantasmagoria.”21 These spaces, decorated and treated as a sanctuary from the radical social and urban changes outside the threshold, were not impermeable. As seen at Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, the state and the market increasingly sought to blur the border between public and private space. For all its advanced domestic technology and welfare amenities, the complex was designed to ensure that no one ever felt truly at home. Residents were supposed to remain perpetual guests. Regardless of the changes in Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s financing and composition—or perhaps because of them—in 1966 Pani published a special celebratory double issue of Arquitectura/México dedicated to the complex. The journal’s nearly three hundred pages documented the complex exhaustively. A summary in English and French was also included for foreign investors and architecture critics. The journal’s cover image was not the by-now standard aerial view of the massive complex but a photograph by Armando Salas Portugal. It was taken at the base of the pyramidal Torre Insignia, looking up at a twenty-five-story office building at the western edge of the complex. It announced the erection of a new landmark for a Mexico City transformed by Nonoalco-Tlatelolco and other social infrastructure projects. Emblematic of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s estranging effect on the city, the photograph emphasized the curtain-walled façade over any sense of place, with clouds reflected in its windows while most of the sky and Mexico City’s distinctive volcanic basin were cropped out.22 The tower also blocked the view of the nearby Nonoalco Bridge, which offered a critical perspective on modernization in so many midcentury films and novels, including those by Carlos Fuentes and Fernando del Paso. In his letter from the editor Pani remained confident of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s efficacy and legacy. Pani concluded: “Today this exemplar of modern Mexican culture rises, before all and above all, as an act of faith in national destiny.”23 Pani reiterated the state’s and the modernist planner-architects’ claims of authority, based in sovereignty and expertise, respectively, but each at the same time claiming a corpus mysticum, a social body that must submit on the basis of faith rather than consent. Although hospitality had evolved well beyond its Judeo-Christian origins, the Mexican government’s endur-

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ing and often-mystical practice required citizens’ suspension of disbelief. The ways Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s first residents used and remade the complex complicated Pani’s prophecy, however. Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s residents were not so docile as expected; they refused to remain mere guests. By the time Pani published his double issue of Arquitectura/México, they were already transforming the complex. Close to a hundred thousand people lived there already, thirty thousand more than planned. Some of their uses and changes recalled established modes of familial and collective living, whereas others proposed new arrangements. Underutilized bedrooms and service patios, including those on the roofs of buildings, were sublet, offering an extra revenue stream. The Certificates of Real-Estate Participation were traded in an informal market, granting their holders the liquidity that they needed. Gente magazine, reflecting a general dubiousness among the popular press, called the complex a “great fiasco” that was merely photogenic rather than a properly functioning community.24 Eventually residents’ associations would form to claim roles in the complex’s administration. They were unwilling to accept that the state and its agents might encompass, let alone satisfy, all their requirements and desires, whether as residents or as citizens. Less than two years later, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco became a base of operation for the ’68 Movement, along with the IPN and UNAM’s CU. As the CNH leader Raúl Álvarez Garín told Elena Poniatowska, he did not “join” the movement as if it were an extracurricular club or sport. It already existed in the recalcitrant history of protest at Mexico’s universities and northern proletarian neighborhoods like Tlatelolco, where he came of age. “It’s a question of fighting for everything we believe in,” he told her from Lecumberri, “for the things we’ve always fought for, things that our fathers and our father’s fathers fought before us. . . . We come from working-class families, people who have always worked hard for a living.”25 Álvarez Garín offered Poniatowska a genealogical and recursive chronology that competed with Pani’s teleological vision of Tlatelolco (and Hotel Mexico) as “national destiny.” Álvarez Garín and Pani were both correct to understand Tlatelolco as a site for constructing Mexico’s pasts as well as its futures. In the 1970s and 1980s the state largely abandoned the complex, allowing it to become an early experiment in neoliberal privatization. The complex was handed off to the Administradora Inmobilaria, S.A. (AISA), a company created by Banobras (formerly BNHUOP) that invested minimally in its maintenance.26 In 1974 AISA began to raise fees levied upon residents by as much as 20 percent without improving services. It also sought to convert rentals

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and Certificates of Real-Estate Participation into condominiums. Residents were generally amenable to this, but not with without taking into account the years of neglect and thus depreciation. Earthquakes had also damaged the complex in 1979 and 1982. Various neighbor associations, their members ranging from owners to squatters, mobilized to fight the change.27 Echoing the ’68 Movement, they published newsletters, engaged the mass media, and marched to Los Pinos, the presidential residence. The protests were effective to a degree; a government agency took over for AISA in 1982, although returning to the state’s usual clientalistic approach. In September 1985 Mexico City suffered a devastating earthquake, during which the complex was disproportionately hit. Several buildings collapsed. The state’s lumbering response to the emergency was catastrophic in its own right, and communities throughout the city banded together (some established, others newly formed) to save and support their neighbors. At Nonoalco-Tlatelolco one of these groups would evolve into the Topos (Moles), a humanitarian disaster search-and-rescue team. These events and others ensure that the complex remains a national barometer, registering the pressures placed on citizens by the state and the market, and vice versa. Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was a full expression of Pani’s theory of urban rationalization, especially his notions of social traffic and public but highly managed conviviality. Its design, while seeking to orchestrate the complex if not infinite flows of the city and its residents, also revealed the limits of this totalistic thinking. Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was designed to disappear the neighborhood’s encampments and vecindades but instead reproduced many of its forms of collective living. Pani underestimated how established and new ways of life emerge in even the most restrictive environments, the result of people’s dwelling in and on the city, their spatial imagination. Furthermore, although conditional hospitality is a practice that seeks to mediate the asymmetrical relationship between host and guest with as little social friction as possible, risks are entailed when the sovereignty of the host and the dependency of the guest are reified. The conditions of the state’s hospitality—a merely biological “bare life” in exchange for political privation—could be observed, studied, walked through, smelled, and touched on an everyday basis. The bodies of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s residents and the spaces they dwelled upon were the foundation for a mode of urban and political consciousness that recognized the cunning of the Hotel Mexico and sought to deconstruct it. The continuous reproduction of space and social relations at Nonoalco-Tlatelolco extended well beyond its superblocks, as the ’68 Movement’s interventions throughout Mexico City proposed. And as Poniatowska, Fons, and other early narrators of the move-

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ment would propose through their phenomenological and emotional place making, this reproduction did not need to be limited by time or distance from the events of 1968. In fact, these afterlives would be fundamental to inviting spectators to serve as witnesses to the Tlatelolco Massacre but also to the routine violence under PRI-led modernization and governance.

archive of dwelling Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco is perhaps the most widely read narration of the ’68 Movement. The book is a collection of testimonies that the journalist gathered in the two months following the October 2 massacre. Poniatowska was not present for the event but visited Nonoalco-Tlatelolco after receiving word of the violence. She gathered accounts not only from ’68 Movement’s leaders at Lecumberri but also from their families and friends, especially mothers, sisters, and daughters, who were not always given a prominent role in movement discourse.28 She also did not limit herself to spoken testimony. La noche de Tlatelolco reproduces Rosario Castellanos’s poem Memorial de Tlatelolco, a photo essay (with most images by Héctor Garcia), newspaper headlines, excerpts of government reports, and movement slogans, among other fragments from over the summer. The testimonies also appear as fragments. Few if any are offered in their entirety. Seldom does their sequencing offer a sustained narrative arc. They can be read in any order. The book’s authors, then, are multiple. Some seem reliable; others, less so. Some voices are stronger than others. The overall effect is impressionistic and cacophonous. In her role as reporter, editor, and advocate, Poniatowska reserved the privilege of selection, order, and emphasis.29 However, instead of creating a definitive narrative of the ’68 Movement, she creates an archive. This is not only an archive in the traditional sense, a physical structure (in this case a book) containing fragments of the past; it is also an encounter between reader and representation. Not unlike the ’68 Movement documentary El grito, which was produced after October 2 from sundry film shot by the cinema brigades, La noche de Tlatelolco’s form emphasizes the spectator-reader’s process of interpretation. Knowledge of the events is cumulative but nonlinear, with many routes. One is likely to conclude that the state was responsible for the massacre, but beyond that key fact many other conclusions are possible. The sum of testimonies does not produce “what really happened,” the expectation held by readers of conventional histories. Poniatowska extends the circle of testimony by including accounts—often passionate—from

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those, like her, not inside the ’68 Movement or at the massacre and yet affected in deep, material and repeating ways. The text harbors—as well as detonates within audiences—such feelings as tragic loss, euphoria, militancy, and self-doubt, among many others. Such an open-ended framework can be used to disassemble official histories and spaces presented as definitive wholes—like the state’s account of the Tlatelolco Massacre or Olympic Mexico City. Throughout La noche de Tlatelolco, residents of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco describe how they live in the complex but also how it influenced their thinking about the ’68 Movement and Mexican society more broadly. The testimonies supplement the histories and futures proposed by Pani and his associates and further link the movement to the social, economic, and political transformations of Mexico City well before the emergence of the movement in July 1968 and well after the Tlatelolco Massacre. Margarita Isabel, an actress who lived in the complex, reported that she was chased by soldiers:30 When I got to the corner, I ran down the street to my building as fast as my two legs would carry me, dashed up the stairs to my apartment, and locked myself in! About five seconds later, I heard the downstairs door open, but those two dumb bastards never dreamed they’d be confronted with so many apartments inside my building—from outside it looks as though there are only two or three of them, but once you’re inside it’s a labyrinth, like an [Michelangelo] Antonioni film—you know?—a real maze, with forty apartments or so, and you go out of your mind if you don’t know your way around.

Although the buildings of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco were arranged on an orthogonal grid, and its circulation systems and apartments were carefully zoned, ostensibly transparent in their logic, the complex was entirely opaque to the soldiers, agents of the state that was the complex’s patron. Pani’s design called for the utmost efficiency, requiring that elevators and stairwells served the maximum number of apartments, creating warrenlike levels. The planner-architect could not reconcile the state’s desire for a more transparent domestic sphere and the financial limitations put on the project. Isabel underlines one of the many contradictions housed by NonoalcoTlatelolco that destabilized its public image as a microcosm of the nationstate and made it such a resonant site for narrators of the ’68 Movement. While Pani envisioned a specific, delimited conviviality for NonoalcoTlatelolco, unplanned associations and affinities emerged nonetheless. Mercedes Olivera de Vázquez, an anthropologist living in the Chihuahua Building, told Poniatowska:31

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Just think what would have happened if the Tlatelolco housing complex had become a well-organized revolutionary nucleus, a sort of center of urban guerilla activities. We didn’t have the means available to organize one, but perhaps the government thought we did and decided to put a stop to it. The authorities were well aware that the people had started taking an active part in the movement—not just a group of students . . . but working-class people in Mexico City. . . . I maintain that it was for that very reason that the authorities chose Tlatelolco as the place to stamp out the movement once and for all.

Another resident put it more definitively: “A sort of popular movement sprang up among the fathers and mothers and teen-agers, and even little kids, six, seven, eight, nine years old, who began playing a new game— marching around with wooden rifles past the granaderos and soldiers on duty . . . even before October 2.”32 These were solidarities that fell outside the state’s rigid political system and could not be countenanced. Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was the site of some of the most violent confrontations between the ’68 Movement and state security forces after the initial Ciudadela conflict in July.33 Students at Vocacional 7, the IPN-affiliated technical school on the grounds of the housing complex, were among the most militant of the CNH. Early on the morning of August 29 dozens of military detachments or paramilitaries posing as students from FNET and MURO, two student organizations without ties to the state, fired at the façade of the school. In recognition of this attack and of the growing solidarity with the residents there, the CNH held its first meeting at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. Security forces returned to the complex September 21, on their way to occupy the IPN’s Casco de Santo Tomás campus nearby. Receiving advance word of a significant movement of troops in their direction, students created barricades by knocking down electricity poles and hijacking buses. They also disabled traffic signals to create congestion, all in order to slow the troops’ advance and to give their companions on campus an opportunity to escape. They fought in and around Nonoalco-Tlatelolco for over eight hours. Residents of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco came to the students’ rescue throwing trash, “stones, jars, cans, pieces of wood, paving blocks” from their windows and balconies onto the troops.34 Taking advantage of their buildings’ modern boilers and cooktops, they threw scaldinghot water, too. When the air finally cleared, many entered Vocacional 7 to see evidence of the battle. They visited “as if a monument or a guided visit,” according to the student organizer Jaime García Reyes. In doing so the residents expanded the boundaries of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the statemanaged national-heritage site, to include popular dissent.35 The IPN was

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not fully occupied by the military until September 23, in part because of Tlatelolco’s fighters and residents. This informal solidarity and conviviality would continue beyond the Tlatelolco Massacre. The writer María Luisa Mendoza confessed to Poniatowska:36 I’m never going to leave Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, even if [the secretary of defense] General Marcelino García Barragán shows up in person, with all his gold stripes, and troops armed with bazookas to try to get me out of here. This is my own little bit of breathing space, my trench. . . . Oh, no, listen: Don’t put that down, that I said it was my trench, because they’ll think I’ve got a stock of bombs and hand grenades in here, when even my kitchen knives are so dull they won’t cut!

For many interviewed the complex offered a physical structure for resistance and protection at the same time as it was a place of surveillance and repression. Their comments offer to Poniatowska and her readers a Nonoalco-Tlatelolco that is a physical place, a material structure for collective memory, where violence occurred and could be visited. They also offered the complex as a discursive and imaginative structure for memory, as the embodiment of the Mexican Miracle and citizens’ ideas about or practices for transforming it in their own image. Readers of Poniatowska could visit this supplemental structure virtually and indefinitely. In an editor’s note to La noche de Tlatelolco, Poniatowska suggests that grief is “a personal thing,” recognizing the difficulties in coming forward to testify. She adds: “Putting it into words is almost unbearable; hence asking questions, digging for facts, borders on an invasion of people’s privacy.”37 Nonetheless, the text’s significant contribution to the corpus of ’68 Movement narratives, and to testimonial literature more broadly, is its proposal that feelings are public and that such narratives form publics (and potentially social movements).38 If the state blurred the boundary between public and private space at Nonoalco-Tlatelolco to manage both more tightly, then Poniatowka’s text and those like it blur public and private to create room for the work of collective memory outside government institutions, against censorship and co-option. In the process, seemingly discrete categories such as body, memory, and environment no longer hold so firmly, as a matter of either perception, creativity, or political necessity. Some residents, like Catalina Ibarrola de Cabeza, were especially sensitive to this blurring. She told Poniatowska:39 I could taste blood in my mouth; I walked along the esplanade with the warm, salty taste of the blood of all the dead choking me. . . . I know that the blood is drying up now, that it’s turning black, but it seems to

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me that it’s soaked right down through the cracks between the paving stones in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, that it’s encrusted the tezontle [porous volcanic stone]. You know, even the tezontle seems like blood trampled underfoot.

Ibarrola de Cabeza’s synesthetic comments register the strong visceral connections that residents made between the massacre and its site. She tells Poniatowska that she wants to move away from the complex. Ultimately, La noche de Tlatelolco captures Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s centrifugal and centripetal forces, as Pani envisioned but with a very different rationale. Poniatowska and her witnesses call readers to the site, asking them also to witness the massacre as well as the Mexican Miracle’s routine violence. They ask readers to go away also, in the hope that they may tell yet others and seek recourse. The script of Jorge Fons’s Rojo amanecer borrows liberally from La noche de Tlatelolco, taking seriously the sense among survivors of the October 2 massacre that dwelling in and on the housing complex holds traces both for reconstructing the event and for deconstructing the PRI’s Hotel Mexico.

unexpected guests Rosario Castellanos’s poem Memorial de Tlatelolco comments on the tension between the grave violence of October 2 and the early-onset amnesia of the mainstream media’s reporting. She wrote:40 By dawn the following morning the Plaza has been swept clean. The lead stories in the papers were about the weather. And on television, on the radio, at the movie theaters the programs went on as scheduled.

It would take some time before a commercial, nondocumentary film dealing with the Tlatelolco Massacre reached theaters. Fons’s Rojo amanecer was under review by the government for close to a year before colleagues of the producers joined together to petition for its release.41 This was allowed only with cuts to any reference to the military’s role in the massacre. Also, its exhibition was restricted to the secondary circuit in Mexico City. On account of the delay and limitation—Poniatowska has asserted her book became an instant bestseller because readers assumed it would be quickly censored—Rojo amanecer become one of the highest-grossing domestic films of 1991.42 Set largely within a single apartment inside the Chihuahua Building from the morning of October 2 to the next daybreak, it is at its heart a domestic melodrama. The plot turns on the arrival of a

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series of unexpected guests at one family’s door, their responses, and ultimately those of the film’s audiences. As early narrators of the ’68 Movement argued, public memory depended on secondary and tertiary witnesses—unexpected guests—who must testify if chants like NEVER AGAIN! are to be heeded and, moreover, if the failures of official means of justice for victims and survivors may be remedied. Generosity, Rojo amanecer proposes, is one possible avenue. The film’s female protagonist is transformed by the massacre, from stock selfabnegating mother to paragon of unconditional hospitality. She welcomes students running from the massacre. Paramilitaries also demand and gain entry to her home. While harboring students leads to most of the family’s murder, this shock exemplifies the challenges of bearing witness to grave historical violence and reckoning with trauma. Witnessing involves not only recognizing and remembering violence but also giving up control, embracing without claiming ownership and authority, and thereby mitigating the risks reproducing the power dynamic that facilitated or enacted that violence. Such unconditional hospitality, as Jacques Derrida argues, is almost if not entirely impossible. However, to aspire to such an ideal is to orient memory and justice toward universal human rights rather than toward institutions supervised by a state that perpetrates such crimes, either in deed or through negligence. Housing three generations in one two-bedroom apartment, the characters of Rojo amanecer stand in for the dramatis personae of the events of 1968. Humberto (Héctor Bonilla), the father, is a functionary in the Department of the Federal District, the state agency overseeing Mexico City, and Alicia (María Rojo), his wife, is a homemaker. They have two sons, Sergio and Jorge (Bruno Bichir and Demián Bichir), who attend university and are active in the ’68 Movement, and two younger children, Carlos and Graciela (Ademar Arau and Paloma Robles). Their grandfather Roque (Jorge Fegán), a former military officer, lives with them as well. The first gathering, breakfast at the dining table, is expository. Alicia and her sons recount recent events, offering a month-by-month chronology. The demands of the CNH are reiterated point by point. Rojo amanencer becomes another node in the ’68 Movement’s rhizomatic structure of collective memory: repeating information, recalling the past, and creating a dense media field that cannot be denied or co-opted by its enemies. The three generations also embody many of 1968’s more fleeting aspects: personal crisis, broken familial bonds, and moments of human generosity. While Humberto is lighthearted, a modern father who seeks to spend more time with his children, Roque represents a more traditional position.

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Concerned for his sons, Humberto alerts them that the government is escalating its response. Father and sons argue, and when it grows too heated Alicia comes to their defense as the family’s peacemaker. Roque, however, is quick to make it clear that her authority is derived via Humberto: “It is because of your father that we eat, because of your father that you go to school, . . . ungrateful kids.” Roque echoes the state’s criticism of the ’68 Movement using the language of a host rebuffed, his hospitality refused. Fons’s camera stays almost exclusively inside the family’s apartment, a huis-clos aesthetic that was a practicality and highlighted the PRI’s conditional hospitality. Fons made Rojo amanecer for 310,000 pesos (about $100,000), filming on weekends to allow his cast and crew to earn a living.43 Shooting a massacre or march scene on location would have been expensive and would have drawn the attention of the authorities. The government had only recently begun to formally acknowledge the Tlatelolco Massacre, and it was not yet clear how it might respond to the first narrative film to deal with the subject. In order to guarantee discretion, a near-replica of a Nonoalco-Tlatelolco apartment was built in a studio. Fons’s huis-clos aesthetic also drew attention to the social relations that gave Nonoalco-Tlatelolco and wider Mexico City their shape. In Rojo amanecer the family unit and the apartment unit are tied together—but in ways that supplemented or else rejected Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s modernist design. The film’s first shot is of Roque’s bedside table, crowded with personal effects and detritus: alarm clock, lamp, half-filled glass of water, wadded-up tissue paper, bottles of medicine. When Humberto’s alarm goes off, we see that his is not much different. These still-lifes of the everyday are the opposite of the streamlined, hygienic space envisioned by Pani or in the promotional photographs that presented either apartments empty except for furniture or families self-consciously posing. As the camera pans around the apartment, establishing a sense of place, the architecture’s crisp lines and domestic technology are blurred or covered over by the family’s furnishings. Its white walls are overloaded with wallpaper, photographs, mirrors, and an altar. The linoleum floors are covered in carpets. The apartment is also filled with people, exceeding the planned occupancy: Humberto and Alicia share a bedroom, as do Roque and Carlos, and Sergio and Jorge; Graciela sleeps on the sofa in the living room. Fons takes time to note the lived-in quality of the apartment, a gesture to the lifeworlds that were recognized by Pani and associates only to be razed to clear space for the complex. The huis-clos aesthetic also drew attention to Mexico’s political structure. Leaders in the ’68 Movement often used the metaphor of enclosure to describe the PRI’s corporatist system. David Huerta called it “claustrophobic,” a politics

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figure 28. Luxury-apartment interior, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco, ca. 1964. (Photo: Office of Mario Pani Arquitecto y Asociados.)

of “closed rooms, full of smoke.”44 Willing and unwilling enclosures were also experiences specific to the massacre and its immediate aftermath. In the days and weeks following the massacre, those who were not arrested stayed home. What was left of the CNH met in private homes instead of in public; the propaganda brigades disappeared. Humberto Mussachio reported that “there was no longer the climate to maintain the movement. We could no longer go out on the street.”45 The massacre also left a psychic mark. As Roberto Escudo described it, “a profound depression floated in the city.”46 Thanks to La noche de Tlatelolco and many other narrations of the ’68 Movement, the state’s culpability for the October 2 massacre was common knowledge by the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yet Rojo amanecer still produces chills and other disquieting responses from viewers who for the most part know what is coming and how the film will end. This knowledge is the absent establishing shot of the film, replacing any need for a long panning or aerial shot of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco to set the geographical or temporal scene. The Plaza de las Tres Culturas appears only briefly, a few times, and not during the massacre. The housing complex, as much of the state’s social infrastructure, attempted to domesticate the routine violence of Mexican

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modernization. Pani cleared Tlatelolco of its militant proletariat to offer government employees modern apartments. Yet the apartments, in spite of Pani’s clearing and the popular pathologization of the vecindades and their inhabitants, maintained many of this building type’s features. The violence of this process, symbolic but also physical, haunted any semblance of middle-class comfort at the housing complex.47 Rojo amanecer consistently knocks down any illusion between public and private space, as state terror occupies the family’s apartment, making plain the logic of official conviviality and compulsory visibility implicit in its design. Viewers are apt to be discomforted in their own viewing environment. What, then, are the sources and consequences of our security, comfort, and pleasure? Who is host? Who is guest? These were questions relevant not only to residents of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco in the 1960s. Rojo amanecer narrates the events of October 2 but also the middleclass anxieties of the late 1980s and the 1990s. The film was released, like some of the earlier ’68 Movement narrations, at a moment of political liberalization. However, this did not mean that its critique of PRI-led modernization and governance no longer held true. Then-president Carlos Salinas Gortari was attempting to moderate a series of economic debacles, the devastating 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, and his own contested election in 1988. As the party had done in the past, Salinas Gortari sought to mitigate social outcry without giving up too much power: the PRI’s relief-valve strategy. Two decades earlier, President Echeverría’s “democratic aperture” attempted to win back the intelligentsia after the Tlatelolco Massacre with funding for universities and the culture industries. Since the 1970s, however, Mexico’s middle classes contracted significantly, and the magical thinking of the Miracle had long since been debunked. The fundamental insecurity of the middle classes in Mexican political life— accommodated yet not fully at home—was no longer compensated for by a promising economic position. Seeking to overwhelm the PRI’s relief-valve strategy, Fons and his screenwriters, Xavier Robles and Guadalupe Ortega, emphasized the horror of the Tlatelolco Massacre but also its melodrama. This was an unlikely choice, given that melodrama is often criticized for its sensationalism and distorting exaggeration. Indeed, some critics questioned the approach. However, as feminist theorists of the genre have argued, melodrama’s narrative and emotional excesses bring to the surface—on screen and through spectators’ bodies—social tensions and contradictions obscured or naturalized by the dominant society and especially consumer culture. Melodrama’s mise-en-scène is generally overloaded with signifiers, with

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objects, environments, and countenances carrying the burden of communication left unresolved by the narrative or, in the case of Tlatelolco, by state institutions. Government censors assessing Rojo amanecer were most likely disarmed by its melodrama. However, once detonated these effects are not easily contained, complicating any effort by the state to channel the ’68 Movement into its cultural nationalism, a pantheon of deracinated and defanged insurgents. As hours pass the family’s apartment goes dark and grows disheveled, giving shape to accumulated tension and imminent danger. The apartment begins to reveal the undesired but necessary and inescapable reality of Mexico’s urbanization, the shadow city of rural migrants and urban poor that Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was intended to replace. As Luis González de Alba told Poniatowska of his and others’ experience in the early hours of the massacre: “They found themselves in a pitch-black apartment, with furniture all shoved in one corner, and a kitchen full of shoes.”48 That an apartment heralded as a model of modernity and transparency could be so quickly and easily transformed into a hiding space or execution chamber revealed the speciousness of its functionalist zoning and the supposedly scientific prescriptions of its designers. The state’s hospitality, as much as it offered accommodation, also sought to conceal the political and economic structures that disenfranchised and displaced citizens to begin with. By the time he directed Rojo amanecer, Fons was already a well-established member of Mexico’s leftist intelligentsia, which called for collective memory of the Tlatelolco Massacre along with survivors. He was among the first generation of CUEC graduates, and now fluent in navigating the film industry and Mexican politics, which converged in the national cinema. Although he did not participate in the ’68 Movement, he signed on to a letter from several writers and artists, including Juan Rulfo and Carlos Monsiváis, who supported the movement. In the early 1960s he participated in the Grupo Nuevo Cine collective, which sought to expand the borders of Mexican national cinema by developing alternative institutions and engaging the new cinemas of Europe and the Americas. With the waning of Nuevo Cine, he joined another collective, Taller de Cine Octubre (October Cinema Workshop), in the early 1970s. While the legacy of the Tlatelolco Massacre is implicit in the workshop’s name, its mission was also to critically engage Echeverría’s “democratic aperture.” For the film industry the president’s policies brought a small burst of government funding, especially for young filmmakers, and the semblance of less censorship. Suspicious of this attempt at rapprochement yet eager to access funds amid a broader trend of privatization and creative stagnation, Cine Octubre worked to stake out a position between invisibility and govern-

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ment co-option. Most of the opportunities were in popular entertainment, in genre cinema and television. Like Nuevo Cine, the collective was interested in activating what it saw as passive spectatorship. However, Cine Octubre did not assume that popularity was automatically an obstacle to engaged spectatorship. In a mimeographed leaflet from 1976 the workshop argued that the sociopolitical impact of popular genres was just as powerful as (if not potentially more so than) attending a rally or participating in a strike.49 Fons worked in this milieu, directing telenovelas and game shows for Televisa, the dominant broadcaster.50 Throughout his career Fons has demonstrated a consistent interest in developing filmic space, especially the domestic mise-en-scène, as a site for investigating Mexico City. In El callejón de los milagros (1994, released in the United States as Midaq Alley), he follows three people as their lives intersect in one of the city’s working-class barrios.51 In this film and others, the vastness of Mexico City can be accessed, however fragmented, through metonym, a part for the whole. A single alleyway stands for but does not seek to replace the complexity of the megalopolis or event. Rather, it instigates a process of interpretation. In Los albañiles (1976, The Bricklayers), for example, a high-rise apartment under construction is the site of a murder mystery that is left unresolved but implicates almost every character in the process of detection. In Rojo amanecer, Fons makes the case that the Tlatelolco Massacre is not localized to the violence on October 2 at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas but expands outwards to encompass other times, places, and survivors. In similar fashion, Fons proceeds from the assumption that collective memory is an everyday practice rather than a onetime event. Accordingly, the Tlatelolco Massacre is not represented directly in the film. The audience hears it through the apartment’s living-room window, which recalls a darkened film or television screen occasionally lit up by gunfire. Fons leaves the family members and their interactions to flesh out the reality of its violence. He is interested in the massacre’s aftershocks as much as its immediate impact. Repetition and circularity are also hallmarks of melodrama. Most narrative films move toward resolution by their end. Melodrama, conversely, focuses on ongoing if not irresolvable challenges, specifically challenges faced by families. As the film theorist Linda Williams argues, melodrama, along with horror and pornography, which she denominates “body genres,” spectacularizes a body caught in the grip of an intense sensation while inviting reciprocity in sensation from its audience. This response is the result of a particular narrative temporality, she argues. For melodrama it is a structure of “too late,” or not enough time to take corrective action or a new trajectory in the face of personal

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disaster. In this scenario’s story lines, bodies and feelings will collide.52 Fons dramatizes this collision throughout Rojo amanecer. Tidying Sergio and Jorge’s room, Alicia discovers an issue of ¿Por qué? magazine, one of the few to represent the violent encounters between the movement and security forces graphically. She examines it as if it were pornography she discovered under a mattress, holding it away from her body, wincing in disgust. Fons’s position on popular entertainment was not universal. Some Mexican critics were discomforted by Rojo amanecer’s melodrama. The genre was thought to exploitatively manipulate the emotions of audiences, especially of women, and has been dismissed by a largely male-written discourse. However, critics of Rojo amanecer’s melodrama have been more concerned with the quality and respectability of such a women’s genre for the traumatic national event and the male heroic subjects who figure prominently in earlier ’68 Movement narratives. Rafael Medina de la Serna, who in his criticism was generally attuned to issues of spectatorship, argued: “[It] is a good film . . . even if it appeals almost exclusively to the visceral response of the spectator.”53 Medina laments that so few contemporary commercial films engage “national reality,” or unofficial historical truth. Rojo amanecer approaches this reality, he suggests, but he also sees others in the future coming closer—without muddling the event with the emotional excesses of melodrama. Melodrama is a hugely popular genre in Mexico across many media. The audiences that it draws are not necessarily or automatically beguiled by with the state, capital, or patriarchy, as is often assumed by elite observers. The melodramatic film may instigate emotion, but it is quickly supplemented if not superseded by the viewer’s own response. As feminist critics have argued, the genre produces a wide spectrum of responses, emotional but also oriented toward social, economic, and political consciousness.54 The responses are real even if they come out of vicariousness and can serve as means of extralinguistic communication when words fail or are censored, as in an authoritarian or patriarchal society. As in José Revueltas’s claustrophobic Lecumberri novella El apando (1969), these afterlives of the film are carried forward in the bodies of viewers and may be thought of as a bodily form of knowledge, the embodied transmission of cultural memory and history.55 Through these responses, audiences can begin to bear witness to an atrocity but also to the political and economic structures and social relations that give them shape. Putting aside Medina’s quality judgment, the language of his review is telling. Fons’s intention, the critic argues, is to “jolt” the consciences of those who lived through the events “in their own flesh” (en carne propia).

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Produced close to two decades after the Tlatelolco Massacre, Rojo amanecer is more likely oriented toward subsequent generations. Almost fifty years later, the film continues to circulate: first in VHS, then DVD, and now online. It is screened mostly in intimate and noncommercial settings that echo Fons’s focus on the domestic interior as an allegory of middle-class subjectivity in the Hotel Mexico. Given the viscerality of melodrama, this new family of witnesses may remember the events of 1968 en carne propia too. As the ’68 Movement demonstrated with its urban interventions, even citizens whom the PRI treated as satellites and guests could mobilize and give insurgent meaning to existing systems of communication and association. Fons and Poniatowska took this spatiopolitical imagination one step further, proposing and modeling through their narrations of the ’68 Movement a Mexican society and politics that do not turn on conditional hospitality or outright repression. This future required a critical, ethical, and generous spectator-reader, a citizenship in which the political and cultural senses of the concept are fused. In Rojo amanecer Alicia, the mother, comes closest to modeling hospitality without condition, in spite of her precarious position. In the hours following Operation Galeana, Sergio and Jorge return home with fellow students in tow. Alicia welcomes them without initially asking who they are or where they come from. Throughout the night violence lurks just outside their door, as people are dragged through the halls and stairwells and beaten. Alicia has no hot food or information to offer her unexpected guests, as the complex’s electricity and phone lines have been cut, but she is able to intervene on how hospitality is expressed within her home. She offers aid when her family is most dispersed. Her husband, father, and daughter are away from the apartment (at the time), and she has no idea of their safety. She welcomes as she hopes others would welcome her loved ones. One of Alicia’s guests is seriously injured. As she attends to him he confesses that he was forced to leave his sister behind amid the chaos of the plaza. While some social bonds are broken by the massacre, others are newly formed. Under Alicia’s welcome they begin to piece together their partial and imperfect perspectives. Sergio continues to wear his eyeglasses, smashed in the commotion of the plaza, material evidence not only of his experience but of his fragmented memory also. Jorge traces the bullet hole in the living room window with his finger. Looking out onto the plaza he reports that “all one sees are shadows.” Like Sergio’s eyes, his own cannot fully make sense of the massacre; he seeks other sensory inputs. For all its reality effects, Rojo amanecer offers no transparent vision of the massacre. While they can no longer pretend that the apartment is a private safe haven, their memories move from the individual toward the public there through exchange and comparison.

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New guests bang at Alicia’s door early in the morning, unexpected by the family but anticipated by the film’s audience: the plainclothes paramilitaries. The students are hidden in the bathroom, and Roque (finally home) hides Carlos under his bed. However, a Che Guevara poster and a copy of The Communist Manifesto in Jorge and Sergio’s bedroom out them as supporters of the ’68 Movement. This is confirmed by bloodstained sheets used in tending to the injured student. The “too late” of melodrama is in full effect. The paramilitaries gun down the extended family one by one. Just as they are a microcosm of the nation, they are a microcosm of the massacre, their dead bodies slumped on the floor of their modern apartment, participants in the movement and bystanders. While their killing is a climax in the narrative sense, there is no catharsis: an emotive release, perhaps, but no purging or purification—in spite of the state’s attempts to clean up its mess the next morning. Carlos, who is not found by the paramilitaries, eventually emerges from under his bed to view the bodies. He and the audience must see them en carne propia. Carlos walks down the dark, bloodied stairwell to the ground floor being swept by a municipal employee. The censored version of Rojo amanecer ends abruptly before two soldiers with rifles walk by. In the pirated version that circulated while the film was under review by the government, the role of the military in the massacre—protected even under Fox’s transitional-justice scheme— was not cut. The task for the orphaned Carlos is to go out into the world, with its blinding morning light and church bell ringing, to testify. It is then no longer a trivial detail that earlier in the day Carlos had told his grandfather that history was his favorite subject in school. Preadolescent Carlos does not have the capacity to understand the massacre completely in the “now” of Rojo amanecer. He carries the traumatic event forward into the future, beyond the diegetic and narrative frame of the film. Moreover, confronted by the same expectation to bear witness, the audience occupies—and will continue to occupy—the space of future narration. Dreadful knowing and unknown emotive response offer a provocative model for writing the history of the ’68 Movement. Rojo amanecer, while “too emotional” per some critics, embraces the “too late” narrative structure of melodrama to do the work of stoking collective memory “just in time”: in the wake of the government’s failed response to the 1985 earthquake and the fraudulent election of Salinas de Gortari, who would begin to officially acknowledge the Tlatelolco Massacre in order to smooth over the pains of neoliberal transition. This is made all the more urgent by the state’s failure to prosecute those responsible for the massacre or the subsequent dirty war in the early 2000s.

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Salvador Elizondo, who wrote some of the more provocative essays in Nuevo Cine in the early 1960s and taught Fons at UNAM, argues that the filmmaker understands tragedy differently than do most of his colleagues. Elizondo sees Rojo amanecer as the belated fruition of the aspirations of Nuevo Cine and new cinemas abroad, which sought to develop a critical spectator above all else.56 Fons intentionally misreads the conventions of tragedy by frustrating the audience’s catharsis, leaving the full and final response to the film open to the audience. In Carlos we have an echo of the children at the end of Roberto Rossellini’s harrowing and at times melodramatic international Neorealist success Rome, Open City (1945), who witness the execution of a priest by a Nazi officer from behind a chain-link fence. They stand in for the renewed hope of postwar democracy in a physically and morally ruined Italy. Jean-Paul Sartre infamously wrote “Hell is—other people” in Huis clos, his 1943 existentialist drama (translated as No Exit) in which three dead characters are locked in a room together for eternity. Sartre signaled, among other things, the impossibility of social communion. However it is these “other people” who have taken up the task of publicly remembering the ’68 Movement. The movement may have failed in establishing an open, bilateral dialog with the state, but its narrators have succeeded in constituting publics through a phenomenological and emotive site-specificity that straddles 1968 and the present moment. These narratives invite audiences to bear witness but do not compel them to do anything else; that space is their own for remaking. This is their move toward unconditional hospitality. They accept that even strangers—those who are historically or culturally distant from the object of memory—may and must participate in the stewardship of 1968. If representations, whether texts or images, are to perform memory work beyond mere documentation or illustration, then they belong to no one and everyone at the same time. The lesson of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s domestic interior, per Rojo amanecer, is not the social discipline (and historical management) of biopolitics but the possibility of hospitality without dominance: that representations of the ’68 Movement continue to galvanize intense emotion, mobilize bodies, forge social bonds, and arouse action, suggesting something other than the passivity or exploitation expected of citizen-guests in the Hotel Mexico.

discrepancies El 2 de octubre no se olvida. This is perhaps the most popular refrain employed to recall the events of 1968 and the Tlatelolco Massacre in particular. It can be understood in several ways: October 2 will not be

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forgotten; October 2 should not be forgotten; October 2 cannot be forgotten. The day is probably not forgotten by bystanders caught in demonstrations that take place annually in Mexico City. Thousands march from the Plaza de las Tres Culturas to the Zócalo, snarling traffic along the way with their bodies, banners, chants, frustrations, and—perhaps still—hope. Although there are many ways to remember, given the continued circulation of the ’68 Movement’s media and citations in contemporary politics and culture, the march is a chance to publicly and collectively link it to the city where it emerged and to link the movement to more recent events in the unfinished business of democratization in Mexico. The most recent event to intersect with the ’68 Movement is the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43. On September 26, 2014, forty-three young men from a teacher’s college in Ayotzinapa went to Iguala, situated on the highway from Acapulco to Mexico City, to protest discriminatory discrepancies in school funding by the government. Both towns are located in Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states and highly volatile because of ongoing narcoterror. As is customary, they commandeered buses to make the roughly three-hour journey. They planned to continue to Mexico City for the Tlatelolco Massacre commemoration on October 2. They were intercepted in Iguala, and this is the last that we know of them for certain. It is likely that one of the buses they commandeered was used to transport drugs and that the police, in cahoots with a regional cartel, confronted the teachers-in-training in order to keep their illicit cargo. There was a shootout, with six people confirmed dead, including three students. The remaining teachers-in-training were disappeared, their bodies presumably disposed of in such a way as to avoid detection. The investigation is ongoing, turning up mass graves were not associated with the Ayotzinapa 43. The state has vigorously tried to clamp down on public outcry while doing very little to elucidate what took place. In November 2014 it agreed to allow an international group of investigators, affiliated with the Inter-American Commission of American States, to look into the matter, a not-insignificant incursion on its sovereignty. It cooperated until the investigators called into question, via three reports published in 2015 and 2016, the state’s version of events and its use of torture to secure information.57 The outside group also suggested that federal security forces appear to have been involved in the shootout. At that point, the state’s relief valve was shut. The Ayotzinapa 43 are a sign that the dirty war of the 1970s and 1980s, although the object of a transitional-justice scheme during the Fox presidency, has never ended. Furthermore, it has taken on new forms in the

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state’s collaboration with and more recent war on drug cartels. Tens of thousands of Mexicans have been disappeared in the last decade as a result. Although there has been a sharp increase in reports of abuses to the National Human Rights Commission, there have been few successful prosecutions.58 Some commentators point to the return of the PRI to the presidency with the election of Enrique Peña Nieto in 2012 as a sign of the return of the “old, bad” Mexican state. However, the routine nature of violence and impunity, tolerated or facilitated by the state, remains a constant in Mexico regardless of what political party holds power. On September 26, 2015, protest marches halted the normal flows of life in Mexico City. I was on my way to take a photograph for this book that day, of the IPN’s Zacatenco campus, when protesters stopped traffic. My taxi driver and I were confronted with the faces of the young men from Ayotzinapa, their photos printed on large posters held above the protesters’ heads. This was less than a week before the October 2 commemoration, intervening on what is meant by El 2 de octubre no se olvida, as the massacre’s survivors and narrators envisioned. The status of Mexico’s so-called democratic transition remains very much in question, and not localized to the sphere of political elites or public intellectuals, as this action and many others make clear. But what exactly will not/should not/cannot be forgotten? What is the ’68 Movement’s legacy and, moreover, its futures? Putting aside anachronistic (and romantic and foreclosing) notions to the effect that the ’68 Movement was a harbinger of uneven democratization decades later, Hotel Mexico argues for another, perhaps more potent inheritance. The ’68 Movement offered a spatiopolitical imaginary that contrasted with and challenged the official image of Mexico on offer from the government. In their street- and media-savvy praxis participants in the movement proposed a compelling mode of urban experience, a new way of seeing and traveling through the modern city as available, reproducible, and changeable—a medium of communication potentially as transformative as mass media, the state, and even global capital. The students and their supporters, including narrators, hijacked existing networks and created new, rhizomatic ones to disseminate their prodemocracy message and circumvent denial, censorship, and co-option. Their praxis demonstrated an understanding of the complementary (and competing) relations between an authoritarian state and capitalist modernization. They also understood that the street was an operational scale of power, where it was exercised but also negotiated. In the process they rendered visible the conditions of the state’s hospitality: gestures of accommodation in exchange for political (and often economic) estrangement. They dwelled in and on Hotel Mexico not as

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guests but citizens. To a certain extent, Mexico City could never be seen or moved through in the same way. The ’68 Movement was ultimately radical rather than reformist, because it struck at the heart of the state’s claims of sovereignty. It was most radical because it intervened on perception, a tool for resistance that is portable and flexible and not dependent on regimes, finances, or full recognition as citizens. More broadly, Hotel Mexico explored modes of dwelling in and on Mexico City by a variety of actors that further blurred traditional boundaries between individual, built environment, and media (mass, elite, and underground) as part of a growing sense that embodied space was an especially effective category of not only aesthetic but also social intervention at midcentury. The city loomed large in the imaginations and experiments of architects, planners, and bureaucrats but also activists, artists, writers, and filmmakers. Mexico City’s residents were invited to enter, sense, and intervene on these spaces, although with varying degrees of hospitality. At the same time, these urban actors also renegotiated their own social purchase, aspiring to and operating in an expanded field in which the local, the national, and the global (and even the cosmic) were not perceived as disparate or irreconcilable scales. In Mexico during this period, government cultural patronage shifted toward large and highly visible public works, ranging from microwave broadcast stations to museums. At the same time an alternative (nongovernmental, mostly middle-class) cultural infrastructure emerged: private galleries, cineclubs, and cult magazines. By tracing 1968 and its afterlives, an intermedial cultural history of Mexican architecture, art, literature, and cinema in the Long Sixties emerges, in particular a reevaluation of modernism that was connected to simultaneous processes in the postwar global North. However, in an authoritarian context, this reevaluation was not uniformly liberatory in its origins and objectives. Close to fifty years after the Tlatelolco Massacre, the ’68 Movement continues to be cited and repurposed. By emphasizing embodied (and necessarily partial, incomplete) modes of representation, its narrators activated (or reactivated) not only the historical event but also the site of consumption, the “here and now” of their audiences. By most accounts they have been tremendously successful in sustaining its currency without centralized coordination through the dense web of representation that they created and the publics that formed around them. They reactivated cultural citizenship in such a way that the state’s monopolistic use of culture was superseded as an expedient resource to govern by. One paradox of this rep-

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resentation is that no single image, text, or figure—nor all these together— may fully express its gravity or encompass its profundity. (It was all right, then, to abandon my quest for the “perfect” photo of Zacatenco.) Representations serve as mnemonics for this national trauma but do not fully reproduce it. They produce something other than the event, an openended framework for these fragments of memory and, moreover, for defacto modes of seeking truth and justice. This has been crucial to the ’68 Movement’s currency but has also made it highly malleable and undecidable. One movement participant, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, recognized these stakes, writing: “I realize, then, that we seem doomed to be ghosts of ’68. And well, what’s the big deal? I tell myself: better to be Draculas of resistance than PRI-ist monsters of Frankenstein, or of modernity.”59 We cannot assume that secondary or tertiary acts of witnessing are necessarily a degradation of firsthand witnessing. These supposed deformations can produce new forms of knowledge and activism, including those not yet envisioned. As Derrida has argued: “If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal; if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from.”60 While hospitality is a useful metaphor for understanding the structured yet potentially volatile nexus of power and space and nation and state, this book proposes it is also useful for testing the conventional limits of testimony, evidence, and jurisdiction. Mexico’s capitalist urbanization saw the rise of the market and mass media as spaces for cultural production, class distinction, active spectatorship, political participation—but also disenfranchisement and disaffection—calling for revised modes of practicing citizenship but also studying these phenomena. The approach here is not hospitality as managerial science or sacred obligation but intellectual enterprise; leaving room for discrepancy, reinterpretation, repetition, irreconcilability, and the belated, all forms of testimony and witness that course into the future. If the ’68 Movement’s critiques of democracy and capital, still mostly valid, are to be taken up by new social movements, as they already have been, then we must approach citation and the interpretation (or the reinterpretation) of 1968 with generosity and amplitude. At graduation ceremonies for UNAM architecture students in 1970, the rector Javier Barros Sierra proclaimed in a speech: “Long live plurality!” (¡Viva discrepancia!) Barros Sierra called not for the false plurality of the PRI’s corporatism or relief-valve strategy (which concedes the better to control), but a participatory democracy and civil society where many issues, actors, and stakes operate within an expanded field that is

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continually in formation. Hotel Mexico proposes that we should aspire to unconditional hospitality—which is neither uncritical nor dispassionate— in assessing both the histories and the futures of the ’68 Movement. In other words, “thinking as hospitality,” per this chapter’s epigraph. The choice is not between memory and history, or juridical forms of justice and cultural forms. There are many ways to “win the street”; and this is one way that El 2 de octubre no se olvida.

Notes

introduction 1. I employ the phrase “ ’68 Movement” in preference to “ ’68 Student Movement” to account for a coalition that included, however temporarily or partially, several constituencies besides students. The “Long Sixties” in Latin America generally runs from 1959 to 1973, from Fulgencio Bautista’s ouster from Cuba by Fidel Castro and comrades to the military coup d’état against President Salvador Allende in Chile. Furthermore, in humanistic LatinAmerican studies the notion that we still live in the (distorted) shadow of the Long Sixties has considerable currency. 2. The Mexican Miracle ran from roughly 1940 to 1970. The government’s import-substitution policies sought to stoke a domestic consumer market and an industrial base simultaneously, attracting sizable foreign investment that required political stability. The beneficiaries of this expansion were largely existing business elites and emergent middle classes. By the mid-1950s, signs of economic and social strain were apparent, and the government sought more sustainable models for growth. 3. As of 2006, some 34 to 44 deaths have been documented by reliable sources. It is likely that family and friends did not come forward to claim bodies, if they were available, because of fear of reprisal. Kate Doyle, The Dead of Tlatelolco: Using the Archives to Exhume the Past, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 201 (Washington, D.C.: National Security Archive, 2006), http:// nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB201/. (Accessed March 29, 2016.) 4. This thinking is derived from the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences of the last three decades, principally the work of Henri LeFebvre, Michel de Certeau, and David Harvey. 5. This is not the first study to consider the ’68 Movement’s political imagination; see César Gilabert, El hábito de la utopia: Análisis del imaginario sociopolítico en el movimiento estudiantil de México, 1968 (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 1993); Sergio Zermeño,

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México, una democracia utópica: El movimiento estudiantil del 68 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1978). However, these studies do not consider the spatial basis of the movement’s imagination or its representation. Architectural historians have worked with the concept of spatial imagination. See Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Space in the New American Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Swati Chattopadhyay, “Architectural History and the Spatial Imagination,” American Historical Association Perspectives on History, January 2014, https://historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectiveson-history/january-2014/architectural-history-and-spatial-imagination. (Accessed March 29, 2016.) 6. In this respect I build on the agenda-setting scholarship of two recent major exhibitions in Mexico: Olivier Debroise, ed., La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en México / The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968–1997 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007), and Rita Eder, ed., Desafio de la estabilidad: Procesos artísticos en México, 1952–1967/Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967 (Mexico City: Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, 2014). 7. See George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1999); David Caute, The Year of the Barricades: A Journey through 1968 (New York: HarperCollins, 1988); Gerard J. De Groot, Student Protest: The Sixties and After (New York: Routledge, 1998); Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1998); Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (New York: Random House, 2005); Gerard J. De Groot, The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996). 8. Renata Keller, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 9. Students also read Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse, followed liberation theology in Colombia, and were familiar with protests over university autonomy in La Paz, Río de Janeiro, and Argentina. See Jeffrey L. Gould, “Solidarity under Siege: The Latin-American Left, 1968,” American Historical Review 114, no. 2 (2009): 348–75. 10. José Emilio Pacheco, “Si los Estados Unidos no se retiran como perdedores tendrán que permanecer como genocidas,” La Cultura en México, February 21, 1968: 4–6. 11. See Luis M. Castañeda, Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda and the 1968 Olympics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 12. The term “biopolitics,” as deployed by humanities and humanistic social-sciences scholars in the late twentieth century and after, originated in the work of Michel Foucault: see Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2010).

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13. There is little consensus among historians or survivors on whether the conflict was between neighborhood gangs or between gang members and students. Regardless, the ’68 Movement crystallized around police brutality and its victims rather than whatever brought the granaderos to Ciudadela. For a cogent analysis of these early days, see Ariel Rodríguez Kuri, “Los primeros días: Una explicación de los orígenes inmediatos del movimiento estudiantil de 1968,” Historia Mexicana 53, no. 1 (2003): 179–228. 14. Participating groups included the Central Nacional de Estudiantes Democráticos (CNED, National Center for Democratic Students), associated with the Communist Party; the Federación Nacional de Estudiantes Técnicos (FNET, National Federation of Technical Students), with close ties to the government; and the Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación (MURO, University Movement for Renovated Orientation), aligned with the Right. Nonstudents, whether members of gangs or government infiltrators, were also drawn into the mobilization, seeing it as an opportunity to advance their interests. 15. In the protest, UNAM and IPN were joined by Colegio de México, Universidad Iberoamericana, Escuela Normal Superior de México, Colegio La Salle, and Escuela Nacional de Agricultura. 16. Research on developments in the provinces is currently limited. Protest in support of the ’68 Movement was registered in the states of Baja California, Sonora, Yucatán, Nuevo León, Chihuahua, Veracruz, Puebla, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Morelos, and Hidalgo. 17. The social-dissolution articles made meetings of three or more persons with the intention to disturb public peace subject to from two to twelve years’ imprisonment. They also policed communications deemed rebellious, seditious, or obstructionist. 18. Although by no means subaltern, the ’68 Movement should not be confused as the mere result of consumer-culture malaise, intergenerational conflict, or sociosexual liberalization: Diana Sorensen, “Tlatelolco 1968: Paz and Poniatowska on Law and Violence,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 18, no. 2 (2002): 301–2. 19. On the rise of urban space as political space, see James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 20. That said, members of the CNH were mostly mestizo, lower- to uppermiddle class, and politically left of center. 21. On the students’ economic motivations, see Soledad Loaeza, “México, 1968: Los orígenes de la transición,” in La transición interrumpida: México, 1968–1988, ed. Ilán Semo (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1993), 17–47. 22. The CIA and American embassy in Mexico City did closely monitor the situation and supplied arms to the government. Kate Doyle, Tlatelolco Massacre:

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Declassified U.S. Documents on Mexico and the Events of 1968, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 10 (Washington, D.C.: National Security Archive, 2003), http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB10 /intro.htm. 23. Quoted in José Canbrera Parra, Díaz Ordaz y el 68 (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1982), 92. 24. Raúl Álvarez Garín, La estela de Tlatelolco: Una reconstrucción histórica del movimiento estudiantil de 68 (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1998), 256. 25. Although there is no comprehensive bibliography of the ’68 Movement, there are some good approximations. See Héctor Jiménez Guzmán, “El 68 y sus rutas de interpretación: Una crítica historiográfica” (M.A. thesis, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Azcapotzalco, 2011); Lucía Saas Villegas, “Estado de la cuestion del movimiento estudiantil mexicano de 1968” (B.A. thesis, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, 2003). 26. These figures were part of Mexico’s New Left, which not unlike counterparts in Europe and the Americas aspired to participatory democracy based on sociocultural groundswell (and vanguardism) as opposed to the orthodoxy and methods of the country’s Communist Party or the example of the Soviet Union. See Eric Zolov, “Expanding Our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift from an Old to a New Left in Latin America,” A Contracorriente 5, no. 2 (2008): 47–73. 27. Eugenia Allier Montaño traces shifts in mainstream-press discourse between 1968 and 2007, generally from the euphemistic “events” of October 2 toward the Tlatelolco “Massacre” and from eulogy to calls for prosecution: Allier Montaño, “Presentes-pasodos del 68 mexicano: Una historización de las memorias públicas del movimiento estudiantil, 1968–2007,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 71, no. 2 (2009), 287–317. See also Fernando Herrera Calderón and Adela Cedillo, eds., Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964–1982 (New York: Routledge, 2012). 28. The validity of Salinas’s election in 1988 was widely questioned after a computer system’s purported crash that appeared to correct for returns pointing to the PRI’s defeat. See Jorge Castañeda, La herencia: Arqueología de la sucesión presidencial en México (Mexico City: Extra Alfaguara, 1999). 29. PRI liberalizations starting in the 1980s allowed Mexico City residents to vote for mayor (rather than receive a regent appointed by the president) and permitted the Mexican Communist Party and Mexican Workers Party back on the national stage. They quickly claimed the ’68 Movement as their inheritance and were joined by nongovernmental organizations. There was also significant student protest in 1986–87, this time not directly repressed, at UNAM. This was all both catalyzed and complicated by the seemingly sudden emergence in 1994 of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, Zapatista Army of National Liberation), which forcefully reintroduced the question of indigenous rights to the national agenda. 30. Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).

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31. Embracing the tradition of repetition in the Tlatelolco literature, González de Alba would write a sequel to his memoir to offer a queer subjectivity: Otros días, otros años (Mexico City: Planeta, 2008). 32. Luis Mario Moncada, “La olimpiada terminó hace mucho tiempo,” Cultura UNAM: Programa para Olimpia 68 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2008): 3. As Claudio Lomnitz also pointed out, Mexico’s insurgent indigenous communities were asked to “bury Zapata” or give up their agitation but “never forget” the ’68 Movement: Lomnitz, “An Intellectual’s Stock in the Factory of Mexico’s Ruins,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 1055. 33. Regina is the fictional biography of a victim of the Tlatelolco Massacre, which is interpreted as a willing sacrifice to awaken the people of Mexico from their spiritual stupor. 34. González de Alba expressed his concern in Nexos when he saw La noche de Tlatelolco being read as a conventional history. Poniatowska resigned from the magazine’s editorial board as a result: Raúl Álvarez Garín, “Aclaración necesaria,” La Jornada, October 16, 1997. González de Alba would increasingly express his frustration with the canonization of memory: see “De la ‘imaginación del poder’ al poder sin imaginación,” Nexos, October 1998, http://www .nexos.com.mx/?p=9039. (Accessed March 29, 2016.) 35. This book borrows the term “rhizomatic” from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to describe structures—material and discursive—that permit and in fact depend on multiple nonhierarchical branches and points of entry and exit: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]). 36. José Ignacio Cabrujas, interviewed in Heterodoxia y estado: Cinco respuestas, ed. Cabrujas (Caracas: Dirección de Relaciones Internacionales de la Comisión Presidencial para la Reforma del Estado, 1987), 7–35. This reference was brought to my attention by Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 8. 37. Octavio Paz, “The Philanthropic Ogre,” in The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 380. 38. See Roderic Ai Camp, Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). 39. Derrida draws from Emmanuel Levinas’s hermeneutics of lived experience in the world and rejects Immanuel Kant’s nation-state-bound cosmopolitanism. See Jacques Derrida, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York: Routledge, 2001), Derrida, with Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999 [1997]).

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40. Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 173. 41. Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). On the relationship between the technocratic state and violence in Latin America, see Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein, eds., Violent Democracies in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 42. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). See also Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 43. See, for example, the essays in Paul Gillingham and Benjamin Smith, eds., Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 44. See Tracy McNulty, The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 45. It was a right normally claimed by planners, architects, and other urban professionals rather than all citizens: David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40. The phrase “right to the city” was coined by Henri Lefebvre in 1968; see Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval, trans. Alfred Ehrenfeld (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969 [1968]). 46. Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 47. As Giorgio Agamben argues, there is an inherent lacuna in positivistic modes of bearing witness: Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 48. As Kristen Ross argues for 1968 in France, the events have long been “overtaken by subsequent representations”: Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1. 49. See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2001); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 50. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1925]); Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 51. Gyanendra Pandey argues against the total consolidation of historical fragments in Routine Violence, 16–44. 52. See Dora Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (Newark: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 53. Dwelling is a recurring concept in twentieth-century philosophical inquiry. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (New

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York: Routledge, 2002 [1945]); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996 [1927]); Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969 [1961]). Architectural theorists would also take up phenomenology beginning in the 1970s: see Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980 [1979]); Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: John Wiley–Academic, 2005). 54. See Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009); Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002). 55. See Sydney Clark, All the Best in Mexico (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974), 153–54. 56. Juan José Loeza, interviewed by Associated Press writer Janelle Conaway, “Mexico’s Grand Hotel Only an Unfinished Dream,” The Dispatch (Lexington, N.C.), June 24, 1985: 8. 57. Juan Villoro, “1980,” in Material de lectura, ed. Lauro Zavala (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2011), 13. 58. Fabrizio Mejía Madrid, Pequeños actos de desobediencia civil (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1996), 107–11.

1. city of palaces 1. See Guillermo Tovar de Teresa, La ciudad de los palacios: Crónica de un patrimonio perdido (Mexico City: Vuelta, 1992). 2. The name “Black Palace” referred as much to the despair and corruption at Lecumberri as to the sewage accumulated on its walls after repeated flooding, which plagued the city well into the twentieth century: El palacio de Lecumberri (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación, 1990). 3. Mexico City’s jails were the object of positivistic investigations, including the early criminologist Carlos Roumagnac’s studies of physiognomy: Roumagnac, Los criminales en México: Ensayo de psicología criminal (Mexico City: Tipografía El Fenix, 1904). 4. Charles A. Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in Late NineteenthCentury Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 5. José Revueltas, El apando (Mexico City: Era, 1982 [1969]), 31. 6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979 [1975]), 187. 7. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen; Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

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8. Luis González de Alba, Los días y los años (Mexico City: Planeta, 2008 [1971]), 7. 9. The living conditions of the prisoners after the hunger strike led filmmakers Óscar Menéndez and Rodolfo Alvarez, who escaped arrest after October 2, to smuggle Super-8 cameras into Lecumberri to create the documentary Historia de un documento (1971). 10. González de Alba, Los días y los años, 19, 32. 11. Sócrates Campos Lemus would present his own version of the events in El otoño de la revolución (Mexico City: B. Costa-Amic, 1974). 12. González de Alba, Los días y los años, 127–28. 13. Both Alvarez Garín and Guevara Niebla were veterans of student protest, participating in earlier confrontations with the state as members of Mexico’s Communist Youth group. 14. González de Alba, Los días y los años, 37. 15. Gilberto Guevara Niebla, “Los años de la gran represión,” in Pensar el 68, ed. Héctor Aguilar Camín and Hermann Bellinghausen (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 2008), 136. 16. Eduardo Valle, “Es apenas el comienzo,” in Pensar el 68, 243–46. 17. Prisoners had their own information systems in place, graffiti and even murals, some reproduced in Ricardo Elizondo Elizondo, Lecumberri, angel y escorpión: Galería fotográfica del ultimo día (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación, 2000). 18. Elena Poniatowska, “Los camarones del líder Raúl Álvarez Garín,” La Jornada, September 29, 2014: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2014/09/29 /opinion/020a1pol. (Accessed March 29, 2016.) 19. González de Alba, Los días y los años, 27. 20. Ibid., 7. 21. Ibid., 58. 22. Ibid., 61. 23. Ibid., 145. 24. Revueltas’s relationship with the Left in Mexico was complicated. He was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party in 1943 after criticizing its ineffective bureaucracy, coming to the conclusion that the country’s proletariat was “without a head”: José Revueltas, “Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza,” in Escritos políticos, vol. 3, edited by Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron (Mexico City: Era, 1984 [1962]). Revueltas was not new to government repression. He had already written a prison memoir: Los muros de agua (Mexico City: Era, 1985 [1941]) was based on his experience at another Porfirian penitentiary. 25. Here I borrow the language of Giorgio Agamben’s revision to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics: Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. 26. Revueltas, El apando, 54–55. 27. José Revueltas, México 68: Juventud y revolución (Mexico City: Era, 2008 [1978]), 270. 28. See also José Revueltas, Los días terrenales (Mexico City: Editorial Stylo, 1949).

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29. José Revueltas, México 68, 263. Several of the prisoners would publish the government’s accusations as well as their defense. See Raúl Álvarez Garín et al., Los procesos de México 68: Acusaciones y defensa (Mexico City: Editorial Estudiantes, 1970). 30. Barbarism was a frequent theme for Revueltas. From the late 1940s through the 1960s he worked on an essay titled “México: Una democracia bárbara,” with a version published in 1958. 31. Revueltas, México 68, 198. 32. Ibid., 246. 33. Reproduced ibid., 245–47; emphases original. 34. See Donald C. Mabry, University and Government in Mexico: Autonomy in an Authoritarian System (New York: Praeger, 1980). 35. Amparo Trejo, “Mexico’s Fox Releases Secret Files,” Associated Press, June 18, 2002. 36. Articles VI and VIII of the Mexican Constitution already affirmed freedom of information and petition, respectively, but there was previously no system in place for citizens to exercise this right. In practice, requests were limited to agencies supervised by the executive branch of government. 37. Once elected, Fox created the Office of the Presidential Image, overseen by a former executive for Proctor and Gamble, the consumer products company. Political consultants Dick Morris, U.S. president Bill Clinton’s former advisor, and Alan Stoga, formerly of Kissinger Associates, were contracted: Guillermo H. Cantú, Asalto a palacio: Las entrañas de una guerra (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2001). 38. Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa, “Desaparecidos,” Reforma, November 28, 2001. The PRI escaped the political instability of its neighbors in Central and South America by treating the military as a corporate client. See Thomas Rath, Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 39. For the most thorough analysis of FEMOSPP, see Javier Treviño-Rangel, “Policing the Past: Transitional Justice and the Special Prosecutor’s Office in Mexico, 2000–2006,” (Ph.D. dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2012). See also Kate Doyle, Lost in Transition: Bold Ambitions, Limited Results for Human Rights under Fox (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2006). 40. Víctor Ballinas, “Carrillo y Fox no quieren castigo: Rosario Ibarra,” La Jornada, July 27, 2005: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2005/07/27/index.php? section=politica&article=007n1pol. (Accessed March 29, 2016.) 41. Abel Barajas, “Critican comisión para el 68,” Reforma, September 2, 2004, 12. 42. Ambassador Zinsler’s top pick, Alberto Szekeley, a longtime diplomat who had served on the U.N. International Law Commission, was rejected. 43. David Casas, “Incrementaron los abusos en Nuevo Léon al dirigir Américo Meléndez la PJ,” Crónica, July 21, 2004: http://www.cronica.com.mx /notas/2004/135437.html. (Accessed March 29, 2016.) Gustavo Castillo García,

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“Inhabilitan por 10 años a ex funcionario de FEMOSPP,” La Jornada December 26, 2007: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/12/26/index.php?section=politica &article=006n1pol. (Accessed March 29, 2016.) 44. Mexico ratified the U.N. convention on genocide in 1952, and it was integrated into the federal penal code in 1967 but remained little used. 45. The federal penal code had recently changed to allow those over the age of seventy to be put in jail provided that it was house arrest. 46. Javier Treviño-Rangel, “El control de la historia,” Proceso, September 17, 2008, 59. 47. The final draft of FEMOSPP’s White Book minimized the institutional role of the military. See the original draft at Draft Report Documents Eighteen Years of ‘Dirty War’ in Mexico, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 180 (2006): http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB180. (Accessed March 29, 2016.) The former ’68 Movement leader and Lecumberri political prisoner Eduardo Valle detailed his participation as a FEMOSPP researcher in El año de la rebelión por la democracia (Mexico City: Océano, 2009). 48. See Naomi Roht-Arriaza, The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 49. Vicente Fox Quesada, “Transcript of the Remarks by President Vicente Fox Quesada during the Ceremony at Which the Archives of the Former Federal Security and General Political and Social Investigations Bureaus Were Opened,” June 18, 2002: http://fox.presidencia.gob.mx/en/activities/speeches /?contenido=3244&pagina=2. (Accessed November 12, 2015.) Emphasis added. 50. At the time it came out against the military occupation of UNAM, supporting the university’s autonomy. Gerardo Medina Valdés, El 68, Tlatelolco, y el PAN (Mexico City: Partido Acción Nacional, 1990). 51. Vicente Fox Quesada, “Transcript of the Remarks by President Vicente Fox Quesada.” 52. Transitional justice has been criticized for assuming that national unity should be a chief outcome and that national elites can be trusted to supervise the process, which is treated as inevitable and uncontestable: Stanley Cohen, “State Crimes of Previous Regimes: Knowledge, Accountability, and the Policing of the Past,” Law & Social Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1995): 7–50. Similarly, democratic transition has been accepted as an unquestioned public good: Carlos M. Vilas, “Participation, Inequality, and the Whereabouts of Democracy,” in The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation and Representation, ed. Douglas A. Chalmers et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3–42. On the use of bribery and force in Latin America to install democracy modeled on that in the United States, see Abraham F. Lowenthal, ed., Exporting Democracy: The United States and Latin America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1991). 53. Mary Kay Vaughan, “Transnational Processes and the Rise and Fall of the Mexican Cultural State: Notes from the Past,” in Fragments of a Golden

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Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 478. 54. Evelina Dagnino, “Citizenship in Latin America: An Introduction,” Latin-American Perspectives 30, no. 2 (2003): 211–25. 55. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 56. Susanna Draper, Afterlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Postdictatorship Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 49. 57. Files were culled from the Acervo Histórico Diplomático, Dirección Federal de Seguridad, Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales, Secretaría de la Defensa. On research difficulties in the AGN, see María Magdaleno Cárdenas, “Pérdidas documentales,” Proceso, special issue, 23 (2008): 54–55; Tanalís Padilla and Louise E. Walker, “In the Archives: History and Politics,” Journal of Iberian and Latin-American Research 19, no.1 (July 2013): 1–10. 58. The directorship of the AGN is a political appointment. Susana Zavala Orozco, “Guerra Sucia: Cierran consulta directa de archivos,” El Universal, March 17, 2015: http://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/periodismo-datos/2015 /guerra-sucia-cierran-consulta-archivos-103036.html. (Accessed March 29, 2016.) 59. Eric Zolov, “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow’: Mexico and the 1968 Olympics,” The Americas 61, no. 2 (October 2004): 160. 60. Jorge Volpi, La imaginación y el poder: Una historia intelectual de 1968 (Mexico City: Era, 1998), 431. 61. Sergio Aguayo Quezada was a trailblazer in this respect, researching archives outside Mexico, followed by Kate Doyle of the private National Security Archive of George Washington University. See Aguayo Quezada, 1968: Archivos de la violencia (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1998). More recently: Jacinto Rodríguez Munguía, 1968: Todos los culpables (Mexico City: Debate, 2008), La otra guerra secreta: Los archivos prohibidos de la prensa y el poder (Mexico City: Debate, 2007), Las nóminas secretas de gobernación (Mexico City: Libertad de Información-México, 2004); Raúl Jardón, El espionaje contra el movimiento estudiantil: Los documentos de la Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Mexico City: Itaca, 2003). 62. Marcelino García Barragán, Parte de Guerra, Tlatelolco 1968: Documentos del General Marcelino García Barragán, ed. Julio Scherer García with Carlos Monsiváis (Mexico City: Nuevo Siglo, 1999). 63. See Jaime Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture during the Long Sixties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); Louise E. Walker, Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 64. See Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 65. See John Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

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66. Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of the Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 236–37. See also Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1995]). 67. See Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh A. Payne, eds., Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 68. Gustavo Castillo García, “En la PGR ‘no existe’ informe de la FEMOSPP sobre actos de lesa humanidad,” La Jornada, August 28, 2007: http://www .jornada.unam.mx/2007/08/28/index.php?section=politica&article=011n1pol . (Accessed March 29, 2016.) 69. See Nelly Richard, Residuos y metáforas: Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1998); Alberto Moreiras, “Postdictadura y reforma del pensamiento,” Revista de Crítica Cultural 7 (1993): 26–35; Idelber Avelar, Alegorías de la derrota: La ficción postdictatorial y el trabajo del duelo (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000); Macarena Gomez-Barris, Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009). 70. See Roberta Villalón, “The Resurgence of Collective Memory, Truth, and Justice Mobilizations in Latin America,” Latin-American Perspectives 42, no. 3 (2015), 3–19. 71. See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007). 72. See Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 [2000]); Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Culture Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

2. revenge of dust 1. For a summary of the criticism, see Claire Brewster, Responding to Crisis in Contemporary Mexico: The Political Writings of Paz, Fuentes, Monsiváis and Poniatowska (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005), 59–61. 2. Octavio Paz, The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1972 [1970]), 77. 3. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969 [1940]), 256. 4. “Floating reserve army of labor” is borrowed from Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism: Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1990 [1867]), 781–801. 5. See Samuel Steinberg, “ ‘Tlatelolco me bautizó’: Literary Renewal and the Neoliberal Transition,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 28, no. 2 (2012): 265–86. 6. Paz, The Other Mexico, 13. 7. Luis Buñuel scouted Tlatelolco and adjacent neighborhoods for five months with camera in hand in preparation to film Los olvidados (1959): Elena

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Cervera, ed., México fotografiado por Luis Buñuel (Madrid: Filmoteca Española, 2008). 8. Alfonso Reyes, “Visión de Anáhuac (1519),” in The Position of America and Other Essays, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Knopf, 1950), 7. 9. This is suggested in his letter to Antonio Mediz Bolio (August 5, 1922), reproduced in Alfonso Reyes, Simpatías y diferencias, ed. Antonio Castro Leal, vol. 2 (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1945), 264–65. Emphasis original. 10. Originated by the French philosopher Auguste Comte between 1830 and 1842, positivism was carried to Mexico by one of his students, Gabino Barreda, where over time it was stripped of its spiritual aspects to produce an especially harsh translation. 11. Alfonso Reyes, “Visión de Anáhuac,” 13. 12. Alfonso Reyes, “Palinodia del polvo,” in Obras completas de Alfonso Reyes, vol. 21 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981), 61–64. 13. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 187. 14. Alberto J. Pani, La higiene en México (Mexico City: J. Ballescá, 1916). 15. The debate between the modernists and the more conservative faction of the SAM is encapsulated in Pláticas sobre arquitectura (Mexico City: Sociedad de Arquitectos Mexicanos, 1933). 16. The architect José Villagrán García, who regularly taught the architecturaltheory seminar at the national university’s architecture school from the mid1920s through the late 1950s, argued for the profession’s social responsibility. He published his lectures as Teoría de la arquitectura (Mexico City: Instituto de Bellas Artes, 1962). 17. The photographer Armando Salas Portugal emphasized the transparency (and reflectivity) of many of the housing complex’s surfaces. 18. Novedades, January 3, 1968. 19. The dictum is part of a longer statement at the end of Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (1923). He wrote: “Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may obtain or may not. Everything lies in that: everything depends on the effort made and the attention paid to these alarming symptoms. Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided”: CharlesÉdouard Jeanneret-Gris [Le Corbusier], Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1985), 268–69. 20. Conjunto urbano “Presidente López Mateos” (Nonoalco-Tlatelolco): Una realización del Presidente Adolfo López Mateos (Mexico City: Banco Nacional Hipotecario Urbano y de Obras Publicas, 1963), 7. 21. By 1956 there were an estimated three hundred colonias proletarias, and by 1958 they took up about 35 percent of the total area of Mexico City: Enrique Espinosa López, Ciudad de México: Compendio cronológico de su desarollo urbano, 1521–2000 (Mexico City: Instituto Politécnico Nacional, 2003), 233. 22. James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 5. 23. He was eventually demoted when his opposition to the redevelopment plans grew too vocal: Francisco González Rul, Urbanismo y arquitectura

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en Tlatelolco (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia, 1998), 130. 24. See Mary K. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 25. Paz, The Other Mexico, 108–10. See also García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 127. 26. See Joshua Lund, The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 27. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 27. 28. Ricardo de Robina, “Plaza de las Tres Culturas,” Arquitectura/México 94–95 (June–September 1966): 213–19. Manuel Sánchez Santoveña, who would serve as secretary of the Mexican committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, argued in Arquitectura/México for a forward-looking respect of the past, without “protecting cadavers”: Sánchez Santoveña, “Meditaciones sobre el significado de lo histórico en la ciudad,” Arquitectura/ México 86 (June 1964): 75. 29. “Torre de 24 pisos para la Proyección Internacional de México,” Construcción Mexicana 8, no. 3 (March 1967): 11–13. 30. Alternativas de vivienda en barrios populares (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco/Secretaría de Desarrollo Urbano y Ecología, 1988), 24. 31. Adolfo Zamora, El problema de la habitación en la Ciudad de México (Mexico City: Banco Nacional Hipotecario Urbano y de Obras Publicas, 1952). 32. The rate of response was low, suggesting that families and teachers refused to participate: La vivienda popular: Problemas y soluciones (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Vivienda, 1958). 33. Mariano Azuela, Nueva burgesía (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997 [1941]), 130. 34. On crime photography, see Jesse Lerner, The Shock of the Modernity: Crime Photography in Mexico City (Mexico City: Turner, 2007). 35. On these films, known as cabareteras, see Julia Tuñón, Mujeres de luz y sombra en el cine mexicano: La construcción de una imagen (Mexico City: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 1998). Other cabareteras set at least partly in Tlatelolco include El muro de la ciudad (1964), Del brazo y por la calle (1955), Trotacalles (1951), and A la sombra del puente (1946). 36. Carlos Monsiváis, “ ‘Red News’: The Crime Pages in Mexico,” in Mexican Postcards, ed. and trans. John Kraniauskas (New York: Verso, 1997), 148–49. 37. Juan Rulfo’s spectral writings also contributed to the global rise of Latin-American literature in the 1960s. 38. Juan Rulfo, The Burning Plain and Other Stories, trans. George D. Schade (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971 [1953]), 150. 39. Ibid., 153. Tlatelolco was specifically referenced in the first edition of the story but struck from subsequent ones.

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40. Rulfo planned to produce a guide to Mexican architecture, drafting descriptions for close to four hundred buildings he encountered in his travels. 41. Rulfo previously took pictures during the shooting of Galvadón’s film La escondida in 1955, which features the railroad. Víctor Jiménez, “Juan Rulfo y el ferrocarril,” In En los ferrocarriles: Juan Rulfo, fotografías, ed. Víctor Jiménez (Mexico City: Editorial RM, 2014), 19–24. See also “La nueva Terminal de Carga solucionará vitales problemas,” Arquitectura/México 55 (September 1956): 196. 42. The magazine published several stories from Llano en llamas in March 1957. 43. Four of Rulfo’s photos appeared in “Informe técnico,” Revista Ferronales 27, no. 7 (July 1956): 74–75. Rulfo is also credited as a photographer for the June 1956 issue of Revista Ferronales, “Terminal del Valle de México: Reportaje gráfico,” with perhaps one or two out of eighty full-page photographs. 44. Revista Ferronales 31, no. 1 (1968): n.p. See also Jorge L. Medellín and Francisco T. Mancilla, “Planificación ferroviaria del Valle de México,” Arquitectura/México 28 (July 1949): 148. 45. Quoted in Luis Leal, Juan Rulfo (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 58. 46. Quoted in Marco Antonio Campos, “Un novelista por la totalidad: Entrevista a Fernando del Paso,” Revista de la Universidad de México 497 (1992): 38–48. 47. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8. 48. Fernando del Paso, José Trigo (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2006 [1966]), 526–36. 49. One of the defining novels of modern Mexican letters, La region más transparente is also generally appreciated as a last major attempt to narrate a sprawling Mexico City as a whole. Ryan F. Long reads Fuentes as part of Mexico’s “fiction of totality,” which is ultimately abandoned by writers postTlatelolco in favor of no less ambitious but more localized and fragmentary literary interventions: Long, Fictions of Totality: The Mexican Novel, 1968, and the National-Popular State (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008), 20. 50. Fuentes, Where the Air Is Clear,12. 51. Ibid., 375. 52. Jonathan Fox and Libby Haight, “Transparency Reforms in Mexico: Theory and Practice,” in Mexico’s Democratic Challenges, ed. Andrew Selee and Jacqueline Peschard (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 135–61.

3. urban logistics and kinetic environments 1. The routes were also outfitted with telephone lines and portable radio antennas, while multilingual hostesses (edecanes) stationed at the kiosks offered directions and police monitored traffic, ensuring the continual flow of automobiles and official information: Archivo del Comité Organizador de los

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Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada (COJO), Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Mexico City, Box 43, Folder 7-78. 2. That Mexico was not aligned with either NATO countries or the communist bloc was also attractive to voters. See Kevin B. Witherspoon, Before the Eyes of the World: Mexico and the 1968 Olympic Games (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008). 3. María Josefa Ortega and Tania Ragasol, eds., Diseñando México 68: Una identidad olímpica (Mexico City: Museo de Arte Moderno, 2008), 26. Emphasis added. 4. John Canaday, “Designing the 1968 Olympics—The Biggest Fiesta of All,” New York Times, December 31, 1967: 67. 5. See Claire Brewster and Keith Brewster, Representing the Nation: Sport and Spectacle in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2010); Ariel Rodríguez Kuri, “El otro 68: Política y estilo en la organización de los juegos olímpicos de la Ciudad de México,” Relaciones 19, no. 76 (1998): 107–30. 6. Terrazas, interviewed in Calli Internacional: Revista Analítica de Arquitectura Contemporánea 35 (1968): 17. 7. As Luis M. Castañeda argues, the COJO’s interventions intersected with longer-term urbanization plans advocated by the government, planner-architects, and private interests: Castañeda, Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda and the 1968 Olympics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 8. Mark Wigley, “Network Fever,” Grey Room 4 (2001): 82–122. 9. Although Goeritz would also express some doubts. In 1952 he pointed to the trouble with collaboration, because of the hierarchy of the process, to which the artist usually comes late: Goeritz, “La integración plástica en el Centro Urbano ‘Presidente Juárez,’ ” Arquitectura/México 40 (December 1952): 421. 10. The flexibility of postwar design should not be understood solely as a response to changes in technologies or client needs. This teamwork ethos also served the requirements of post-Fordist economies and the unevenly developed economies of the global South. 11. A special issue of Pani’s journal was published to coincide with the Congress: Arquitectura/México 39 (September 1952). 12. Guillermo Rossell de la Lama and Lorenzo Carrasco, eds., Guía de arquitectura mexicana contemporánea (Mexico City: Editorial Espacios, 1952), n.p. 13. After studying at UNAM, Terrazas pursued a master’s degree in architecture at Cornell University, graduating in 1960. From upstate New York, he went to Rome. While there he was invited by curator and cultural administrator Fernando Gamboa to aid in the design for a major state-sponsored exhibition of Mexican art in Leningrad. He later worked in the London office of Howell, Killick, Partridge, and Amis and the Paris office of Candilis, Josic, Woods. 14. See Arindam Dutta, ed., A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013). 15. “Television Team of 464 Is Largest at Olympics,” New York Times, October 13, 1968: S3.

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16. Nervi was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes’s architecture department in 1962. 17. Mauricio Gómez Mayorga, “La arquitectura contemporánea en México: Notas polémicas,” Artes de México 36 (1961): 18. 18. COJO, AGN, Box 533, Folder 37-120. The Palacio had another important precedent in fusing architecture with television, the hundred-twentythousand-seat Estadio Azteca, which was also used for Olympic competitions. Completed in 1966 with a design by Ramírez Vázquez and Rafael Mijares, the stadium was championed by Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, head of Televisa, Mexico’s television and radio giant, with an eye toward sports broadcasting. 19. Juan Vicente Melo, Juan García Ponce, and Ralph Meyers, “Editorial,” México 68: XIX Olimpiada 9 (1968): 3. 20. The Olympics Center’s architects were Luis McGregor Krieger, Francisco J. Serrano, José Rava Requesens, and Fernando Pineda. 21. In 1953 Leopoldo Méndez created a large-scale mural made out of semitransparent Lucite for the Automex executive offices, an example of integración plástica that included works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Lola Álvarez Bravo, and Clara Porset, designed by Guillermo Rossell de la Lama. 22. See Luis M. Castañeda, “Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68,” Grey Room 40 (2010): 100–126. Also, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Mexican architect Juan José Díaz Infante experimented with reinforced polymers as a building material: Díaz Infante, “México, un proyecto hacia la arquitectura dinámica,” Arquitectura/México 93 (March 1966): 36. 23. Working at Nelson’s New York office in the 1960s, Terrazas may have been familiar with the design. 24. México 68, vol. 4 (Mexico City: Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada, 1969), 346. 25. México 68, vol. 1 (Mexico City: Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada, 1969), 30. 26. Néstor Garciá Canclini, ed., La ciudad de los viajeros: Travesías y imaginarios urbanos, México, 1940–2000 (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, 1996), 29. 27. Canaday, “Designing the 1968 Olympics,” 67; Rubén Salazar, “Wonderland of Color,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 1968: 8. 28. COJO, AGN, Mexico City, Box 43, Folder 7-78. 29. See Francisco Antúnez Echegaray, “La foto-topografía aérea y sus aplicaciones prácticas,” Planificación 1, no. 5 (1928): 13. 30. Integración plástica overlapped with but also diverged from the “synthesis of the arts” discourse in Europe, which was first articulated by avantgardes in the 1920s and was renewed in the postwar period. Both drew from nineteenth-century notions of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Joan Ockman argues that in Europe what began as a humanistic set of ideals devolved into a professional lobby and a market for large-scale art. See Ockman, “A Plastic Epic: The Synthesis of the Arts Discourse in France in the Mid-Twentieth-Century,” in

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Architecture + Art: New Visions, New Strategies, ed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Esa Laaksinen (Helsinki: Alvar Aalto Academy, 2007), 30–61. 31. Mario Pani, “Satélite: La ciudad fuera de la ciudad,” Arquitectura/ México 60 (December 1957): 215–26. 32. The use of pictograms also aided illiterate residents, as in the Mexico City subway, although more literate and cosmopolitan audiences were the likely target. 33. José Revueltas, “TV y cultura en los juegos deportivos de la XIX Olimpiada,” México 68: Reseña Gráfica 1, no. 33 (1968): 14. 34. Revueltas, “TV y cultura,” 18. 35. Ibid., 4. Emphasis added. 36. Ibid. 37. Canaday, “Designing the 1968 Olympics,” 67. 38. Canaday was not an especially progressive critic; he relished taking a reactionary position against Abstract Expressionism in New York, for example: John Canaday, Embattled Critic: Views on Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962). 39. See Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 40. György Kepes, ed., Arts of the Environment (New York: G. Braziller, 1972). Terrazas left Woods for the New York office of George Nelson, where he met Wyman and worked on the Pop Art–inspired Chrysler Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair (1964–65). He also worked for Ramírez Vázquez as the on-site architect for the Mexican Pavilion at that fair. 41. A five-year Rockefeller Foundation grant allowed them to travel back and forth between Mexico and MIT starting in 1946. After that, Wiener regularly lectured in Mexico. See Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,” Philosophy of Science 10, no. 1 (1943): 18–24. 42. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: J. Wiley, 1948). The architectural critic Siegfried Giedion shared Wiener’s and Kepes’s interest in homeostatic systems in his Mechanization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). 43. An alternative theory of “whole design” also emerged from countercultural ecology, one that sought to eschew determinism: Simon Sadler, “An Architecture of the Whole,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (2008): 108–29. 44. Quoted from one of their pamphlets in Elizabeth Finch, The Center for Advanced Visual Studies: A Brief History (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, n.d.); http://cavs.mit.edu/MEDIA/CenterHistory.pdf. 45. György Kepes, The Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobold, 1944), 13, 23.

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46. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960). 47. György Kepes, “Art and Ecological Consciousness,” in Arts of the Environment, ed. György Kepes (New York: G. Braziller, 1972), 3. 48. Rosalind Krauss wrote of an “expanded field” for sculpture in this period; see Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (1979): 30–44. See also James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014). 49. Kepes and Terrazas met in 1961 in Rome: Eduardo Terrazas, e-mail communication, April 9, 2014. 50. Terrazas, “Creation of Environment: Mexico 68,” in Kepes, ed., Arts of the Environment, 198. 51. Ibid., 206. 52. “Scale” also came out of the plastic-integration discourse as a means of organizing the correspondences between art and architecture. 53. Similarly, Kepes wrote in his introduction to Arts of the Environment (11): “Buildings and groups of buildings are no longer considered sculptural forms and their space-organizations, but rather as systems of functions, programming life patterns with the participation of those concerned.” 54. Although Terrazas did not cite these authors in his essay for Kepes, he referred to Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander’s Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism (New York: Anchor Books, 1963). Terrazas also credited one of his mentors at Cornell, Alan R. Solomon, an art critic and curator, for the prominence of color in his methods. Solomon was a key figure in the promotion of Pop Art and staged important early exhibitions of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg: Author interview (with Luis Castañeda) of Eduardo Terrazas, June 26, 2009. 55. Legorreta worked with Wyman, Murdock, and others on the branding of the Camino Real: Ricardo Legorreta, “Un equipo internacional de diseño,” Arquitectura/México 99 (1967): 194. 56. The Italian office-equipment maker was at the forefront of converting its showrooms into dramatic stages for consumption and the subject of an exhibition at New York’s MOMA in 1952. 57. Terrazas, “Creation of Environment,” 205. 58. Kepes, in collaboration with Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas McNulty, created City by Night for the fair, a kinetic installation in a corridorlike space formed by a dark-colored and perforated false ceiling through which lights shone intermittently, accompanied by recorded urban sounds. 59. Three of Milan’s universities had seen protest, and the May 1968 Paris general strike was ongoing. See Paola Nicolin, “Protest by Design: Giancarlo de Carlo and the 14th Milan Triennale,” in Cold War Modern: Design, 1945–1970, ed. David Crowley and Jane Pavitt (London: V. & A. Publishing, 2008), 228–33. 60. Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New York: Horizon Press, 1964), 258.

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61. Juan Vicente Melo, “XIV Trienal de Milan,” Mexico 68: Reseña Gráfica, no. 40 (1968): 3. 62. See Jennifer Josten, “Mathias Goeritz y el arte internacional de nuevos medios en la década de 1960,” in Ready Media: Arqueología de los medios y invención en México, ed. Karla Jasso and Tania Aedo (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2012), 118–32. 63. Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, “Integración total de André Bloc,” Arquitectura/México 80 (December 1962): 291–93. In this article, Rodríguez Prampolini distinguishes between integration and “true” or “total” integration, with the latter being more difficult to attain in such a highly individualistic era and also because the artist and architect, as individuals, are not united by a common aesthetic sensibility. On Goeritz’s larger role in the internationalizaton of Mexican art and architecture, see Jennifer Josten, “Mathias Goeritz and International Modernism in Mexico, 1942–1962” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2012). 64. Luis Barragán called it a “símbolo plástico-publicitario,” pointing to a conflation of sign, sculpture, and advertising: Luis Barragán, “La propiedad artística de las Torres de Satélite,” Plural: Revista Cultural de Excélsior 48 (September 1975): 84. 65. Visitors accessed the museum through a long hallway that narrowed as it receded from the entrance. See Mathias Goeritz, “Manifiesto de la arquitectura emocional,” in El eco de Mathias Goeritz: Pensamientos y dudas autocríticas, ed. Leonor Cuahonte (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2007), 27–30. 66. Quoted in Karel Wendl, “The Route of Friendship: A Cultural/Artistic Event of the Games of the XIX Olympiad in Mexico City, 1968,” Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies 7 (1998): 115. 67. Siegfried Giedion, José Luis Sert, and Fernand Léger, “Nine Points on Monumentality,” reproduced in Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology, ed. Joan Ockman with Edward Eigen (New York: Rizzoli, 1993 [1943]), 29-30. 68. Daniel Garza Usabiaga makes a case for Mexico-based antecedents to cinetismo, including Goeritz, Rossell, Germán Cueto, and David Alfaro Siqueiros: Garza Usabiaga, ed., Cinetismo: Movimiento y transformación en arte de los sesenta y setenta (Mexico City: Museo de Arte Moderno, 2012), 14–16. 69. Goeritz in Willoughby Sharp, ed., Cinetismo: Esculturas electrónicas en situaciones ambientales (Mexico City: Museo Universitario de Cinencias y Arte, 1968), 4. Kepes shared Goeritz’s more forceful view that “the forces of nature that man has brought under a measure of his control have again become alien; they now approach us menacingly by avenues opened by science and technology”: Kepes, Arts of the Environment, 1. 70. Goeritz was perhaps also responding to the rise of nuclear power, the atomic bomb, and the 1976 Treaty of Tlatelolco, which secured nuclear nonproliferation in Latin America. See Mathias Goeritz, “Advertencia,” Arquitectura/ México 75 (September 1961): 172.

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71. With the title, Cuevas was also referring to the Cold War’s Iron Curtain: José Luis Cuevas, “The Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter on Conformity in Mexican Art” Evergreen Review 2, no. 7 (1959 [1958]): 111–20. 72. Interview of Felguérez moderated by Pilar García, “Salón Independiente, 1968–1971,” Sub-versiones de la memoria . . . 60–70 . . . México, ed. Pilar García and Rafael Ortega, DVD vol. 6 (Mexico City: Centro de Documentación Arkehia, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, 2011). Emphasis added. 73. Raquel Tibol, “En la universidad,” Calli Internacional: Revista Analítica de Arquitectura Contemporánea 35 (1968): 9. Days before the ephemeral mural was begun, the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana organized a group show to counter the Exposición Solar, the main art exhibition of the Cultural Olympiad, contesting its antiquated orientation toward painting and sculpture and prize structure. Although none of the artwork specifically or formally pointed to recent events—they had been produced for the most part before the movement began—several artists hung their canvases facing the wall, choosing to display handwritten protest messages or popular slogans. See Pilar García, “The Salón Independiente: A New Reading,” in La era de la discrepancia: Arte y cultura visual en México / The Age of Discrepancy: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968–1997, ed. Olivier Debroise (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007), 49–57. 74. “El arte cinético tiende a romper las normas tradicionales impuestas por las minorías: Julio Le Parc,” El Día, May 28, 1968. 75. To point to a comparable case, Venezuela’s government and economic elites were quick to endorse the work of various artists (Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Alejandro Otero), which was perceived as harboring no explicit political message. 76. Canaday, “Designing the 1968 Olympics,” 67.

4. gestures of hospitality 1. Speech dated January 24, 1967: COJO, AGN, Box 412, Folder32-79. The committee also established an office of accommodation control, which signed contracts with the city’s hotels in order to assign all visitors to rooms and ensure that international standards were met. See COJO, AGN, Boxes 1023 and 412. 2. Richard McGee Morse, “Claims of Political Tradition,” New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 104. Mexico may be compared to other magical states in the Americas. See Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 3. Quoted in Carlos Monsiváis, “Javier Barro Sierra: ¡Viva la discrepancia!” in Pensar el 68, ed. Héctor Aguilar Camín and Hermann Bellinghausen (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1988), 101. 4. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Una mano está tendida (Mexico City: Cultura y Ciencia Política, 1968), 10.

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5. Ibid., 8–9. 6. A little over a month later, in his State of the Republic speech, Díaz Ordaz used the hand image again to patronizingly exalt the rural peasant, the selfabnegating Other to the ’68 Movement: “I pay heartfelt homage to those hands that do not handle money [that they are entitled to], that rarely feel the flattery of a caress”: Cuarto informe que rinde al H. Congreso de la Unión el C. Presidente de la República, Lic. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (Mexico City: Presidencia de la República, 1968). 7. The editorial was not entirely fawning, allowing that Mexicans should not forget “our political positions, our differences, our particular desires and purposes”: “La mano invita; ¡Acudamos todos!,” ¡Siempre! August 14, 1968. 8. Heberto Castillo, “Respuesta al presidente,” ¿Por qué? September 18, 1968: 3–7. 9. Quoted in Raúl Jardón, 1968: El fuego de la esperanza (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1998), 230. 10. The phrase is borrowed from George Lukacs, Theory of the Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974 [1920]), 41. See also Max Weber’s The City (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1958 [1905]); Georg Simmel’s essays “The Stranger” (1908) in Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 143–49, and “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in Urban Place and Process: Readings in the Anthropology of Cities, ed. Irwin Press and M. Estellie Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1980 [1908]), 19–30; and Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010 [1925]). 11. Armando Estrada Núñez, “Campaña nacional para crear una conciencia olímpica,” Excélsior, August 29, 1965. 12. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1. 13. Ramírez Vázquez also enlisted the comedic actor Mario Moreno (Cantinflas) for a series of shorts to be played before films and on television: COJO, AGN, Box 1079, Folder 287; Box 1079, Folders 287A and287B. 14. Jules B. Farber, “The Big Build-up in Mexico: Nation Plans for 1968 Olympics by Pushing Construction of New Hotels and Improving Other Tourist Facilities,” New York Times, March 6, 1966: XX59. 15. See Dina Berger, The Development of Mexico’s Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 16. Suárez served as a front man for Alemán’s business dealings while in office: Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 290. 17. The president did not register the corresponding commodification of indigenous culture and lack of environmental protections: Discursos de Gustavo Díaz Ordaz: Pronuncias en el territorio de Quintana Roo los días 7 y 8 de marzo de 1964 (Mexico City: Partido Revolucionario Institucional, 1964), 32–33.

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18. Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85–172. 19. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Hotel Lobby,” Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 3 (May 2007 [1922]): 289–97. 20. See Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality; McNulty, The Hostess. 21. “Prison Paintings of Siqueiros Draw Leftists and Art Lovers,” New York Times, September 13, 1964: 82. See also Siqueiros en Lecumberri: Una lección de dignidad, 1960–1964 (Mexico City: Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, 1999). 22. He settled on My Prison Paintings, which opened at the Galería Misrachi in Mexico City with over two hundred works. 23. David Alfaro Siqueiros, No hay más ruta que la nuestra: Importancia nacional e internacional de la pintura mexicana moderna (Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1945). 24. Raquel Tibol, Confrontaciones: Crónica y recuento (Mexico City: Sámara, 1992), 33–100. 25. Rossell’s grandfather initially subdivided the neighborhood in the late 1940s.That this area was situated on major roads in the southern half of the city, where elites were increasingly moving after the city’s historic center appeared unavailable to redevelopment, certainly also contributed to the nexus of political and economic willpower. For years Ernesto Uruchurtu, defender of middle-class interests as city regent, successfully opposed the plans, until Díaz Ordaz forced him to resign in 1966 over his opposition to the construction of the subway system. 26. Rossell lamented what they saw as the overspecialization and alienation of his training and the spiritual poverty of architectural practice. See Guillermo Rossell de la Lama, “Hacia una conciencia professional,” Espacios 11–12 (1952): n.p. 27. Plastic integration also resonated with Siqueiros’s advocacy of artists as cultural workers, in joint class struggle with other laborers, as articulated in his “Manifesto del Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos, Pintores y Escultores,” El Machete 7 (June 1924 [1923]): 4. 28. Siqueiros, “Los vehículos de la pintura dialéctico-subversiva,” in Palabras de Siqueiros, ed. Raquel Tibol (Mexico City: Fondo Cultural Económica, 1997 [1932]), 62–78. 29. See Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter-Revolutionary Road,” New Masses, May 29, 1934: 16–19. 30. This was a more positive view of the culture industry than was held by other intellectuals influenced by Karl Marx, such as members of the Frankfurt School. 31. David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Hacia una nueva plástica integral,” Espacios 1 (1948): n.p. 32. Olivier Debroise, Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico, trans. Stella de Sá Rego (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 240–41.

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33. Mari Carmen Ramírez, “The Masses Are the Matrix: Theory and Practice of the Cinematographic Murals in Siqueiros,” in David Alfaro Siqueiros: Portrait of a Decade, 1930–40, ed. Catherine Lampert and Graciela de Reyes Retana (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 1997), 66–95. 34. Siqueiros’s collaborators were Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Antonio Berni, Juan Carlos Castagnino, and Enrique Lázaro. 35. Siqueiros, “Los vehículos de la pintura dialéctico-subversiva”; Siqueiros, Cómo se pinta un mural (Mexico City: Ediciones Mexicanas, 1951). 36. See also Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949 [1929]), 45–63. See also Juan Carlos Arias Herrera, “From the Screen to the Wall: Siqueiros and Eisenstein in Mexico,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 30, no. 2 (2014): 421–45. 37. Siqueiros collaborated with several photographers on studies for paintings, including the Mexican Guillermo Zamora and the Colombian Leo Matiz. 38. Ockman, “A Plastic Epic.” 39. Siqueiros, “Hacia una nueva plástica integral.” For the full sweep of Siqueiros’s contributions to plastic-integration discourse, see Raquel Tibol, “David Alfaro Siqueiros en la integración plástica,” Cuadernos de Arquitectura 20 (1965): 8–21. 40. Siqueiros, “Pintura activa para un espectador activo,” in Palabras de Siqueiros, ed. Raquel Tibol (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996 [1966]), 438–51. See also Itala Schmelz, “De la perspectiva a la poliangularidad,” in Siqueiros: El lugar de la utopia, ed. Irene Hener, Itala Schmelz, and Alfonso Morales (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes/Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, 1994), 75. 41. Siqueiros, “Hacia una nueva plástica integral,” n.p. 42. Siqueiros and Rossell collaborated again in 1953 on the executive offices for Automex, Chrysler’s subsidiary in Mexico, which was an important example of plastic integration. For the façade Siqueiros produced Velocidad, a sculptomural meant to capture the lunging speed of a moving car (and spectator). 43. Guillermo Rosell de la Lama, La ciudad (Mexico City: Secretaría del Patrimonio Nacional, 1960), n.p. 44. See Keith Eggener, Luis Barragán’s Gardens of El Pedregal (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001). 45. Cited in Fabrizio Mejía Madrid, “Insurgentes,” in The Mexico City Reader, ed. Rubén Gallo, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 69. 46. The Camino Real, also under construction, was narrated in similar fashion, although its semifolkloric design and contemporary international-art collection were foregrounded, instead of its technological capabilities. 47. Guillermo Rossell de la Lama, México: Importantes retos en el siglo XXI (Mexico City: Colegio de Arquitectos–Sociedad de Arquitectos Mexicanos, 1998) 40.

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48. Adrian García Cortés, Praxis, un hombre y un equipo (Mexico City: Central de Publicaciones, 1971), 251, 263. 49. See Carlos Lazo, La planificación de las comunicaciones y sus proyecciones en el turismo: Circuito turístico del Golfo de México y del Caribe (Mexico City: Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas, 1953). 50. Guillermo Rossell de la Lama, “Estudio de planificación de Nueva Ciudad Guerrero,” M.A. thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1949. 51. See Annabel Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001); A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 52. Pani usurped this and another project from Carlos Obregón Santacilia, who, like Villagrán García, was an early leading voice in Mexican modernism. Obregón Santacilia made charges of intellectual theft public in a self-published book, Historia folletinesca del Hotel Prado: Un episodio técnico-pintorescoirónico-trágico-bochornoso de la postrevolución (Mexico City: Nuevo Mundo, 1951). 53. Carlos Herrero, Joaquín Suárez y Suárez y Manuel Suárez y Suárez: Una familia, varios caminos, muchas empresas (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Históricos Internacionales, 1999), 18–19. 54. Prolonged war in Europe, in particular, produced a human and humanistic crisis, and Mexico City (as well as Buenos Aires, São Paulo, etc.) was imagined by exiles and natives alike as a haven for universal patrimony and the (unfinished) project of modernity, which was up for revision as well as safekeeping. 55. The modern Olympic movement and Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which sent photos selected from sixty-eight countries to eleven (mostly European) countries beginning in 1955, are well-known examples of this revival of humanism, two of several over the course of the twentieth century. 56. Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, México (Mexico City: Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, 1970), n.p. 57. Siqueiros, No hay más ruta que la nuestra; Siqueiros, “Carta a Orozco,” Hoy 398 (October 7, 1944), 60–63. See also Siquieiros, “Tres llamamientos de orientación actual a los pintores y escultores de la nueva generación americana,” Vida Americana: Revista Norte, Centro y Sudamericana de Vanguardia 1 (May 1921), 2–3. 58. Belkin and Icaza admired both Tamayo and Siqueiros, visiting the latter while he was in Lecumberri. They published a newsletter for him, which developed into the group’s publication, Nueva Presencia: Shifra Goldman, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). 59. Ernesto Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” in The Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Guerilla Strategy, Politics and Revolution, ed. David Deutschmann (Sydney: Pathfinder Press, 2003 [1965]), 212–30.

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60. Rafael Squirru, Challenge of the New Man: A Cultural Approach to the Latin-American Scene (Washington, D.C.: Pan-American Union, 1964). See also Claire F. Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Michael G. Wellen, “PanAmerican Dreams: Art, Politics, and Museum-Making at the OAS, 1948–1976,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2012. 61. Guillermo Rossell de la Lama, “Tésis turística del Hotel de México y del Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros,” Mundo Gastronómico, ca. 1970–71: 14, 16. 62. See, for example, letter from Siqueiros to Suárez dated April 2, 1970, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (SAPS), Folder 10.2.267; see also letter from Suárez to Siqueiros dated April 28, 1971, SAPS, Folder 10.2.268. 63. Jennifer Jolly, “Art of the Collective: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau and Their Collaboration at the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 (2008): 129–51. 64. Siqueiros was held at Lecumberri from May 1940 until March 1941. Trotsky was later killed in 1940, probably by an agent of Joseph Stalin. 65. The six lower registers are panels painted in Cuernavaca (72 total) and fitted into place. The ceiling or seventh register was painted in situ. 66. Rafael Squirru, “Polyforum Siqueiros,” Américas 24, no. 10 (1972): 12–18. 67. It also led to conflict between Siqueiros and the photographer Leo Matiz, with whom the muralist had collaborated on a series of photographs featuring a seminude Siqueiros and model Víctor Arrevillaga with their hands bound and unbound (among other subjects between 1945 and 1947), for which Siqueiros failed to credit Matiz. 68. See Luis Vargas-Santiago, “David Alfaro Siqueiros, El Coronelazo, 1945” in Catálogo comentado del acervo del Museo Nacional de Arte: Pintura, siglo XX, ed. Dafne Cruz Porchini (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 2014), 74–82. 69. In this respect, Siqueiros was not unique: both García’s and Matiz’s bodies of photographic work also feature countless foci on the “hands of the artist” and, in Matiz’s case, “hands of the indigene.” 70. Daniel Cosío Villegas, “La crisis de México,” Cuadernos Americanos 32 (March 1947): 29–51. The fiftieth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, celebrated by the PRI in 1960, invited a new round of reflection among the country’s intellectuals. 71. Rossell de la Lama, “Tésis turística del Hotel de México.” 72. Letter from Rossell de la Lama to Suárez dated December 28, 1970, SAPS, Folder 10.2.267. Subcontracts to the original dictated not only the completion of certain parts of the mural but the revision of some of the iconographic aspects as well. 73. Alan Riding, “Siqueiros: Ten Years and a Polyforum Later,” New York Times, June 20, 1971: D22. 74. Excerpted in Adrian García Cortés, Siqueiros, Suárez y el Polyforum: Vidas paralelas, sin paralelo (Mexico City: Polyforum Siqueiros, 2000), 169–98.

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75. Siqueiros’s other major project of the 1960s, his mural for Chapultepec Palace (1957–65), was also a sweeping epic painted over a long period of time that could be read as an allegory of the failure of the Mexican Miracle. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture, 120–21. 76. Stitching more threads to the state, Rossell consulted Margarita López Portillo, wife of the future president, and Margarita Suárez de Salvat, wife of the former government head of tourism, for ideas on how to position the Polyforum, including inviting foreign diplomats to the inauguration. Letter from Rossell de la Lama to Department of Public Relations, dated November 16, 1971, SAPS, Folder 10.2.268. 77. Reproduced in Rossell de la Lama, México: Importantes retos, 54–70. 78. Quoted in Folgarait, So Far from Heaven: David Alfaro Siqueiros’ The March of Humanity and Mexican Revolutionary Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 56. 79. When pressed on the mural’s obvious political content, Echeverría answered (ibid.): I believe that it encloses a much wider message than the one that you are seeing. You are limiting yourself too much with very limited political or aesthetic ideas. It is something wider in scope. . . . It is very profound, for that is what is important. If you limit yourself to traditional concepts you will not understand this work. . . . It is a rediscovery of many things. . . . That is why it interests me very much.

80. Folgarait (So Far from Heaven, 77–91) chronicles the critical response. He argues that the mural caught artists off guard and did not deliver on their expectations for the medium, which in part explains the vitriol. 81. A persistent though untrue rumor is that Suárez ordered a crypt built into the Polyforum to house his remains and those of Siqueiros and other luminaries of modern Mexican art. 82. Until recently this shift in Mexican art was characterized as a “rupture.” Octavio Paz originated the term ruptura in a 1950 essay on Tamayo, thought to be an important transitional artist, and was more subtle in deploying it than subsequent critics, who suggested a sudden or complete break with tradition. See also Manuel Felguérez, “La Ruptura, 1935–1955,” Ruptura (Mexico City: Museo Carrillo Gil, 1988), 93–102. 83. A commercial-art market now supplemented the state as patron and exhibition circuit. The number of galleries grew significantly in fashionable neighborhoods like Zona Rosa, including the Prisse, Antonio Souza, Juan Martín, Pecanins, Tusó galleries: Pilar García, “The Zona Rosa, University Spaces, and the Creation of New Museums,” in Rita Eder, ed., Desafio de la estabilidad: Procesos artísticos en México/Defying Stability: Artistic Processes in Mexico, 1952–1967 (Mexico City: Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, 2014), 495–503.This expansion was driven, as Chrisine Frérot argues, by the expansion of a middle class with more disposable income and a higher education who defined themselves through the prestigious deployment of cultural capital through the consumption of art: Frérot, El

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mercado del arte en México, 1950–1976 (Mexico City: Instituto de Bellas Artes, 1990). 84. Cuevas, “The Cactus Curtain.” 85. Juan Vicente Melo, Juan García Ponce, and Ralph Meyers, “Para crear una identidad olímpica,” México 68: XIX Olimpiada 9 (1968): 9. 86. Reproduced in Rossell de la Lama, “El reto del Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros y una aspiración turística internacional, el Hotel de México,” México: Importantes retos en el siglo XXI, 43. 87. Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, 138.

5. satellites 1. The middle classes were not formally recognized until the mid-1940s, as part of the Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares (CNOP, National Confederation of Popular Organizations). The confederation incorporated university-educated professionals, small merchants, and government employees, with most living in cities, although not necessarily sharing political or economic interests. 2. See Robert F. Alegre, Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 3. See Diane E. Davis, Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 4. James Holston uses the term “differential incorporation” to describe this uneven citizenship. Holston, The Modernist City, 278. 5. Louise Walker, Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). 6. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Informes presidenciales: Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (Mexico City: Centro de Documentación, Información y Análisis, Cámara de Diputados, 2006), 133. 7. The literature on cultural nationalism in Mexico is extensive. See the classic essays in Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, eds., The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds., Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 8. John Canaday, “Culture Gets High Billing at Olympics in Mexico,” New York Times, December 14, 1967: 75. 9. México 68, vol. 1 (Mexico City: Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada, 1969), 7. 10. COJO, AGN, Box 8, Folder 1-45. 11. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Mensaje del Presidente Díaz Ordaz a los jóvenes de México. El Gobierno Mexicano, no. 44 (Mexico City: Secretaría de la Presidencia, 1970), 64–69. 12. Such charges constituted a panic that the state tried to carefully manage, stoking it but at the same time attempting to maintain diplomatic relations

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with Cuba after its 1959 Revolution, thereby maintaining its nonaligned position toward the United States. This ambivalence was driven primarily by its desire to clamp down on the Left in Mexico as the PRI continued to move to the right. See Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 13. Mariano Ruíz-Funes, Criminalidad de los menores (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1953). 14. Héctor Solís Quiroga, Introducción a la sociología criminal (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1962). Throughout the 1960s Solís Quiroga also published opinion pieces in the newspaper El Nacional. See Rachel Kram Villarreal, “Gladiolas for the Children of Sánchez: Ernesto P. Uruchurtu’s Mexico City, 1950–1968,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 2008. 15. Pensado, Rebel Mexico, 50–82. This purported youth crisis was not limited to Mexico: see Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Perón to Videla (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 16. The Catholic Church also played an important role, reaching youth through lay organizations and magazines as it adapted to the increasing prominence of secular popular culture. 17. Hugo Lara Chávez, “Los jefes de la calle: Los jóvenes de la ciudad,” in Chávez, Una ciudad inventada por el cine (Mexico City: CONACULTA/ Cineteca Nacional, 2006), 121–31. 18. Also, in an increasingly competitive film market, wherein North American imports were gaining a greater share of audiences, censorship protected Mexican national cinema: Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 58–60. 19. See Salvador Martínez Della Rocca, Estado y universidad en México, 1920–1968: Historia de los movimientos estudiantiles en la UNAM (Mexico City: J. Boldó i Climent, 1986). 20. Pérez Rayón’s campus drew from recent educational and industrial architecture in Mexico and the United States, as the two building types grew increasingly indistinguishable. Guillermo Rossell de la Lama’s corporate offices for Automex (1952), the Chrysler car assembly subsidiary, and Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (1939–58) both employed pilotis (piers) to similar effect. 21. Unidad Profesional del Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Zacatenco, México (Mexico City: Fondo Editorial, 1964), n.p. 22. Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral, La construcción de la Ciudad Universitaria del Pedregal: Concepto, programa y planeación arquitectónica (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1979), 54. 23. See Esther McCoy, “The New University of Mexico,” Arts and Architecture (August 1952): 21; see also “Moving Day in Mexico,” Los Angeles

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Times, October 19, 1952: 12; “Observations on Mexico’s University City: Six Reports,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 19 (January 1953): 6–14; Thomas Sharp, “Mexico University’s New University City,” Architectural Review 114 (November 1953): 306–18. 24. Antonio Acevedo Escobedo, “Los edificios de la antigua universidad,” Arquitectura/México 39 (September 1952): 199–202 (special issue of the journal dedicated to the new UNAM campus). 25. Pani cited the architect Patrick Abercrombie’s plan for “new towns,” prepared in anticipation of the end of World War II and built between 1946 and 1970: see Mario Pani, “Satélite: La ciudad fuera de la ciudad,” Arquitectura/ México 60 (December 1957): 215. 26. See Vladimir Kaspé et al., “Crítica de ideas arquitectónicas, suplemento periódico de debate y planteo de problemas no. 13: El problema del centro de la Ciudad de México,” Arquitectura/México 71 (September 1960): 161–68. Likewise, developers of Ciudad Satélite, located on a major highway linking Mexico City to Querétaro (on land owned by President Adolfo López Mateos), failed to respect the parameters set in Pani’s master plan and became as crowded and traffic-clogged as the city center. 27. Herrey collaborated with his wife, Erna Herrey, a physicist, and the architect Constantin Alexander Pertzoff. See Herrey, “Comprehensive Planning for the City: Market and Dwelling Place,” Pencil Points, April 1944: 82. 28. Mario Pani, Housing Scheme: The Nonoalco-Tlatelolco Urban Renewal Program for Mexico City (Mexico City: Banco Nacional Hipotecario Urbano y de Obras Públicas, 1959). 29. Mario Pani, “Problemas urbanísticos: La calle,” Arquitectura/México 107 (1972): 183. See also Mario Pani, “Problemas urbanísticos: La célula urbana,” Arquitectura/México 108 (December 1973): 235–36. 30. The Mexico City subway would not reach the UNAM or the IPN campus until 1982, during its third phase of construction, suggesting that their connection was not a high priority. 31. I follow the subaltern-studies scholar Ranajit Guha in defining insurgency, which “extricates itself from the placenta of common crime in which it may be initially enmeshed and establishes its own identity as violence which is public, collective, destructive and total in its modalities.” Violence for Guha signifies not simply destruction but also fluency in and recoding of signs of authority: Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 109. 32. The Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre, a Marxist-Leninist insurgent group, classified by the state as terrorist, would honor the date with its name and by carrying out several attacks and kidnappings in the 1970s. 33. Jaime García Reyes, Fernándo Hernádez Zárate, and David Vega, “Las batallas en el Politécino,” in Pensar el 68, ed. Héctor Aguilar Camín and Hermann Bellinghausen (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 2008), 90. This domesticated space was not without gender politics, though; see Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen, “Defining the Space of Mexico ’68: Heroic Masculinity in the

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Prison and ‘Women’ in the Streets,” Hispanic-American Historical Review 83, no. 4 (2003): 650–51. 34. Speech quoted in Gilberto Guevara Niebla, La libertad nunca se olvida: Memoria del 68 (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 2004), 221. 35. On October 5, 1968, days after the Tlatelolco Massacre, Campos Lemus accused members of Mexico’s leftist intelligentsia, most prominent among them the writer Elena Garro, of being coconspirators in a plot to overthrow the government and install Carlos Madrazo, who was pushed out of the presidency of the PRI for seeking democratic reforms. Garro, in turn, accused the students of plotting to assassinate Interior Minister Luis Echeverría and went on to implicate other intellectuals: Rebecca E. Biron, Elena Garro and Mexico’s Modern Dreams (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 43–64. 36. The general’s diary is one of the few documents written by an official to go on the record regarding the ’68 Movement and Tlatelolco Massacre. García Barragán includes copies of internal documents that suggest he had “no other choice” and that he sought absolution: Marcelino García Barragán, Parte de guerra, 92–95. 37. On September 8 another counterdemonstration was staged by MURO, the conservative student group, at a bullfighting ring. An effigy of Che Guevara was burned, and large banners reading VIVA Our President! and with anticommunist messages were displayed. Photographs show a sparsely attended event. 38. González de Alba, Los días y los años, 127–28. 39. Pablo González Casanova, La democracia en México (Mexico City: Era, 1965). 40. On the railroaders, see Antonio Alonso, El movimiento ferrocarrilero en México, 1958–1959: De la conciliación a la lucha de clases (Mexico City: Era, 1972). On the medics, see Ricardo Pozas Horcasitas, La democracia en blanco: El movimiento médico en México, 1964–1965 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1993). 41. See Claire Brewster, “The Student Movement of 1968 and the Mexican Press: The Cases of Excélsior and Siempre,” Bulletin of Latin-American Research 21, no. 2 (2002): 182. 42. González de Alba, Los días y los años, 71. 43. Paco Ignacio Taibo II, ’68, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 21. 44. Women actively participated in the ’68 Movement’s leadership and dayto-day operations, although not without encountering patriarchal preconceptions (stares, harassment, menial assignments) both within the movement and on the streets. See Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices. 45. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 46. González de Alba, Los días y los años, 168. 47. Néstor García Canclini, “Una modernización que atrasa: La cultura bajo la regresión neoconservadora,” Estudios sobre las Culturas Contemporáneas 16–17 (1994): 28.

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6. mobilization and mediation 1. See Zolov, Refried Elvis. 2. On mediation, see Jesús Martín-Barbero, De los medios a las mediaciones: Comunicación, cultura y hegemonía (Mexico City: G. Gili, 1987). 3. The term “media fields,” borrowed from colleagues in the founding Media Fields Collective (2007) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggests that mass media and built environment are mutually informing phenomena. See also Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, eds., MediaSpace: Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2004); Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 4. Guevara Niebla, La libertad nunca se olvida, 221. 5. Jorge Pérezvega, interviewed in “Movimiento estudiantil del 68 y la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas,” Sub-versiones de la memoria . . . 60–70 México, DVD 2, Mexico City: Centro de Documentación Arkehia, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, 2011. 6. Arnulfo Aquino and Jorge Pérezvega, interviewed in “Agrupaciones artísticas en la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 1963–1971,” Sub-versiones de la memoria . . . 60–70 México, DVD 1. 7. The gorilla image marked a shift from political posters of the 1930s through the 1950s, which represented soldiers as faceless or skeletal. The gorilla image marked a shift from political posters of the 1930s through the 1950s, which represented soldiers as faceless or skeletal: James Oles and Pilar García, Gritos desde el archivo: Grabado político del Taller Gráfica Popular, Colección Academia de Artes (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2008). 8. See Russ Davidson, ed., Latin-American Posters: Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006). 9. According to Jorge Pérezvega, images like these were a key motivator for city residents to become involved in the movement. Pérezvega, interviewed in “Movimiento estudiantil del 68 y la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas,” Subversiones de la memoria . . . 60–70 México, DVD 2. 10. For a comparison, see Georges Roque, “La gráfica del ’68,” in Memorial del 68, ed. Álvaro Vásquez Mantecón (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007), 216–33. 11. Jorge Pérezvega, interviewed in “Movimiento estudiantil del 68 y la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas.” 12. Luis González de Alba, Los días y los años, 130. 13. Other counterinsurgency groups of questionable independence at this time included the Comité Mexicano de Orientación Popular (Mexican Committee for Popular Orientation) and the Frente Renovador Estudiantil (Student Reform Front). 14. Manuel Felguérez, interviewed in “Salón Independiente, 1968–1971,” Sub-versiones de la memoria . . . 60–70 México, DVD 6. 15. A reference to the Spanish colonial chronicler Bernardo de Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana, published in 1604, and to the Mexican poet Salvador

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Novo’s follow-up, Nueva grandeza mexicana, of 1946: Arnulfo Aquino and Jorge Pérezvega, eds., Imagenes y símbolos del 68: Fotografía y gráfica del movimiento estudiantil (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004), 113. For published reproductions of movement graphics, see also La gráfica del ’68: Homenaje al movimiento estudiantil (Mexico City: Grupo Mira, 1982); Luis Olivera, ed., Impresos sueltos del movimiento estudiantil mexicano, 1968 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1992). 16. Jesús Martínez was among the most technically competent printmakers for the ’68 Movement, having trained at several commercial newspapers before arriving at San Carlos. Jorge Pérezvega had studied with Ángel Bracho of the TGP to perfect his linocut technique. 17. “Todo es posible en la paz,” Excélsior, September 30, 1968. 18. Arnulfo Aquino has also cited Eduardo del Río, who cartooned as Rius, as a key influence in his production for the ’68 Movement. Del Río’s comics, under the titles Los supermachos and Los agachados, criticized the legacy of the Mexican Revolution as supervised by the PRI: Aquino, “El 68 en la gráfica política contemporánea: El cartel y la estampa de implicación social en México,” Discurso Visual (July–December 2009), http://discursovisual.net/dvweb13 /aportes/apoarnulfo.htm. (Accessed March 31, 2016.) See also Georges Roque, “Aproximaciones argumentativas a la gráfica del ’68 en México,” Curare: Espacio Crítico para las Artes 10 (1997): 139–68. 19. Anne G. Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 20. Not unlike David Alfaro Siqueiros in his 1966 Lecumberri portrait by Héctor García. The brigades appear to have adopted a portrait of Vallejo originally created by the cartoonist Rogelio Naranjo for their prints, although they did not credit him. 21. On the rise of television news in Mexico, see Celeste González de Bustamante, Muy buenas noches: Mexico, Television, and the Cold War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). 22. Aquino interview moderated by Cuauhtémoc Medina in “Agrupaciones artísticas en la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 1963–1971,” Sub-versiones de la memoria . . . 60–70 México, DVD 1. 23. As Pilar García has identified, Mexiac’s print circulated as far as a Soviet pamphlet from 1958. Also, another, more abstracted version was reproduced in 1968 with a stronger black-and-white contrast and no text: Oles and Pilar García, Gritos desde el archivo, 100. 24. Daniel Luna Cárdenas with Paulina Martínez Figueroa, La Academia de San Carlos en el movimiento estudiantil de 1968 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2008), 25. 25. As Pilar García elucidates, this boycott led to the establishment of a series of “Independent Salons” between 1968 and 1971. See García, “The Salón Independiente: A New Reading,” in La era de la discrepancia, 49–57. These salons were preceded by other exhibitions that framed this ongoing debate: the

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UNAM University Museum of Arts and Sciences’ Nuevos exponentes de la pintura mexicana (1959) and Tendencias de arte abstracto en México (1967), the Museum of Modern Art’s Salón Esso para jóvenes artistas (1965), and the Institute of Fine Art’s Confrontación 66 (1966). 26. Invitation to Nuevos Grabadores exhibition at the Casa del Lago, May– June 1967, reproduced in Luna Cárdenas, La Academia de San Carlos, 174. By the 1960s the TGP had reached a point of exhaustion, with several prominent members leaving the collective. Nuevos Grabadores exhibited again in 1968 as part of the Cultural Olympiad at Galería Reforma, Mexico City. 27. Raquel Tibol, Gráficas y neográficas en México (Mexico City: Casa San Pablo, 1987). There were other high-profile collaborations at the time, particularly one with twelve artists led by Mathias Goeritz coming together as Los Hartos (The Fed-Ups) for a Mexico City exhibition in December 1961 for which they presented, satirically in part, work outside the medium they were already well known for in order to “deflate” debates over figuration versus abstraction and the art market and star system. See Jennifer Josten, “Los Hartos,” in Desafio de la estabilidad, 198–201. 28. The same may be said of mail art in the period. See Victoria C. Hansen, Contemporary Printmaking in America: Collaborative Prints and Presses, 1960–1990 (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1995); Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Ursula Davila-Villa, and Gina McDaniel Tarver, eds., New York Graphic Workshop, 1964–74 (Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, 2009). 29. The collectives received early critical-curatorial attention and had their countercultural authenticity somewhat essentialized by early exhibitions. See Dominique Liquois, De los grupos los individuos: Artistas plásticos de los grupos metropolitanos (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1985). See also Arden Decker, “Los Grupos and the Art of Intervention in 1970s Mexico” (Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York, 2015); Julio García Murillo, “La hora de los chacales: Una contra-genealogía de Grupo Proceso Pentágono, 1973–1974” (M.A. thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2015). 30. Other important intellectual nodes for Los Grupos in the early 1970s were the philosopher and art critic Alberto Híjar’s Taller de Arte e Ideologia, an informal offshoot of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of UNAM, and the Peruvian expatriate critic Juan Acha’s notion of arte no-objectual. Both were Marxist in orientation. 31. Hersúa, interviewed in “Agrupaciones artísticas en la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 1963–1971.” 32. Since the 1980s several professional artists who participated in the propaganda brigades have come forward to identify authorship of certain of the ’68 Movement’s prints and to preserve them as an archive of popular struggle. In 1982 members of Grupo MIRA published the first of several editions of La gráfica del 68: Homenaje al movimiento estudiantil, the first time a portion of the material was reproduced. Arnulfo Aquino, along with Jesús Martínez and Jorge Pérezvega, has also curated exhibitions and contributed to recent oral histories. Aquino, in particular, has taken a keen interest in tracing the afterlives of the propaganda brigades’ production in subsequent social movements both in Mexico City and in

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rural provinces like Oaxaca: see Aquino, Imágenes épicas en el México contemporáneo: De la gráfica al graffiti, 1968–2011 (Mexico City: Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e Información de Artes Plásticas, 2011). 33. Quoted in The Village Voice, in Jonas Mekas’s “Movie Journal” column on December 17, 1964, and later anthologized in his book of the same name. Super 8 would be taken up with gusto by experimental filmmakers after 1968. See also James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 34. Álvaro Vázquez Mantecón, “Visualizing 1968,” in La era de la discrepancia, 37–39. The interviews are available in the DVD edition of Alfredo Joskowicz’s El cambio (1971, The Change). 35. The comunicados are included in the 2007 DVD edition of El grito (1969). 36. See John Mraz, Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 37. Emphasis original. 38. COJO, AGN, Box 1079, Folder 305. Emphasis added. 39. I borrow “mobile, virtual gaze” from Anne Friedberg, who locates this politics of looking in spaces of consumption, malls and movies especially: Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 40. Another short, México, ciudad de los setentas, attempted to substantiate the COJO’s claim of seamless modernity by envisioning the future. The famed actress Dolores del Río, who had a career in Mexico and the United States, narrated a “universal” history of great cities that led from Paris to London to New York and, in the next decade, Mexico City: COJO, AGN, Box 1079, Folder 306. 41. On the New Latin-American Cinema, see Michael T. Martin, ed., New Latin-American Cinema, 2 vols. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997); Ana M. López, “An ‘Other’ History: The New Latin-American Cinema,” in Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History, ed. Robert Sklar and Charles Musser (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 308–30. 42. Film in Mexico was closely tied to the state, which provided financing and reviewed films prior to distribution. President Miguel Alemán nationalized the main production-finance bank in 1949, placing it under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior, responsible for internal security. In the 1970s, the state would step back from this role, resulting in a severe decrease in funding that the private sector was slow to make up, although scholars see it as an unexpected boon for independent and experimental film. 43. Carlos Monsiváis, interviewed in the journal Hablamos de Cine 69 (1977–78): 26. 44. Film criticism figured prominently in middle-class venues such as Novedades, Revista de la Universidad de México, Radio UNAM, IPN’s Channel 11, and ¡Siempre! 45. Other members include Emilio García Riela, José de la Colina, Salvador Elizondo, Paul Leduc, and Fernando Macotela. Several had met at the cineclub of El Instituto Francés de America Latina, the French cultural center in Mexico

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City. Their manifesto was first published in La Cultura en México that month. The manifesto was reproduced in José de la Colina et al., “Manifesto del Grupo Nuevo Cine,” Nuevo Cine 1, no. 1 (April 1961): 3. See also Salvador Elizondo, “El cine mexicano y la crisis,” Nuevo Cine 1, no. 7 (August 1962): 5–8. 46. In February 1962 the group also lobbied President Adolfo López Mateos and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, then Minister of the Interior, for more funding from the national-film finance bank to support new work by emerging producers. 47. Independent experimental festivals and competitions, organized around interest in Super 8, would emerge in the 1970s. See Jesse Lerner, “Superocheros,” Wide Angle 21, no. 3 (July 1999): 2–35. 48. The episodic structure of Los caifanes, resembling a series of short films, appears to refer to this restriction. 49. In Mexico to be an auteur was to be separate from or critical of the unions and companies that controlled access to the national cinema, part of a cultivated sense of outsider status. Jomi García Ascot was also a Spanish exile: García Ascot, “Un profundo desarreglo,” Nuevo Cine 1, no. 6 (March 1962): 4. 50. See Jorge Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano (Mexico City: Era, 1968), cited in Israel Rodríguez, “An Auteur Cinema for Mexico,” in Desafio de la estabilidad, 133–43. 51. Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano, 296. See also the Super 8–focused issue of Wide Angle guest-edited by Jesse Lerner: Óscar Menéndez et al., “Manifesto: 8 Millimeters versus 8 Millions,” Wide Angle 21, no. 3 (1999): 36–41; José Carlos Méndez, “Toward a Political Cinema: The Cooperative of Marginal Cinema,” Wide Angle 21, no. 3 (1999): 42–65. 52. Contributors of footage include Leobardo López Aretche, Alfredo Joskowicz, Roberto Sánchez, José Rovirosa, Francisco Bojórquez, Jorge de la Rosa, León Chávez, Francisco Gaytán, Raúl Kamffer, Jaime Ponce, Federico Villegas, Arturo de la Rosa, Carlos Cuenca, Guillermo Díaz Palafox, Fernando Ladrón de Guevara, Juan Mora, Sergio Valdez, and Federico Weingartshofer. 53. A more formal public presentation took place on July 23, 1976, at the Cineteca Nacional, the national film archive: Carolina Mónica Tolosa Jablonska, “El movimiento estudiantil de 1968 a través El grito y Rojo amanecer: Una aproximación desde la ideología,” in Reflexión y crítica en torno al movimiento estudiantil de 1968: Nuevos enfoques y perspectivas, ed. Alberto del Castillo Troncoso (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 2012), 59. 54. Sergio García, Hacia el 4o. cine (Zacatecas: La Editorial Universitaria, 1973), reproduced in Wide Angle 21, no. 3 (1999): 89. 55. Manuel Michel, “Un cine marginal,” Revista de Bellas Artes 3 (May– June 1965): 91–94, reproduced in Wide Angle 21, no. 3 (1999): 70-81. 56. The Chilean singer-songwriter Ángel Parra’s protest song “México 68” plays at the same time with lyrics insisting, “These stains do not come out with either soap or water. I ask you, granadero, ‘How did you think you would wash them?’ ” 57. Jorge Ayala Blanco, La búsqueda del cine mexicano, 1968–1972 (Mexico City: Posada, 1974), 327–28.

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7. dwellings 1. Although there were communications between the U.S. and Mexican governments regarding the ’68 Movement, and the former certainly monitored the situation, there was no risk of an American invasion. Declassified U.S. documents show that Mexican informants were able to mislead the CIA about the state’s culpability for the massacre: Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 2. The footage has not been located. See Tania Molina Ramírez, “Ignoro dónde está lo que filmé el 2 de octubre del 68 en Tlatelolco,” La Jornada, August 22, 2007, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/08/22/index.php?section=espect aculos&article=a08n1esp. (Accessed March 31, 2016.) 3. Several architects collaborated on the Taller, including José Luis Cuevas (no relation to the artist), Domingo García Ramos, Hilario Galguera, Víctor Vila, and Homero Martínez de Hoyos. It received funding from the Banco Internacional Inmobilario. 4. Mario Pani and Salvador Ortega, “El primer edificio en México de propiedad por pisos,” Arquitectura/México 53 (March 1956): 3–12. 5. See Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal. 6. It also included nine primary schools, one secondary school, one vocational school, thirteen nurseries, three medical clinics, three social clubs, six parking zones, one museum (Plaza de las Tres Culturas), one union office, and a handful of small merchants. 7. This is echoed in the oral histories collected in Graciela de Garay, ed., Rumores y retratos de un lugar de la modernidad: Historia oral del multifamiliar Miguel Alemán, 1949–1999 (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 2002). 8. The earliest summation is Mario Pani, Los multifamiliares de pensiones (Mexico City: Editorial Arquitectura, 1952). 9. Mauricio Gómez Mayorga, “El problema de la habitación en México: Realidad de su solución—Una conversación con el arquitecto Mario Pani,” Arquitectura/México 27 (April 1949): 67–74. 10. Mauricio Gómez Mayorga drew from the French geographer Jean Gottmann, who introduced the term “megalopolis.” Gómez Mayorga, “Notas de urbanismo teórico,” Arquitectura/México 79 (September 1962): 211–14. 11. Mario Pani, “México: Un problema, una solución,” Arquitectura/México 60 (December 1957): 199. See also Victor Vila, “Conjunto Urbano Ciudad Tlatelolco: Aspectos urbanos,” Arquitectura/México 94–95 (June–September 1967): 79. 12. Conjunto urbano “Presidente López Mateos,” 83. 13. See Antonio de Ibarrola, “Los espacios educativos en una nueva unidad de habitación,” Arquitectura/México 94–95 (June–September 1966): 253–72. 14. Lilia Gómez and Miguel Ángel Quevedo, eds., Testimonios vivos: Veinte arquitectos (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1981), 109. Emphasis added.

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15. “Sólo en Ciudad Tlatelolco,” El Universal, December 23, 1966. 16. Pani went on to indepedently design the Hotel Alameda (1944) in Morelia and the Hotel Plaza (1946) in Mexico City. See Lourdes Cruz González Franco, “Los hoteles para un México moderno,” in Mario Pani, ed. Louise Noelle (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2008), 55–67. 17. Carlos Obregón Santacilia, Cincuenta años de arquitectura mexicana, 1900–1950 (Mexico City: Editorial Patria, 1952), 67. See also Enrique Yañez, Del funcionalismo al post-racionalismo: Ensayo sobre la arquitectura contemporánea en México (Mexico City: Trillas, 1989). 18. Mauricio Gómez Mayorga, “El problema de la habitación en México: Realidad de su solución—Una conversación con el arquitecto Mario Pani,” Arquitectura/México 27 (April 1949): 67–74. 19. Even before this development, mortgages were difficult for lowerincome residents to secure, given bank requirements. See Priscilla Connolly, La producción de vivienda en la zona metropolitana de la Ciudad de México (Mexico City: Centro Operacional de Vivienda y Poblamiento, 1977). 20. Roberto A. Esteva Ruíz, El certificado de participación inmobilaria como título de inversion productivo (Mexico City: Banco Nacional Hipotecario Urbano y de Obras Públicas, 1960). 21. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1935–1938, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002 [1935]): 38. 22. See Cristóbal Andrés Jácome Moreno, “Las construcciones de la imagen: La serie del Conjunto Urbano Nonoalco-Tlatelolco de Armando Salas Portugal,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 95 (2009): 85–115. 23. Mario Pani, “Tlatelolco,” Arquitectura/México 94–95 (June–September 1966): 72. Emphasis added. 24. “El gran fiasco de la Unidad Santiago Tlatelolco,” Gente, August 16, 1966: 6. 25. Elena Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de historia oral (Mexico City: Era, 1971), 5. 26. Rubén Cantú Chapa, Tlatelolco: La autoadministración en unidades habitacionales—Gestión urbana y planificación (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2001). 27. These groups included the Frente de Residentes de Tlatelolco (Tlatelolco Residents’ Front), Asociación de Residentes de Tlatelolco (Association of Tlatelolco Residents), and Coordinadora de Cuartos de Azotea de Tlatelolco (Coordinator of Tlatelolco Rooftop Rooms). See Max Mendizábal, Movimiento vecinal en Tlatelolco: Una experiencia urbana (Mexico City: Unidad Urbana, 1984); Adriana López Monjardin and Carolina Verduzco Ríos, “Vivienda popular y reconstrucción,” Cuadernos Políticos 45 (January–March 1986): 25–37. 28. For feminist readings of the ’68 Movement, see Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices; Frazier and Cohen, “Defining the Space of Mexico ’68.”

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29. See Christopher Harris, “Remembering 1968 in Mexico: Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco as Documentary Narrative,” Bulletin of Latin-American Research 24, no. 4 (2005): 481–95; Beth E. Jörgensen, “Framing Questions: The Role of the Editor in Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco,” Latin-American Perspectives 18, no. 3 (1991): 80–90. 30. Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco, 96. 31. Ibid., 319. 32. Ibid., 87. 33. See Ramón Ramírez, El movimiento estudiantil de México, julio– diciembre de 1968. 2 vols. (Mexico City: Era, 1969). See also Justo Igor de León Loyola, La noche de Santo Tomás (Mexico City: Ediciones de Cultura Popular, 1988). 34. Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco, 73. 35. See Jaime García Reyes, Fernándo Hernández Zárate, and David Vega, “Las batallas en el Politécino,” in Pensar el 68, 81–90. 36. Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco, 319. 37. Ibid., 199. 38. See Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 39. Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco, 318. 40. Reproduced in Rosario Castellanos, Poesía no eres tú: Obra poética, 1948–1971 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1972), 297–98. 41. Francisco Sánchez, “Introducción,” in Xavier Robles and Guadalupe Ortega, Rojo amanecer: Bengalas en el cielo (Mexico City: El Milagro, 1995), 16. 42. The film grossed 2.8 million pesos and won eleven Ariel awards, the industry’s highest honor: “Rojo amanecer,” Dicine 39 (May 1991): 5. 43. Olga Rodríguez Cruz, El 68 en el cine mexicano (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2000). 44. Mantecón, ed., Memorial del 68, 144. 45. David Huerta, interviewed in Alvaro Vásquez Mantecón, ed., Memorial del 68 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007), 155. 46. Humberto Mussachio, interviewed ibid., 144. 47. Roberto Escudo, interviewed ibid. 48. Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco, 254. 49. Reproduced in Alberto Ruy Sánchez, “Cine mexicano: Producción social de una estética,” Historia y Sociedad 18 (1978): 83. 50. Fons directed the soap opera La casa al final de la calle (1988) for Televisa, with Héctor Bonilla in the lead; and with Felipe Cazals he directed El qué sabe, sabe (1980), a game show. Popular entertainment was more prevalent, but nevertheless more self-consciously experimental or critical efforts were produced as well, especially by Cazals (Canoa, Los poquianchis, El apando). Most were careful not to indict the state directly, however.

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Notes to Pages 219–227

51. See David William Foster, Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 46; Andrea Noble, “Sexuality and Space in Jorge Fons’ El callejón de los milagros,” Framework 44, no. 1 (2003): 22–35. 52. The narrative structure of pornography is “on time,” whereas horror is “too soon”: Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13. 53. Rafael Medina de la Serna, “Rojo amanecer,” Dicine 37 (November 1990): 21. See also Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “Mexican Melodramas of Patriarchy: Specificity of a Transcultural Form,” in Framing Latin-American Cinema: Critical Perspectives, ed. Ann Marie Stock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 186–234. 54. Ana M. López, “Tears and Desire: Women and Melodrama in the ‘Old’ Mexican Cinema,” in Latin-American Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Ana del Sarto, Alicia Ríos, and Abril Trigo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 441– 58. 55. On the performance of cultural memory, see Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Culture Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: CircumAtlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 56. Salvador Elizondo, “Entre Nuevo Cine y Rojo amanecer,” El Nacional (24 October 1991), reprinted in Elizondo, Estanquillo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 13–16. 57. The reports were published by the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts) and can be viewed at http://prensagieiayotzi.wix.com/giei-ayotzinapa. (Accessed May 3, 2016.) 58. Out of Control: Torture and Other Ill-Treatment in Mexico (London: Amnesty International, 2014). 59. Paco Ignacio Taibo II, ’68, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 122. Earlier versions of ’68 were published in Mexico and Cuba as Fantasmas nuestros de cada día (Our Everyday Ghosts). 60. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 2006), 17.

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Index

Academia de San Carlos, 159, 160, 161, 165, 171; history as politicized space, 172; state surveillance of, 167 “Action Office” (Miller), 79 advertising, 37, 87, 113–14, 133, 169 Agamben, Giorgio, 236n25 AGN [Archivo General de la Nacíón] (national archive), 20, 26, 37, 40; directorship of, 239n58; restricted access to files in, 44 Aguilar Mora, Jorge, 1, 4, 18 Agustín, José, 152 AISA (Administradora Inmobilaria, S.A.), 207–8 Albañiles, Los [The Bricklayers] (film, 1976, Fons), 219 Alemán, Miguel, 95 Alemán Valdés, Miguel, 105, 115, 127, 250n16, 263n42 Allende, Salvador, 229n1 Alliance for Progress, 205 Almanza, Héctor Raúl, 204 Alma pura, Una [A Pure Soul] (film, 1965, Ibáñez), 188 Alvarez, Rodolfo, 236n9 Alvarez Félix, Enrique, 157 Álvarez Garín, Raúl, 30, 39, 207, 236n13 Anxious Object, The (Rosenberg, 1964), 91–92 Apando, El (Revueltas, 1969), 19, 26, 33–36, 220

Aquino, Arnulfo, 160, 168, 171, 172, 175, 262n32 Arau, Ademar, 214 architecture, 25, 54–56, 71, 74, 95; architectural photography, 202; artist–architect collaborations, 82–83; consumable image of Mexico and, 133; “emotional architecture,” 93; modernist, 18, 56, 198; PanAmerican Congress of Architects, 75; penal, 26; “routine violence” and, 17; sculpture fused with, 93; urban planning and, 74, 85 Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, L’ (architecture journal), 93 Argentina, 38, 46 Arias Marueta, Gustavo, 95 Arquitectura/México (architecture journal), 58, 60, 89, 141, 197; advertising in, 198; arts supplement to, 93; issue dedicated to NonoalcoTlatlolco, 206, 207; Le Corbusier’s vision in, 202 Arrevillaga, Víctor, 254n67 art, 3, 19, 25, 95; happenings, 21, 72, 173; installation art, 94; mail art, 130; Nueva Presencia (New Image), 118; participatory, 95; printmaking, 159–61, 162, 163–64, 173, 175. See also kinetic art/environments Arte Otro, 175 Artigas, Francisco, 114

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Arts of the Environment (Kepes, 1972), 88, 247n53 Asamblea de Escritores y Artistas (Writers and Artists Assembly), 9 Aseguradora Mexicana, 205 Ateneo de la Juventud, 53 Audencia Nacional (Spain), 42 Aulenti, Gae, 90 Aupart, Ramón, 184 Ayala Blanco, Jorge, 183, 188 Ayotzinapa 43, disappearance of, 224–25 Azuela, Mariano, 60 Balbuena, Bernardo de, 52 Barragán, Luis, 93, 114, 248n64 Barreda, Gabino, 27, 241n10 Barreda Moreno, Luis de la, 40 Barros Sierra, Javier, 101, 227 Baschet, François and Bernard, 94 Basilio, Enriqueta, 180 Baskin, Leonard, 173 Battle of Algiers, The (film, 1966, Pontecorvo), 180 Bauhaus, 142 Bautista, Fulgencio, 229n1 Bazin, André, 183 Becerril, Francisco, 160, 172 bedroom communities, 93, 156 Belkin, Arnold, 118, 253n58 Benjamin, Walter, 49, 206 Bentham, Jeremy, 27 Berni, Antonio, 111, 252n34 Bichir, Bruno, 214 Bichir, Demián, 214 biopolitics, 7, 16, 44, 230n12, 236n25; bodies as carriers of knowledge, 35; hospitality metaphor and, 106; human disposability and, 58; modernist architecture and, 203–4; penitentiary and, 34; PRI sovereignty and, 28; “vortex of integration” and, 68 Black Palace. See Palacio de Lecumberri Bloc, André, 93 BNHUOP [Banco Nacional Hipotecario Urbano y de Obras Públicas]

(National Urban Mortgage and Public Works Bank), 55, 56, 59, 205, 207 Bonilla, Héctor, 214 Bracho, Julio, 181 Buñuel, Luis, 240n7 Cabrujas, Ignacio, 14–15 Caifanes, Los [The Outsiders] (film, 1967, Ibáñez), 22, 138, 155, 157, 178, 182–83; episodic structure of, 264n48; middle-class audiences and, 188–89; still from, 188 Calderón, Felipe, 41 Callejón de los milagros, El [Midaq Alley] (film, 1994, Fons), 219 Calli (architecture journal), 73 Camino Real Hotel (Legoretta, 1968), 89, 98, 114, 247n55, 252n46 Campa, Valentín, 66, 150, 171 Campos Lemus, Sócrates, 30, 147, 236n11, 259n35 Campuzano, Jorge, 57 Canaday, John, 81, 85, 96, 246n38 Candela, Félix, 76, 77, 121 Candelaria de los Patos (1952, Almanza), 204 Candilis, Georges, 86 Capedavila, Francisco Moreno, 172, 173 capitalism, 16, 49, 64; hospitality metaphor and, 106; incompleteness of the individual under, 119; individualism and, 120; modernity and, 116; modernization and, 105, 180, 183, 206, 225; properties of capitalist citizenship, 27; revolutionary ideals in coexistence with, 116; urbanization and, 2, 5, 103, 135, 205 Cárdenas, Daniel Librado Luna, 173 Carey, Elaine, 13 Carlos, John, 6 Carranza, Venustiano, 117 Carrasco, Lorenzo, 110, 112, 115 Carrillo, Lilia, 95 Carrillo Prieto, Ignacio, 39–41, 45

Index cartoons, political, 169, 171, 261n20 Casino de la Selva, 106, 109 Castagnino, Juan Carlos, 111, 252n34 Castañeda, Jorge, 38 Castañeda, Luis M., 244n7 Castañeda Tamborrel, Enrique, 76 Castanedo, Rafael, 178 Castellanos, Rosario, 209, 213 Castillo, Heberto, 33, 102, 147, 158 Castro, Fidel, 8, 229n1 Castro, Rolando de, 184 Cazals, Felipe, 178, 267n50 censorship, 12, 26, 139, 164, 225, 257n18; of cinema, 181, 218; direct and indirect, 169; in mainstream press, 10, 168; self-censorship, 6 Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, 13 Centro Residencial Morelos, 120 Centro Urbano Presidente Alemán, 198 Certeau, Michel de, 229n4 Chacón, Alfredo Cardona, 95 Chicanos (Mexican Americans), 6, 171 Children of Sanchez (Lewis, 1964), 204 Chile, 42, 46 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 11, 137, 231n22, 265n1 CIAM [Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne] (International Congress of Modern Architecture), 75, 86, 199 Cinema Novo, 181 cinetismo, 94, 248n68 Cinetismo: Esculturas electrónicas en situaciones ambientales [Kineticism: Systems Sculture in Environmental Situations] (MUCA exhibition, 1968), 92–93, 94 citizenship, 2, 21, 132, 139, 146; conditional hospitality and, 97; cultural, 43, 153, 226; informal modes of, 4; political, 43; properties of capitalist citizenship, 27; rhetoric and reality of, 134

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City by Night (Kepes, Stevens, McNulty), 247n58 Ciudad Satélite (Satellite City), 93, 135, 142, 156, 258n26 Ciudad Universitaria [CU] (1952, Pani and Moral), 75, 101, 119, 124, 138, 197; aerial view of, 143; army occupation of, 153, 184; construction of, 139; design and reception of, 140; location away from “corrupting” city core, 160; Nonoalco-Tlatelolco as base of operation for, 207; production of modern labor force and, 135; rector’s tower, 118, 122; ‘68 Movement and, 145; student strike (1966) at, 172; urban mobility theories and, 142–43 civil society, 13, 15, 133, 153, 227; expansion of, 158; suffocation of, 197, 198; weakness of, 134 class, 2, 155 CNDH [Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos] (National Human Rights Commission), 38, 42 CNED [Centro Nacional de Estudiantes Democráticos] (National Center for Democratic Students), 231n14 CNH [Consejo Nacional de Huelga] (National Strike Council), 9, 10, 144–45, 149, 159, 190, 231n20; army occupation of campuses and, 153; dissolution of, 193; film communicados and, 180; González de Alba and, 30; graphic images and, 164; “Invitation to the People of Mexico” flyer, 103; march organized by, 146–48; private meetings after massacre, 216; propaganda brigades and, 165; televisual aesthetic and, 171; Tlatelolco Massacre and, 192 CNOP [Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares] (National Confederation of Popular Organizations), 256n1 Coalición de Profesores de Enseñanza Media y Superior Pro-Libertades Democráticas, 9

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COJO [Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada] (Organizing Committee of the XIX Olympic Games), 71, 72, 79–80, 81; beautification efforts, 70; cinema department, 178, 180; hospitality metaphor and, 104; hotels and, 98, 249n1; image of Mexico City’s modernity and, 73; integrateddesign approach of, 90; international press and, 85; kinetic environments of, 74, 76, 89, 96, 145; media saturation techniques of, 159, 167, 168; Milan Triennial display, 89–92; Mobile TV Units, 83–84; Olympic Center, 77, 78, 89, 96, 245n21; Palacio de Deportes (Sports Palace), 76–77, 245n18; urbanization plans and, 244n7; on youth demographic, 136–37 Cold War, 11, 137, 249n71 Comité 68 por Libertades Democráticas (‘68 Committee for Democratic Liberty), 39 Comité Eureka, 39 communism, 11, 244n2, 258n32 Communist Party, Mexican, 8, 231n14, 232n26; PRI liberalizations and, 232n29; Revueltas and, 33, 236n24 Comte, Auguste, 27, 241n10 Conquest, Spanish, 49, 50 Constitution, Mexican, 34, 165, 237n36; first liberal Constitution (1857), 124; gorilla image and, 161, 162, 168; postrevolutionary (1917), 36, 54 Construcción Mexicana (architecture journal), 58 consumerism/consumption, 43, 155, 263n39 Contreras, Carlos, 81 Corkidi, Rafael, 178, 182 Coronelazo, El [The Great Colonel] (Siqueiros, 1945), 126–27 Corpus Christi Massacre (1971), 38, 39, 40 Cortazár, Julio, 183

Cosío Villegas, Daniel, 127 Costa, Lucio, 198 Creel Miranda, Santiago, 36, 38 “Crisis de México, La” (Cosío Villegas, 1947), 127 Cuba, 8, 146, 229n1 Cuban Revolution, 6, 119, 124, 164, 171, 257n12 CUEC [Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos] (University Center for Cinematographic Studies), 176–78, 183, 184, 218 Cueto, Germán, 248n68 Cueto, Luis, 8, 9, 164, 168 Cuevas, José Luis (architect), 81, 265n3 Cuevas, José Luis (artist), 94, 95–96, 118, 130, 172, 249n71 Cultura en México, La (newspaper), 6, 9, 35, 264n45 cybernetics, 20, 71, 74, 76, 86, 89 Czechoslovakia, 6 De Carlo, Giancarlo, 90, 91, 92 Deleuze, Gilles, 233n35 democracy, 2, 4, 13, 36, 84, 128; apertura democrática (democratic opening), 12; degraded, 25, 34, 149, 176; democratic transition, 225; democratization as unfinished business, 7; in everyday practice, 167; Fox administration and, 37; outward appearance of, 6; participatory, 157, 227; postrevolutionary pact and, 134 democratization, 33, 37, 72, 156, 196; neoliberal, 46; uneven, 225 Denís, Roberto, 95 Derrida, Jacques, 15–16, 99, 105, 106, 214, 233n39 Días de guardar (Monsiváis, 1970), 11 Días y los años, Los (González de Alba, 1971), 11, 19, 26, 34, 46, 152; on continuity of prison and everyday social relations, 32; historical significance of ‘68 Movement and, 29–30; on the Tlatelolco Massacre, 32–33

Index Díaz, Porfirio, 19, 53, 117 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 53 Díaz Infante, Juan José, 245n22 Díaz Morales, José, 138 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 11, 30, 45, 58, 71, 251n25, 264n46; army occupation of campuses and, 190; CNH-organized march and, 147; gorilla image and, 161, 162, 168; middle classes and, 135; Operation Galeana and, 191; “outstretched hand” imagery of, 101–3, 120, 127, 131, 148, 250n6; preview tour of Sports Palace, 77; tourism and, 105; youth criticized by, 137 dirty war (1970s and ‘80s), 7, 222, 224 disappearances, 7, 36, 40, 224–25 Draper, Susanna, 44 dwelling, 5, 14–19, 195, 196, 234n53; “revenge of dust” and, 52, 65; spatial imagination and, 208 Echeverría, Luis, 37, 40, 41, 129–30, 131; alleged assassination plot against, 259n35; “democratic aperture” of, 12, 217, 218; gorilla image and, 168; Operation Galeana and, 191; on Siqueiros’s The March of Humanity, 130, 255n79 ecology, 20, 71, 87, 122 education, 6, 10–11, 12, 136 Efímero pánico (Ephemeral Panic) happenings, 173 Eisenstein, Sergei, 111, 112 Ejercicio plástico [Three-Dimensional Exercise] (Siqueiros, 1933), 111 Elizondo, Salvador, 223 En el balcón vacío [On the Empty Balcony] (film, 1962, García Ascot), 183 Escobedo, Acevedo, 142 Escobedo, Helen, 94 Escudo, Roberto, 216 Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National School of Plastic Arts). See Academia de San Carlos La Esmeralda, 159, 161, 165, 172

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Espacios [Spaces] (art and architecture journal), 110, 111, 112 ethnicity, 2, 133 Exigimos deslinde de responsabilidades (Becceril), 161 Expo 67 (Montreal), 85 Exposición Solar (Palacio de Bellas Artes exhibition, 1968), 173, 249n73 EZLN [Ejército Zapatista Liberación Nacional] (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), 232n29 Fallaci, Oriana, 184, 185 Fando y Lis (film, 1968, Jodorowsky), 139 Fegán, Jorge, 214 Felguérez, Manuel, 95 feminism, 13, 18 FEMOSPP [Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado] (Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past), 39–40, 45, 46; compromised legitimacy of, 41; declassified documents and, 44; legal strategy of, 40; White Book of, 41, 238n47 Fernández, Emilio, 61 Fernández de Cevallo, Diego, 38 Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México (national railroad company), 63 Figueroa, Gabriel, 51, 61 film (cinema), 3, 7, 19, 156; cineclubs, 10, 22, 173, 177, 182, 226; CUEC brigades and communicados, 176– 81; as easily reproduced and circulated medium, 110; French New Wave, 181; Golden Age of Mexican cinema, 61, 181; Mexican state ties to, 181, 263n42; Neorealist, 173, 180, 181, 223; Super 8 filmmaking, 177, 263n33; Taller de Cine Octubre (October Cinema Workshop), 218– 19; youth melodramas, 138 FNET [Federación Nacional de Estudiantes Técnicos] (National Federation of Technical Students), 144, 211, 231n14

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Fons, Jorge, 12, 22, 182, 183, 208; career in popular TV entertainment, 267n50; collective memory and, 196; huis-clos aesthetic of, 215; leftist intelligentsia and, 218; NonoalcoTlatelolco as locus for truth seeking, 195. See also Rojo amanecer Fontana, Lucio, 94 Foucault, Michel, 28, 54, 230n12, 236n25 Fox, Vicente, 7, 13, 194, 237n37; break in longstanding power of PRI and, 36–37; image-management techniques of, 41; special prosecutor and, 38–39; Tlatelolco Massacre documents declassified by, 20, 36, 42; transitional justice and, 42, 46, 224; transparency reforms of, 69 Frías, Armando, 9 Friese, Heidrun, 190 Fuentes, Carlos, 20, 49, 51, 53, 55, 206; “fiction of totality” and, 243n49; Latin American literary boom and, 182–83; Tlatelolco as palimpsest and, 66 Fuller, Buckminster, 86 Galguera, Hilario, 265n3 Galván, Malecio, 175 Gamboa, Fernando, 244n13 Gámiz García, Arturo, 146 García, Héctor, 107, 127, 150, 209, 261n20 García, Sergio, 186 García, Villagrán, 253n52 García Ascot, Jomi (José Miguel), 182, 183, 264n49 García Barragán, Gen. Marcelino, 8, 147, 212, 259n36 García Canclini, Néstor, 81, 133, 153 García Marquez, Gabriel, 183 García Ramos, Domingo, 265n3 García Reyes, Jaime, 146, 211 Garro, Elena, 259n35 Gas, Gelsen, 94 Gavadón, Roberto, 63, 243n41 gender, 2, 16, 133, 155

genocide, 40, 41, 42, 238n44 Gestalt psychology, 20, 71, 87 Giedion, Siegfried, 94 Gironella, Alberto, 172 globalization, 46 Godard, Jean-Luc, 173 Goeritz, Mathias, 70, 74, 88, 94, 244n9, 248nn68–70; Cinetismo exhibition and, 92–93; collaborations with architects, 82; in Los Hartos (The Fed-Ups) exhibition, 262n27 Gómez Mayorga, Mauricio, 76, 200, 265n10 González Casanova, Manuel, 181, 182 González Casanova, Pablo, 149 González de Alba, Luis, 11, 12, 14, 35, 47, 233n34; on CNH meetings, 148; denunciation of the state for Tlatelolco Massacre, 19; gay-rights discourse and, 13; Mexican history and, 20; as prisoner at Lecumberri, 26; on the propaganda brigades, 165; released from Lecumberri, 37; on street demonstrations, 150, 152; Tlatelolco Massacre and, 32–33, 218. See also Días y los años, Los González Hernández, Servando, 193 González Mello, Flavio, 13 González Rul, Francisco, 56–57 Gordon, Avery, 67 granaderos (riot police), 2, 8, 73, 163, 231n13; CNH meetings as protection from, 30; demand for elimination of, 9, 145; gorilla graphic image of, 160, 161, 162, 163, 260n7 Grandeza Mexicana (Mexican Greatness), 168, 260–61n15 Gran obstáculo, El [The Great Obstacle] (Méndez, 1936), 126 Grito, El (documentary film, 1969), 22, 158, 176, 184–88, 209 Gropius, Walter, 142 Grove, Richard, 75 Grupo Marco, 175 Grupo Mira, 175, 262n32 Grupo Nuevo Cine, 182–83, 187, 218, 219

Index Los Grupos, 175, 262n30 Grupo Suma, 175 Guattari, Félix, 233n35 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 7, 149, 150, 222, 259n37; as global political icon, 171; on the “New Man and Woman,” 119 Guevara Niebla, Gilberto, 30, 236n13 Guha, Ranajit, 258n31 Gutiérrez Barrios, Fernando, 39 Gutiérrez Paredes, Manuel, 193 Harvey, David, 229n4 Heartfield, John, 169 Herrey, Erna, 258n27 Herrey, Hermann, 142, 199, 258n27 Herscher, Andrew, 17 Hersúa (Manuel Suárez Hernández), 175, 176 Hidalgo, Rebeca, 175 Historia de un documento (film, 1971, Menéndez and Alvarez), 236n9 Holston, James, 56 Hombre frente al infinito [Man Facing the Infinite] (Tamayo, 1967), 118 homeostasis, 86, 104 horror genre, 12, 18, 219, 268n2 hospitality, 9, 14–19, 35, 97; JudeoChristian origins of, 103, 206; sovereign power and, 28; unconditional, 15, 99, 105, 188, 214, 228 hospitality, conditional, 23, 99, 116, 131, 136, 161, 215; biopolitics and, 16, 208; citizenship and, 97; controlled conviviality and, 22; corporatist political system and, 105; infiltration of campuses and, 139; intelligentsia and, 52; NonoalcoTlatelolco residents tied to, 195; “outstretched hand” imagery and, 120, 127; parody of, 103 Hotel de México (World Trade Center Mexico [WTC]), 1, 97, 121; apparent magnanimity of the state, 21; conditional hospitality and, 131; construction of, 114; corpus

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mysticum (“mystical body”) and, 114–17; incomplete monumentality of, 22–23; Mexican state compared to, 99; Olympic Games and, 7, 10, 98, 119, 128; Siqueiros sketch for, 112–13, 113; Siqueiros–Suárez collaboration as cosmic communion, 116–20; tourism and, 105 Hotel María Isabel (Villagrán García and Sordo Madaleno, 1962), 98 Hotel Prado (1946, Pani), 203 Hotel Reforma (1936, Pani), 116, 203 Huerta, David, 215–16 Huerta, Victoriano, 117 Huis clos [No Exit] (Sartre, 1943), 223 human rights, 20, 36, 69, 173; culture and, 47; international discourse of, 37, 41–42; memory and, 214 Humboldt, Alexander von, 25 Ibáñez, Juan, 22, 138, 178, 182, 188 Ibarra de Piedra, Rosario, 39 Ibarrola de Cabeza, Catalina, 212–13 ICA [Ingenieros Civiles Asociados] (Associated Civil Engineers), 198 Icaza, Francisco, 95, 118, 253n58 IFAI [Instituto Federal de Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos] (Federal Institute for Access of Information and Data Protection), 69 INAH [Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia] (National Institute of Anthropology and History), 58 indigenous communities/people, 13, 50, 172, 202, 232n29, 233n32, 250n17 industrialization, 5, 64, 116, 140, 156, 199 infrastructure, 7, 82–83, 105, 115, 132; ethical, 184; Nonoalco-Tlatelolco and, 199; PRI’s developmentalist agenda and, 197; reorganized for Olympic Games, 70, 81, 243n1; transport and communications, 20, 105, 143–44, 200

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INJM [Instituto Nacional de la Juventud Mexicana] (National Institute for Mexican Youth), 137 Instituto Nacional de Vivienda (National Housing Institute), 59, 60 insurgency, 29, 45, 144, 150, 258n31 integración plástica (plastic integration), 82, 93, 112, 120, 245n30, 252n42 intelligentsia, 37, 58, 65, 179, 259n35; Echeverría’s “democratic opening” and, 12, 217; leftist, 3, 9, 11, 218; PRI’s ideology questioned by, 100; state’s conditional hospitality and, 52 Inter-American Commission of American States, 224 Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 42 Inter-American Development Bank, 205 International Meeting of Sculptors, 93 IOC (International Olympic Committee), 71, 79, 98 IPN (Instituto Politécnico Nacional), 8, 9, 135, 231n15; army occupation of, 153, 183, 190, 211–12; cineclub, 185; Lecumberri as offshoot of, 31; middleclass students at, 10; modernization plans and, 139–40; NonoalcoTlatelolco as base of operation for, 207; showplace campuses of, 21; ‘68 Movement and, 145; UNAM links with, 148; Vocacional 7 technical school, 211; Zacatenco campus, 139, 140, 141, 146, 197, 225 Isaac, Alberto, 178, 180 Isabel, Margarita, 210 Jardines del Pedregal, 114, 156 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 19, 139, 173 José Trigo (Paso, 1966), 66–67 Joskowicz, Alfredo, 177–78, 184 justice, transitional, 20, 37, 42, 238n52; as failed process, 45, 46; in global South, 43; national borders and, 41; reversals and contradictions in, 38

Juventud desenfrenada [Unbridled Youth] (film, 1956, Díaz Morales), 138 Juventud rebelde [Rebel Youth] (film, 1961, Soler), 138 Kant, Immanuel, 233n39 Kennedy, John F., 205 Kepes, György, 75–76, 88, 246n42, 248n69; Gestalt psychology and, 90; “image of the city,” 89; at MIT, 86–87 KGB (Soviet intelligence), 11, 137 kinetic art/environments, 20, 72, 74, 145; energized by viewers, 94, 95; global networks and, 96–97 Klein, William, 90 Kracauer, Siegfried, 105–6 Krauss, Rosalind, 247n48 Kuchar, George, 177 Laberinto de la soledad, La [The Labyrinth of Solitude] (Paz), 49 labor movements, 8, 20, 97, 101, 149, 190–91 Language of Vision (Kepes), 87, 90 Larrauri, Iker, 78 La Trobe, Charles Joseph, 25 Lázato, Enrique, 111, 252n34 Lazo, Carlos, 114, 115 LEAR [Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios] (League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers), 124, 172, 173 Lebrun, Rico, 173 Le Corbusier, 55, 202, 241n19 Lecumberri. See Palacio de Lecumberri [Black Palace] Leduc, Paul, 178 LeFebvre, Henri, 229n4 Legarreta, Juan, 54 Legoretta, Ricardo, 89, 98, 203, 247n55 Le Parc, Julio, 94, 95 Levinas, Emmanuel, 233n39 Levine, Les, 94 Lewis, Oscar, 204 liberation theology, 146, 230n9

Index Llano en llamas [The Burning Plain] (Rulfo, 1953), 62–63, 243n42 Llano Macedo, Julia Isabel de, 155 Long Sixties, 1–2, 45, 226, 229n1 López Aretche, Leobardo, 184 López Mateos, Adolfo, 55, 71, 73, 107, 258n26, 264n46 López Portillo, Margarita, 255n76 Lynch, Kevin, 87, 89 Macedo de la Concha, Rafael, 36, 38, 39 Macedo y Macedo, Miguel, 27 Madero, Francisco, 19 Madrazo, Carlos, 259n35 Madrid, Fabrizio Mejía, 23 Madrid, Miguel de la, 12 Mailer, Norman, 107 Maoists, 11, 137 Mao Tse-tung, 146 March of Humanity (Siqueiros, 1971), 21, 100–101, 120, 123, 188; commission for, 106; critical responses to, 130, 255n80; hand motif in, 124, 125, 126–28; iconography of, 122–23, 124; as synthesis of painting and sculpture, 112, 120 Marcuse, Herbert, 230n9 Martínez, Jesús, 169, 175, 261n16, 262n32 Martínez de Hoyos, Homero, 265n3 Marx, Karl, 230n9, 240n4, 251n30 Marxism, 165 mass media, 6, 19, 76, 157, 193, 226, 227 Matiz, Leo, 252n37, 254n67 Mbembe, Achille, 58 McLaren, Norman, 173 McLuhan, Marshall, 86 media fields, 22, 158, 260n3 mediation, 6, 138, 171; as catalyst, 153; mobilization of, 176–89; phenomenological, 47; selfdetermination and, 157 Medina de la Serna, Rafael, 220 Medina Mora, Eduardo, 36

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Meléndez Reyna, Américo, 39 Melo, Juan Vicente, 92 melodrama, 195–96, 213, 217–18, 221, 222; as “body genre,” 219–20; popularity in Mexico, 220 Memorial de Tlatelolco (Castellanos), 209, 213 memory, collective, 4, 20, 218; critical analysis of, 44; fragmented status of, 17–18; Lecumberri prisoners and, 25–26 Méndez, Leopoldo, 126, 245n21 Mendiolea, Raúl, 9 Mendoza, María Luisa, 212 Menéndez, Óscar, 185, 236n9 Mérida, Carlos, 82 Messeguer, Benito, 94–95 Mexiac, Alfredo, 172, 261n23 Mexican Workers Party, 232n29 Mexica (Aztecs), 3, 20, 49, 50, 55, 58 Mexican Miracle, 2, 10, 20, 92, 139, 229n2; citizenship and, 21; consumerism and, 15; disconnect between aspirations and reality of, 100; doubts about, 8; failure of, 255n75; magical thinking of, 217; modern architecture of, 197; Nonoalco-Tlatelolco as embodiment of, 212; Olympic Games and, 71, 180; routine violence of, 195; tenuous gains of, 150; uneven modernization of, 99, 132, 176; waning of, 134 Mexican Revolution (1910–20), 3, 9, 25, 44, 50, 100; fiftieth anniversary (1960), 254n70; humanistic view of, 53; institutionalization of, 181; legacy of, 72, 127; in literature, 67–68; progressive ideals of, 5, 108, 116, 123; railroads’ role in nation building and, 62, 64; rural people displaced by, 48; violence of, 20 Mexican state, 4, 5, 67; assault on the Left, 8, 26; authoritarianism of, 64, 148, 225; biopolitical governance of, 68, 203–4; challenges to legitimacy of, 46; conditional hospitality of, 136;

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Mexican state (continued) corpus mysticum (“mystical body”) of, 100, 105, 114–16, 206; criminality of, 34; cultural-nationalism project of, 82, 136, 168, 218; delegitimization of ‘68 Movement by, 11; drug cartels and, 225; hotel/hospitality metaphor and, 9, 15, 21, 99–100, 105; human rights violations of, 37; modernization and, 2; monopoly on national culture, 6, 10; “operation amnesia” of, 11; responsibility for Tlatelolco Massacre, 3, 29, 216; transnational drug trade and, 7. See also PRI [Partido Revolucionario Institucional] México, ciudad de los setentas (COJO short film), 263n40 Mexico 68 (Olympic brand), 73, 79; art/design/technology nexus of, 74–75; global broadcast of, 71; information booth elevations, 80; Milan Triennial logo display, 89–92, 91; Op Art inspiration of, 70, 72, 77; slogans of, 88. See also Olympic Games (Mexico City, summer 1968) Mexico City, 7, 17, 98; automobile traffic, 113, 133; beautification of, 55, 70, 83; capitalist urbanization in, 59; as City of Palaces, 25, 47; Ciudadela District, 8, 231n13; growth of, 81, 197; high-rise buildings, 77; Olympic Games and image of modernity, 73; socioeconomic geography of, 30; subway system, 7, 69, 246n32, 251n25; violence in, 4; Zona Rosa, 95, 138, 152, 255n83. See also vecindades; Zócalo Meyer, Hannes, 11, 54 Michel, Manuel, 187 middle classes, 12, 61, 95, 148, 256n1; cinema audiences, 155, 157, 181–82, 183, 189; consumption and, 43, 255n83; contraction of, 217; excluded from postrevolutionary pact, 134; domestic spaces, 206;

Mexican Miracle and, 15, 139, 229n2; Nonoalco-Tlatelolco residents, 190, 195; participants in ‘68 Movement, 163, 165; subjectivity of, 183, 221; youth crisis and, 138 Mijares, Rafael, 57, 196, 245n18 Milan Triennial, Fourteenth (1968), 89–92 military, Mexican, 30, 40, 237n38; exemption from civil investigation, 38, 40; government documents and, 36; secret disposal of bodies by, 40; Tlatelolco Massacre and, 3, 147, 191, 193; university campuses occupied by, 153, 183, 184, 190, 211–12 Miller, Arthur, 33 Miller, Hermann, 79 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 76, 86–87, 246n41 modernism, 75, 85, 202, 253n52; reevaluation of, 89, 226; “second modernism,” 76, 96; transition to postmodernism, 96 modernization, 2, 8, 61, 103, 139; authoritarian state and, 150, 225; contradictions of, 167; displacements caused by, 63; domestic spaces and, 206; middle classes and, 134, 183; railroad network and, 50; social displacement and, 118; unevenness of, 81, 99, 115; young people as satellites of, 155 “Modernization That Delays, A” (García Canclini, 1994), 133 Moncada, Luis Mario, 13 Monsiváis, Carlos, 11, 12, 13, 61, 181– 82, 218 Montenegro, Roberto, 110 Moral, Enrique del, 54, 75, 140 Moreiras, Alberto, 46 Morse, Richard, 99 Moya Palencia, Mario, 40 multifamiliares (apartment complexes), 142, 198, 200, 202, 204 Mural Efímero (Ephemeral Mural), 94–95

Index mural paintings, 82, 94–96, 249n73; mass audience as aspiration of, 110; mobility of spectator and, 112; as revolutionary mass medium, 101, 108–9; tourism and, 109. See also March of Humanity (Siqueiros, 1971) Murdoch, Peter, 79, 121 MURO [Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación] (University Movement for Renovated Orientation), 144, 167, 211, 231n14, 259n37 Muros de agua, Los (Revueltas, 1941), 236n24 Museo de Arte Moderno, 77 Museo Experimental El Eco, 93 Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology), 57, 77, 82, 146 Museo Nacional de Historia, 107 Mussachio, Humberto, 216 My Prison Paintings (Siqueiros), 251n22 NAFTA (North American Trade Agreement), 1, 12, 23, 42 Nazar Haro, Miguel, 40 Nelson, George, 75–76, 79, 246n40 neo-avant-garde, 94 neohumanism, 117–19, 123, 253n55 neoliberalism, 23, 43, 51, 207 Neruda, Pablo, 107 Nervi, Pier Luigi, 76, 245n16 New Left, 232n26 New Monumentality, 94 newspapers, 11, 55, 101, 150, 157, 182; self-censorship of, 6; on Tlatelolco Massacre, 191 New York World’s Fair (1964–65), 85, 246n40 NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), 41, 43 Nizzoli, Marcello, 89 Noche de Tlatelolco, La (Poniatowska, 1971), 12, 22, 31, 209, 216, 233n34; as archive of testimonies, 194, 209–13

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No hay más ruta que la nuestra [There Is No Road but Ours] (Siqueiros, 1945), 108 Nonoalco Bridge, 63, 206; in La région más transparente, 67, 68; as threshold between life and death, 66; in Víctimas del pecado, 61, 62 Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex (Pani, 1964), 3, 7, 12, 16, 49, 200; Building Type A plan, 203; bureaucratic defamiliarization and, 199; Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, 13; Certificates of RealEstate Participation and, 206, 207, 208; construction of, 60, 63; history and, 20, 196–97; hospitality metaphor and, 22, 100; inauguration (1964), 67; luxury-apartment interior, 216; as mature expression of modern architecture, 54; organization of everyday life in, 201–2; property regime at, 205–6; residents in sympathy with students, 190; spaces remade by residents, 16–17; in spatial imagination of Mexico City residents, 194–95; Tlatelolco Massacre and, 12, 17; urban road network and, 156; vecindades and, 204, 208 nota roja (“red note”) journalism, 61 Nuestra imágen actual [Our Present Image] (Siqueiros, 1947), 126, 127 Nueva burguesía (Azuela), 60 Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, 115 Nuevo Cine (film journal), 182, 183, 223 Nuevos Grabadores, 175, 262n26 OAS (Organization of American States), 119, 124 Obregón Santacilia, Carlos, 203, 253n52 O’Gorman, Juan, 54 Olimpia ‘68 (González Mello), 13 Olimpiada en México (documentary film, 1968, Isaac), 178

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Olivera de Vázquez, Mercedes, 210–11 Olympic Games (Mexico City, summer 1968), 2, 16, 21, 22, 145; Black Power salute at, 6; Cultural Olympiad, 68, 69, 92, 173, 249n73; dove-of-peace logo, 169, 170; Estadio Azteca, 245n18; hospitality metaphor and, 104; Hotel de México and, 7, 10, 98, 119, 128; image of modern, democratic Mexico and, 29, 190; limpiada (“clean-up”) of city and, 167–68, 169; neohumanism and, 117; opening ceremonies, 3, 186; preparations for, 20. See also COJO; Mexico 68 (Olympic brand) Olympic Games (Rome, 1960), 70, 76, 77 Olympic Games (Tokyo, 1964), 70, 79–80 La Onda writers, 19, 152 Op Art (Optical Art), 20, 70, 71, 72, 77, 90; Mexico 68 branding and, 78, 110; Olympic aesthetic and, 159; unstable visual dynamics and politics of, 95 Operation Galeana, 191, 221 Orozco, José Clemente, 82, 106 Ortega, Guadalupe, 217 Pacheco, José Emilio, 6 Palacio de Bellas Artes, 95, 173 Palacio de Deportes (Sports Palace), 76–77, 121, 245n18 Palacio de Lecumberri [Black Palace] (penitentiary), 19–20, 42, 113, 207, 235n2; aerial view of (1960), 28; collective memory of Tlatelolco Massacre and, 25–26; conversion into AGN (national archive), 20, 26, 37, 45, 47, 48; decommissioned, 37–38; González de Alba’s memoir of, 29–33, 46; hunger strike at, 29, 33, 236n9; invoked in Pérezvega woodblock prints, 173, 174; railroad strikers held at, 150; Revuelta’s novella about, 33–36; Siqueiros as prisoner at, 25, 106, 107, 108, 253n58, 254n64, 261n20; ‘68

Movement participants held in, 192; watchtowers of, 27–29, 44, 120 Palacio negro, El (Ripstein, 1977), 31 “Palinodia del polvo” [Recantation of the Dust] (Reyes, 1940), 53, 54, 127 PAN [Partido Acción Nacional] (National Action Party), 37, 38, 41, 42–43, 194 Pan-American Congress of Architects, 115 Pandey, Gyanendra, 16 Pani, Alberto, 54, 68, 116, 202, 253n52 Pani, Mario, 3, 22, 32, 49, 75, 210; ancient character of Tlatelolco neighborhood and, 56; Arquitectura/ México journal of, 93; career of, 202–3, 266n16; as champion of redevelopment, 142; Ciudad Satélite (Satellite City) and, 93; Ciudad Universitaria (CU) and, 140; modernization plans and, 200–201; multifamiliares and, 198, 200, 204– 5; plastic integration and, 82; PRI’s grand gestures and, 197; supervisory role of, 74; as teacher at UNAM, 113; urban displacement and, 135; urban rationalization theory of, 199, 208. See also Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex “panic” theater, 19 Panopticon (prison prototype), 27, 28 Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution). See PRI Paso, Fernando del, 20, 51, 66, 67, 206 “Paso del Norte” (Rulfo), 62–63 Paz, Octavio, 15, 49, 50–51, 52; critique of national anthropology museum, 58; neohumanism and, 117; on rupture with tradition, 255n82 Pedro Páramo (Rulfo, 1955), 61–62 penal code, federal, 9, 129, 238n45 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 14, 225 Pérez Rayón, Reinaldo, 140, 257n20 Pérezvega, Jorge, 159, 164, 260n9, 261n16, 262n32; influences cited by,

Index 173; ‘68 Movement woodblock prints, 173, 174 Peyri, Antonio, 76 Pfeuffer, Joachim, 90 photography, 63–65, 110, 178 photomontage, 169 Picasso, Pablo, 169 Pinochet, Augusto, 42 Plaza, La (Spota, 1971), 14 Plaza de las Tres Culturas, 3, 49, 58, 68, 168, 184; apartments surrounding, 33; CNH’s first meeting at, 211; fighting in, 190; military occupation of, 192, 193; Operation Galeana and massacre in, 191; redevelopment plan, 57; in Rojo amanecer, 216; vecindades and, 204 police brutality, 2, 8, 39, 231n13 Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, 98, 100, 112, 127; as challenge to conditional hospitality, 120; design of, 120, 121– 22; exterior view of, 121; monumentality of, 129; Universal Forum, 122, 124, 128 Poniatowska, Elena, 11–12, 14, 22, 194, 207, 233n34; collective memory and, 196; Nonoalco-Tlatelolco as locus for truth seeking, 195; as visitor to Lecumberri, 31, 107. See also Noche de Tlatelolco, La Pontecorvo, Gillo, 180 Pop Art, 246n40 ¿Por que? (magazine), 9, 102, 164, 220 pornography, 219, 220, 268n52 Posdata [The Other Mexico] (Paz), 49, 51 postcolonial studies, 16 postmodernism, 96 poststructuralism, 46 PRI [Partido Revolucionario Institucional] (Institutional Revolutionary Party), 2, 10, 14, 33, 124, 221; authoritarianism of, 30, 131, 161, 169; autonomous organizations’ challenge to, 144; back-channel negotiations favored by, 145; biopolitics of, 28; break in

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longstanding power of, 7, 13, 36–37; civic estrangement and, 199; Cold War and, 11, 257n12; communitarian rhetoric of, 154, 163, 181; conditional hospitality of, 97, 103, 115, 120, 131, 215; corporatist political system of, 9, 22, 30, 46, 105, 134–35, 215–16, 227; corpus mysticum (“mystical body”) of, 99, 102, 117, 132; criticized in literature, 19; cultural-nationalism project and, 116, 163, 172; doubts about legitimacy of, 8, 21, 34, 195; Fox and, 42–43; instinct of self-preservation, 4; liberalizations of, 38, 194, 232n29; mass media and, 177; Mexican Miracle and, 99; middle classes and, 15; military as corporate client of, 237n38; modernization agenda, 135, 180, 186, 197, 209; national heritage and, 58; negotiation with governed population, 132; official histories of, 52; Olympic Games and, 71, 84; presumed sovereignty of, 130, 149; as “philanthropic ogre,” 15; postwar name change of, 127; prisoners viewed by, 29; progressive ideals and, 5, 6; propaganda against ‘68 Movement, 167; relief-valve strategy of, 217; return to power (2012), 225; ‘68 Movement characterized by, 191; Tlatelolco Massacre and, 12, 49, 51; unions controlled by, 171, 183 Proceso Pentágono, 175 progress, 43, 51, 96, 123 propaganda brigades, 2, 146, 160, 167, 187; cinema brigades, 176–81; communication flows of the city and, 165; contemporary art scene and, 172–73; cultural-nationalism project criticized by, 168; disappearance of, 216; drawn from art and film schools, 158, 172; in El Grito (film), 185; heroes cited by, 171; political cartooning tradition and, 169; PRI rhetoric borrowed by,

312

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Index

propaganda brigades (continued) 153–54, 163; students and faculty in, 159; travels through Mexico City by bus, 165–66 public space, 32, 46, 133, 136; accessibility of, 133; expression of political will in, 4; graphics displayed in, 158; Nonoalco-Tlatelolco and, 201; participatory democracy and, 157; repatriation of, 143; street as, 138; urban culture and, 153 Pueblo a la Universidad, la Universidad al pueblo, El [From the People to the University, the University to the People] (Siqueiros, 1956), 118–19, 126 Pulsa art collective, 88 Quasar Kanh, 79 ¡Que Viva Mexico! (unfinished Eisenstein film), 111 Quezada, Abel, 104, 169 Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (Klein, 1966), 90 Quintanilla, Luis, 60 Rabel, Fanny, 95 radio, 139, 158 railroads, 50, 62, 63, 64–65, 65, 243n41; nation building and, 62, 64; railroad-worker encampments in literature, 66–67; strike by railroad workers, 66, 67, 150 Ramírez, Mari Carmen, 111 Ramírez Vázquez, Pedro, 57, 71, 73, 75, 78, 79; Estadio Azteca design, 245n18; Foreign Ministry headquarters, 196; hospitality and, 99; hotels and, 104; Mexican Pavilion at New York World’s Fair, 246n40; museum designs overseen by, 77; on Olympic Games, 98, 131, 136, 137; plastic integration and, 82; PRI’s grand gestures and, 197; supervisory role of, 74; UNAM mentors of, 81 Ramos, Samuel, 117 Regina: El 2 de octubre no se olvida [Regina: October 2 Cannot Be

Forgotten] (Velasco Piña, 1989), 13, 233n33 Región más transparente, La [Where the Air Is Clear] (Fuentes, 1958), 49, 53, 66, 67–68, 243n49 Renau, Josep, 111, 120 Respuesta, La [The Response] (second communicado), 178 Retrato de la burguesía [Portrait of the Bourgeoisie] (Siqueiros and Renau, 1939), 111–12 Revista Ferronales (railroad magazine), 63, 64, 243n43 Revueltas, José, 19, 20, 33, 47, 220; al nivel de la crujía (“at cellblock level”) mode of perception, 26, 33, 35–36; barbarism as theme for, 35, 237n30; on Lecumberri’s watchtower, 27–28; on Mobile TV Units, 84; on television, 84; as prisoner at Lecumberri, 26; relationship with the Left, 33, 236n24 Reyes, Alfonso, 52–54, 65, 117, 127 Richard, Nelly, 46 right-wing (counterinsurgency) organizations, 126, 167, 260n13 Río, Eduardo del (Rius), 261n18 Ripstein, Arturo, 31 Rivera, Diego, 82, 95, 106, 110, 130 Robina, Ricardo de, 57, 58 Robles, Paloma, 214 Robles, Xavier, 217 Rodríguez, Israel, 183 Rodríguez Prampolini, Ida, 93, 248n63 Rojo, María, 214 Rojo, Vicente, 172 Rojo amanecer (film, 1989, Fons), 12, 18, 22, 183, 194, 213–23 Rome, Open City (film, 1945, Rossellini), 223 Rosello, Mireille, 16 Rosenberg, Harold, 91–92 Rosenblueth, Arturo, 86 Rossell de la Lama, Guillermo, 98, 99, 109, 248n68, 251nn25–26; alignment with the PRI, 100; Automex corporate offices by,

Index 245n21, 252n42, 257n20; as cofounder/editor of Espacios magazine, 110, 112; collaboration with Siqueiros, 113–14, 252n42; cosmic-communion narrative of, 116, 119, 129; “open Siqueirian hands” and, 127–28; polygonal structures of, 120; on unruly population as threat, 131–32 Rossellini, Roberto, 223 “routine violence,” 16, 20, 68, 209; architecture and, 17; of Mexican Miracle, 195, 213; of modernization, 131, 216–17; Tlatelolco Massacre as, 52 Rubenstein, Anne, 171 Ruíz-Funes, Mariano, 137–38 Rulfo, Juan, 20, 51, 61–63, 68, 218, 242n37; as photographer, 61–65, 243n40, 243n41, 243n43 Salas Portugal, Armando, 114, 202 Salazar, Rubén, 6, 81 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, 12, 23, 42, 217, 222, 232n28 Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, 249n73 Saludos de México [Greetings from Mexico] (COJO short film), 180 Salvat, Agustín, 57 SAM [Sociedad de Arquitectos Mexicanos] (Society of Mexican Architects), 54, 241n15 Sánchez, Roberto, 184 Sánchez Alvarado, Rodolfo, 184 Sánchez Santoveña, Manuel, 242n28 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 223 Seattle World’s Fair (1962), 78 Segovia, Tomás, 128 SEP [Secretaría de Educación Pública] (Ministry of Public Education), 84 Sert, José Luis, 94 Sevilla, Ninón, 61, 62 Sharp, Willoughby, 92, 94 ¡Siempre! (magazine), 102, 263n44 Silva, Federico, 130 Si muero lejos de ti (Aguilar Mora, 1979), 1, 4

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Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 1, 21, 82, 98, 248n68; caricatured as “President of the Zona Rosa,” 95; collaboration with Rossell, 113–14, 252n42; experimentation of, 111; film work of, 111; hand motif in art of, 124, 125, 126–28, 131; Hotel de México and, 112–13, 113; imprisoned in Lecumberri, 25, 106–7, 108, 253n58, 254n64, 261n20; integración plástica and, 112, 120; La Tallera studio in Cuernavaca, 109, 120, 121; Mexican Revolution viewed by, 108, 123–24; muralism as revolutionary mass medium, 101, 108–9, 110, 124, 158; neohumanism and, 118–19, 123; photographers in collaboration with, 252n37; poliangularidad theory of, 112, 122, 128; in Spanish Republican Army, 109, 111, 117, 127; as supporter of ‘68 Movement, 100, 124. See also March of Humanity ‘68 (Taibo, 1991), 1 ‘68 Movement, 2, 81, 94, 97, 209, 229n1; arrests in wake of Tlatelolco Massacre, 33, 192; belated representation of, 51; blamed on outside provocateurs, 137; buses commandeered by, 144, 166, 166; city flows diverted by, 132; collective memory and, 17–18; Cuban revolutionary posters and, 164; in cultural representation, 3; Díaz Ordaz’s hand imagery parodied by, 102–3; film (cinema) and, 177; “Ganar la Calle” (Win the Street) actions, 133, 144–54, 149, 151; global unrest of 1960s and, 6; government documents relating to, 26; legacy of, 5, 196, 225; mobilization of, 7–11; mobilizations of, 134, 136; prisoners, 12, 25, 130; repression against, 95; Silent March, 150, 151, 153; spatial imagination of, 19, 21, 22, 52, 157 Smith, Tommie, 6 Smithson, Robert, 88 S.nob (magazine), 19

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social-dissolution articles, in penal code, 9, 25, 107, 129, 145, 231n17 social justice, 4, 18, 36, 120, 128, 189 Soler, Julián, 138 Solís Quiroga, Héctor, 138 Sombra del caudillo, La [The Shadow of the Tyrant] (film, 1960, Bracho), 263n42 Sordo Madaleno, Juan, 98 Sotelo Marbán, Jorge, 39 Soviet Union, 6, 11, 44, 76, 232n26 “Spaces of Hospitality” (Friese, 2004), 190 Spanish Civil War/Spanish Republic, 109, 111, 117, 127, 183 Spencer, Herbert, 27 Spilimbergo, Lino Enea, 111, 252n34 Spota, Luis, 14 Squirru, Rafael, 119, 124 state, the. See Mexican state street theater, 2, 168 strikes, 8, 11, 66, 150 students, 9, 135, 230n9; international youth protest movements and, 6–7; middle-class status of, 21, 134; satellite status of, 143–44; special prosecutor’s legal strategy and, 40–41; strike after Tlatelolco Massacre, 192 Studio De Pas, D’Urbino, Lomazzi (Milan), 79 Suárez de Salvat, Margarita, 255n76 Suárez y Suárez, Manuel, 105, 106, 250n16; Hotel de México project as cosmic communion, 116–17, 129; new hotel on Avenida de Los Insurgentes Sur and, 109–10; Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros and, 122, 255n81; PRI and, 100, 120; role in Mexican Revolution, 117; workshop for Siqueiros and, 109 Supreme Court, Mexican, 39, 40, 41 Szekeley, Alberto, 237n42 Taibo, Paco Ignacio, II, 1, 18, 152, 227 Taller de Planificación y Urbanismo (Planning and Urbanism Workshop), 198, 265n3

Tamayo, Rufino, 106, 118, 253n58 Team X collective, 75 television, 138, 158, 177; massmediated conflict and, 6; Mobile TV Units, 83, 84; Olympic Games and, 7; receptiveness to, 84; time and space collapsed by, 171; Tlatelolco Massacre and, 11 Terminal del Valle de México (film, 1956, Gavadón), 63 Terrazas, Eduardo, 70, 71, 72, 156, 244n13, 245n23; as COJO chief of urban design, 88; Milan Triennial display, 89–92, 91; reevaluation of modernism and, 75–76; street furniture of, 83; “unity and variety” design strategy, 88–89 TGP [Taller Gráfica Popular] (Popular Graphics Workshop), 124, 126, 172, 173, 261n16, 262n26 Third World, 12 Tibol, Raquel, 95, 130, 175 Tlatelolco Massacre (October 2, 1968), 4, 45, 69, 100, 136, 210; army and, 3, 147, 191, 193; commemorations of, 7; conditional hospitality and, 103; death toll, 3, 193–94, 229n3; early narrators of, 11–12; FEMOSPP and, 39; films addressing, 183, 185, 187– 88; González de Alba at, 32–33; government acknowledgment of, 215, 222; government documents relating to, 20, 36; leftist insurgents radicalized by, 130; legacy of, 218, 223–24; in literary and cinematic representation, 194, 213, 219; mainstream-press discourse about, 232n27; officials responsible for, 7, 192; as “routine violence,” 16; Siqueiros and, 122, 124, 127–28; ‘68 Movement leaders and supporters arrested after, 33; state’s culpability for, 29, 216; statute of limitations and, 38; survivors of, 39, 50, 194 Tlatelolco Media, 3, 4 Tlatelolco neighborhood: displacements caused by building of, 55–56;

Index filmmakers drawn to, 51–52, 61, 240n7; in Mexican history, 49–50, 58; middle-class imagination and, 65; migrants to, 59; palimpsest qualities of, 20, 22, 48, 49, 51, 65–66; reputation as vice zone, 60–61; in Rulfo’s writings and photographs, 62–65, 65. See also NonoalcoTlatelolco housing complex; Plaza de las Tres Culturas Torres Restrepo, Camilo, 146 Torres Torija, Antonio, 27 torture, 32, 36, 40, 193 tourism, 99, 104, 168, 255n76 “Tourism as a Font of Energy in Urban Planning” (Rossell and Carrasco), 115 trauma, 17, 19, 46 Trotsky, Leon, 11, 120, 127, 254n64 Trueblood, Beatrice, 71 truth commissions, 12, 38, 39, 46, 69 Tumba, La [The Tomb] (Agustín, 1964), 152 UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), 8, 9, 39, 231n15; architecture school, 110, 227; cineclub, 185; film school, 22, 176; IPN links with, 148; Lecumberri as offshoot of, 31; middle-class students at, 10; modernization plans and, 141–42; MUCA (Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte), 92, 94; showplace campuses of, 21; sociological study of juvenile delinquency, 137–38; the state and, 35; state infiltration and occupation of, 101, 102, 139, 183, 190; student protests of 1980s, 232n29. See also Ciudad Universitaria [CU] ¡Únete, pueblo! (film, 1968, Menéndez), 185 Uniones y Sociedades de Padres de Familia (Parent Unions and Societies), 167 unions, 9, 11, 30, 134; hospitality and, 105; PRI-controlled, 171, 183

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United Nations (U.N.), 36, 38, 237n42, 238n44 United States, 42, 63, 81, 119, 175, 192; civil rights struggles in, 6, 171; mass consumerism in, 6; Olympic team, 76; prisons in, 27; ‘68 Movement and, 265n1 urban flows, 4, 81, 113, 120, 146, 158 urbanization, 2, 5, 59, 103, 135, 227; functional planning and, 199; middle classes and, 61; moral dangers of, 61; property regime and, 205; railroads and, 64 urban planning, 74, 81, 82, 85, 156, 200 urban space, 18, 46, 127; collective memory and, 4, 26; as controlled environment, 72; occupations of, 136 Uruchurtu, Ernesto, 61, 82, 138, 144, 198, 251n25 Valle, Eduardo, 30, 31, 238n47 Vallejo, Demetrio, 66, 150, 171, 261n20 Valley of Mexico (Anáhuac), 52–54 Vasconcelos, José, 117 Vaughan, Mary Kay, 43 Vázquez Mantecón, Álvaro, 177 vecindades (housing of urban poor), 55–56, 56, 59, 202, 204, 208; as models of conviviality, 32; popular pathologization of, 217 Vega, Edward, 146 Velasco, José María, 52 Velasco Piña, Antonio, 13 Velocidad (Siqueiros, 1953), 252n42 Venezuela, 14, 249n75 Víctimas del pecado [Victims of Sin] (film, 1951, Fernández), 61, 62, 62 Vidrio Plano, 55, 59 Vietnam War, 6, 8, 149, 171 Vila, Victor, 265n3 Villa, Francisco (Pancho), 50, 117 Villagrán García, José, 98, 241n16 Villoro, Juan, 23 violence, 3, 36, 48, 156, 194, 214; built environment and, 17; Mexican

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violence (continued) history and, 49; of insurgency, 258n31; leftist debate over use of, 10; media coverage of government violence, 9; of Mexican Revolution, 20; modernization and, 2, 20; recurring nature of, 4. See also “routine violence” Viramontes, Guillermo, 56 “Vision + Value” series (Kepes), 87, 88 “Visión de Anáhuac (1519)” (Reyes), 52–53 Vittellozzi, Annibale, 76 Vizcaino, Mágda, 184 Volpi, Jorge, 44 Walker, Louise, 135 Weld, Kristin, 45 Wiener, Norbert, 86, 87, 89, 246n41 Wigley, Mark, 74 Williams, Linda, 219

women, 13, 31, 259n44 Woods, Shadrach, 75, 86, 90 working class, 30, 43, 211 WTC (World Trade Center Mexico). See Hotel de México Wyman, Lance, 70, 71, 72, 77, 89, 246n40 Yañez, Enrique, 54 Yo Soy 132 campaign, 13–14 youth, 136–38, 155, 202, 257n16 Zamora, Guillermo, 252n37 Zapata, Emiliano, 171 Zedillo, Ernesto, 12 Zinsler, Adolfo Aguilar, 38, 237n42 Zócalo (central plaza of Mexico City), 8, 30, 95, 101, 141; CNH-organized march to, 146–47, 158; massive demonstrations in, 191; military occupation of, 171; Olympic preparations in, 136