Satellites

The notion of satellites deployed in Chapter 5 elucidates the sociopolitical status of the middle class and youth within the Mexican nation-state at mid-century. Both were peripheral to the franchise, their political options curtailed by the corporatist and clientelist institutions. While the new university campuses, such as the representative University City (supervised in part by Mario Pani), appeared as the spaces of conviviality, they were in fact spaces of management and control, designed to prevent disruptions to the programmed flows of the city. In this light, the chapter discusses the 68 Movement’s slogan ganar la calle as the set of conscious, intentional, and insurgent urban tactics, both embodied and discursive, devised to counter the state’s denial of room for political participation—most notably, through the movement’s marches

Revenge of Dust

Chapter 2 scrutinizes Tlatelolco, site of the October 2 massacre. Its literary, photographic, and cinematographic representations by such authors as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Nacho López, and Fernando del Paso, mediate between the realm of “compulsory visibility” of a modernizing Mexican state and its shadowy byproducts. The first is embodied by the discourses of transparency and hygiene of modern architecture in the Mario Pani’s Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex. The second is the spectral social body inhabiting the hub of the national railroad network at Tlatelolco—that is, self-constructed settlements and tenements of the migrant underclasses, overlooked by the State and eventually displaced by the modernization projects. This blindness and exclusionary practice of the modern technocratic administration is also manifest in the highly managed character of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas erected on the Tlatelolco site, demonstrating the limited scope of de facto citizenship in Mexico. At the same time, the opacity of the site tests the limits of history writing in general.

Mobilization and Mediation

Taking as the departure point a car trip through Mexico City in the movie Los Caifanes by Juan Ibáñez (1966), chapter VI examines the media mobilized by the 68 movement—a vast body of graphics and films, including communiqués and the documentary El Grito (1969). Produced horizontally and collaboratively, printmaking served as an efficient means of counter-information. Heterogeneous materials denounced the state’s violence and everyday repression, circulating widely with the use of the city’s buses so that they saturated urban space not unlike Olympic propaganda. Similarly, small mobile film crews armed with lightweight cameras—trained at the new film school, Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematographicos—sought to disrupt Mexico City’s official representation and communication flows. As such, the 68 movement harnessed the city as the medium of communication, creating open-ended “media fields” that aimed to move their audiences and invite them to participate in their reproduction and transformation.

Urban Logistics and Kinetic Environments

Mexico’s successful bid to host 1968 Olympics necessitated the management of the country’s holistic and cohesive modern image for the worldwide audiences. Chapter 3 analyses the integration and mobilization of various design disciplines—especially built environment and visual communications—to produce and convey such an image. Focusing on the immersive participatory street environments designed for the Games, the chapter examines work of planner-architect Eduardo Terrazas, head of the urban design for the Mexican Olympic organizing committee—and compares them to the ideas promoted by the neo-avant-garde kinetic artists. It thus shows the seemingly neutral notions such as interdisciplinary collaboration, Gestalt psychology, and cybernetic responsiveness engender also frameworks of hierarchy, management, and the cult of expertise. The analysis demonstrates kinetic environments and technologies to be inherently open-ended and unstable, clearing space for the interventions of 68 Movement.

City of Palaces

The central nexus of Chapter 1 the Lecumberri Palace, commonly known as the Black Palace—the state prison inaugurated in 1901, turned into the General National Archive in 1976, and the site of the public announcement of President Vicente Fox’s transparency reforms in 2002. Lecumberri is also the locus of the two early testimonial narratives on the 68 student movement and Tlatelolco massacre, by Luis González de Alba and José Revueltas. Their analysis shows how this theoretically closed, impermeable institution constitutes a node within the network of the modern spaces of discipline and, at the same time, the microcosm of Mexico City. On the other hand, the transmutations of Lecumberri serve to reflect on different modes of knowledge production, history writing and commemoration. Both the prison and the archive are shown to be more than just physical spaces—they are results of the ongoing embodied interpretative processes.

Dwellings

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 70,000 planned residents. Although it was promoted as a “city apart from the city” that suggested it was built on tabula rasa, Pani design drew from the informal housing he sought to displace and residents would eventually restore traditional forms of encounter and exchange as well as introduce new forms. Taking cues from the 68 Movement’s spatial imagination and fellow narrators’ phenomenological and affective accounts, Poniatowska’s La Noche de Tlatelolco and Fons’s Rojo amanecer reactivate Tlatelolco’s palimpsest and uncanny qualities. The October 2 massacre revealed the violent and unjust structures that lay behind the complex’s modern surfaces and the PRI’s hospitality. Both Poniatowska’s anthology of testimonies and Fons’s film would emphasize space and the body as key sites for knowing and memory, including the bodies and locations of their audiences. The aim is not mere aesthetic shock or the defamiliarization of spectatorship but an ethical implication to bear witness in spite of geographic or temporal distance.

Gestures of Hospitality

In Chapter 4 the unfinished mega Hotel de México (started in 1966) performs as the double to the nation-state. The hotel—archetypal building of modernity—conceals its operations and administrative apparatus, very much like the ruling PRI. By extension, the metaphor of hospitality illuminates how this self-proclaimed host treated its citizens, “limiting” or “conditioning” their status as perpetual guests. The analysis of the late major mural by the famous Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros The March of Humanity on Earth and Towards the Cosmos (1964–71), housed in the cultural center adjacent to the Hotel, reveals contradictions that parallel the challenge of reconciling the revolutionary rhetoric with capitalist modernization faced by the regime and its elites. The chapter argues that militant Siqueiros contradicted the official vision of “cosmic communion” proposed by the architect Guillermo Rossel de la Lama by crafting the mural whose story lines and gestures, especially the motif of hands, contested Mexico’s political status quo, echoing the unruliness of the 68 Movement after the Tlatelolco massacre.

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?...