Museum as Hub

Hub Notes: Remembering Tlatelolco, 2/15/08

I got into a conversation today with a visitor in the Hub who was interested in the Museo Tamayo’s Tlatelolco project. He’d spent a lot of time in Mexico City and was particularly well-informed
on the issues and events of Tlatelolco’s tumultuous history. He told me about an article he wrote for The Nation in 1998 on the 30 year occasion of the Tlatelolco massacre that focused on the government’s persistent silence and secrecy regarding the events of October 2, 1968. He recently sent me a copy of the article, titled “Remembering Tlatelolco: Thirty Years After a Massacre of Demonstrators, Mexicans Want the Truth,” published in The Nation, December 7, 1998 (the visitor, it turns out, was the writer Scott Sherman).

In the piece, Sherman gives background information on the historical circumstances surrounding the massacre. The summer of 1968 witnessed the rise of the student movement in Mexico, and demonstrations around the country sprung up protesting the lack of democracy and social justice in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government. Additionally, Mexico City was receiving an enormous amount of international attention as the first Latin American city host of the Olympic Games (which began on October 12, 1968, ten days after the massacre); the hype surrounding the Olympics dramatically amplified the intensity of conflicts between students and government. As the PRI sought to promote a progressive, democratic image of modern Mexico, the student demonstrations undermined their international image. Sherman’s article highlight’s the PRI’s obscurant response to the events of October 2, emphasizing the fundamental lack of accurate information available. How and what actually led to the onslaught of gunfire by military troops? Was it really a response to initial shots supposedly fired by protesters; or, more likely, was it a government ordered attack on hundreds of protesting civilians? The precise circumstances may never be known, Sherman posits, but those who survived 1968 are the generation of change in Mexico. He ends the article describing the 30th anniversary of the massacre, when, on October 2, 1998, some 30,000 people gathered in the rain in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas to commemorate the lives lost in the struggle against government oppression.

-Sabrina Locks