Photopoetics at Tlatelolco: Afterimages of Mexico, 1968 by Samuel Steinberg (original) (raw)
Related papers
Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the '68 Movement (University of California Press, 2016)
Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the '68 Movement 2017 Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art In 1968, Mexico prepared to host the Olympic games amid growing civil unrest. The spectacular sports facilities and urban redevelopment projects built by the government in Mexico City mirrored the country’s rapid but uneven modernization. In the same year, a street-savvy democratization movement led by students emerged in the city. Throughout the summer, the ‘68 Movement staged protests underscoring a widespread sense of political disenfranchisement. Just ten days before the Olympics began, nearly three hundred student protestors were massacred by the military in a plaza at the core of a new public housing complex. In spite of institutional denial and censorship, the 1968 massacre remains a touchstone in contemporary Mexican culture thanks to the public memory work of survivors and Mexico’s leftist intelligentsia. In this highly original study of the afterlives of the ’68 Movement, George F. Flaherty explores how urban spaces—material but also literary, photographic, and cinematic—became an archive of 1968, providing a framework for de facto modes of justice for years to come. “George F. Flaherty’s wildly intermedial study of the Mexican state, modernization, and the 1968 student movement is a tour de force of cultural studies. One leaves this book with a rich appreciation for how the state attempts to control the flow of affect, information, bodies, and ideas.” —Mary K. Coffey, author of How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State “This important study expands the field of inquiry into Mexico’s long 1960s beyond the social and cultural domain to encompass questions of structure and critical formation and of histories evoked by such place names and events as Lecumberri, Tlatelolco, and the Olympics.” —Roberto Tejada, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor, University of Houston “In Hotel Mexico, Flaherty brilliantly deploys the gritty detail of archival documents and visual culture to challenge the grand promises and veiled threats of the modernizing discourse known as the Mexican Miracle.” —Esther Gabara, author of Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil George F. Flaherty is Assistant Professor of Latin American and U.S. Latino Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Cover illustration: Adam Wiseman, from Tlatelolco Desmentido series, 2013. University of California Press www.ucpress.edu [ISBN 978-0-520-29107-2]
Este artículo se propone analizar la novela de Roberto Bolaño Amuleto (1999) y en particular su interés por el límite de una resistencia política. En este estudio se yuxtapone la descripción en la novela de la masacre en Tlatelolco con la obra de Carlos Fuentes Los 68: París, Praga, México (2005), y su uso tanto de la memoria no ficcional de París en 1968 como el recuento ficcional de lo sucedido en Tlatelolco. Este artículo intenta demostrar cómo en Los 68 se intenta recuperar un tipo de subjetividad cuyos imaginarios utópicos definían los años sesenta, y cómo el uso de alegoría en Amuleto marca el vaciamiento de ese imaginario. This paper analyzes Roberto Bolaño’s Amuleto (1999), and in particular its interest in the cotemporary limits of political resistance. The essay subsequently juxtaposes the novel’s depiction of the massacre at Tlateloco with Carlos Fuentes’ Los 68: Paris, Praga, México (2005), and its use of both a non-fictional memoir of Paris in 1968 and a fictionalized account of Tlateloco. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates how Los 68 attempts to recuperate a kind of subjectivity in which utopian imaginaries defined the 1960s, but which Amuleto’s mobilization of allegory reveals as emptied out.
Bowdoin Journal of Art, 2021
The October 2nd 1968 massacre—where the Mexican army opened fire upon student protesters gathered at Tlatelolco Plaza—weighs heavily on the Mexican collective imaginary. In memoriam, Mexico City-based artists founded the Escuela de Cultura Popular Martires del 681 an art collective dedicated to providing a space for the development of artistic practice as a tool for political and social change, twenty years after the fact. Pre-existing scholarship about art collectives that arose in Mexico since the 1960s pays only cursory (if any) attention to the Escuela and the possible historical connection to the 1968 uprising. In response, this paper engages in direct comparative analysis of the Escuela’s portfolios with the print production of the 1968 uprising, tracing the development of a visual language of protest centered around mass reproduction, aesthetic appropriation, and alliance with popular struggle. This places the Escuela within a larger legacy of visual art as a tool for mobilization against authoritarianism,2 imbuing the Escuela’s images with a powerful saliency, proving the power of aesthetics in voicing dissent in the face of continual repression.
From Ayotzinapa to Tlatelolco: A Memorial of Grievances Against the State
2018
In Mexico, as in the case of the massacre of 1968 in Tlatelolco, there exists a long tradition of writing history in a tragic or traumatic key by starting from its founding moments of violence, as if the repetitive compulsion could be met only by the compulsion to repeat the trauma. And yet, this essay proposes that perhaps we should not forget that the compulsion to respond to the violence of repression with a sorrow song or a memorial of grievances ends up being very much part and parcel of the effect of displaying the spectacle of sovereign power that was being sought after in the first place. Precisely because it is so terribly awe-inspiring, state violence when it is wielded serves not just as a symptom of vulnerability but also as a way of diverting attention away from the utopian dreams and efforts in resistance and self-government that were unfolding on the ground prior to the punctual onslaught of repression. Drawing important lessons from the experience of the disappeared ...