In his conclusion, Axel Elias writes, “[t]he 1968 Olympic Games…have not received enough attention” (239). Elias's claim is remarkable considering that the 1968 Mexico City Olympics may be the most thoroughly studied sporting event in Latin American history. In fact, this book joins a growing corpus of books and articles devoted to this increasingly familiar topic. These include two other noteworthy books both published in 2021: Heather Dichter's Bidding for the 1968 Olympics and Harry Blutstein's Games of Discontent. For scholars of Mexican history, Elias's book is especially significant.
Students and scholars with a grounding in the established research of this topic will find much familiar in this book. As Elias notes, scholars such as Brewster and Brewster, Carey, Hoffer, Rodríguez Kuri, Witherspoon, and Zolov, along with many others, have examined many aspects of these Olympics in their work, and a host of other scholars have researched the student movement and the massacre in Tlatelolco Square on October 2, 1968. Elias does not attempt to rewrite the essential narrative established by these previous scholars; rather, his work adds nuance and detail from fresh sources, and at times challenges threads of interpretation laid out by other historians. The result is an important, if not entirely groundbreaking, study.
Elias's chief aim in this book is to place the Mexican citizenry at the center of the Olympic story, and he largely succeeds in this endeavor by examining sources either untouched or underutilized by other scholars. These include twenty-one interviews conducted with Mexican citizens who experienced the upheaval of 1968, including athletes, security guards, Olympic officials, and former students involved in the protest movement. The interviews convey the range of experiences and opinions Mexicans held of the Olympics, and of government actions, in that era. Additional sources include: Mexican government records that have only recently been opened; several other archives including the private papers of Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, president of the organizing committee for the Mexico City Olympics; a thorough review of dozens of newspapers and periodicals; and several important films, including El Grito (1968), which focused on the student protests, and The Olympics in Mexico (1969), the official film of the 1968 Olympics.
Utilizing these and other sources, Elias introduces a number of compelling arguments. Among them, he argues that Mexico City was selected as the host city for the 1968 Olympics primarily because of Mexico's status as a “small scale” country, an emerging nation unaligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union (78). He examines more thoroughly than other scholars the Programme of Olympic Identity, a group established by Ramírez Vázquez, and including dozens of young Mexican and international artists, to promote a new vision of Mexican identity and “present Mexico's vast and unique culture to the world” (92). Analyzing cartoons, banners, street art, and the film El Grito, Elias demonstrates that the Mexican students generally supported the Olympics as a positive development for Mexico, while at the same time they questioned the wisdom of spending vast sums of money for a largely temporary sporting event when the nation had so many other needs. He also argues that the students refrained from protest during the Olympic Games not so much out of fear of reprisals after the massacre at Tlatelolco—though they were indeed afraid—but out of pride in the nation and a long-standing agreement that they would not disrupt the Olympics. He also notes that Mexican citizens were divided in their opinions of the government crackdown; although many found the use of violence abhorrent, others saw the attack as necessary to preserve the Olympics and Mexico's international reputation. Among the strongest portions of the book are Elias's reflections on the period following the Olympics, after the “Olympic oasis” had faded away and Mexican citizens were left to reconcile the outcomes for themselves (212). Examining international reports and other sources, Elias wonders whether Ramírez Vázquez and the organizing committee achieved their goals of using the Olympics to forge a new international vision of Mexico; the rest of the world, it seems, did not thoroughly digest this message.
Elias's book is not perfect. There remain a few editorial glitches and a misspelling here and there. The prose is workmanlike, and the index fairly sparse. At times, content that might be attributed to other works is uncited, which seems to be an editorial preference for limiting references to secondary sources and emphasizing primary sources. With that in mind, this text will probably find limited appeal with a broad readership or those with only a casual interest in the Olympics. However, for students and scholars of Mexican history and Olympic history, it is an essential text shedding much new light on a topic that many of us thought we knew.
