Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T09:50:55.413Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Protests of Engagement: Dignity, False Love, and Self-Love in Mexico during 1968

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2012

Herbert Braun
Herbert Braun
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A few thousand young Mexicans were standing together in large groups in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco in downtown Mexico City to remember the massacre which had brought the student movement of 1968 to a sudden end ten years before. Many turned their heads upward to the balcony of a residential building that faced the plaza to hear Carlos Monsiváis, a well-known intellectual who had savored the protests, tell them that they “no longer saw the state as a tyrannical and omnipresent father.” Still another ten years later, many of them, and others as well, read the words of Hugo Hiriart, a promising young journalist in 1968, who claimed that the students had “dared to lead in a frontal and uncompromising opposition to the paternal and authoritarian Mexican state.”

Type
Structures of Resistance
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , July 1997 , pp. 511 - 549
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Carlos Monsiváis. “Si una nación entera se avergüenza,” in 1968: Los principios del poder, a special edition of the magazine Proceso (1980), 282. His testimonial of the student protest is Días de guardar (Mexico, 1970)Google Scholar. He offers similar views in “Voice of the Opposition. From '68 to Cardenismo: Toward a Chronicle of Social Movements,” Journal of International Affairs, 43 (Winter 1990), 385–93Google Scholar.

2 Hiriart, Hugo, “La revuelta antiautoritaria,” in Nexos 121 (January 1988). p. 6Google Scholar. He traced to 1968 many of the progressive changes he saw taking place in Mexico, from the end of official censorship of films to the legalization of divorce, a liberalized dress code, the environmental movement, and a skeptical attitude toward power. For an example of his evocative journalistic abilities, see his early place in Excélsior, “Granaderos, Estudiantes” (July 25, 1968), 3.

3 A succinct introduction to this elite view of the movement and its historical effects twenty years after the events, can be found in Pensar el 68, an entire issue of Nexos (no. 121, January 1988). The issue was organized and edited by Hugo Hiriart and Hermann Bellinghausen and subsequently published as a book with the same title, also in 1988. This work revolves around the recollections of two centrist leaders of the student movement, Gilberto Guevera Niebla and Raúl Alvárez Garín. It provides an excellent account of the highly politicized academic worlds of the militants before 1968 as well as their interpretation of the events and of their memories of it, often offering a somewhat more nuanced view of the conflict between the students and the state than had been previously available. Significantly, the editors chose not to center the issue around the recollections of the more intransigent wing of the militants. Pensar el 68 also traces the lives of some prominent militant leaders during the past twenty years, pointing to their various accomplishments and the changes they feel have taken place in the nation. Under the direction of Héctor Aguilar Camín, Nexos became in the 1980s a voice of the Generation of 1968.

A more realistic appraisal of the long-term impact of the student movement on Mexican politics is offered by Loaeza, Soledad, “México, 1968: los orígenes de la transición,” Foro International. 30:1 (117) (July-September, 1989), 66–92Google Scholar. Loaeza traces a transition from a corporatist to a pluralist state but is careful to note that politics remains a family affair among small elites. A new middle class, she states, came into power as a result of the protests of 1968.

4 A recent interpretation claims that “the massacre at Tlatelolco … profoundly affected subsequent Mexican developments. Writers and intellectuals openly and vociferously criticized the president and the political system. Although previously the intellectuals supported the PRI and its leaders, many now took a more independent, critical stance. The massacre also encouraged the growth of opposition from both the left and the right…. The massacre also encouraged the opening of the political process. Criticism was more readily tolerated. Effective suffrage and increased participation of opposition in the political system became more accepted … The emphasis was on modernization” (Suchlicki, Jaime, Mexico: From Montezuma to Nafta, Chiapas and Beyond [Washington, 1996], 141–2Google Scholar).

The traditional argument concerning the impact of 1968 on the thinking of intellectual elite, which was given more to highlighting conflict and separations, claims that the events of 1968 have led to a thorough and often agonizing re-evaluation of Mexican history and of the Revolution in particular and to a consequent distancing between the intellectual elite and the state. See, for example. Pereyra, Carlos et al. , Historia ¿para qué? (Mexico, 1980)Google Scholar; Benjamin, Thomas, “The Leviathan on the Zócalo: Recent Historiography on the Postrevolutionary Mexican State.” Latin American Research Review, 20:8 3 (1985). 195–217Google Scholar. especially 197–8; and the new introduction to the second edition of Ross, Stanley R., Is the Mexican Revolution Dead? (Philadelphia, 1975), xi–xxxviiiGoogle Scholar.

For the deep impact which the student movement and Tlatelolco had on the literary production of the intellectual elites, see Stabb, Martin S.. “The New Essay in Mexico: Text and Context,” Hispania, 70:1 (March 1987), 47–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, Dolly J.. “Mexican Literary Reactions to Tlatelolco 1968,” Latin American Research Review, 20:2 (1985). 71–85Google Scholar; Mempo Giardinelli, “Reflexiones sobre la literatura de la onda,” in El Buho, supplement of Excélsior (July 6, 1986); Leal, Luis, “Tlatelolco, Tlatelolco,” Denver Quarterly, 14:1 (1979), 3–13Google Scholar; and Taylor, Kathy, The New Narrative of Mexico: Sub-versions of History in Mexican Fiction (Lewisburg. 1994)Google Scholar.

Two recent testimonials by participant leaders of the movement begin to shed new light on the behavior or the leaders of the movement, and are an important ingredient in the ideas contained in this article. See de Alba, Luis Gonzalaz, “1968: La fiesta y la tragedia,” in Nexos, 189 (September 1993), 23–31Google Scholar, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II, 68 (1991).

5 Although this civil society has been seen to be developing through the years, it was perceived most prominently in the social solidarity of Mexicans of all walks of life in the wake of the devastating 1985 earthquake. One of the first expressions of this connection can be found in Puga, Maria Luisa, “Pontiatowska y Monsiváis (Dos cronistas) La memoria viva: Del 68 al terremoto,” in La Plaza: Crónicas de la Vida Cultural de Coyoacán, 1:10 (June 1986), 11–13Google Scholar.

6 Jorge G. Castañeda, “Mexico's Circle of Misery.” Foreign Affairs (July/August, 1996), 105.

7 President Ernesto Zedillo recently traced to the student movement the democratizing results of the mid-term elections, in which his Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) lost control of Congress for the first time in seventy years. “We were the youth who took the first fundamental step to claim the democracy that a nation like Mexico needs and deserves” (Excélsior, July 8, 1997).

8 This notion of a break in the history of Mexico is stated throughout the testimonial literature, perhaps most clearly in Poniatowska, Elena, Fuerte es el silencio (Mexico, 1971). 51Google Scholar: “At that moment [October 2] the lives of many Mexicans became divided in two: before and after Tlatelolco.” Poniatowska was a young journalist during 1968 and is the author of the classic work on the protest movement. La noche de Tlatelolco (Mexico, 1972)Google Scholar, which has been translated into English as Massacre in Mexico (New York, 1975)Google Scholar. According to Paz, Octavio, an “era in the history of Mexico came to an end.” (Posdata [Mexico, 1970]. 38)Google Scholar. He took the unprecedented act of resigning as ambassador to India in protest against the violent actions of his government; for Fuentes, Carlos the end of the movement is comparable to “Independence, Reforma, Revolution,” the three great stages in the nation's history (Tiempo mexicano [Mexico, 1971], 147)Google Scholar.

9 For a finely textured account of an attempt at diálogo publico and the consequences which came from its denial by colonial authorities during the first moments of the 1692 riot in Mexico City, see Cope, R. Douglas, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison, 1994), 42–48, 125–60Google Scholar. Octavio Paz offers intriguing connections and contrasts between the 1692 protests and those of 1968 in “A cinco años de Tlatelolco,” El ogro filantrópico (Mexico, 1979), 146–52Google Scholar. See Taylor, William B., Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, 1979), 114, 131. 133–34, 141, 143, 168–70Google Scholar. Within the broader Latin American colonial context, Stern's, Steve J. work on Peru, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison, 1982)Google Scholar. is perhaps the most nuanced and systematic study of the various means by which subject peoples came before their authorities to petition for the restitution of rights and privileges which they understood were theirs in a colonial system whose ultimate legitimacy they questioned but rarely. See also, Phelan, John Leddy, “Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 5 (1960). 47–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Just before and during the student protests, many came to think again about what diálogo püblico was all about. According to Adolfo Christlieb Ibarrola, for example, the long-time leader of the opposition Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN). “Diálogo is not Machiavellianism, complacency, transaction, the loss of principles, nor even the offering of vital testimony about what one thinks or says; diálogo is not the expression of weakness. Nor does it imply the acceptance of ambiguous compromises, or the obligation to come to a synthesis, because diálogo is not an end, but a means, one which does not end in the truth in itself, because it only searches for it” (“Informe rendido por el Licenciado Adolfo Christlieb Ibarrola,” Presidente del PAN al Consejo Nacional del Partido en sesión celebrada el 16 de marzo de 1968).

In an obvious effort to demonstrate that the students could not become engaged in a diálogo público with the president, essayist Adán J. Moctezuma stated that diálogo was neither a discussion or a debate. “One dialogues in a serene state of mind; one dialogues among equals. A diálogo takes place between two friends, or two brothers… Diálogo presumes [that] two individuals … respect one another, … do not fear or hate one another … because dialogo is the voice of convivencia … which is superior to coexistence” (“A propósito de diálogos,” El Nacional [August 26, 1968]).

11 Sennett, Richard, Authority (New York, 1980), 50–83Google Scholar.

12 In an effort to understand how some traditions remain in modern societies long after their time would appear to be up, some scholars have looked for those that are strategically, or at least somewhat consciously conceived by elites or counter-elites in order to use them politically by making contemporary connections with the past. Behind these traditions there are overt choices, decisions, insertions, and indeed, inventions. Much of this literature has a hard time moving beyond a functional view of these traditions. See Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terrence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar. These inventions no doubt exist. But what I am after here is tradition in a deeper sense, the type that emerges suddenly and with little thought or strategy. While very much historically conditioned, the behavior of the students in Mexico in 1968 can be seen as spontaneous.

13 For initial efforts to move beyond the dichotomy between hegemony and resistance, between the state and society in the current literature on Mexico, see Joseph, Gilbert M. and Nugent, Daniel, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham, 1994)Google Scholar. Especially helpful is William Roseberry's “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” 355–66, in which he directs us to ways in which subordinate groups and the state can be studied in relationship to each other. Perhaps the most successful effort to move beyond this dichotomized view of power and resistance in the literature on modern Latin America is James, Daniel, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946–1976 (Cambridge, U.K., 1988)Google Scholar.

14 An excellent introduction to Antonio Gramsci's thought on hegemony is Femia, Joseph V., Gramsci's Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness and Revolutionary Process (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar.

15 Scott's critique of the literature on hegemony is most explicitly stated in his Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), especially 304–50Google Scholar.

16 E. P. Thompson. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (1971), 88. See also his more loosely woven “Patrician Society. Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social Histoy, 7 (1974). 382–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 For an earlier analysis of how a social order was broken more from above than below within the context of a violent riot, see Braun, Herbert, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison, 1985)Google Scholar. For some broadly suggestive thoughts on the meaning of the April 9. 1948, in Bogotá and the October 2. 1968, massacre in Mexico City in the history of Colombia and Mexico, see Herbert Braun, “El 9 de abril en Colombia y el 2 de octubre en México: Meditaciones metahistóricas a partir de dos momentos coyunturales, Revista de la Universidad Nacional (Bogotá), no. 17–18 (May–August 1988). 47–51. My understanding of the behavior of the Mexican students owes much to the broadly conceptual views of Moore, Barrington Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and especially to his focus on moral outrage, reciprocity, and mutual obligations in social conflict.

18 Nor is it my intention to argue that these traditions are a form of an essential transhistorical “Mexicanism” or that the paternalism which the students felt is an expression of their deep sense of cultural inferiority. For these pervasive themes in Mexican thought, see Paz, Octavio, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; Ramos, Samuel, Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (Austin, 1962)Google Scholar. and the scholarly work by Schmidt, Henry C., The Roots of Lo Mexicano: Self and Society in Mexican Thought, 1900–1934 (College Station, TX, 1978)Google Scholar. Octavio Paz explains the paternalist veneration of the President in Mexico prior to 1968 as a legacy of the Aztecs and the Spaniards, and the violence of Tlatelolco as a sign that the “invisible thread” connecting the violent character of Mexican history has still not been broken. Paz treats Tlatelolco as the latest of Mexico's sacrificial rites (Posdata, 89, 123, 125, 40).

19 Octavio Paz. Posdata, 24.

20 The centrality of ceremony in Mexican history can be glimpsed from many of the essays in Beezley, William H., Martin, Cheryl English, and French, William E., eds., Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington, 1994)Google Scholar. For a good sense of the tensions in ceremonial life at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Mexico City which come with modernization, see Albán, Juan Pedro Viquiera, ¿Relajados o reprimidos?: Diversiones públicas y vida social en la Ciudad de México durante el Siglo de las Luces (Mexico, 1987)Google Scholar, and Beezley, William H., Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Life (Lincoln, 1987)Google Scholar, respectively.

21 Morse, Richard, “The Claims of Political Tradition,” in his collected essays. New World Soundings: Culture and Ideologx in the Americas (Baltimore, 1989), 104Google Scholar. Morse's connections between these traditions and the Mexican Revolution are on page 125.

22 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, “The City and Politics,” in Hardoy, Jorge E., ed., Urbanization in Latin America: Approaches and Issues (New York, 1975), 181Google Scholar.

23 There has been no effort in the literature to come to grips with the beliefs and the actions of the President. The official history simply assumes that he was intractable, that he had no interest in reaching a solution to the conflict, that both his personality and the system of government that he represented were authoritarian, and thus inevitably incapable of dealing with any change coming from below. Julio Scherer Garcia, one of Mexico's most prominent journalists, has recently stated, quite simply and dismissively. that the President “preferred the peace of the graveyard to a threat to the Olympiad in 1968” (Estos años [Mexico, 1995]. 24). Enrique Krauze offers the first sustained in an effort to include the President as an actor in the events of 1968. Part of his history of Mexico through in-depth political biographies of its leaders. Krauze largely bases this account on his own recollections as a marginal student participant in the movement and on Diaz Ordaz's as yet unpublished memoirs. Krauze's often illuminating but highly emotional interpretation of the events rests on the President's pathological personality, on his conspiratorial view of the world, his “blindness,” and his deeply psyhological need to create order out of the chaos he saw around him. See his Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996 (New York, 1997), 665–737Google Scholar. For an earlier effort to make sense of the President's besieged mentality, see Braun, Herbert. “Diaz Ordaz y Marcuse,” in Nexos. 121 (January 1988), 37–39Google Scholar.

24 Synthetic accounts of the events can be found in Kenneth Johnson, F.. Mexican Democracy: A Critical View (Boston, 1971), 148–64Google Scholar; Stevens, Evelyn P., Protest and Response in Mexico (Boston. 1974). 185–240Google Scholar; Hellman, Judith Adler, Mexico in Crisis (New York), 173–86Google Scholar, and Herzog, Jesús Silva, Una historia de la Universidad de México y sus problemas (Mexico, 1974). 155–81Google Scholar.

25 For a good introduction to the history of the university and the political role of university autonomy, see Daniel Levy, C.. University and Government in Mexico: Autonomy in an Authoritarian System (New York, 1980)Google Scholar. For conflicts between students and the state, see Mabry, Donald J., The Mexican University and the State: Student Conflicts, 1910–1971 (College Station, TX, 1982)Google Scholar; Delia Roca, Salvador Martínez. Estado y universidad en México, 1920–1960 (Mexico. 1986)Google Scholar; Niebla, Gilberto Guevara. ed.. Las luchas estudiantiles en México, 2 vols., (Mexico. 1983)Google Scholar.

26 Among the many works in which the view from above is expressed, the following stand out: Revueltas, José. México 68: Juventud y revolution (Mexico, 1968)Google Scholar; Castillo, Heberto, Si te agarran te van a matar (Mexico, 1985)Google Scholar; Lemos, Sócrates A. Campos. El otoño de la revolutión: octubre (Mexico, 1973)Google Scholar; de Alba, Luis González, Los días y los años (Mexico. 1971)Google Scholar; Carrión, Jorge, Arguedas, Daniel Cazes. Sol, and Carmona, Fernando. Tres culturas en agonía (Mexico, 1969)Google Scholar; for a general, contemporary history of Mexico along these lines, see Casanova, Pablo Gonzalez, Democracy in Mexico (New York. 1970)Google Scholar.

27 This sense of the forthcoming radical Utopia among the middle-class youth of Mexico and the rest of Latin America at that time is amply accounted for by Jorge Castañeda, G., Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (New York. 1993), 174–202Google Scholar.

28 The balancing act which Javier Barros Sierra performed during these events can be garnered from his at times difficult conversations with Gastón García Cantú. Javier Barros Sierra, 1968 (Mexico, 1977)Google Scholar.

29 “Por su estirpe,” Siempre! (August 14. 1969).

30 Excélsior (August 2, 1968); El Día (August 2 and 3, 1968).

31 Excélsior (August 2, 1968).

32 “Nace el movimiento: Entrevista con Gilberto Guevara Niebla.” Nexos, 121 (January1 1988). 25Google Scholar.

33 Stevens. Protest and Response in Mexico, 211.

34 The best account of the student strike of 1966 is Segovia, Rafael, “The Strike and its Aftermath: A Narrative and Perspective,” in Fagen, Richard R. and Cornelius, Wayne A., eds., Political Power in Latin America: Seven Confrontations (Englewood Cliffs, NY. 1970). 316–23Google Scholar. For the railroad and doctor's strike, see Stevens. Protest and Response in Mexico, 99–184.

35 New York Times (August 4. 1968).

36 Writing on September 1. Jorge Aguilar Mora was one of the first to recognize formally that the followers of the movement had become its leaders (“La transformación del movimiento,” La Cultura en México [September 18, 1968]). The most thorough analysis of the Mexican student movement is Sergio Zermeño. México: Una democracia utópica. El movimiento estudiantil del 68 (Mexico, 1978)Google Scholar, who also points systematically to the broad differences between seasoned leaders and the “large radical base.” Zermeño's arguments run in a different direction from those that will be attempted here, for he does not seek to trace the behavior of the students to historical roots, nor does he examine the wellsprings of legitimacy in Mexico which motivated much of the student behavior.

In his recent work. El hábito de la Utopía: análisis del imaginario sociopolítico del movimiento estudiantil de México, 1968 (Mexico, 1993). 206–14Google Scholar, César Gilabert follows up on Zermeño's ideas, together with the writings of Mikail Bakhtin, so much in vogue these days, to point to the spontaneous quotidian collectivity that marked the movement. He speaks of the festivity and carnival to point to a future Utopian democracy in the making within the movement. Unfortunately, Gilabert does not include the diálogo público as a part of this collective behavior, regarding it instead as a mere set of negotiated posturings on both sides.

37 Niebla, Guevara, “El movimiento a la ofensiva.” Nexos, 121 (January 1988). 29–30Google Scholar.

38 Palerm, Angel. “El movimiento estudiantil: Notas sobre un caso,” Comunidad, 4:17 (February 1969). 93Google Scholar. Palerm wrote four different pieces in Comunidad (February. April, June, and August 1969). Only at the end did he identify himself, having written as “Professor A” in order to appear more objective to his readership in his assessment of the student movement.

39 A high school student who wrote anonymously in the midst of the movement recalled the profound silence, the stupor, indignation, and disbelief with which he and his fellow classmates received the news of the destruction of the door to the Preparatoria on San Ildefonso (“El final de julio: testimonio sobre el movimiento estudiantil. [texto de un lider estudiantil].” La Cultura en México [September 11. 1968]).

40 Monsiváis. Dias de guardar, 244.

41 The best testimonial account of what happened on this day is Niebla's, Gilberto Guevara. “5 de Agosto. 1968: la primera autonomiá.” Nexos. 9 (September 1978). 7–11Google Scholar, where he clearly reveals his surprise at the outpouring of support the leaders suddenly obtained and how the early participation of Javier Barros Sierra quickly transformed the student movement into something new and unpredictable.

42 Siempre¡ (August 14. 1968).

43 Most of these declarations are brought together in Ramírez, Ramón, ed., El movimiento estudiamil de México: Julio/diciembre de 1968, vol. 11 (Mexico, 1969)Google Scholar.

44 “Tregua Olímpica: ¡Es por México!” Siempre! (July 24. 1968).

45 El Nacional (August 18. 1968). 6.

46 The two main government-sponsored student organizations were the Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación (MURO). in the UNAM. and the Federación Nacional de Estudiantes Técnicos (FNET), at the Politécnico.

47 Luis Suarez. “Al abrir el dialogo con Siempre! los dirigentes del movimiento juvenil dicen qué quieren y por qué luchan.” Siempre! (August 28. 1968), 19.

48 The first official indication of what the students might have in mind came as early as August 16 (Consejo Nacional de Huelga. “Al Puehlo de México, a los Estudiantes. Maestros y Padres de Familia,” El Día, [August 16. 1968]).

49 On August 15. Celso Delgado, a student, published an open letter to the President in “Primera Plana en Pocas Lineas” of El Día, in which he went so far as to say that the President “personally be the one to [have] dialogue with the Mexican students.”

50 In one of the first lengthy arguments calling for a diálogo. in El Nacional, on August 3, “Necesidad del diálogo,” the editorialist pointed out that most of the actors in the conflict, especially the president and the students who had participated in the orderly march headed by Barros Sierra, had everything to gain from a diálogo. By August 8 in El Nacional, Juan Jerónimo Beltrán. “Urgencia de un diálogo eficaz” was already a great deal more nervous, wondering whether the strike would bring social harmony to an end and result in an American invasion, if a real dialogue was not initiated soon.

While the official version of the events produced by the militants points to a press that was uniformly against them. I am struck by the multiple and constant efforts on the part of most editorialists and columnists, most of whom wrote about little else between July and October, to search for a compromise, to ask both sides to give something up. One of the best examples of the middle road between the two contending sides which so many journalists travelled, was written by one of Mexico's most highly regarded historians. Daniel Cosío Villegas. “Frente a Los Hechos. Examen de Conciencia,” Excélsior (August 16, 1968). This column marked his return to public writing after years in public office.

51 “Urge Encontrar Soluciones.” El Nacional. (August 15. 1968).

52 Palerm, “El movimiento estudiantil: Notas sobre un caso.” (February 1969), 99.

53 Monsiváis. Días de guardar: p. 271.

54 This point is nicely made by Angel Palerm as an outsider to the movement. “El movimiento estudiantil: Notas sobre un caso” (April 1969), 220. This sense of euphoria also fills most of the testimonial literature.

55 Margarita Suzan, “Honestamente la verdad,” Revista de la Universidad (December 1978–January 1979). 15–18.

56 Poniatowska. Fuerte es el silencio, 35.

57 Monsiváis. Días de guardar, 271.

58 Claudia Cortés González, a political science student, sensed the shift that was taking place. “I never really thought about Zapata as a symbol of the students, as an emblem. Zapata had been integrated into the bourgeois ideology; the PRI appropriated him …. We didn't think about Pancho Villa either. That one never even crossed our minds!” Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco, 46.

59 Monsiváis. Días de guardar, 253.

60 Poniatowska. La noche de Tlateloco, 48.

61 The Christian Science Monitor (August 16. 1968).

62 Stevens, Protest and Response in Mexico, 173–4.

63 Taibo, Paco Ignacio II. 68 (Mexico, 1991). 81. 68Google Scholar.

64 Monsiváis, Días de guarder, 270. 272.

65 I refer to the summons as mysterious because it is the only one that was anonymous of the thousands of proclamations that appeared in the newspapers expressing different positions regarding the student protests. All others clearly stated the organization which paid for it and the individuals associated with it. (Excélsior [September 13, 1968]).

66 For an analysis of the role of the brigades, see Palerm, Angel, 2. Comunidad, 4:18. 227–9Google Scholar. For the sense of euphoria that accompanied the brigades, see also Poniatowska. La noche de Tlatelolco, 29–30. and Monsiváis. Días de guardar, 267–9: also Zermeño. Mexico: Una democracia utópica. 167–74.

67 For some of the ways in which the actions and the beliefs of the students created distances with the pueblo, see Braun, Herbert. “Los momentos del 68.” Nexos 123 (March 1988). 67–69Google Scholar (reprint. Pensavel 68, 177–80).

68 New York Times (August 4, 1968).

69 New York Times (August 14. 1968).

70 Cope. The Limits of Racial Domination, 142.

71 El Nacional (August 14. 1968).

72 Taylor. Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages, 115.

73 There is considerable controversy surrounding the actions of the students on this date. Most of the student accounts state that the decision to remain in the Zocalo that night was either made spontaneously by the marchers, once they were there and found the doors of the National Palace closed and all the lights of the building turned off, or by Socrates Campos Lemos. a student leader held by many to be an agent provocateur.

The editors of the 1988 retrospective in Nexos, 121 (January 1988). appear to waffle on the issue. They state that the CNH had declared on September 23 that “a few contingents of students would remain a few hours in that place” and that once there. Sócrates Campos Lemos made his own demand that the students remain until September 1, p. 33.

El National reported on the morning of the demonstration that the students made plans for 50 representatives of each of the 70 schools participating in the strike, that is. a total of 3,500 students, to remain in a “permanent demonstration” and that some students were trying to argue against such an action. It is possible, of course, that El National and outside instigators were working together to get students to undertake such a highly controversial action, so that the military could then forcefully attack the students.

74 Luis Gonzàlez de Alba. “1968: La fiesta y la tragedia.” in Nexos, 189 (September 1993). 23-31; Paco Ignacio Taibo II. 68. Both testimonials were a long time in coming, as both authors felt a deep need to write and could not. González de Alba also wrote the first novel of the student movement. Los dìas v los años (Mexico. 1971).

75 González de Alba. “1968,” 29. 28.

76 Taiho II. 68.

77 Gonzàlez de Alba, “1968.” 29.

78 Taibo II. 68, 67.

79 Ibid., 57.

80 For a sense as the events were unfolding of the militants' understanding of how fundamentally at odds a diálogo público was with the authoritarian government, and thus of its impossibility, see the analysis by the well-known political scientist, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova. “El conflicto estudiantil: decisiones y riesgos.” Excélsior (September 13. 1968).

81 See the September 28 editorial in Sucesos, “Todos a clase. pero sin claudicar: Todo està previsto en nuestras leyes, menos el diàlogo con el Jefe de Estado.” Also. “Ley en Mano, Responde el Gobiemo a los Huelguistas” (Excélsior [September 18. 1968]).

82 These pamphlets' statements and declarations, among hundreds of others, are conveniently collected in Ramón Ramírez, ed., El movimiento estudiantil de México: Julio/diciembre de 1968.

83 A good critique of diálogo público is “¿Circo o diálogo?” written by the Grupo Ariel de la Generación 1929 (Excélsior [September 10, 1968], 10-A) : “Every discussion, if it is formal and has the desire to resolve problems with the authorities, has to be carried out in an enclosed, official space, in the offices of the corresponding government entity. There is no reason for it to take place before a screaming, chanting crowd that intimidates the government functionary and lowers his condition as a servant of Mexico.”

84 See the excerpts of the President's brief correspondence in mid-August with one of Mexico's most venerated historians. Villegas, Daniel Cosfo. Memorias (Mexico. 1976). 259–63Google Scholar.

85 Philip Agee, the Central Intelligence Agency operative stationed in Mexico at the time, read an intelligence report on the afternoon of September 25 that “gave the strong impression that the President is confused and disoriented, without a plan or decision on what to do next” (Inside the Company: CIA Diary [London. 1975], 556Google Scholar).

86 Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination, 138-43; Taylor. Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages. 116-17.

87 Excélsior (September 2, 1968). See Braun, Herbert. “Díaz Ordaz y Marcuse,” in Nexus, 121 (January 1988), 37–39Google Scholar.

88 González de Alba. “1968.” 29.

89 González de Alba and Taibo II begin to share in the tragedy of Tlatelolco. González de Alba describes Tlatelolco as a series of on-the-spot decisions taken in moments of extreme confusion by fearful soldiers who mistakenly shot against one another, with the crowd unfortunately trapped in between. And he concludes that “we student leaders proved with the crime of October 2 what we had always been saying: the government was incapable of responding unless it was by repressing. In part this was true, in part it was what in social psychology is known as “the self-fulfilling prophecy”, except that we never expected that it would come about with such a level of horror. I don't think they did either, neither the army nor the government” (p. 31).

The first public account of the massacre which may complement González de Alba's is that of the diplomat Jorge Castañieda. who witnessed the violence from a window of the Ministry of Foreign Relations, facing the plaza. In a letter addressed to the New York Times on October 11 and published on October 21. he stated that the firing began from the fourth floor of Chihauhua Building, behind the podium the students were using. He does not know in what direction the shots were fired, or by whom, but that it was widely reported that armed plainclothes policemen had attempted to reach the balcony from inside the building. Once the soldiers appeared on the plaza, most of the students had already dispersed. From this account it appears that the soldiers did not attack a multitude of defenseless students, as was widely reported in the international press, and in the New York Times on October 3.

Citing the work of Michael Dziedzic. Roderic Ai Camp states that a decision to clear the square was made by the secretary of defense. General Marcelino García Barragán. Some sources hold that the President was conveniently out of town, and another that he was informed beforehand by the general (Generals in the Palucio: The Militaiy in Modern Mexico [New York. 1992], 27–28Google Scholar).

90 On October 4, 1968, the New York Times reported that the official toll was 28 dead and 200 wounded, but that there could be little doubt that at least 49 were dead, 500 wounded, and 1,500 taken prisoner. The numbers have been expanding exponentially over the years. In 1986, the well known politician, diplomat and historian, Edmundo Flores, claimed that a few more than 800 had died at Tlatelolco (“La UNAM no engendró el conflicto,” Excélsior [June 1. 1986]).

91 Poniatowska. Fuerte es el silencio, 74-75.

92 New York Times (September 9, 1968).

93 The full text of his speech was reproduced in nearly every newspaper of the city on August 2 and 3.

94 Greenfeld. Nationalism, 487-8.

95 Greenfeld, Liah. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, (Cambridge. MA. 1992), 490Google Scholar.

96 Greenfeld, for example, offers an uncritical view of the individualistic form of nationalism which provides little sense of how inequalities and alienations are constructed thereby and a highly negative interpretation of collectivist nationalism that focuses on the role or ressentiment in it. Most of the contemporary literature focuses on the dignity of the individual. See Dealy, Glen Caudill. The Latin Americans: Spirit and Ethos (Boulder. 1992). 98–107Google Scholar; Zeldin, Theodore. An Intimate History of Humanity (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. especially 1-19; Dillon, Robin S., ed., Dignity, Character and Self-Respect (New York. 1995)Google Scholar; Bailey, F. G.. The Kingdom of Individuals: An Essay on Self-Respect and Obligation (Ithaca, 1993)Google Scholar. And it increasingly appears that in the modern world dignity is being understood as a stoic silence in the face of private or public hardship and as a good way of dying.

97 “El Estudiante Habla; El Gobierno Escucha.” Siempre! (July 3. 1968). An illuminating analysis of the “telepathic interaction” between the President and the people, between “authority” and “popular sentiment” was written by Manuel Moreno Sanchez, in the midst of the conflict, as he reacted to the President's Informe, “Diálogo con la Juventud: Díaz Ordaz Responde.” Excélsior (September 2, 1968).

98 See, for example, Hugo Gómez Bulnes. “La Inquietud de la Juventud se Manifestó en el Segundo Concurso de Oratoria Masónica.” El Día (July 20. 1968). On July 3. El Día, one of Mexico City's largest daily newspapers, began a special weekly section. “Horizontes de la Juventud,” on the youth of Mexico and the world. The first issue included an article by Jaime Goded Andreu, “Artistas o no, los Jóvenes Mexicanos Están Obligados a Empeñarse en Cambiar la Sociedad.” Three other articles on that day called for a socialist revolution in Mexico, decried the false form of service to the nation which the President called on the students to perform, and claimed that the Mexican Revolution did not allow young people to be young. See also, Javier González Batta, “Se Puso de Relieve la Preocupación por la Juventud de México en el Acto de Homenaje a Juárez en el Hemiciclo,” El Día (July 19, 1968), who asserts that the integration of Mexico's youth into the nation is “the throbbing national question of our time.”

99 Palerm, “El movimiento estudiantil: Notas sobre un caso” (February 1969). 93, 95, 96.

100 El National (July 19, 1968), 1.

101 El Tiempo (May 6, 1968), 8.

102 Ibid, 8.

103 El Tiempo (Apri l 29, 1968), 5.

104 El Tiempo (August 5, 1968), 4.

105 This kind of language filled column after column of all the newspapers throughout Mexico. The typical phrases cited here all came from the weekly El Tiempo (Apri l 29, May 6, May 13. and May 27, 1968).

106 This treatment of the figure of the President in 1968 may best be seen through the newspaper coverage of the President's September 1 Informe. The day was covered with meticulous detail, beginning with the moment the president awakened, his first moves, breakfast, his mood, the clothes he wore, his family, the route he took from Los Pinos to the Palace, the crowds on each side of the road, the look on his face as he got out of the limousine, the parade to the Congress, how he was received there, the number of times his speech was interrupted by applause, and so forth. See the coverage on September 2 in Excelsior, El Día, El National, among others, and also in the weekly El Tiempo (September 9. 1968).

107 Assad, Carlos Martínez. “La voz de los muros.” Nexos, 121 (January 1988). 42Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

108 Taibo II, 68, 36. Another intimate visual description of the President's face can be found in the memoires of the editor of Excélsior, Julio Scherer García, in Los presidentes (Mexico. 1986). 15.

109 It is along these lines that columnist Antonio Vargas MacDonald seeks to dismiss the movement. He sees the young protesters placing the natural anger they feel toward their parents onto the “street against that national father figure, which is the government. In the process the rebels feel as though they are ‘somebody:’ fearless in agression. heroic in punishment” (“¡Pobre juventud mexicana! ¡Quiere luchar y no sabe por qué ni contra quien!,” Siempre! [August 14, 1968]).

This column was written at least a week before the first student march of August 13. Many of Vargas's subsequent columns in Siempre! are considerably less critical of the students. See his “La juventud abre nuevas puertes a la democracia” (August 28), “¿Partido de la juventud?’ (September 4), and “Frente a la represión, la serenidad.” (October 2).

110 As Daniel Cosío Villegas looked into his television screen at the President delivering his Informe, he noticed that the President's demeanor became altered as he came to the subject of the student protests. “Has not the President taken this matter too personally?” he wondered. “La Reaccion Presidencial: Pantalla y Lectura,” Excélsior (September 20, 1968).

111 “El movimiento a la defensiva: Entrevista con Gilberto Guevara Niebla”, Nexos, 121 (January 1988), 32Google Scholar.

112 Octavio Paz points to some suggestive, albeit broadly conceived, similarities between the Mexican student movement and the protests in Eastern Europe (Posdata, 28–31).

113 Octavio Paz offers some illuminating distinctions between the peaceful reformism of the Mexican students and the violent radicalism and “orgiastic, para-religious tonality of the ‘hippies’” in the United States and France (Posdata, 31–4).

114 For an example of the broad and superficial analysis required to turn 1968 into a world-wide phenomenon, see Katsiaficas, George N., The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston, 1987)Google Scholar. who argues that capitalism and its contradictions were the cause of the content and the form of all the student outbreaks that took place in that year. A more thoughtful and nuanced account, but one which remains too simply globalistic, is Berman, Paul, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York, 1996). especially 21–122Google Scholar.

115 Hamon, Hervé and Rotman, Patrick. Génération (Paris, 1988), 2:663Google Scholar.

116 The Port Huron Statement, which turned into the basis of the student movement in the United States and the founding piece of the New Left is centrally about the relationship between the individual and society. “Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today…. Men have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity…. The goal of man and society should be human independence…. This kind of independence does not mean egotistic individualism—the object is not to have one's way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own.” (Miller, James. Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago [New York, 1987]. 332Google Scholar).

See also, along these lines, Diggins, John P.. The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York, 1992)Google Scholar: Evans, Sara M., Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979)Google Scholar: Davidson, Sara. Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties (New York. 1977)Google Scholar.

For differences between the student movement in Germany and the United States—more social in the former, more individualized in the latter—see Habermas, Jürgen, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics (Boston, 1970). 26–28Google Scholar. Habermas's suggestion that the student movements in the industrialized world may in part be understood by a drive for a new psychological immediacy on the part of middle-class youth which is made possible by an era of abundance, advanced technology, and liberal mores and family structures—none of which were prevalent in Mexico at the time—in tension with many still traditional structures, also points to the distinctions that I seek to make here between the movement in Mexico, and in the United States and Europe (pp. 29–30. 43–46).

117 Tipton, Steven M., Getting Saved from the Sixties: Moral Meaning in Conversion and Cultural Change (Berkeley. 1982)Google Scholar.

118 For a highly suggestive exploration into the place of citizenship in Brazil, and by extension perhaps throughout Latin America, see da Matta, Roberto, “The Quest for Citizenship in a Relational Universe.” in Wirth, John D.. Nunes, Edson de Oliveria, and Bogensshild, Thomas F., eds., State and Society in Brazil: Continuity and Change (Boulder, 1987), 307–35Google Scholar. An amplified version of the essay is “‘Do You Know Who You Are Talking to?!’: The Distinction between Individual and Person in Brazil.” in his Carnivals, Rogues and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma (Notre Dame, 1991), 137–97Google Scholar.

119 I am struck by the distinctly different tones with which the students were dealt with in the press, and perhaps even in daily life, during and after the events. In Mexico there were very few who lashed out against the students, whereas in the United States the acrimony, even venom, against the young was unmistakable. See, for example, the following, which all trace their new conservative ideas to a personal, often visceral reaction to the events of 1968: Feuer, Lewis S., The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of the Student Movements (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Hook, Sidney, Academic Freedom and Academic Anarchy (New York. 1969)Google Scholar; Kristol, Irving. Neoconsenatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York, 1987)Google Scholar. See also Brennan, Mary C., Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill. 1995)Google Scholar.

There is little of this literature among the intellectual elite in Mexico. A review of the debates shows that almost everyone speaks well of the students and that the disagreements are, relatively speaking, quite soft. Three minor exceptions to this conciliatory view of the students are Moheno, Roberto Blanco. Tlatelolco: historia de una infamia (Mexico, 1969)Google Scholar; Spota, Luis, La plaza (Mexico, 1972)Google Scholar; and de Anda, Gustavo, La máquina infernal: 1968 (Mexico, 1975)Google Scholar. None has had much of an impact over time. The most positive interpretation of the student movement is the mystical novel by Antonio Velasco Piña. Regina (Mexico. 1987)Google Scholar.

Rather than attack different sectors of society, or the students, most of the debates in Mexico concentrate on the state, which was attacked both from the left and the right. Its central place in the social order, however, is rarely questioned, as it is in the United States today. See Susarrey, Jaime Sánchez, El debate político e intelectual en México (Mexico, 1993)Google Scholar. The first defense of President Díaz Ordaz is the privately published account of his military chief of staff, General Oropeza, Luis Gutiérrez, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz: El hombre, el político, el gobernante (Mexico, 1986Google Scholar).

120 Taibo II, 68, 71, 114, 53–54.

121 Richard Sennett, Authorin; 76.

122 Poniatowska. La noche de Tlatelolco, 34.

123 Julio Scherer García, Los presidentes, 26.

124 Fuerte es el silencio, 63.

125 Niebla, Gilberto Guevara, “Volver al 68,” in Nexos, 190 (October 1993), 31Google Scholar.

126 The traditional arguments on the political repercussions of 1968 are silent on the role of the thousands of students who had so vociferously protested on the streets in 1968, almost as though they ceased to exist once their protest came to an end. The literature stresses elites, members of the state, and the most well-known intellectuals, perhaps reflecting the deeply ingrained idea that it is elites who make the history of Mexico. The literature stresses the growing distance that takes place between these intellectuals and the state, and focuses on the actions of the state to co-opt and re-integrate them. Examples are Miguel Basáñez, La lucha por la hegemonía en México, 185–209; Shapira, Yoram, “Mexico: The Impact of the 1968 Student Protest on Echeverría's Reformism,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 19:4 (1977), 557–580CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth Century Mexico (Austin, 1985), 206–22Google Scholar, Roderic A. Camp points to the many connections, both historically and after 1968, between the state and the intellectuals, but places emphasis on the break between the two as a result of Tlatelolco, concluding that the state has successfully co-opted many of the intellectuals, wh o in turn have sold themselves to the state.

127 The state's first public defense of Diaz Ordaz and the first public criticism of the student movement would not appear until 1997, twenty-nine years later. During the ceremony commemorating the eighteenth anniversary of the President's death, his military chief of staff in 1968, General Luis Gutiérrez Oropeza, eulogized the President as a statesman who had saved Mexico from the impending chaos and claimed that the student movement was the result of the machinations of an international Communist conspiracy against Mexico. In an obvious effort to revindicate the former President as the PRI was losing control of the political system in the wake of the July 6 elections, Emilio Chuayfett, the Secretary of the Interior, also attended the ceremony and referred to Díaz Ordaz as a “patriot.” El Nacional, (July 16, 1997), 5; La Jornada (July 16, 1997), 9.

128 Excélsior (September 2, 1969).

129 For the many futile efforts by Julio Scherer García, then the editor-in chief of Excélsior to get the president to talk about the events in 1969 before he left office, see his Los presidentes, 27–28. The president understood the journalist's effort to talk about the Tlatelolco as a desire on his part to do harm to Mexico. The two men did talk often about other subjects. In 1977, when Diaz Ordaz was appointed his nation's ambassador to Spain, he did defend himself while placing the blame on dark conspiratorial forces that aimed to do harm to Mexico (Excélsior [April 13, 1977]).

130 The official view of the militants on the silence of the state can be seen in Hiriart, Hugo, “El silencio antidemocrático,” Nexos, 121 (January 1988), 15Google Scholar. Hiriart understands the silence as a sign of weakness of the state, its fragility, and its authoritarian inability to communicate openly and democratically with the society. A more illuminating effort to explain the silence among the leaders of the state, in which the state is not conceived of simply as ineffectual, is Warman, Arturo, “Secretos de familia,” Nexos, 121 (January 1988), 63–64Google Scholar.

131 The strategy of the state—if that is what it was—to encourage the criticism of the intellectuals, may well have worked. In 1981. Enrique Krauze offered a warning, based in part on the lessons from the integration of some in the intellectual elite into the administration of Luis Echeverría (1970–76). Krauze feared that many in the Generation of 1968 would end up “building from within” the state, abdicating their roles as real social critics. (“Los temples de la cultura,” in Camp., Roderic A. et al. , eds., Los intelectuales y el poder en México: Memorias de la VI Conferencia de Historicidores Mexicanos y Estadounidenses [Mexico, 1991] 595–605)Google Scholar.

Writing in Nexos, 123 in (March 1988). Miguel Basáñiez made explicit the evolving connections between the state and the intellectual elite, principally the writers in Nexos and Vuelta, whom he traces to the experience of 1968. “Now, twenty years later, as the students of 1968 begin to arrive at social, economic and political power … their task is to rebuild the consensus which after 50 years began to be broken in 1968” (“1968 y el México nuevo” (Nexos, 123 [March 1988], 16). The inclusion of Vuelta here may be unfair, as most of its writers, especially Octavio Paz and Enrique Krauze have remained critical of the state, while Nexos, under the direction of Hector Aguilar Camín, gave itself over to the regime of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94).

As the Salinas years were drawing to an end, Sergio Zermeno, who wrote the most thorough history of the 1968 student movement, points us in a more critical direction. He shows how the intellectuals drew close to the state after 1968 through a reformist ideology, as opposed to more radical alternatives, and concludes with the highly imaginative ways in which Salinas brought the intellectuals into his neo-liberal agenda. The result, according to Zermeño, is a social order deeply riven by economic inequalities in which the intellectuals have been effectively separated from the real lives of the Mexican people (Zermeño, Sergio, “Intellectuals and the State in the ‘Lost Decade,’” in Harvey, Neil, ed., Mexico: Dilemmas of Transition [London, 1993], 279–98Google Scholar).

In 1996 political scientist Jorge G. Castañeda concluded that “the people who had believed that things really had changed in Mexico either wanted to believe it because they had an interest in doing so, or they simply didn't want to look hard enough” (cited by Anthony de Palma, “How a Tortilla Empire Was Built on Favoritism. The New York Times [February 15, 1996], 1). Castañeda and Zermeño are but two of many intellectuals who have remained critical and outside of the state.

132 Monsiváis, Carlos, “Notas en torno a la moral social en México.” Trimestre Politico, 1:2 (October–December. 1975). 63–64Google Scholar.

133 Although largely unconcerned with the visions and ideals that may be held by those who join the state, the literature on state recruitment in Mexico shows that no significant changes can be detected before and after 1968. See Smith, Peter H., Labyrinths of Power: Political Recruitment in Twentieth Century Mexico (Princeton, 1979)Google Scholar; Cardona, Armando Rendón, La renovación de la clase político en México (Mexico, 1990)Google Scholar; and Fanías, Francisco Suárez, Elite, tecnocracia y movilidad politico en México (Mexico, 1991)Google Scholar. Camp., Roderic AiPolitical Recruitment Across Two Centuries: Mexico, 1884–1991 (Austin, 1995), 88Google Scholar, states that after the Díaz Ordaz administration there was a substantial 36 percent decline in politicians without a college degree and a 14 percent increase in those with graduate training who held places in high office.

134 Miguel Angel Centeno argues that members of the “radicalized” generation of 1968 were coopted, first into the administration of Luis Echeverriá, and then principally by de Gortari, Salinas: “[T]he apparent economic and social conservatism of the present technocrats would imply a radical break from the beliefs of their youth” (Democracy Within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico) [University Park, PA, 1994], 152Google Scholar).

135 “Life in Mexico doesn't tolerate the margins, the outsides…. It doesn't admit disbelievers or heretics, it doesn't believe in a different morality” (Monsiváis, “Notas en torno a la moral social,” 73).

136 I drew these conclusions in an initial sort of way in Braun, Herbert, “¿Te acuerdas del 68,” Nexos, 135 (March 1989). 66Google Scholar.