BiblioVault - Books about 1946-1970

1968 Mexico

Constellations of Freedom and Democracy

Susana Draper

Duke University Press, 2018

Recognizing the fiftieth anniversary of the protests, strikes, and violent struggles that formed the political and cultural backdrop of 1968 across Europe, the United States, and Latin America, Susana Draper offers a nuanced perspective of the 1968 movement in Mexico. She challenges the dominant cultural narrative of the movement that has emphasized the importance of the October 2nd Tlatelolco Massacre and the responses of male student leaders. From marginal cinema collectives to women’s cooperative experiments, Draper reveals new archives of revolutionary participation that provide insight into how 1968 and its many afterlives are understood in Mexico and beyond. By giving voice to Mexican Marxist philosophers, political prisoners, and women who participated in the movement, Draper counters the canonical memorialization of 1968 by illustrating how many diverse voices inspired alternative forms of political participation. Given the current rise of social movements around the globe, in 1968 Mexico Draper provides a new framework to understand the events of 1968 in order to rethink the everyday existential, political, and philosophical problems of the present.

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Dictablanda

Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968

Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith, eds.

Duke University Press, 2014

In 1910 Mexicans rebelled against an imperfect dictatorship; after 1940 they ended up with what some called the perfect dictatorship. A single party ruled Mexico for over seventy years, holding elections and talking about revolution while overseeing one of the world's most inequitable economies. The contributors to this groundbreaking collection revise earlier interpretations, arguing that state power was not based exclusively on hegemony, corporatism, or violence. Force was real, but it was also exercised by the ruled. It went hand-in-hand with consent, produced by resource regulation, political pragmatism, local autonomies and a popular veto. The result was a dictablanda: a soft authoritarian regime.

This deliberately heterodox volume brings together social historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists to offer a radical new understanding of the emergence and persistence of the modern Mexican state. It also proposes bold, multidisciplinary approaches to critical problems in contemporary politics. With its blend of contested elections, authoritarianism, and resistance, Mexico foreshadowed the hybrid regimes that have spread across much of the globe. Dictablanda suggests how they may endure.

Contributors. Roberto Blancarte, Christopher R. Boyer, Guillermo de la Peña, María Teresa Fernández Aceves, Paul Gillingham, Rogelio Hernández Rodríguez, Alan Knight, Gladys McCormick, Tanalís Padilla, Wil G. Pansters, Andrew Paxman, Jaime Pensado, Pablo Piccato, Thomas Rath, Jeffrey W. Rubin, Benjamin T. Smith, Michael Snodgrass

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The Last Good Neighbor

Mexico in the Global Sixties

Eric Zolov

Duke University Press, 2020

In The Last Good Neighbor Eric Zolov presents a revisionist account of Mexican domestic politics and international relations during the long 1960s, tracing how Mexico emerged from the shadow of FDR's Good Neighbor policy to become a geopolitical player in its own right during the Cold War. Zolov shows how President Adolfo López Mateos (1958–1964) leveraged Mexico's historical ties with the United States while harnessing the left's passionate calls for solidarity with developing nations in a bold attempt to alter the course of global politics. During this period, Mexico forged relationships with the Soviet Bloc, took positions at odds with US interests, and entered the scene of Third World internationalism. Drawing on archival research from Mexico, the United States, and Britain, Zolov gives a broad perspective on the multitudinous, transnational forces that shaped Mexican political culture in ways that challenge standard histories of the period.

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Photopoetics at Tlatelolco

Afterimages of Mexico, 1968

By Samuel Steinberg

University of Texas Press, 2016

In the months leading up to the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, students took to the streets, calling for greater democratization and decrying crackdowns on political resistance by the ruling PRI party. During a mass meeting held at the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco neighborhood, paramilitary forces opened fire on the gathering. The death toll from the massacre remains a contested number, ranging from an official count in the dozens to estimates in the hundreds by journalists and scholars. Rereading the legacy of this tragedy through diverse artistic-political interventions across the decades, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco explores the state’s dual repression—both the massacre’s crushing effects on the movement and the manipulation of cultural discourse and political thought in the aftermath.

Examining artifacts ranging from documentary photography and testimony to poetry, essays, chronicles, cinema, literary texts, video, and performance, Samuel Steinberg considers the broad photographic and photopoetic nature of modern witnessing as well as the specific elements of light (gunfire, flares, camera flashes) that ultimately defined the massacre. Steinberg also demonstrates the ways in which the labels of “massacre” and “sacrifice” inform contemporary perceptions of the state’s blatant and violent repression of unrest. With implications for similar processes throughout the rest of Latin America from the 1960s to the present day, Photopoetics at Tlatelolco provides a powerful new model for understanding the intersection of political history and cultural memory.

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Responding to Crisis in Contemporary Mexico

The Political Writings of Paz, Fuentes, Monsiváis, and Poniatowska

Claire Brewster

University of Arizona Press, 2005

Regarded as among modern Mexico’s foremost creative writers, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Monsiváis, and Elena Poniatowska are also esteemed as analyzers of society, critics of public officials, and both molders and mirrors of public opinion. This book offers a reading of Mexican current affairs from 1968 to 1995 through a comparative study of these four writers’ political work. In hundreds of articles, essays, and comments published in the Mexican press—Excélsior, La Cultura en México, La Jornada, Proceso, and many other publications—these writers tackled current affairs as events unfolded. Yet the lack of detailed examination of their contributions in the press has left a gap in our understanding of their vital role in raising awareness of national concerns as they were happening.

Claire Brewster has mined direct quotations from a host of publications to illustrate the techniques that they used in combating government and editorial restraints. Brewster first addresses the Student Movement of 1968—the violent suppression of which was a watershed in the relationship between the Mexican government and people—and illustrates the ways in which the student crisis affected the writers’ relationships with presidents Luis Echeverría Alvarez and José López Portillo. She next considers the profound social and political repercussions of the 1985 earthquake as described by Poniatowska and Monsiváis and the consequent emergence of Mexican civil society. She then outlines Paz’s and Monsiváis’s vociferous responses to the 1988 presidential election campaigns and their highly contentious result, and lastly she examines the Chiapas rebellion from January to July 1994.

The eloquent Zapatista spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, challenged Mexican writers to a duel of words, and Brewster analyzes the ways in which the four writers took up the gauntlet—and in so doing reveals the development of their political thoughts and their relationships with the Mexican people and the federal government. The work of these four authors charts an important historical era, and a close examination of their essays reveals their maturation as writers and provides an understanding of the development of Mexican society. By bringing their opinions and attitudes to light, Brewster unearths a rich lode of insight into the inner workings of Mexican intellectuals and invites observers of contemporary Mexico to reconsider their role in reflecting social change.

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Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata

The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priísta, 1940–1962

Tanalís Padilla

Duke University Press, 2008

In Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, Tanalís Padilla shows that the period from 1940 to 1968, generally viewed as a time of social and political stability in Mexico, actually saw numerous instances of popular discontent and widespread state repression. Padilla provides a detailed history of a mid-twentieth-century agrarian mobilization in the Mexican state of Morelos, the homeland of Emiliano Zapata. In so doing, she brings to the fore the continuities between the popular struggles surrounding the Mexican Revolution and contemporary rural uprisings such as the Zapatista rebellion.

The peasants known in popular memory as Jaramillistas were led by Rubén Jaramillo (1900–1962). An agrarian leader from Morelos who participated in the Mexican Revolution and fought under Zapata, Jaramillo later became an outspoken defender of the rural poor. The Jaramillistas were inspired by the legacy of the Zapatistas, the peasant army that fought for land and community autonomy with particular tenacity during the Revolution. Padilla examines the way that the Jaramillistas used the legacy of Zapatismo but also transformed, expanded, and updated it in dialogue with other national and international political movements.

The Jaramillistas fought persistently through legal channels for access to land, the means to work it, and sustainable prices for their products, but the Mexican government increasingly closed its doors to rural reform. The government ultimately responded with repression, pushing the Jaramillistas into armed struggle, and transforming their calls for local reform into a broader critique of capitalism. With Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, Padilla sheds new light on the decision to initiate armed struggle, women’s challenges to patriarchal norms, and the ways that campesinos framed their demands in relation to national and international political developments.

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