Between the stone and the mirror: Tlatelolco 1968 massacre and poetic debates on the history of violence

Abstract

On 2 October 1968, ten days before the Olympic Games began in Mexico, a student demonstration in the Plaza of Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco district of the capital was attacked by the army, paramilitary squads and police. Many were killed, including residents of the apartment blocks in the square. The massacre soon became the subject of many debates, studies, and literary works, whose aim is to keep the event alive in the collective memory and to tell “the truth” about what happened that night. The first poetic responses to the massacre told the story of the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec empire as a metaphor or the Tlatelolco massacre. We shall explore these texts to determine whether the parallels drawn between the Tlatelolco 1968 massacre and the pivotal events in Mexican history reveal the habitual or affective nature of “2 de octubre.” The analysis is based on the theory of posthegemony with a particular focus on the notions of affect and habit, exploring these in the context of Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory. The essay focuses on the hitherto unexplored theoretical perspective of the posthegemonic nature of a violent event’s symbolic value.