‘You want the truth? you can't handle the truth’: poetic representations of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre

Abstract

The 1968 massacre of students demonstrating in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City, has been the subject of a corpus known as la literatura de Tlatelolco, whose aim is to keep the event alive in the collective memory and to provide a true account of the massacre. This article explores poetic representations of the massacre, and seeks to establish whether ‘the truth’ about the massacre is necessary to preserve the event in the collective memory.