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Defining the Space of Mexico’68: Heroic Masculinity in the Prison and “Women” in the Streets

2003; Duke University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-83-4-617

1527-1900

Lessie Jo Frazier, Déborah Cohen,

Youth, Politics, and Society

In 2001 we attended a Mexico City conference on twentieth-century student activism featuring a plenary session with four prominent leaders from Mexico’s 1968 student movement.1 We were struck by how different these men’sBoth authors shared equally in the research and writing of this piece, which—as anyone who has collaborated will tell you—is in some ways a lot more work than going it alone, but also certainly more rewarding. Partial funding came from the University of Chicago and the University of South Carolina. We thank Mary Kay Vaughan and the two HAHR readers for their extraordinarily provocative comments and suggestions. We benefited from John French’s invitation to present this work at Duke University’s Latin American Labor History seminar in April 2002, where we especially gained from comments by Susan Gauss, Jeffrey Gould, Mark Alan Healy, Daniel James, Jocelyn Olcott, and Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes. We also thank the participants of the other seminars and conferences where we have presented portions of this work: the Five Colleges Mexican Studies Workshop (2002), especially Pamela Voekel, Kristin Pesola, and Velma García; the Seminario Nacional Movimientos Estudiantiles Mexicanos en el Siglo XX (UNAM, Mexico, D.F., 2001), especially Silvia Díaz Escoto; the 2001 LASA meetings, in particular, Ann Blum, Elizabeth Maier, Edward McCaughan, Barry Carr, and Eric Zolov; Eileen Boris, the commentator on our panel at the 2001 Social Science History Association meetings; and the 2002 European Social Science History meetings. We thank Kathryn Litherland for extraordinary editing, Jeanne Barker Nunn for editorial assistance, Jodi Barnes for research assistance, and John Coatsworth, Peter Guardino, and Friedrich Katz for initial and ongoing encouragement. Our initial research in 1989 was facilitated by Sigfrido Reyes, Sara Lovera, Elena Urrutia, and Ilán Semo. While in Mexico (1999), we appreciated support from Gabriela Cano, Graciela Hernández, Francisco Zapata, and El Colegio de México. Most of all, we thank Mari Carmen Fernández for over a dozen years of hospitality, friendship, and incisive feedback, as well as all the people with whom we conducted oral histories in Mexico City. Without their willingness to discuss their experiences, we would have no project. narratives were from those told to us by women who had participated in Mexican radical student organizations. We wondered how these men had come to dominate public discourse about ’68, almost as spokesmen of a generation. In this article we explore this public discourse by looking at the complex convergences and divergences between men’s and women’s accounts of the movement to reveal the gendered underpinnings of Mexican political culture. Narratives centered on the leaders’ accounts have too narrowly defined the space of the movement; consequently, juxtaposing the accounts of male leaders and female participants breaks open these definitions and expands our understanding of historical agency and the possibilities for political subjectivity in this movement.2These ’68 leaders claimed that student movements were central to Mexico’s push towards democracy, which they attributed to the way in which the university as a particular kind of civic space brings together those who are—in their words—”informed,” “intelligent,” and trained to make decisions based on “reason”—all traits commonly associated with middle-class masculinity. Their description of a proper student movement, however, with its masculine qualities of intelligence and reasoned sentiment, disregards the unruly feminine emotion and uncontrolled spontaneity of the masses, which leaders, as a political vanguard, were supposed to mold into a disciplined revolutionary force.3This dual logic of masculine reasoning/feminine emotion is made more complicated in the presentation of Marcelino Perelló, who compared ’68 move ment leaders to Evariste Galois, the nineteenth-century French mathematical prodigy. According to Perelló, Galois found his brilliance underappreciated by the French monarchy and, in the defining moment of Perelló’s story, made an impudent toast at a banquet for King Louis-Philippe, for which he was drawn into a fatal duel. This story, which exalts the heroic masculinity of the youthful male body defying the patriarchal state, replayed itself, Perelló argued, in aspects of the ’68 student movement. Although university students attempted to mobilize diverse sectors of society, the movement’s core was still composed of privileged youth destined to assume key positions within the social and political elite.4 Not surprisingly, then, public narratives of ’68 have not only been predominantly male but also predominantly elite. This elite male leader version has become the lens through which ’68 and subsequent movements have been understood and measured.5Male leaders’ public narratives foreground strategic debates that took place within the movement’s highest institution (the Consejo Nacional de Huelga, or CNH), negotiations between student leaders and the state, and major dramatic events such as large demonstrations and rallies. Indeed, most analyses of the movement have focused on leaders and the state in order to understand a struggle that both called attention to state authoritarianism and itself fostered political participation in a broad sense. Listening to these accounts at the conference, we asked ourselves: given the character of the movement, why have scholars concentrated on its upper echelons and its interactions with the state? Why have they not more thoroughly investigated base participation and its impact on the movement, both locally and generally?6 We left the panel amazed at the striking differences—and curious points of similarity—between the version of the movement described by these male leaders and the stories told by women participants, which we would present later at the same conference.Cultural critic Armando Bartra has suggested that that, in fact, there “are many ’68s.”7 Yet male leaders’ published narratives have reduced this multiplicity to just one of the possible many—one that centers on their actions, lives, and political visions.8 While we do not want to minimize their importance, their commitment to political struggle, or the horror of their prison experiences, we do want to call attention to the ways in which these leaders’ top-down public narratives9 have obscured the mass participation that both made the movement so powerful and threatening to the state and indirectly catapulted its leaders into lasting prominence.10In counterposing male leaders’ published accounts with our oral histories of female participants, we challenge the singular version congealed in leaders’ public narratives, which they “began to elaborate . . . in the long afternoons of forced inactivity” in prison.11 In fact, this official version emerged not in the assemblies and marches of the four primary months of the movement, but in the prison. Thus, what leaders’ narratives most vividly reveal is the dynamic of this space, a dynamic mistaken for the movement itself, effectively erasing the participation of hundreds of thousands of university and high school students, housewives, workers, and other citizens who gave the movement its unique character and its place in Mexico’s recent history.Women participants, in contrast, have generally not relayed their experiences through published interviews or memoirs, but instead through novels and other creative texts.12 Genres are often highly gendered; in this case, memoirs have clearer purchase on the status of historical document than do novels, a distinction that has limited the impact of women’s texts on the official history.13 Still, we would caution that women’s oral histories are not necessarily a “feminine” or “private” genre; our interviewees, for the most part professionals familiar and comfortable with the interview process, knew that we planned to write a scholarly article for publication in Mexico. The oral history interview, especially in this case, is as much a public performance as is the memoir, and both often tease public/private boundaries.Just as it would be a mistake to map the differences between genres neatly onto gender dichotomies, our understanding of the gendering of social spaces must be equally nuanced.14 We understand the various spaces of the movement as porous ones within which social, cultural, and political relations and practices were reconfigured.15 The actions recounted in women’s oral histories primarily took place in “public” spaces: the campus, the street, and the prison. In examining these spaces, and the ways in which various actors occupied and transversed them, we challenge the automatic labeling of spaces as either male/public or female/private. Women’s oral histories—like male leaders’ published narratives—reflect women’s political formation in multiple spaces, even as they explore the relational aspects of activism foregrounded in this article.This discussion highlights the gendering of political subjectivity, with leadership overdetermined as male and el pueblo, or “the people” (understood in populist rhetoric as the beneficiaries of that leadership) as female.16 This gendered dynamic of political culture has dramatically skewed understandings of the ’68 student movement and its legacies precisely because it was mapped onto other gendered political tensions: most specifically the relationship between leadership and base participants.To unpack this gendering of Mexican political culture, we first lay out a timeline of the central months of ’68, focusing on Mexico City.17 Next, we use former leaders’ memoirs to explore the space of the prison, proposing that these memoirs are the product of, and a window onto, the prison, shaping its role in male leaders’ subjectivity and positioning them as the movement’s official spokesmen. Finally, we analyze women’s base participation as retold in oral histories. We challenge the leadership-centered approach of previous analyses: why would a mass movement critiquing authoritarianism be examined solely through the lens of its leadership? Focusing on women’s participation enables us to look at the experiences of a sector that, though defined as “non-vanguard” within Mexican political culture, found ways of participating that were more in line with the movement’s own political convictions. Yet the leadership-centered perspective of official history permeated women’s understanding of both their own participation and the goals and successes of the movement itself. We argue that this entrenched leader-centric framing effectively relegated the movement’s profound social and cultural consequences to the realm of the personal-as-nonpolitical, stripping the movement of its complexity and implications.Although we incorporate base participants’ words and understandings into our analyses of the movement, we do not claim that their vision of the movement is the “real” one or that the sum total of their experiences comprises a singular “women’s” perspective. Rather, we challenge the inherent logic of a gendered political rhetoric that not only determines who is and who is not a political actor or subject but that also maps the division between leader/political actor and participant/el pueblo onto the space of the movement, highlighting the leader-dominated decision-making bodies as the place of politics. Only by questioning this gendered political logic—that simultaneously defines certain individuals as political actors and certain spaces as the terrain of political action—can we begin to grasp the movement’s lasting impact: the links between the social and cultural transformations that Mexico underwent in its aftermath and the changes in formal political practices vis-à-vis the central state.From the outset, Mexico’s political elite regarded 1968 as a pivotal year for the nation. As the first so-called third-world country to host the Olympics, Mexico would showcase its state-promoted “Mexican miracle” of rapid industrialization and urbanization and announce to the world its arrival as a modern nation-state. It was also the year that a new official presidential candidate would be named, entailing intense, behind-the-scenes political maneuvering within the PRI, the centerpiece of Mexico’s single-party system.In most accounts, the movement began in late July with a rumble between vocational-school students. This fight was brutally broken up by the police, who chased students back into their schools and beat anyone in their path, including teachers trying to calm the situation.18 Subsequently, marchers from the Instituto Politécnico who were protesting this incident met up with student demonstrators celebrating the July 26 anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. As the two demonstrations merged in the center of the city, they met further police brutality. In reaction to this police violence, a broader front formed to challenge the authoritarian workings of the government.The following days brought clashes between police and students. In retaliation for these confrontations, the military attacked the principal entrance of a college preparatory school. In protest, the rector of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) lowered the university’s flag to half-staff. Students at UNAM, the Politécnico, and many smaller institutions and secondary schools declared a strike and demanded the punishment of state aggressors. Each school sent two students to serve on the newly formed Comité Nacional de Huelga, a body of about two hundred representatives. The students received support from various trade unions, especially the railway workers’ and teachers’ unions, who themselves had experienced recent confrontations with the state. Nearly half a million students engaged in multiple forms of protest: leafleting, street theater, publishing propaganda, and, along with other supporters, large-scale street demonstrations. Together, they pressured the government to punish those responsible for state aggression, to compensate the victims and their families, and to grant freedom to political prisoners from earlier struggles. The government, a one-party system that invested inordinate political power in the president, responded by sending the military to occupy UNAM and the Politécnico, desperately wanting to reimpose public order before the opening of the Olympics in October.On the evening of October 2, over ten thousand protestors rallied peacefully in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (also referred to as Tlatelolco). Shots rang out, sending people running for cover. The cross fire between rival military, police, and other security forces left hundreds dead or injured. While the state acknowledged only a handful of deaths, unofficial totals reached upward of seven hundred. In addition to the dead and wounded, almost three thousand leaders and activists were rounded up and taken to a military camp for interrogation. They were expeditiously tried, and three hundred were imprisoned at Lecumberri prison, some remaining until mid-1971.19 The movement was then pushed underground. Some activists joined the urban guerilla movements of the early 1970s that were summarily extinguished in a brief and effective dirty war. Others renewed their activism following the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the emergence of a viable opposition party in 1988.20 Then-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz shouldered most of the political fallout for the violence, while the political system closed ranks and did not reopen until Mexico faced recession in the mid-to-late 1970s and imminent bankruptcy in the early 1980s, at that point even absorbing a number of the ’68 leaders.The standard, event-based narrative of the movement starts with a concrete launching point—the initial police aggression. It foregrounds the organizing of the CNH, its negotiation with the state, and the student and then military occupation of the university; it culminates with the arrest of movement leaders and finishes with the denouement of the mopping up of the leadership across Mexico. This standard version limits the movement to those short four months between July and October. We unpack and recontextualize this standard narrative by foregrounding the relationship between “the political” and other social and cultural dynamics, especially in the constitution of political subjectivities—who can claim to be a historical protagonist and the realms in which these protagonists operate. While men’s narratives ostensibly follow this chronology and emphasize the negotiation between student leaders and the state, they actually anchor their narratives in their subsequent experiences as political prisoners.Our objective is neither to debunk men’s narratives nor to simply supplement this history with women’s experiences.21 Instead, by reading both sets of narratives in relation to one another we gain a different perspective on ’68, the spaces in which it was lived, and the kinds of historical subjectivities to which it gave rise.Male leaders’ memoirs simultaneously contribute to a universalist discourse about the movement—in which their experiences represent the entire range of possibilities for movement participation—and assert the particularity of these men and their roles. By claiming not only the ability, but the right, to speak for “the people,” leaders situate themselves as not of, but above, “the people.” They have used this particularity to claim for themselves a heroic masculinity that in part draws on the “New Man” socialist rhetoric embodied in the figure of Che Guevara—who was, in the words of one leader, a man “who was everywhere, even as a dead man. Our dead man.”22 However, both the universalist nature and heroic content of their narratives were more effects of the prison experience than of the four months of mass mobilization. As critic Barbara Harlow notes, prison narratives “actively engage . . . in the re-definition of the self and the individual in terms of the collective enterprise and struggle” and generate “collective documents, testimonies written by individuals to their common struggle.”23 They typically cast the prison as a liminal space in which moral positions are constituted and solidified in the context of bodily deprivation. The forging of a collective identity as leaders—which simultaneously cast them as individual public personalities—is a universal/particular dual positioning granted to male citizenship.24Leaders’ accounts of the movement showcase as protagonists not only leaders but also the state; by emphasizing the period of state repression rather than the earlier formative process, these narratives further privilege state agency. Thus, the relationship between the state and the student leaders becomes the centerpiece of public narratives, while women and other nonleaders are written out of the story. By appropriating the dual position of individual agent/collective subject, these narratives erase any possibilities for a significant broader collective agency.Some of the writings of leaders and central figures (including Sócrates Campos Lemus, Heberto Castillo, Luis González de Alba, Paco Ignacio Taibo, Gilberto Guevara Niebla, and Raúl Alvarez Garín) were produced during the time of imprisonment or shortly thereafter, while others were written in time for the 20- or 30-year anniversaries.25 Although the tenor of these narratives certainly changes with the times—from 1960s socialist revolutionary rhetoric to a late 1990s language of democracy—these men persistently foregrounded themselves as historical protagonists. Even the memoir of Paco Taibo II, who was exiled rather than jailed, exalts the heroic martyrdom of the prisoners, based on what other leaders told him. The space of the prison overdetermines all these accounts by reconfiguring leaders as spokespersons for an entire generation of activists. The space of the movement and the space of the prison are collapsed as male leaders become the movement’s historical protagonists—a process to which even base participants contributed. This collapsing of spaces speaks both to the trauma of the prison experience and to the importance of the prison as a liminal space, a kind of reform school through which the state recuperated for the political system this particular class of men.Particularly striking in Sócrates Campos Lemus’s account is the way in which discussion of the prison experience overwhelms the actions and events of the broader movement. He opens his account not at the beginning of the movement, but with a dramatic recounting of the military’s march into the Plaza de Tres Culturas. The text then moves to the actions of leaders in the months leading up to the October 2 climax and their subsequent time in prison. This text, like others, secures the leaders’ place in movement history by devoting ample print to spaces where men presided: the CNH and the prison.26 Lecumberri, a massive colonial structure, was designed with a large center space and long radial passageways branching off in various directions, each lined with individual cells. In each cell, recounts Gilberto Guevara Niebla, “were four bunk beds and a narrow walkway, which we practically never used since each of us spent [the time] in his bunk.” The structure’s design had an impact on prisoners’ activities; as Gilberto continues, they “got accustomed to dialogues from a horizontal position, a great way of having a conversation.”27 While Gilberto and others may have been confined physically, the space of the prison provided the time necessary for their intellectual and spiritual growth.28For Heberto Castillo, as for many others, imprisonment was overwhelming. Yet he was able to transcend his physical confinement and experience intellectual liberation. “In the beginning the cell was stifling,” he explained. “I awoke on the second day of confinement with a horrible sensation of asphyxiation. The walls, dirty, damp, putrid, were so close to me that they penetrated my brain, they seared my consciousness, making me understand that physical incarceration . . . brings with it mental incarceration. I understood that my only world, my cosmos, was within myself.” This was suffering of the highest magnitude, a suffering that changed the prisoners’ relationship to the world and to time and space. “In prison, with the passage of time, so slowly, we become lazy, as if our inertia increases as our mass grows. And that which, outside, is left until tomorrow, here it’s left for next week.”29Nevertheless, Heberto continued, “I know, in spite of everything, I am free; no one can submit my conscience to prison . . . I studied history, economics. That’s how I preserved my sanity, physically and mentally.”30 Undergirding such descriptions is a Cartesian separation of mind and body. In the face of bodily degradations imposed by a threatening exterior world, the rational self turns inward—a mapping that leaders inherently drew upon as they linked the prison to the nation. Here the prison is conflated with, and thus condenses, the space of the movement; it is transformed into a space where these men, as political prisoners, express their embodiment of the martyred consciousness of the Mexican people. Leaders experienced their separation from “the people” as the bifurcation of the movement from the nation. Heberto emphasizes this sense of separation: “The real world outside got fatally smaller and also our time. Everything contracted. We, in prison, grew old slowly, at least that’s what we thought. Our loved ones grew very rapidly. . . . To comprehend our reality, we would have had to understand that we were growing old at the same speed as those on the outside.”31 The prison acted as a capsule of space and time set apart from the rest of the world, a utopia of young male homosociality. Leaders sacrificed themselves, through suffering and self-abnegation, in the name of higher ideals.Prisoners’ lives were demarcated by the damp, dark, and dirty prison walls that penetrated their souls and “seared their consciousness.”32 Nevertheless, this pain, loneliness, and deprivation had another side. As Gilberto so vividly explains it, the experience “had two faces.”33 Though no leader would have chosen incarceration, the intensity of that experience produced a very particular sense of community and “yielded an intense interchange of information and judgments; these discussions ended up being very educational. We learned a lot, we had the chance to converse with intelligent and well-informed individuals.”34 Even as bodies were deprived, minds flourished, not unlike a monastic learned society. The time spent behind the walls of Lecumberri provided leaders a physical space to do what they longed to: devote themselves to study. As Gilberto elaborates,Prisoners even once mixed yeast, fruit, water, and sugar in tubes from the infirmary to brew a tasty fermented beverage under the guise of a class experiment.36 They could engage in hours or even days of heated discussions without worrying where the clothes on their backs or their next meal would come from—these necessities of life were provided by prison officials and families and friends who made daily visits.“In Lecumberri, they isolated us,” Gilberto said, “they practiced all forms of extortion and violence. . . . Jail represented an ambivalent experience. In jail you live separated from those you love, from your family, from the spaces in which you’ve lived, from the University. However, we maintained vigorous connections with the outside world.” These connections took various forms. “One was an intellectual connection; the opportunity and possibility of having books and visits from professors . . . allowed us to continue growing academically. In this sense, studying represented a form of freedom that articulated everything that happened to us outside of jail. . . . I wrote my thesis and applied to take my professional exams, but the authorities . . . refused to let jail be declared a satellite university campus.”37 Gilberto describes the prison as an intellectually liberating space, despite the fact that the state attempted to regulate this potential by refusing to establish the prison as a satellite university site.Yet, as one of Heberto’s comments shows, the liberating potential of the prison was always at risk of contamination from that outside world. “The young prisoners watch, read, and listen all day to the media about how Mexico is drowning in disgrace, that abjection is the best ‘virtue’ for a man trying to become a [government] functionary, that loyalty is practiced by stupid ‘stupids’ because they put principles before interests, that love is the motive for mocking, that fidelity doesn’t exist, and that lies can be . . . imposed as long as one has the means to do so.”38 Heberto emphasizes their vulnerability to this corruption: “The young fall easily into the anti-everything . . . anti-party, anti-TomDickandHarry, anti-love, anti-friendship. In their rejection of all traditional values, the young, inside and outside of prison, have intensified their rejection and repudiation of a system that deceives. . . . [T]hey are against everything.” Ultimately, Heberto sympathizes with what he interprets as his younger comrades’ confusion, which “is explainable when they know that an imperial giant like the U.S. . . . is spying on countries in Indochina. It is understandable that the young are against everything when they see that Mexican high officials, without sweat, say there are no political prisoners, when they hear Díaz Ordaz confirm that ‘university autonomy has not been damaged.’”39In this depiction, the prison cell sits between, and acts as an extension of, both the university and the world ripped open by the state’s occupation of the campus. The corruption of the outside world—symbolized by the violation of the university, the very space their movement had offered as a model for national reform—heightened leaders’ attachment to their own perfection through intellectual transcendence of their physical surroundings. They saw themselves as the moral conscience of el pueblo so easily led astray. Yet the prison space was always at risk: some prisoners could not withstand the stories of corruption and capitalist influence; they were always on the verge becoming the state’s intellectual prey, even though others mobilized the prison’s liberating potential to escape the state’s unrelenting grasp.Still, the boundaries of that intellectual liberty were limited by the state, as demonstrated by the state’s refusal to designate the prison as an official satellite campus so that student-prisoners could complete their qualifying exams. The prison became a school for many lessons, one of which was the state-as-father’s domestication of these rebellious youths, a substantial number of whom would be reincorporated into the official political party apparatus and the majority of whom would go on to become respectable, productive citizens and even professors of subsequent generations.From the leaders’ narratives emerges a constant tension and interplay between restriction and freedom, between deprivation and satisfaction, built upon notions of self-sacrifice for a larger goal. These men became symbolic martyrs, emblems of a movement whose supporters had been slaughtered by state forces in full view of thousands and annihilated again in the government’s denials of the massacre. Further echoing Christian symbols and ethos, these leaders turned the other cheek, even as they were renounced as traitors and communists by the government and forgotten by their following. Yet only through this suffering could their minds transcend the commonness and mortality of their bodies and experience freedom.The prison dynamic encapsulated a particular relationship between suffering and thriving that was mediated by a constant threat of violence: viol