Defining the space of Mexico '68: Heroic masculinity in the prison and "women" in the streets

HAHR - Hispanic American Historical Review

Volumn 83, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 617-660

  Frazier, Lessie Jo ^a   Cohen, Deborah ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949766316     PISSN: 00182168     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-83-4-617     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. Seminario Nacional Movimientos Estudiantiles Mexicanos en el Siglo XX, IIB-DGAPA, UNAM, Mexico City, 2001
2. Though we realize that these terms index complex theoretical debates, for the purposes of this article agency refers to the capacity of social actors (collective or otherwise) to intentionally impact their circumstances, while subjectivity refers to actors' sense of their own positions. Scholars such as Robert Buffington have pointed out the need for Latin American historians not to collapse the two; Buffington, "Subjectivity and Agency Revisited" (comments for the panel "New Directions in Latin American Gender History" at the annual meeting of the Conference on Latin American History, Chicago, Jan. 2003)
3. On the gendering of el pueblo in postrevolutionary Mexican politics, see Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995)
4. Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Girls, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998)
5. Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico's Northern Frontier (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1995)
6. Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1989)
7. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991)
8. and Mary Kay Vaughan, The Cultural Politics of Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1997)
9. Luis Tomás Cervantes also acknowledges that former leaders tended to end up working in government. See "Luis Tomás Cervantes Cabeza de Vaca," in 1968: Más allá del mito, ed. Esteban Ascencio (Mexico City: Ed. del Milenio, 1998), 37-38
10. José Revueltas and Elena Poniatowska were two important nonacademic writers central to the canonization of the leaders' position within the movement. Poniatowska's La noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de historia oral (Mexico City: Era, 1971), written shortly after the massacre, positioned those in jail as "the movement leadership." Her continued visits during that time reminded this leadership of their connection to el pueblo
11. For another key literary early treatment, see José Revueltas, El apando (Mexico City: Era, 1987 [1969])
12. For recent efforts to shift away from this leader-centered perspective by looking at women's participation, see, for example, Elaine Carey, "Women and Men on the Edge of Modernity: A Cultural History of 1968, Mexico" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of New Mexico, 1999)
13. and Julia Sloan, "The 1968 Student Movement and the Crisis of Mexico's Institutionalized Revolution" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Houston, 2001)
14. For an earlier treatment of women's participation, see our "'No sólo cocinábamos . . .': Historia inédita de la otra mitad de '68," in La transición interrumpida: México, 1968-1988, ed. Ilán Semo (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana; Nueva Imagen, 1993), 75-109
15. Armando Bartra, 1968: El mayo de la revolución (Mexico City: Itaca, 1999), 139. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes and passages have been translated by the authors
16. As a vivid example, see Hermann Bellinghausen's introduction to Pensar el 68, ed. Hermann Bellinghausen and Luis Franco Ramos (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1988), 13, for his discussion of how participants for this 20th-anniversary volume were selected
17. In a kindred critique, Michelle Joffroy has argued that men were able to narrativize their understanding of '68 through memoirs, a gendered genre largely excluding women's voices. Later women writers powerfully conveyed their take on '68 through the autobiographical novel; "Ambiguous Subjects: The Gendered Narrativization of Political Awakening in Mexico," in Love-In, Love-Out: Gender and Sexuality in a Global '68, ed. Lessie Jo Frazier and Deborah Cohen, ms
18. Luis González de Alba, in Sócrates A. Campos Lemus and Juan Sánchez Mendoza, 68: Tiempo del hablar (Mexico City: Sansores y Aljure, 1998), 148
19. On the impact of the novela de '68, see Michelle Joffroy, "Ambiguous Subjects." For fiction considered part of the novela de '68
20. see Martha Rubles, Los octubres del otoño (Mexico: Océano, 1982)
21. María Luisa Puga, Pánico o peligro (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1983)
22. Emma Prieto, Los testigos (Mexico City: Katún, 1985)
23. María Luisa Mendoza, Con él, conmigo, con nosotros tres: Cronovela (Mexico City: Joaquín Motiz, 1971)
24. and Vilma Fuentes, Ayer es nunca jamás (Mexico City: Joaquín Motiz, 1988)
25. For nonreductionist discussions of the gendering of place and space in Mexico, see Deborah Cohen, "Masculinité et visibilité sociale: Le spectacle de l'état dans la construction de la nation mexicaine," Clio: Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés 12 (2000): 163-76
26. as well as Marta Lamas, "By Night, a Street Rite: 'Public' Women of the Night in the Streets of Mexico City,"
27. and Ana María Alonso, "What the Strong Owe to the Weak: Rationality, Domestic Violence, and Governmentality in Nineteenth-Century Mexico," in Gender's Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America, ed. Rosario Montoya, Lessie Jo Frazier, and Janise Hurtig (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
28. For further historical perspectives on gender and place/space in Latin America, see Marisol de la Cadena, "The Racial-Moral Politics of Place: Mestizas and Intellectuals in Turn-of-the-Century Peru,"
29. Lessie Jo Frazier "Forging Democracy and Locality: Democratization, Mental Health, and Reparations in Chile,"
30. and Hurtig, Montoya, and Frazier, "A Desalambrar: Unfencing Gender's Place in Research on Latin America," in Montoya, Frazier, and Hurtig, Gender's Place
31. See also Joseph Scarpaci and Lessie Jo Frazier, "State Terror: Ideology, Protest, and the Gendering of Landscapes in the Southern Cone," Progress in Human Geography 20 (1992): 1-21
32. Our understanding of social processes in particular spaces draws on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999 [1977])
33. The rich scholarship on the gendering of the nation and political cultures more generally includes Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1991)
34. Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem, eds., Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999)
35. Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (London: Routledge, 2000)
36. and Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997)
37. We also conducted informal interviews with activists from other regions; while their accounts share many significant features, the points of comparison merit further study, especially in terms of the movement's time line and the state's response. See Gloria Tirado Villegas, "El movimiento estudiantil poblano, 1968," in Memoria: Seminario Nacional Movimientos Estudiantiles Mexicanos en el Siglo XX [electronic document], ed. Paulo César Cu Mena (Mexico City: UNTAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas; Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico, 2001), 98-104
38. For detailed timelines of the movement, see, among others, Sergio Aguayo Quezada, 1968: Los archivos de la violencia (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1998)
39. and Sergio Zermeño, Mexico: Una democracia utópica. El movimiento estudiantil del 68 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1987 [1978])
40. See also Eric Zolov, "Protest and Counterculture in the 1968 Student Movement in Mexico," in Student Protest: The Sixties and After, ed. Gerard De Groot (London: Longman, 1998), 70-84
41. Notable within a long list of attempts to situate the movement within a longer period of Mexican history are Miguel Basáñez, La lucha por la begemonía en México, 1968-1990 (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1990 [1981])
42. Gilberto Guevara Niebla, La democracia en la calle: Crónica del movimiento estudiantil mexicano (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1988)
43. and Ilán Semo's book El ocaso de los mitos (Mexico City: Alianza, 1989) and edited volume La transición interrumpida
44. For collections of documents see, among others, Ramón Ramírez Gómez's El movimiento estudiantil de México: Julio/diciembre de 1968, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Era, 1969)
45. Aurora Cano Andaluz, 1968: Antología periodística (Mexico City: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, 1993)
46. and Luis Olivera, Impresos sueltos del movimiento estudiantil mexicano, 1968 (Mexico City: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, 1992)
47. Paco Ignacio Taibo II, 68 (Mexico City: Planeta, 1991), 17, emphasis added
48. See also Ileana Rodríguez, Women, Guerillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996)
49. and Rosario Montoya del Solar, Fractured Solidarities, ms
50. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York Methuen, 1987), 120
51. On Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment gendering of citizenship, see, among others, Judith Butler and Joan Wallach Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992)
52. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and 'Female'' in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984)
53. Iris Marion Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997)
54. Pnina Werbner and Nira Yuval Davis, eds., Women, Citizenship, and Difference (London: Zed, 1999)
55. and Arturo Aldama, ed. Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State (Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press 2003)
56. On Latin America, see Verónica Schild, "Neo-liberalism's New Gendered Market Citizens: The 'Civilizing' Dimension of Social Programmes in Chile," Citizenship Studies 4, no. 3 (2000): 275-305
57. and Lucy Taylor, Citizenship, Participation, and Democracy: Changing Dynamics in Chile and Argentina (New York: St. Martin's, 1998)
58. See, for example, Daniel Cazés, ed., Memorial del '68: Relato a much as voces (Mexico City: La Jornada, 1993)
59. Gilberto Guevara Niebla, "Una temporada en Lecumberri," in Bellinghausen and Franco Ramos, Pensar el '68, 136-37
60. The brutal conditions in the colonial prison (where Reason was confined) stand in stark accusatory contrast to Mexico's claims to have won the modernization game, epitomized in the display of the "Mexican Miracle" on the world-historical stage of the Olympics. This issue of gender and Mexico's modernity is further explored in Deborah Cohen's Bordering Modernities: Race, Masculinity, and the Cultural Politics of Mexico-U.S. Migration, ms
61. Heberto Castillo, Si te agarran te van a matar (Mexico City: Proceso, 1998 [1983]), 118, 123
62. Guevara Niebla, "Una temporada en Lecumberri," 135-37
63. For the centrality of love in '68 movements, see Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier, "Beyond Eros," in Frazier and Cohen, Love-In, Love-Out, ms
64. Castillo, Si te agarran, 120-21
65. José Revueltas recounts a similar incident where prisoners exhibited heroic masculinity. He was being held apart from the other political prisoners in a block officially controlled by dangerous criminals. Sõcrates and another leader had been tricked into coming to that block on a day when Sõcrates's frail mother and pregnant wife were visiting. The student prisoners rioted, breaking through a locked doorway to rescue their separated comrades. José declined the opportunity to escape to the political prisoners' wing for two reasons: he had not been held with Socrates' group, and he was worried for the safety of Sócrates's visitors. José Revueltas, "Diario de Lecumberri, Martes, 7 de abril de 1970," Mexico '68: Juventud y revolución (Mexico City: Era, 1998 [1978]), 199-203
66. Nexos, 189
67. quoted in Campos Lemus and Sánchez, '68, 148, 145
68. Heberto Castillo initially entitled his book "Mejor la verdad."
69. Taibo, 68, 48
70. Bartra, 1968, 142
71. Castillo, Se te agarran, 122. This kind of discussion of love draws on Christian discourses of martyrdom
72. Taibo, 68, 15
73. While this diffuse structure gave women the possibility of putting their ideas into practice, Sergio Aguayo Quezada sees this lack of enforced hierarchy as partly a result of the CNH's inability to "formulate a clear direction" for the movement. Quoting leader Luis González de Alba on one specific point in the movement, "All of the first week in September, even though the situation demanded precise directives to orient the students and the entire population, the CNH lost itself in long useless sessions. The brigades continued working without new directives. There was only was road: to resist." That both a prominent historian and a former leader gloss over the limitations of movement institutions bolsters our contention that more research needs to be done to understand the movement's quotidian workings. González de Alba, Los días y los años (Mexico City: Era, 1971), 110
74. quoted in Aguayo, 1968, 313
75. Gilberto Guevara Niebla, interview, 4 Aug. 1989
76. Despite teachers' struggles against the administration, Socrates claims that they, as well as the press, intellectuals, adults, workers, politicians, political parties, and the church, were part of a massive "conspiracy of silence." From his point of view, mothers were the only sector of Mexican society that remained faithful: "[M]others never remained silent. Their best solidarity were their homes, because at dinnertime, one brought five friends or more home to eat and mothers threw water on the beans, but we all ate. When it was time to sleep, they gave us a place to rest, they offered us advice, they prayed for us" (Campos Lemus and Sanchez, '68, 223)
77. Cohen and Frazier, "'No sólo cocinábamos,'" 82
78. For more on the propaganda and its relation to the state, see Elaine Carey, "Deviant Masculinities: Mutual Characterizations of Students and the State in Mexico," in Frazier and Cohen, Love-In, Love-Out
79. Laura Aliearn, "Language and Agency," Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 109-37
80. Not coincidentally, men's narratives of the prison experience cite not their wives', girlfriends', mothers', or daughters' terror at the harassment and threats of physical violence, but their own anger at how prison officials were trying to play around with the prisoners themselves. In fact, these narratives say nothing about how these women felt or experienced this terror. See, for example, "Para sobrevivir, entrevista con Heberto Castillo," in Bellinghausen and Franco Ramos, Pensar el 68, 201-4
81. Lauran Berlant, "America, 'Fat,' and the Fetus," in Gendered Agents: Women and Institutional Knowledge, ed. Silvestra Mariniello and Paul A. Bové (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), 192-244
82. See fns. 3 and 16
83. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice
84. Hugo Hiriart, "La revuelta antiautoritaria," in Bellinghausen and Franco Ramos, Pensar el 68, 17-21, 19
85. Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism, and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988)
86. We build on a problematic that Spivak explored, now a number of years ago, about the limits for conditions of political possibility. However, her thoughtful analysis involves almost exclusively looking at the subaltern voice, whereas we want to situate that problematic in a thicker context of the social movement in question and the relationship between subordinate and dominant subjectivities. Fernando Coronil, in his The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), points to the ambiguities of multiple layers of subordination and power, especially in postcolonial states
87. We see this in a recent retrospective volume featuring a chapter entitled "The Protagonists of Yesterday and Today." This book explores political personalities from 1968, together with Cuáuhtemoc Cárdenas, Ernesto Zedillo, and Vicente Fox Quisada, all but one of whom is male. The choice of "protagonists" presents political agency as (nearly) exclusively male, elite, and individual. Renward García Medrano, El dos de octubre de 1968, en sus propias palabras (Mexico City: Rayuela, 1998)
88. Michel de Certeau The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997)
89. On emergence, see Bruce Mannheim and Dennis Tedlock, eds., The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995)