'68

This is an analysis of the massacre that took place in Mexico in 1968, where governmental forces used weapons to murder hundreds of people who protested the Olympic Games that were held that year.

The author uses a mixture of sharp insight, humor, and keen observation into the minds of youths to create an effective backdrop that contrasts the bloody events as they unfolded.

This was not the first time we had been beaten up by the cops. It was one of the Mexican state’s demented customs to give the students a bit of stick every now and again, just to show them who was boss. The year before, police had assaulted Vocational School 7, and the 1965 Vietnam demo had been broken up with batons, wounding fifty people. I was one of them, earning myself a three-inch gash over the left eyebrow, where a plainclothesman slugged me with a metal bar rolled up in a newspaper. In Sonora, too, the year before, the army had been sent in, and all of us had heard stories of what had occurred two years earlier at Morelia University. All the same, this was different: what were they cooking up now? In the meantime, we ended that night at a christening, summing up with difficulty the events of the day but happy to find ourselves still in one piece. We showed each other our cuts and bruises. Fear, for now, was gone.

On Tuesday, blinded by their overweening arrogance, the authorities launched the army against Preparatory 1. The school’s entrance, dating to colonial times, was struck by bazooka fire; there was shooting, and hundreds of arrests. A group of students took refuge on the roof as the soldiers, with bayonets fixed, entered the courtyards of their school, where there are murals by Orozco, Revueltas, Siqueiros, and Rivera. For a time everything took on symbolic force. They had blasted the historic doorway of the preparatory to pieces. With bazookas. The famous door. But then we were beyond symbolism, thanks to the photos, which showed blood pooled amid the splintered wood.

Jaime’s daughter would grow up in a worse world. Very soon her father would be in prison. But to be a woman in ’68 was no bad thing. For thousands of sisters the times offered a chance to be equal. Sixty-eight antedated the new feminism. It was better than feminism. It was violently egalitarian—and if it wasn’t always, it always could be. One man, one woman, one vote—and one collection box, one stack of fliers, one level of risk . . . That it mattered little whether you wore a skirt or pants was a given. Being a man then was better too, because those women existed.

They were great. And gorgeous, really gorgeous. They wore their undeniable beauty without fuss—and without makeup. Any role model worth the name was supposed to be cinematographic, but in those days Anita Ekberg and Sophia Loren, even Kim Novak’s honeyed glances and Elke Sommer’s poutiness, had ceased to operate. The sixties generated its own points of reference at more than twenty-four frames per second: miniskirts, a well-thumbed Simone de Beauvoir novel dangling from the hand, fishnet stockings, velvet hairbands, ponytails, bangs, plaid skirts, boots with blue jeans, and candlelight dinners with white wine and smoked ham.

I have been stuck in that moment every single day since. I was certainly there when, three years later, I met Paloma. And I think I am still there when I watch my sixteen-year-old daughter brushing her hair in these distant nineties.

I could never say it as well as Monsiváis: “Days without sleep, unforgettable dreams.”

This is an analysis of the massacre that took place in Mexico in 1968, where governmental forces used weapons to murder hundreds of people who protested the Olympic Games that were held that year.

The author uses a mixture of sharp insight, humor, and keen observation into the minds of youths to create an effective backdrop that contrasts the bloody events as they unfolded.

This was not the first time we had been beaten up by the cops. It was one of the Mexican state’s demented customs to give the students a bit of stick every now and again, just to show them who was boss. The year before, police had assaulted Vocational School 7, and the 1965 Vietnam demo had been broken up with batons, wounding fifty people. I was one of them, earning myself a three-inch gash over the left eyebrow, where a plainclothesman slugged me with a metal bar rolled up in a newspaper. In Sonora, too, the year before, the army had been sent in, and all of us had heard stories of what had occurred two years earlier at Morelia University. All the same, this was different: what were they cooking up now? In the meantime, we ended that night at a christening, summing up with difficulty the events of the day but happy to find ourselves still in one piece. We showed each other our cuts and bruises. Fear, for now, was gone.

On Tuesday, blinded by their overweening arrogance, the authorities launched the army against Preparatory 1. The school’s entrance, dating to colonial times, was struck by bazooka fire; there was shooting, and hundreds of arrests. A group of students took refuge on the roof as the soldiers, with bayonets fixed, entered the courtyards of their school, where there are murals by Orozco, Revueltas, Siqueiros, and Rivera. For a time everything took on symbolic force. They had blasted the historic doorway of the preparatory to pieces. With bazookas. The famous door. But then we were beyond symbolism, thanks to the photos, which showed blood pooled amid the splintered wood.

Jaime’s daughter would grow up in a worse world. Very soon her father would be in prison. But to be a woman in ’68 was no bad thing. For thousands of sisters the times offered a chance to be equal. Sixty-eight antedated the new feminism. It was better than feminism. It was violently egalitarian—and if it wasn’t always, it always could be. One man, one woman, one vote—and one collection box, one stack of fliers, one level of risk . . . That it mattered little whether you wore a skirt or pants was a given. Being a man then was better too, because those women existed.

They were great. And gorgeous, really gorgeous. They wore their undeniable beauty without fuss—and without makeup. Any role model worth the name was supposed to be cinematographic, but in those days Anita Ekberg and Sophia Loren, even Kim Novak’s honeyed glances and Elke Sommer’s poutiness, had ceased to operate. The sixties generated its own points of reference at more than twenty-four frames per second: miniskirts, a well-thumbed Simone de Beauvoir novel dangling from the hand, fishnet stockings, velvet hairbands, ponytails, bangs, plaid skirts, boots with blue jeans, and candlelight dinners with white wine and smoked ham.

I have been stuck in that moment every single day since. I was certainly there when, three years later, I met Paloma. And I think I am still there when I watch my sixteen-year-old daughter brushing her hair in these distant nineties.

I could never say it as well as Monsiváis: “Days without sleep, unforgettable dreams.”