Unsettled Debts: 1968 and the Problem of Historical Memory| Afterlives of Tlatelolco: Memory, Contested Space, and Collective Imagination

Authors

  • Paulina Lanz USC Annenberg

Keywords:

Tlatelolco massacre, collective memory, remembrance, imagination

Abstract

Ten days before the 1968 Summer Olympics began in Mexico City, a pivotal student rally took place in the Square of the Three Cultures at the city’s Tlatelolco Plaza. The Mexican army opened fire on the crowd, killing more than 300 protesters. The massacre remains a crucial flashpoint in the country’s long history of political repression. In recent decades, the state has taken part in commemorating the massacre, helping to convert Tlatelolco itself into a site and a symbol of civic memorialization. Drawing upon personal narratives, visual art, artifacts, film, and music, the essay intertwines official national commemorations with the collectivized memories of the massacre. It introduces newcomers to violence, silence, and memory in Latin America, engaging with different materializations of memory. By analyzing Tlatelolco as a space of historical reckoning and imagination, the essay evidences how the contested production of Tlatelolco simultaneously fosters historical memory and historical amnesia. 

Author Biography

Paulina Lanz, USC Annenberg

Paulina is a PhD Candidate in Communication at USC. She identies material culture as a source of memory and nostalgia through the lens of archival and cultural studies. By the means of visual and audible aesthetics, these sensorial fields are used as stimuli for developing an interdisciplinary commitment from former disciplines to the present endeavor. Objects as sources of memory function as an archival mechanism for storytelling through spatial-temporal remembrance, as a blueprint-incepted testimony. Paulina is a member of the Civic Paths group and the Multidisciplinary Intersectional Approaches to the Study o Violence and Trauma Research and Writing Group. She is also involved in research in the Skid Row and Homeless Connectivity Project, and the Mobile Devices Global Mapping Project. She is a founding member and organizer of Critical Mediations, a Communication and Cultural Studies Conference. 

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Published

2022-10-04

Issue

Vol. 16 (2022)

Section

Special Sections

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