School of Historical and European Studies

History Program - The Digital Bookshelf

Barry Carr'The Many Meanings of 1968 in Mexico: The Student-Popular Movement Thirty Years After'

Originally published (with the title: 'The Many Meanings of 1968') in the fall-winter 1998 issue of Enfoque, a publication of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Reprinted with permission.

Assessing the legacies of 1968 is not easy. Every five years since the suppression of the student-popular movement, roundtables and conferences have examined the movement's contribution to the development of popular culture, social movements, and the struggle for democracy in Mexico. Although there are clearly many 1968s and although 'sesentaeocheros' are not united in their verdict on that year's events, there is consensus that 1968 was a vital, transcendental moment. Parteaguas (watershed) is the word usually applied, although one veteran of the movement has suggested that the much more irreverent 'partemadres' would more accurately convey the iconoclastic character of the events!

The trauma of defeat and repression was enormous, most analysts and participants agree. But while repression can lead to passivity and disillusionment, it also provides time for reflection and the gestation of novel approaches to politics and culture. Jails proved to be fertile incubators of new ideas for Mexican activists during 1968-1971; political prisoners sarcastically labeled the grim Lecumberri prison the 'Sierra Maestra' with good reason.

During this 30th anniversary of Tlatelolco, 'remembering 1968' has absorbed energy on a grand scale. One measure is the sheer quantity of new books (8 thus far) and major journal and newspaper articles (well over 200) published on the 'meaning of 1968.'

The new center-left government in the Federal District, led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, declared October 2 a day of mourning. Survivors of the National Strike Committee which guided the movement (the 'historic leaders') have dashed about Mexico City speaking at dozens of events concerned with deciphering 1968.

Mainstream Mexico - even sectors of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, not just the forces contesting the status quo- has embraced the ideals of the sesentaeocheros. To some extent this is a measure of official attempts to appropriate the memory and legacy of 1968 as part of the national patrimony - the development of what Mexican critics like Luis Javier Garrido have derisively called '1968 lite.' As Carlos Monsiváis, another Mexican critic and prominent chronicler of the 1968 movement, recently reminded us, 'Everything points to the normalization of '68 and its inclusion among the foundational legacies of this century.' Curiously, until a few days before this year's commemoration of the massacre of student protestors at Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968, the normally loquacious Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation had little or nothing to say about 1968.

Although 1968 was clearly an important event, there are problems with how the student-popular movement has been treated. For a start, the emphasis is too national. This is understandable given the weighty role played by institutions like the National Polytechnic Institute and the National

Autonomous University of Mexico, and the enormous concentration of power in the Federal District. But what was the import and impact of 1968 in the provinces? Certainly in the aftermath of 1968, the radicalization of a number of regional universities (Puebla, Sinaloa, and Guerrero are the main examples) introduced a major new actor into local politics.

An exclusively national focus also fails to locate Mexico within the global student and youth insurgency unfolding in 1968. Why, for example, did Mexican students not center their demands and struggles on educational as well as broader political issues, as did students in Western Europe, even though the deleterious consequences of the massification of tertiary education were every bit as dramatic in Mexico as they were in Europe and North America?

A further problem is our tendency to exaggerate the significance of 1968. The obsession with the notion of 'watershed' leads us to see every major development of the following three decades as flowing inexorably from the student-popular movement and its bloody repression. If one wants to be positive about the legacy of 1968, these include political reform, the deepening of civil society, and a more libertarian stance on sexuality and 'difference.' In more negative readings, they are the entrenchment of familiar defects of the Left: dogmatism, authoritarianism, intolerance, and a tendency to develop faulty readings of the character of the Mexican state and to be co-opted by the government apparatus.

The trouble with this tendency is that continuities in Mexican political and social life are not sufficiently acknowledged. Many of the Left's defects, for example, are quite old; the state's co-optation skills are well established; simplistic and overly homogenized readings of the state's monolithic character were also a weakness in the railroad workers' struggles of 1958-1959. Similarly, the 'ideology of the Mexican Revolution' was already being undermined long before 1968 - in the novels of Carlos Fuentes, for example.

People were not 'asleep' in 1968, ready to be awakened by the heroism and creativity of the student brigades. This would ignore the significance of the worker and union struggles of 1956-1960, the radicalizing impact of the Cuban Revolution, and the development of new forms of agrarian radicalism in the 1960s.

Moreover, the achievements of 1968 are frequently presented as though they were complete and overwhelmingly comprehensive. In fact, progress, if we want to indulge in teleology, was extremely uneven. Mexico did not advance along a neat unilinear continuum, from the despotic presidentialism of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz through José López Portillo, with pauses during the rebirth of civil society in the aftermath of the 1985 earthquakes and in the electoral upheaval of 1988, to emerge triumphant in the postmodern explosion of neozapatismo in 1994.

As a number of Mexican observers have insistently noted, the legacies of 1968 would better be described as a zigzag path, sometimes with two steps back for every step forward. One of the legacies of 1968 was undoubtedly the impetus it gave to the development of the apparatus of surveillance and political repression in the 1970s and 1980s - partly a response to the threat posed by the short-lived guerrilla actions of the late 1960s and 1970s but surviving the defeat of these movements. The democratization process has been immensely uneven: presidentialism has survived, and indiscriminate violence and terror as a weapon against dissenters is growing rather than diminishing, as demonstrated by the Aguas Blancas killings in Guerrero in 1995 and the December 1997 massacre at Acteal, Chiapas.

Nevertheless, 1968 did alter the landscape in important ways. An assessment of some of the most important consequences for the broad Left might begin by flagging the following developments:

The creation of several new political parties or pre-party projects such as the Mexican Workers' Party, many of whose cadres are leading members of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution.

The fragmentation and dispersion of the Left for many years. Gilberto Guevara, one of 1968's 'historic leaders,' has argued that 'the Left paid the price for 1968 - because, in the aftermath of defeat, the Left was atomized and spent too many years thinking that armed struggle was the only response to a state seen as embodying simple naked repression.' The establishment of new publications - such as Punto Crítico and Cuadernos Políticos - that enabled a more accurate and attentive tracking of daily life in factories, neighborhoods, and farms.

The flowering of the unique chronicling and testimonial work of writers like Carlos Monsiváis and Elena Poniatowka.

The proliferation of urban popular movements and social movements, some with a Maoist inflection. Many of the earliest examples of this new wave of movement organizing (carrying evocative titles such as Popular Defense Committee, Land and Freedom Camp, Pancho Villa Colonia), especially in north and north-central Mexico, owed a great deal to the work of cadres formed in 1968. And some of these cadres' careers would lead them eventually to Chiapas in the middle and late 1970s, where they contributed in important ways to the development of what we now call the Zapatistas.

'Go to the People!' was one of the most powerful lessons learned from 1968. But the slogan was interpreted in so many ways. For some, it meant armed struggle; for others, the construction of new kinds of political parties. And for many, the most urgent task was to develop new critical int' of the Left,' was one of the most powerful legacies of 1968) and in social life.

Barry Carr teaches Latin American history at La Trobe University, Australia.