Reviews

68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

imjustmaria's review against another edition

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informative

5.0

jules_vp's review against another edition

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emotional slow-paced

3.75

aimeereadsthebooks's review against another edition

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informative reflective fast-paced

4.0

vterrazas00's review against another edition

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dark informative reflective sad slow-paced

3.0

readingthebacklist's review against another edition

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informative reflective sad slow-paced

3.5

Via diaries and memories, and within the context of the 60’s social movements, Taibo examines the events preceding the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, the government’s response and the sanctioned narrative. This account is an interesting look at the ordinariness entwined with the renowned, the idealism, the shortcomings and the guilt. I enjoyed the casual tone, but the author sometimes comes across as a relic of his time with the excessive mention of women’s miniskirts.

lauren_endnotes's review against another edition

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"[He] told me that I had to write this book because my memories were not my private property -- that there are loves that last, even for those who have not lived them in the first place."

From '68 by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated from the Spanish by Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1991/2004 by @7storiespress

The student movement of 1968 in Mexico City - now often referred to as the 'Tlatelolco Massacre' - is remembered for the numbers of students murdered and disappeared by the military. It's still not known how many people - but in the hundreds - killed on October 2, 1968.

Taibo, present during for weeks in the Movement, but not there on "the night" steps back a few months before the massacre & notes the 123 preceding days of "heroic strike". In many ways this book is a processing of the guilt he feels for being absent that day/night...

Poetic and anecdotal, musings, calls to action, and some passionate writing.

"All those guys who lied, who kept us down, who kissed ass, who threatened us - they were the real Mexico. But then we, the NEW we, made from the many that we had been, decided that, fuck it, we were also the real Mexico."

"Memory tends to simplify, whether by retaining absurdly trivial anecdotes or by seeing the big picture strictly in balc and white. The Movement was, in fact, many things at once. For thousands of students, it was an unmasking of the Mexican state as an emperor with no clothes."

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While Taibo's book describes the emotions of being a student activist "on the ground", I'm still learning the details of the what / why of Tlatelolco. My reference points before "68" were secondhand literary sources, primarily Roberto Bolaño's fictional work - the Massacre is part of his AMULET, and also is mentioned in THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES. I'd like to acquire Elena Poniatowska's journalism work on the events too, the translated English title "Massacre in Mexico".

A major cultural touch point in modern Mexican history.

Taibo is a VERY prolific writer - some 80 titles - and a giant of the literature scene in Mexico, organizing book festivals and literary gatherings. Many of his works are translated into English - much more to explore.

lizlikesfrogs's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective fast-paced

4.0


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mossymanul's review against another edition

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5.0

Taibo's sporadic, intimate writing does a spectacular job of bringing the reader into that summer and fall of the failed revolution. He writes as if he has little care that the reader should understand every piece of insider knowledge of that time, every anecdote and joke, but he gives enough that you feel like you understand this complex and confusing web that the young adults were launched into that year. The nostalgia of the era, along with the pain of it, becomes personal. On a grander scale, it's an incredibly valuable book to understanding that era of protest and failure, particularly the emotional side of it. 4.5 stars.

pivic's review

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3.0

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.


Some words about feminism of the day, written in the 1990s:

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.”


Overall, a near-hypnogogic-yet-strangely-lucid recollection of events where the Mexican government had hundreds of humans murdered to keep the “rabble-rousers” down.
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