'68 Read online

  Anyway, as I was saying, it was Alejandro who broke open the door and opened up the space that would be transformed into a mixed dormitory—a rather puritanical one, to be sure, with nothing going bump in the night. We would stretch out in two rows, fifteen or so jokers in each, toe to toe, and wait for someone from the Dormitory Organizing Committee to cover the whole lot of us with one immense velvet curtain. As for pillows, we had our jackets. The lights were never turned off: there was always someone who would rather read than sleep.

  By far the most exciting part was night-guard duty—what we called rounds. The wee hours were a truly crazy time. On one of the first nights we decided to put this dead time to good use by decorating the department. We tied the place up in an enormous bow of two-color typewriter ribbon, more than four hundred meters of it; the two colors, of course, were red and black—the colors of the strike. On another sleepless night, Manuel El Chiquito, Trobamala, and I set about painting the Sciences tower red and black. And I remember that on the third night of the strike we decided to pay a visit to the comrades of Orthodontics to serenade them in the spirit of solidarity. We figured that they were new to the craziness of the revolution and that they deserved something like this from us old hands at Political Sciences.

  The days were more reasonable.

  Confetti

  On 31 July we went into the street in massive numbers. The government had relinquished some of the schools taken over by the authorities earlier, but it had also mounted new assaults on others, among them the National Theater School. In their frenzy the authorities had used police dogs to attack the students.

  The demonstration was led off the campus by the rector of the University, its main demand being the defense of the autonomy of the academy. Some of us wanted more than that. On a rainy afternoon a hundred thousand students flowed into the street from the esplanade of the Ciudad Universitaria. They aimed to go no further than Félix Cuevas, beyond which were dragons. Dozens of armored vehicles, squads of police, battalions of riot police, military transports, and soldiers with fixed bayonets had been deployed. The Zócalo was off-limits to us. But we were very many, thousands upon thousands, and we spoke with one voice.

  The high point of the day came when we passed the housing projects, and confetti rained down upon us courtesy of the tenants. We all gazed up as the blizzard of colored paper descended. We were not alone.

  That same evening President Díaz Ordaz, in a speech from the city of Guadalajara, tendered his famous “outstretched hand” to the students in exchange for their submission. An outstretched hand—if you apologize. The imaginative riposte appeared the next day on thousands of handbills and flyposters: A la mano tendida, la prueba de la parafina (Give the outstretched hand the paraffin test). I think this slogan was the brainchild of Jaime Goded, mastermind of student propaganda and leader of the Marilyn Monroe Brigade. I remember that we celebrated his inspiration in a rather odd way: by going with a whole truckful of brigadistas, complete with banners, pamphlets, and megaphones, to see Jaime’s newborn daughter at an apartment in the Florida section. By the time Evelyn was halfway across the sidewalk, holding her baby up for us to see, we had calmed down a bit, and we applauded enthusiastically. The baby was so diminutive, so wrinkled. A grinning Jaime showed her off. Then the brigade went to demonstrate in the markets in the south of the city.

  Of Women and Mattresses

  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.

  What fucking apron-wearing wusses we were! We couldn’t eat a taco at a taco stand. We had never danced at a housing-project dance—that came later. As for me, ever the late arrival, I never liked Tecate with lime and tequila. We had no sense of humor and no sense of savoir-faire in so many areas of life. Not one of us was capable of speaking up for chocolate malteds or quesadillas in the doorway of the bakery. Maybe it was the women who first defended such things even as they discoursed on Vargas Llosa’s “The Cubs”: they had a better sense of everyday life and were so much less limited than we were.

  They could also laugh, and get you to laugh with them, at any moron who announced, say, that “the sisters obviously can’t go out painting slogans at night.” We were so damn equal—and so damn different. Sure enough, there was always some dope who wanted the women to run the kitchen of the department café; but there would always be someone slightly less dopey to say that that was everybody’s job.

  The women had family stories, recounted with fury, about horrendous struggles for equality; as often as not they had a black-and-blue arm to prove what they said. They told of fights over an extra half-hour outside, over the right to be in the city at night, over the disastrous discovery of a pack of birth-control pills. Only by resorting to screams and threats of leaving home did they hold their own against unyielding mothers, retrograde grandparents, and pro-PRI fathers. But, Televisa notwithstanding, the stereotypical Mexican “little mother” was on her way out.

  According to the myth, the sixties happened largely on beds: big round beds, hammocks, mattresses on the floor, straw mats, you name it. Rock’n’roll, marijuana, and sex. Rock? Well, yes. Marijuana? For the most part, marijuana was what the cops liked to plant on you. And sex? In Mexico sexual liberation was not a high-profile arrival, save perhaps in the spiel of inveterate Casanovas. No, sex seemed to be experienced as part of a sweet and fairly romantic and egalitarian project, a project framed in the literature stacks, in Guevarism, even in obscure traces ferried by our chromosomes from Gutiérrez Nájera or Amado Nervo. The myth says there was a lot of action in 1968. A lot less, I’d say, than in 1967, and even less than in 1966. In ’68 there was, well, less time.

  People always say that there was more sex back then, before, that there is more somewhere else, at some other time, across the street, in the next tribe, in Sweden. . . But I suppose the Swedes say the same thing about us, and that those from way-back-when say it about the people we were then, just as the people we are now are liable to say it about those growing up now.

  And Sometimes We Believe in the Informative Value of Tremors Running Through the Atmosphere

  A movement results from combinations that even its own participants cannot control. And that its enemies cannot calculate. It evolves in ways that cannot be predicted, and even those who foresee it are taken by surprise.

  It was raining during those days, and the city had turned enormous. I wanted to capture the moment in a poem but could not. Happily, there were others who could, others who had written earlier, in other cities under the rain. Like the sometimes pedestrian Yucatán poet José Peón Contreras (to us, at the time, the name of an avenue), who had asked: “Where can the beach be that awaits us?”

  Since I couldn’t manage a poem, I crisscrossed th
e city from appointment to appointment, rally to minimarch, assembly to conference, brigadista powwow to underground planning session. I went from setting up a mimeograph machine to stealing paper, from a siesta snatched in some truck to hair-raising trips in Galileo, which was Paco Pérez Arce’s car, and on to a rendezvous with a bunch of refinery workers in Puente de Vigas. From there to a quince años party in Doctores, where with waltz music in the background we planned a propaganda campaign in the factories of Ixtapalapa, or else to Mixcoac to eat chicken soup as the day broke. Sitting still was a sin—the only sin I can remember from those days. I spent my time picking up the vibes, which I would discuss later with my two ideological gurus, Armando Bartra and Martín Reyes, both in their undershirts, cooped up in an apartment in Lomas de Plateros so full of smoke from the Del Prado plant that you could barely see the walls.

  There was no day or night, just actions, the street, and vibrations that called for interpretation by someone.

  The Godchildren

  At the beginning of August, with the strike underway, the student center-left and left-left published their list of demands, solidifying the loose patchwork of demands and thus getting a jump on the authorities, who were striving to confine the conflict to the University and to a very liberal defense of academic freedom. The student program was very brief, consisting famously of six points that resounded throughout the country thanks to the voices of thousands of brigadistas clinging to lampposts and passing out millions of handbills: freedom for political prisoners; repeal of the law against “social dissipation,” which was used to justify the jailing of political dissidents; dismissal of the police leadership; apportionment of blame for repressive measures; compensation for the wounded and for the families of those killed; and abolition of the riot police. This set of demands had a second meaning, too, understood by all and taken to heart by all, namely, the call for democracy. The right of citizens to live in society was being won in the streets and imposed upon a repressive power structure.

  On 5 August the first consolidated demonstration of the new Movement was a march from Zacatenco to the Santo Tomás campus of the IPN, and it signaled the political rout of the gangsterism of the FNET, the conservatism of the heads of the IPN schools, and the vacillating liberals. It also signaled a victory over fear.

  At the march’s halfway point many people left their contingents and contemplated from the sidelines the demonstration of which they had been part until a few seconds before. What they saw was how very, very many we were. Each school made its individual presence felt, chanting its own slogans and carrying its own enormous banner at the head of its contingent, so that no one could forget that they had not failed to make it, that they had answered the call, that they were well and truly there. The Movement might be anonymous, but the basis of its unity was clear: the school, “el cole.”

  Memory tends to simplify, whether by retaining absurdly trivial anecdotes or by seeing the big picture strictly in black and white. The Movement was, in fact, many things at once. For thousands of students, it meant an unmasking of the Mexican state as an emperor with no clothes. It meant the occupation of schools and the creation of libertarian common spaces based on assemblies. It meant family discussions in thousands of homes. It meant crisis for the traditional ways of misinforming the nation, a confrontation with leafleting, with the live voice, and with the rescuing power of rumor as alternatives to a controlled press and television. It also meant violence, repression, fear, prison, assassination. But above all, far more than anything else, it meant the reengagement of a generation of students with their own society, their investment in neighborhoods hitherto unknown to them, discussions on the bus, a breaking-down of barriers, the discovery of solidarity among the people, and, as they made it past the gray perimeter of the factories and reached those who were to be found within, the closest encounter yet with a mass of “others.”

  If the deepest meaning of the Movement lay in what it was without knowing it, its limitations lay in its message, so student-centered, exclusive, private, egoistic: we had our dead, our victims of repression, our freedoms—even our police, which we wished to abolish. But Mexican society was full of other dead, other wounded, other police (not to mention corrupt union leaders, factory bosses, suburban caciques, and venal functionaries). There were other authoritarianisms, which this first wave of students were just beginning to recognize but which they could not yet make into their enemy. Their reason understood, but not yet their heart, as Saint-Exupéry’s goody-goody would have said. We still needed time to become real Mexicans. The Movement’s heart did not reach out to strangers, apart from the political prisoners. All the same, we were beginning to discern the country through the fog. You couldn’t go out into the street and not be changed by it. And meanwhile the people of the Valley of Mexico, even if they were on another planet, felt sympathy for these students: these sons and daughters, neighbors, godchildren, nieces and nephews of the lady in Apartment 7, cousins of old Amalia . . . And the people of the Valley of Mexico filled the students’ red-and-black collecting cans with coins and took their little leaflets—so full of pompous phrases, so rhetorical—and in the markets gave them melons and potatoes, yams and avocados (maybe a little bruised) and papayas, and they wished them well.

  Menu

  Menu for the Nguyen Van Troi Cafeteria, Department of Political Sciences, in early August 1968. Cooks: a Maoist, a leftist Christian democrat, a Trotskyist, two miniskirted Guevarists. To drink: agua de Jamaica (hibiscus flower tea). To eat: chicken soup, boiled potatoes with salt, and bananas for dessert. Menu remains unchanged for four days, until food donated by Mixcoac Market vendors is finished. No siesta. Brigade activity in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl: newspaper distribution, factory visit, assembly. At night: massive graffiti-painting campaign. There are one hundred painting brigades in this school. Thousands of painting brigades to paint the entire humanities wing. The city as rainbow. A quick slogan: ¡HOCICÓN! (Big mouth—in reference to the supremo of the Republic). A not-so-quick slogan (because it has one letter more): ¡LIBERTAD!

  We Remember the Days of Glory but Tend to Forget They Were Fourteen-Hour Days

  During the mobilization of August 1968 the brigades occupied the streets without exposing a flank to the repressive forces. Those forces perceived the Movement as an unmanageable mass. With whom could you negotiate when the leadership consisted of three hundred people? Who was an interlocutor, especially an interlocutor you could frighten and corner? Who could you buy off? The Movement failed to fit any of the State’s usual ways of dealing with an adversary. The mobilization had two faces: the slippery brigades on the one hand and imposing demonstrations with half a million or more participants on the other. The leadership, calling itself the National Strike Council (CNH) consisted of three representatives from each school on strike; these were often rotating delegates, which made the Council easy to infiltrate but impossible to split, scare, corrupt, or detach from its base through negotiation. Since control was denied by these means, the only options left were isolation and repression. In any event negotiation had no place in the operating procedures of an authoritarian system whose reference points were the Aztecs, Cortés, and the PRI. According to our national tradition, an authority that negotiates surrenders its power.

  On the propaganda front, the government had already lost the capital and several provincial cities to which the strike had spread. Television and the printed press were almost worthless against the half-million voices that rebutted their lies day in and day out.

  The first organizational allies of the student movement now joined the fray, namely the Coalition of High-School and Higher-Education Teachers and the Assembly of Intellectuals, Artists, and Writers. Here were to be found the remnants of the best of the previous generation: Carlos Félix, José Revueltas, Eli de Gortari, Luis Alberto de la Garza (my history teacher at Preparatory 1), José Agustín, Carlos Monsiváis (our future electrical expert), Armando Castillejos (the great lawyer), and the painters, wh
o became more radical as they painted, as they registered their enduring solidarity in the most ephemeral of muralisms.

  The streets were getting bigger, more comprehensive. And in our minds the feeling grew that the Movement was somehow greater than the sum of its parts. A feeling that now, twenty years later, especially in view of the elections of 1988, I admit still has life in it: the vague idea that the country could change, that we could perhaps therefore build a different country; obviously, this was a feeling that arose from our power. On 13 August we tried to lay claim to the Zócalo. The demonstration set out from the Santo Tomás campus, with Poli and UNAM contingents alternating. The call to demonstrate gave this advice: “Should it be impossible to reach the Zócalo, your contingent should scatter into the downtown area, holding flash rallies and trying to avoid clashes with the authorities.” The State was falling back, however, and two hundred thousand of us marched into the Zócalo. The city was immense, the streets wide. The Zócalo is the largest public square in the world, a space that absorbed all echoes and made us cry like idiots. I remember the earnestness of the Poli nurses who almost wanted someone to collapse from dehydration just so they could leap into action. I remember the enormous banner with Che’s face on it that the Philosophy contingent unfurled. And I remember the text of a letter sent from the Lecumberri prison by Víctor Rico Galán:“The future prospects for developing the movement you are leading lie with the workers. . . . When, during the big demonstrations that you organize, the people throw sheets of plastic or paper down to you from their windows to help you keep yourselves dry; when poor folk, whose clothing clearly reveals their near-destitute condition, come up to you marchers to applaud, take your leaflets, or show their sympathy by handing you bread or fruit; when these things happen, it is because the people, even without the guidance of its organizations, even without the means of making its great voice heard, is seeking opportunities to express its support. . . . Students, hear the people!”