Hindsight

Tlatelolco: a Mexican palimpsest
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Earlier this month in Mexico City, thousands of people marched through the streets to mark the 40th anniversary of a brazen and brutal repression of student protesters, carried out by the state on the eve of the Mexico City Olympic Games. The Tlatelolco massacre, as it became known, spilt yet more blood upon one of Mexico City's most significant historical and archaeological sites. In Hindsight we explore the rich layers of history at Tlatelolco.

The late Mexican poet Octavio Paz described the plaza at Tlatelolco as being "magnetic with history". The architecture in the plaza shows a cross section of epic Mexican history - Aztec ruins, a Spanish church, and monolithic public housing blocks.

Tlatelolco got a facelift in the early 1960s, and a new name to go with it. They called it the Plaza de las Tres Culturas - the Square of the Three Cultures - to honour the spectrum of pre-Hispanic, colonial and modern buildings that share the space. But everyone knows it best by the Aztec name, which dates to around 1330.

Tlatelolco was the last Aztec stronghold in the Spanish seige of the city in 1521. Here, the last Aztec ruler, Cuautemoc, surrendered to Hernán Cortés. And here, in 1968, just 10 days before the Mexico City Olympic Games, the Mexican government staged its bloody curtain raiser to the "dirty war" of the 1970s and 80s.

Interviews with student leaders from 1968, Margarita Suzán and Raúl Álvarez, were made available by UNAM's Memorial de 68.

Guests

Kate Doyle, analyst
Director of the Mexico Documentation Project
National Security Archive
George Washington University

Elena Poniatowska, journalist
Author of La Noche de Tlatelolco (Ediciones Era 1971)
published in English as Massacre in Mexico (The Viking Press, 1975)

Barry Carr, historian
Visiting Professor
Department of History
University of California
Berkeley

Salvador Guilliem Arroyo, archaeologist
Director of the Archaeological Zone
Tlatelolco

Anna Lanyon, historian and writer
Author of Malinche's Conquest (Allen & Unwin 1999)
and (working title) The earth on which they walked (Allen & Unwin, scheduled release late 2009)

Further Information

Memorial de 68, El Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco

National Security Archive's Mexico Project

Publications

Title: Massacre in Mexico
Author: Elena Poniatowska Translated by Helen R. Lane
Publisher: The Viking Press, 1975

Title: Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete
Author: Amy Bass
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Title: Nothing, and so be it
Author: Oriana Fallaci Translated by Isabel Quigly
Publisher: Doubleday, 1972

Title: The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid
Author: Octavio Paz Translated by Lysander Kemp
Publisher: Grove Press, 1972

Title: The Conquest of New Spain
Author: Bernal Diaz del Castillo Translated by J.M.Cohen
Publisher: Penguin Books 1963

Title: We People Here: Nahuatl accounts of the conquest of Mexico
Author: James Lockhart
Publisher: University of California Press, 1993

Title: Letters From Mexico
Author: Hernan Cortes Translated by Anthony Pagden
Publisher: Yale University Press, 1986

Title: Malinche's Conquest
Author: Anna Lanyon
Publisher: Allen & Unwin 1999

Title: Tlatelolco: Rival de Tenochtitlan
Author: Robert Barlow
Publisher: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, 1987

Title: Aztecs: The History of the Indies of New Spain
Author: Fray Diego Durán Translated by Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas
Publisher: Orion Press, 1964

Title: Aztecs: an interpretationn
Author: Inga Clendinnen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press 1991

Presenter

Catherine Freyne

Story Researcher and Producer

Catherine Freyne