I ..

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An6nimo, Exigimos deslinde
de responsabilidades
Jesus Martinez, Paloma de la
Paz atravesada por una bayoneta
Adolfo Mexiac, ;Libertad
de expresi6n!
Appropriation, Parody and Space in the Mexico
City Student Movement Graphics, 1968.
George F. Flaherty
On October 10, 1968, the "youth of Mexico welcomed the
youth of the world" at Mexico City's main square, the Z6calo.
This was not a spontaneous event but a carefully choreo-
graphed spectacle for the benefit of the international
press, which had arrived to cover the Mexico City Olympics
beginning two days later. Several thousand young men,
dressed in white leotards and slippers, fanned across the
immense plaza, settling into precise rows and columns. For
forty minutes they performed synchronized calisthenics and
chants. The welcome event, in addition to displaying athletic
virtuosity and folkloric detail, had an eerie martial quality.
Almost a year earlier, Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, chairman of
the Mexican Olympic organizing committee, presciently told
the New York Times, "There are only two occasions when we
see the youth of the world parading in uniform; when they
go to war, and at the Olympics." 1 Since July, the city had
been under intense police surveillance and the national
university campus, where the opening ceremonies were to
take place, was occupied by the army. "Everything is possible
with peace," was the Olympic slogan for 1968.
A mass of Mexico's best and brightest chanting in the
Z6calo recalled scenes from the not too distant past. Two
weeks earlier, on August 27, thousands of striking secondary
school and university students and their supporters
assembled there, after marching through the city, demanding
to speak to the president. Protests began in late July in
response to police brutality but quickly evolved into a call
for greater democratization to match recent macroeconomic
successes, the so-called Mexican Miracle, which the Olympics
celebrated symbolically. Throughout the post-revolutionary
period the state accepted limited direct participation
from the body politic while at the same time asserting its
totalizing sovereignty: it represented all Mexicans, with or
without their consent. This work was often done through
John Canaday, "Art: Culture Gets High Billing at Olympics in Mexico,"
New York Times (December 14, 1976).
images, which attempted to suture over real social fissures. As such, image making
(and remaking) are central to the experience of power in Mexico. Early .in the
morning of August 28 the students were chased out of the Z6calo by army tanks;
those who fell behind were beaten. They were replaced by an image manufactured
by the government: federal employees who were herded into the plaza to perform a
counter demonstration.
***
The student movement's actions on August 27 were representative of their
praxis that summer. The movement sought to, in the words of one of their slogans,
ganar la calle or "win the street." The phrase connoted taking up physical space
as well winning popular support. With limited access to mass media or financial
resources, they used urban space as their communications network, hoping
to reroute Mexico's political status quo, asserting that their mobilization was
neither haphazard nor hermetic (or criminal). The students pursued links to other
recent movements, like the railroad workers strike in the late 1950s, and also
the impending Games, which offered an opportunity to alert the wider world to the
authoritarianism that lay behind the veil of Olympic pageantry. 2 Selecting the
street as the preferred site for engaging the public was a practical matter for
the student movement-it was more or less accessible and highly visible-but it
was also strategic. The occasion of the Olympics had converted city streets, plazas
and other public spaces into a seamless tableau of modernity.
In response, the student movement created its own litany of urban
images, produced at Mexico's two major art schools, the Escuela Nacional de
Artes Plasticas ("San Carlos") and Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura ("La
Esmeralda"). Most of the work produced was graphic, using primarily silkscreen
and linocut techniques, which allowed for quick, cheap reproduction. They printed
on paper they had to hand, including newspapers, which sometimes resulted in
discordant juxtapositions. These cacophonous images offered a counter-narrative
to mainstream press reports that were at best ambivalent toward the movement.
The movement also fine-tuned its messages over time, addressing residents as a
(sometimes discordant) chorus rather than the singular "voice of God" of the state
or the Olympic identity. ,,,..
·-·
The students worked collectively for the most part, I}Ot claiming authorship
for purposes of anonymity in the face of violence but also for ideological purposes: ..,
2 This poaching of spaces thought to be the exclusive domain of the state,-opening them tlp for
resignification, recalled the detournement of the Situationist International in Europe, although specific
to the experience of capitalist urbanization in Mexico City. With origins in the 1950s, Situationist
theory was an intellectual touchstone for the May 1968 general strike in Paris. Georges Roque compares
the Mexican student movement's graphic production to that of France's, see his "Grafica del 68," in
Memorial del 68, ed. Alvaro Vazquez Mantec6n (Mexico City: UNAM/ Editorial Turner, 2007), 218-233
this arrangement reinforced claims of community and cross-class solidarity. Even
when the individual artist is known, as was the case with the now iconic print
depicting a dove pierced by a bayonet by Jesus Martinez, the work pointed to a
web of formal and thematic coordinates. Martinez appropriated the Olympics' "dove
of peace" logo and turned its (empty) aspiration upside down, making it a sign of
the historical moment rather than Christian or neo-humanist fraternity. 1 If certain
visual tropes can be identified, then police and army were animalized, represented
as dogs and gorillas. In one such graphic a gorilla-police officer stands over a
lifeless student, blood dripping from his baton. The accompanying text reads: "[A]
stimulating incorporation of an 18-year old to the political life of the nation." In
this gesture to the animalistic, these graphics denounced the government's brutish
behavior and failure to govern with justice. In Francisco Becerril's Exigimos deslinde
de responsabilidades ("We demand accountability"), for example, a caricature of
president Diaz Ordaz is layered over a granadero (riot police) with a gorilla-like
profile, emphatically conflating power with violence.
Faculty at the art schools, veterans of past protest movements, also took part
in the production of graphics, including Gabriel Fernandez Ledesma, Santos Balmori,
Francisco Becerril, Alberto Hijar, Francisco Moreno Capdevila, Adolfo Mexiac and Tri-
nidad Osorio. Capdevila, who created prints for the 1959 railroad strike, and
Mexiac, who was a member of the activist Taller Grafica Popular ("People's Graphic
Workshop") in the 1950s, allowed students to reinterpret their past work in
addition to producing new ones themselves. The students chose Mexiac's Libertad
de expression, which he first printed in 1954 in support of indigenous communities
while he was in Chiapas. 2 It shows a young man with his mouth gagged by a lock
and chain. The students reproduced the image without much modification except
for adding the ·phrase "Freedom of Expression" and the Mexico City Olympics logo
below, again juxtaposing the lack of civil liberties and the Olympic spectacle.
Indeed, palimpsest appropriation was an important tactic for student
movement graphics. The graphics gestured to a wide array of images and slogans
from national and international revolutionary culture. 3 Portraits of Emiliano Zapata
and Che Guevara, as well as contemporary political prisoner Demetrio Vallejo,
asserted a historical context for the movement's struggle and suggested that their
grievances were immediate as well as long-standing.
Furthermore, Martinez also referred with his bayonetted dove to an anti-fascist photomontage by
German artist John Heartfield that memorialized a police deadly attack on protestors at the League of
Nations Palace in Geneva in 1932.
2 Pilar Garcia de Germenos and James Oles, Gritos desde el archivo: grabado polftico del Taller de
Grdjica Popular, Colecci6n Academia de Artes (Mexico City: UNAM, 2008)
3 As postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha was argued, "mimicry is at once resemblance and menace."
In other words, in appropriating the visual language of the Mexico City Olympics the student movement
located ambivalence and critique in its presumed universality and dominance of expression. Bhabha, "Of
Mimicry and Man," in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 85-92.
***
A few kilometers north of the Z6calo on October 2 a helicopter hovered
above the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, so named because it is framed by pre-Hispanic
ruins, a former colonial monastery and a modernist housing complex. The student
movement had gathered again to protest peacefully. A flare dropped from the
helicopter: the sign for troops that had surrounded the plaza, as well as snipers
stationed in the complex's many towers, to begin firing on the crowd. Panic
ensued, with tens of thousands of people running and seeking shelter. Plainclothes
paramilitaries spent the evening going from apartment to apartment to flush
out demonstrators harbored by sympathetic neighbors. By dawn an estimated
300 civilians were murdered. The plaza was quickly swept of all evidence; blood
scrubbed off the stones and lost shoes collected by municipal employees. If Mexico
City's major newspapers and television stations were any indication, reports of the
massacre were sanitized. News of the impending Olympics took their place and it
has largely been up to artists, writers and filmmakers to begin to fill this lacuna. 4
While the Tlatelolco massacre may have put an end to the 1968 student
movement, this is not to say that social protest ceased in Mexico-or that the
graphics produced at San Carlos and La Esmeralda did not continue to circulate and
engage audiences. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the event, a commemorative
stela was installed on the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, which included a relief based
on Martinez's Unidos ... Adelante!! print; in this case, the doves refer to progressive
futures but also to a spectral presence. Arnulfo Aquino, Rebeca Hidalgo and Ma-
lecio Galvan, students at San Carlos and members of the movement, continued
the ethos of collaboration after 1968, forming an artist collective known as
Grupo Mira in 1977. They saved much of their work from the period and in 1982
published their archive. 5 Grupo Mira and other collectives continued to navigate
Mexico City throughout the 1970s and 80s, producing work specifically for urban
consumption-although not without new challenges. 6 While the student movement
may not have fundamentally changed Mexico City's physical form, they did open
up new lines of communication and hijack existing ones. There are many routes to
ganar la calle. Q
4 The two best known examples are journalists Elena Poniatowska's Noche de Tlatelolco (1971) and
filmmaker Jorge Fons's Rojo amanecer (1989).
5 Grupo Mira, La grdjica del 68: homenaje al movimiento estudiantil (Mexico "City: Ediciones Zurda,
1982). See also Arnulfo Aquino and Jorge Perezvega eds., Imdgenes y sfmbolos del 68 (Mexico Cfty:
UNAM, 2004). Several of these grupos or "groups" emerge in the 1970s, although only Mira emerged
directly from the propaganda brigades.
6 It was difficult to conjure utopias post-Tlatelolco. During the 1970s, in addition to urban art
there were urban guerilla movements, which the state sought extinguish by engaging in a dirty war.
See Laura Castellanos, Mexico armada: 1943-1981 (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2007).