Lance Wyman and Eduardo

Terrazas. Mexico ’68 Logo, 1968.

Image courtesy of Lance Wyman.

100
 Beyond Tlatelolco:
Design, Media, and Politics
at Mexico ’68
LUIS CASTAÑEDA

After more than four decades, the iconic logo of the Mexico ’68
Summer Olympics continues to identify one of the most memo-
rable design campaigns of the last century. It is partly on account of
this campaign, a testament to the media event’s mobilization of
architecture and design in Mexico, that the history of the 1968
Olympics is well known. Notwithstanding this, scholars have been
reluctant to regard the organizational logic and visual language of
the Olympics as part of the broad context of mid-twentieth-century
design. At Mexico ’68, however, design was hardly an accessory.
Mexico’s Olympic bid officially began in 1963, during the tenure
of president Adolfo López Mateos (1958–1964). López Mateos con-
tinued to serve as chairman of the Mexican Olympic Committee
(MOC) after his presidency ended in 1964, but in July 1966 he was
succeeded by Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, the architect responsible for
almost all of Mexico’s World’s Fair pavilions and national museums
during the decade preceding the Olympics.1 Although Ramírez was
no stranger to political office, this would be his position of greatest
visibility, because he not only oversaw the design of the Olympics
but had executive control over their organization as well.
The 1968 Olympics have been discussed from various perspec-
tives, but the relationship between their planning and Ramírez’s
previous efforts in the design of temporary and permanent exhibi-
tions has never been closely examined.2 In paving the way for his
appointment as Olympic organizer, Ramírez’s experience as World’s
Fair architect, which began with the design of the Mexican pavil-
ion for the 1958 Brussels fair and continued through the 1962 and
1964 fairs at Seattle and New York, was crucial.3 Ramírez’s work as
head architect of Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology
and History, a commission that led him to collaborate with intel-
lectuals, exhibition designers, and politicians between 1961 and
1964, also proved to be a defining prelude to his Olympic tenure.
Seen as part of a unified effort of state propaganda, these works
constitute one of the largest such campaigns in postrevolutionary
Mexico. Far from presenting us with a coherent ideological profile,
however, they evince the tensions that characterized official rhetoric
at the time. The connections between them are not nearly as nebulous

Grey Room 40, Summer 2010, pp. 100–126. © 2010 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 101
as they may seem at first glance. These works were produced by a
handful of designers, architects, and planners employed under
Ramírez’s watch over the course of a decade. Indeed, while Ramírez
famously brought along such New York–based designers as
Beatrice Trueblood and logo coauthor Lance Wyman to Mexico for
the Olympics, the teams he assembled in Mexico for his museums
and pavilions before the games eventually became the bulk of the
MOC’s workforce.
An analysis of their precedents in design can help us address the
most problematic issue surrounding the Olympics today: their
place in Mexican memory. Eric Zolov has discussed this issue, par-
ticularly vis-à-vis the relationship between the games and the tragic
massacre of hundreds of student protesters by government forces
at the Plaza of the Three Cultures, which abuts Mario Pani’s
Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing project (1964). As Zolov has shown,
the massacre, which took place on October 2, 1968, only ten days
before the opening of the games, is the event Mexicans most easily
associate with the year 1968. While not targeted at the Olympics,
the protests of 1968 were partly instigated by the attempt by the
Díaz Ordaz regime (1964–1970) to present itself to the world as
democratic through the games, an image that was at odds with its
authoritarian practices. Their meanings rendered ambiguous by the
conflicting narratives wrought around them, the Olympics and
the massacre coexist in tension, ever present in memory yet uneasily
embedded in historical accounts.4
Though built independently of the Olympics, the emblematic
Plaza of the Three Cultures (1964) is powerfully connected to the
lineage of works that Ramírez and his collaborators produced. A
permanent work of urbanism, its design was informed by the strate-
gies of display employed in Ramírez’s exhibition architecture. But
matters beyond design would complicate this relationship further.
That the massacre took place at the plaza has had a lasting effect in
determining the critical afterlife of all the architectural spaces of
1960s Mexico. Over the course of the last four decades, a wide
range of historical narratives and media representations have
constructed a strong association between Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s
modernist architecture and the tumultuous events of October 2, an
association that continues to preclude in-depth analyses of the
buildings of the era.
Traditional narratives single out the mas-
sacre as the breaking point in the decline of
Mexico’s one-party state, characterizing the
urban intervention at the plaza, which the
state sponsored, as a monument to its failures.
Scholars are quick to place the burden of polit-
ical collapse on the work of architecture itself,

102 Grey Room 40

 often grounding their accusations on a superficial understanding of
the motivations behind its design. But what exactly ties the plaza
and Ramírez’s pavilions and museums together, and how can their
interrelation with the massacre and the Olympics be better under-
stood? This essay examines the specific design connections between
these various projects, inscribing them within the intersecting
political and media economies of midcentury Mexico.

|||||

Shortly before the 1968 Olympics began, Ramírez reflected on all

that was at stake in hosting the games in Mexico. “The rest of the
world,” he wrote in Arquitectura/México (the country’s premier
architecture magazine, published by Pani),
has taken a long time to forget an image of Mexico, that of a
figure covered by a poncho and a sombrero sleeping soundly
beneath the shadow of a tree. . . . The new international image
of Mexico is being created this Olympic Year. It is, of course,
entirely different, but by no means is an effort being made to
create a false image.5
Provocative declarations of this sort were not new in Mexican
architecture or politics. Attempts to refashion an official image for
Mexico through architecture were, likewise, hardly unheard of. But
what was Mexico’s “new,” “international” image at midcentury? As
explained in the script for the 1958 Brussels pavilion, the first of
Ramírez’s works, the structure was intended to present Mexico as
“a young and vigorous country with deep, old roots.” Simple
enough on paper, this formulation had a long history.
Simultaneously billed as part of Mexico’s national essence and
branded as a tourist commodity, modern Mexico’s “roots” had been
advertised in its international pavilions from the start.6 After the
1929 fair in Seville, however, the emphasis on the ancient history
of Mexico had intensified in state propaganda. Beginning in the
1940s, Mexico’s “youth” came to receive increasing attention as
images of the country’s spectacular economic progress gradually
became as pervasive as those of its ancient past. These two compo-
nents of the discourse of Mexican nationalism first congealed
around a work of exhibition architecture at Brussels, and echoes of
their encounter would define subsequent official displays.
Rafael Mijares, who was responsible for much of the design at
Ramírez’s office, devised a state-of-the-art structure for the fair. A
steel-frame shed filled with prefabricated concrete panels, the
pavilion was nonetheless equipped with a number of “traditional”
Mexican features. Approached from two winding roads, the Avenues
de Seringas and des Narcisses, its façade included a wooden screen

Ricardo de Robina and Mario

Pani. Plaza of the Three Cultures,
Mexico City, 1964. Published in
Arquitectura/México 100 (1968).

Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 103
fitted with blocks of blue-colored blown glass of the kind used com-
monly in vernacular buildings in Mexico. Light shining through the
glass would create the effect, the architects claimed, of “making
[the visitors] feel Mexico’s sky inside the pavilion.”7 Reminiscent
of the concrete sunbreakers of Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s
Brazilian pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the screen
was flanked by a mural of multicolored stone and glass designed by
artist José Chávez Morado.
The pavilion’s combination of modernist box and mural was
most akin to many of the buildings in the recently completed
University City in Mexico’s capital (1953). The pavilion most
directly recalled Ramírez’s own School of Medicine, a hulking
structure in reinforced concrete whose main façade included a
mosaic mural by artist Francisco Eppens. Chávez Morado had also
worked on the University City project, designing glass mosaic
murals for the auditorium at the School of Sciences. Of all recent
official buildings, those of the University City, photographs of
which were showcased prominently inside the Brussels pavilion,
were most heavily promoted as symbols of Mexico’s economic and
political progress after the revolution of the 1910s.8 Ramírez and
Mijares were thus eager to emphasize the affinities between the
City and their pavilion. As at the former, which melded references
to Mexico’s ancient and colonial architectural traditions within the
parameters of a midcentury utopian scheme, notions of Mexican Below: Pedro Ramírez Vázquez
modernity were qualified in Brussels. and Rafael Mijares. Mexican
Pavilion, Brussels World’s Fair,
A replica of a colossal stone sculpture from the site of Tula stood Brussels, 1958. Archivo Pedro
at the intersection of the streets leading to the Brussels pavilion. Its Ramírez Vázquez, Mexico City.
contrast with the building was meant to embody the dialogue Opposite: Pedro Ramírez
between ancient and modern that the structure as a whole adver- Vázquez and Rafael Mijares.
tised as national patrimony. For the interior of the pavilion, art his- Mexican Pavilion, Brussels
World’s Fair, Brussels, 1958.
torian Fernando Gamboa assembled an exhibit combining displays Interior. Archivo Pedro Ramírez
of pre-Hispanic, colonial, modern, and folk art. Gamboa was a Vázquez, Mexico City.

104 Grey Room 40

renowned curator of state-sponsored exhibitions of Mexican art for
foreign audiences, having organized several large shows in major
European cities. As in the case of these exhibitions, his layout for
Brussels emphasized the stylistic continuity between the arts of
these various periods, but it was particularly focused on the glori-
fication of the most ancient and most recent ones, pitting the works
of such artists as José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros,
and Diego Rivera against those of their alleged ancient forebears.9
Inside the pavilion, light-frame displays hung from the ceiling,
seemingly floating in space. Within this unmistakably modernist
environment, however, stood fiberglass copies of ancient stone
sculptures, a wooden colonial altar, and large models of archaeo-
logical sites. The patent materiality of these objects contrasted with
the lightness of the screens hanging from the ceiling, reminding the
fair’s visitors that Mexico’s streamlined “new” look included rough
traces of the “old.” The pavilion’s exterior surface also had primi-
tivist resonances. Its walls were faced with tezontle, a reddish vol-
canic rock little known outside of Mexico.10 Although not part of
the final project, “organic” gestures had been discussed for the
pavilion. Writing to Oscar Urrutia, on-site architect for the pavilion
in February 1957, Mijares suggested that “two or three water spouts”
be added to its walls in order to have “mossy stains in some [of its]
parts.”11
Although it initially faced significant opposition, the eventual
success of the Brussels pavilion, which earned the highest award
given at the 1958 fair, bolstered Ramírez’s prestige and seemed to
bring recognition to Mexico’s exhibition
architecture more broadly.12 At the 1962
World’s Fair in Seattle, the pavilions
were standardized, with participant
nations allowed to add only a distinctive
emblem to their entrances. Exhibition
designer Iker Larrauri devised a set of
floor-to-ceiling panels covered with
images of Mexico’s monuments, ancient
as well as modern, for the Mexican
pavilion’s interior. Portraits of Mexicans
in various regional attires taken by Nacho
López, the renowned photojournalist,
supplemented the images. Displays
emphasizing Mexico’s industrial pro-
duction dominated the show, departing
somewhat from the emphasis placed on
constructing a narrative of national
culture at the Brussels fair.
In his comments to the local press,

Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 105
however, pavilion commissioner Lenin Molina established a con-
nection between the Seattle display and its predecessor, claiming
that a loosely defined dialogue between modern and ancient char-
acterized the Mexican show. “We asked ourselves,” Molina said to
the Seattle Times, “what could our nation, only recently emerging
from the boundaries of the past, bring to the world of the future?”13
With a mural, now lost, artist Manuel Felguérez provided a provoca-
tive answer to the bureaucrat’s question. “The two-sided creation,”
a report stated, “was originally intended as a designed collection of
samples of all natural and industrial goods produced by Mexico. . . .
These run the gamut from two-penny copper naib to singing
violins.”14 Embedding the latest products of Mexico’s economic
“miracle” onto the surface of a mural, the format most associated
with the social ambitions of Mexican modern art, Felguérez’s work
proved wildly popular.15
Ramírez’s next showing, the pavilion for the New York World’s
Fair of 1964, was designed in tandem with the Seattle show. Mexico
Below: Pedro Ramírez Vázquez
was given one of the best sites at the Queens fairgrounds, directly and Rafael Mijares. Mexican
in front of the steel Unisphere designed by Gilmore D. Clarke as the Pavilion, New York World’s Fair,
fair’s space-age symbol. As can be gleaned from an exchange New York, 1964–1965. Detail.
New York World’s Fair 1964–1965
between Lawrence McGinley, Fordham University president and Corporation Records, Manuscripts
architecture power broker in New York, and fair official Bruce and Archives Division, The New
Nicholson, expectations of Mexico among the fair’s organizers in York Public Library, Astor, Lenox,
and Tilden Foundations.
New York were high. While McGinley prepared to visit the pavil-
ion’s architects in Mexico in late 1963, Nicholson asked him to per- Opposite: Flyers of Papantla in
front of the Mexican Pavilion,
suade them about certain aspects of their display then in the works: New York World’s Fair, 1964–1965.
“The Fair would like to have the architects stress the cultural New York World’s Fair 1964–1965
aspects of Mexico above and beyond the others. We are not sure Corporation Records, Manuscripts
and Archives Division, The New
that the Mexicans are entirely aware of the great impression and York Public Library, Astor, Lenox,
influence their modern architecture and paintings are having on and Tilden Foundations.
architects and artists throughout the world.”
What Nicholson wanted to see in the New
York pavilion, moreover, was what the one in
Brussels had contained. “From the point of
view of the mass of visitors being North
Americans,” he wrote, “we feel [the Mexicans]
should design their exhibits to stress the
ancient cultures and the modern cultures as
seen through their artists, and how one was
affected by the other.”16
The dialogue between Mexico’s ancient
and modern cultures was not, however, the
main emphasis of the New York pavilion, at
least not initially. In the building itself, this
dialogue was not apparent in any obvious
way. Mijares designed a structure in rein-

106 Grey Room 40

forced concrete that included two levels and a mezzanine terrace
and rested on cross-shaped supports. Four-sided in plan, its façades
were concave and equipped with steel sunbreakers. In dialogue
with a number of other structures at the fair, the Mexican pavilion
also related well with the Unisphere. As early as 1961, as he pre-
pared its design, Mijares had requested information about the fair’s
emblem and geared his building to respond to Clarke’s structure.17
In the eyes of some, however, these internationalist aspirations
threatened the distinctiveness of the Mexican pavilion. After visiting
the fairgrounds in early 1963, Mijares himself was worried that his
project looked too much like the U.S. Federal Pavilion. He sent anx-
ious telegrams to fair staff to confirm whether this was the case.18
Initially, the New York pavilion’s primary focus was not on
Mexican culture but on industrial production. Nevertheless, exotic
displays were not absent. Most popular among these were the
Flyers of Papantla, “a spectacle derived from ancient Aztec tradi-
tion in which,” in the words of Jorge Canavati, pavilion commis-
sioner, “hanging by their heels from ropes attached to a platform
atop a 50-foot pole, the performers . . . fling themselves into space

Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 107
and spiral headlong to earth in ever widening arcs, while a lone
musician seated aloft calls out ritual melodies on a reed flute.”19
Spectacular as the flyers, placed in front of the pavilion, proved to
be, Eduardo Terrazas, architect in charge of the pavilion’s con-
struction, recalls that its 1964 season was not popular enough by
the standards of fair organizers. This led Mexican officials to
request Fernando Gamboa to replace Canavati as pavilion commis-
sioner and design the interior of its second season, which opened
in April 1965.
The New York pavilion’s second run was much more focused on
Mexican art and culture than the first and brought back much of
what audiences had enjoyed at Brussels.20 Most significantly,
Gamboa brought a set of monumental stone Olmec heads to the fair.
To claim that these monuments bolstered the pavilion’s “Mexicanness”
in any narrow sense, however, misses how expansive and oblique
the concept could prove to be at the time. New York audiences
knew well the largest of the heads, which arrived at the fair on
July 9, 1965.21 Since May of that year, the monolith had stood at
Seagram Plaza, facing Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s skyscraper on
Park Avenue. Curiously enough, the first display of one of the
smaller heads also had occurred in front of a Mies van der Rohe
building. In 1963, James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Museum
of Fine Arts, Houston, had transported it out of the jungles of
Veracruz and organized an exhibition that featured the monolith’s
presence in front of Mies’s Cullinan Hall, the steel-and-glass exhi-
bition pavilion Sweeney had commissioned from the architect
in 1958.22

108 Grey Room 40


Opposite: Fernando Gamboa and
Gov. Charles Poletti, left, standing
next to an Olmec head at the
Mexican Pavilion, New York
World’s Fair, 1964–1965.
New York World’s Fair 1964–1965
Corporation Records, Manuscripts
and Archives Division, The New
York Public Library, Astor, Lenox,
and Tilden Foundations.
Below: Pedro Ramírez Vázquez
and Rafael Mijares. Museum
at Ciudad Juárez, Ciudad Juárez,
1964. Archivo Pedro Ramírez
Vázquez, Mexico City.
The ways in which these images resonated with one another
convey some idea of how fluid notions of Mexican modernity were
at the fair. The Mexican pavilion was undeniably indebted to
Cullinan Hall and other Miesian structures, a connection made all
the more evident by the ancient monuments placed next to it.
Moreover, the Olmec heads brought by Gamboa stood in interest-
ing dialogue with other symbols at the fair. A press release for the
fair stressed that the “Olmeca head, expressing the cultures and
beliefs of [ancient Mexico], [would] face the Unisphere, the World’s
Fair symbol of present-day ‘Peace through Understanding.’ . . .
The two will serve as giant expressions of art in their respective
eras.”23 Emblems of imagined deep pasts and utopian futures, the
Olmec head and the Unisphere found themselves in communion in
Flushing Meadows. The New York pavilion was the most spectac-
ular incarnation of the “new” Mexico Ramírez and his collabora-
tors devised before 1968. The discourse of this pavilion and its
predecessors would resonate with many aspects of their designs for
the Olympics.
|||||
While these images of Mexican modernity were showcased abroad,
Ramírez was busy working on no-less-ambitious displays at home.
The most dramatic museum designed at Ramírez’s office was built
in Ciudad Juárez, a city on the Texas-Mexico border, in 1964.
Circular in plan and with bell-shaped concrete walls, the museum’s
main volume was flanked on one side by a reflecting pool and an
elongated gallery, both of which echoed the museum’s curved con-
tours. The peculiar forms of the complex did not go unnoticed by
writers of the period. “When these buildings were designed,” a
report in Construcción Mexicana stated, “the North American taste
for spectacular advertisements and Mexico’s sculptural sensibili-
ties were taken into account at the same time.” Like the main chamber
in the New York pavilion, the museum’s central room was devoted
to a didactic explanation of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past and included
replicas of the Tula sculpture shown in Brussels and of the Olmec
heads that New York audiences saw
during the World’s Fair.
The purpose of the museum, one
of several that Ramírez was commis-
sioned to design in Mexico during
the early 1960s, was twofold: “on the
one hand, to encourage tourism”; on
the other hand, to “disseminate essen-
tially Mexican cultural values and
assert our nationality.”24 The center-
Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 109
piece of this network was Mexico City’s National Museum of
Anthropology and History, designed with these issues very much
in mind. Completed in 1964, this permanent space-age container of
Mexico’s ancient treasures made a case for the country’s simulta-
neous “youth” and “deep roots.” The museum showcased images
of national grandeur in much the same language as the pavilions.
Tourism was one of the main concerns throughout its design
process, which was supervised by a central planning committee
headed by Ramírez. “A high percentage of tourism into our country
is fueled by our world-renowned archaeological riches, monuments
and museums,” the committee’s first report stated. “This represents
a source of incalculable income, which can increase greatly [with]
a new Museum.”25
The museum comprised twenty-six rooms devoted to didactic
displays of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic history as well as to contempo-
rary ethnography. Iker Larrauri, who briefly left his work at the
museum to design the Seattle pavilion, served with architect
Ricardo de Robina as head supervisor of the exhibition layout,
which was developed in collaboration with anthropologists spe-
cialized in each of the subject areas. The rooms at the museum
surrounded an open courtyard, the centerpiece of which was a
reinforced-concrete umbrella clad in aluminum, supported by a
single column, and facing a pond. One of the most striking techni-
cal accomplishments of the era, the column sported sculpted reliefs
made by Chávez Morado, who had designed the murals for the
Brussels pavilion.
The symbolic focus of the complex, the courtyard was designed in
acute awareness of international precedents. Receptivity to interna-
tional models, contemporary as well as historical, defined the
museum’s design process as a whole. During its planning stages, sev-
eral of its key exhibition designers were sent to visit museums in a
number of world cities. Larrauri claims that the central courtyard that
distributes circulation into the various galleries of the Museum of
Anthropology was inspired by the neoclassical rotunda of John Russell
Pope’s 1937 design of the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
DC, which was among the museums visited.26 As a model for a project
of such nationalist resonance, Pope’s monument to early twentieth-
century U.S. continental hegemony was fittingly grand.27
As at Ramírez’s pavilions, however, images of continental ambition
in the museum were inseparable from gestures of cultural speci-
ficity. In ways reminiscent of the Brussels pavilion’s play of “local”
and “universal,” “old” and “new” materials, the Museum of
Anthropology’s surfaces combined the roughness of brick and
stone with the slickness of steel. Ramírez, who was keen to discuss
the building’s language in terms of local architectural traditions,
described its central patio as “a quadrangle layout,” a solution “bor-

Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Rafael

Mijares, and Jorge Campuzano.
National Museum of Anthropology
and History, Mexico City, 1964.
Photograph by the author.

110 Grey Room 40

rowed from classical Mayan architecture. It consist[ed] of a kind of
patio bounded by enclosed buildings that communicate with the
outside by means of clear spans of their corners and through door-
ways, arranged in register between galleries, thus maintaining a
sense of the exterior merging with the interior.”28 Other references,
however loose, to such traditions were also present. The steel tracery
in the courtyard’s walls, designed by Seattle mural artist Manuel
Felguérez, for instance, recalled sculptural façades of ancient
Mayan buildings in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Felguérez was one of twenty-three artists summoned to work at
the Museum of Anthropology. German-born Mathias Goeritz, an
artist formerly distanced from official art circles in Mexico, also
completed murals for the museum’s interior. Goeritz, who designed
mural-size tapestries for the room devoted to Mexico’s Huichol
peoples, had long championed abstract art as a response to what he
described, as early as 1954, as an overly politicized tradition of offi-
cial figurative art in Mexico.29 The inclusion of his works at the
museum, however, was one of the marks of his absorption into the
national canon. His contribution to the museum—tapestries that
merged abstraction with the longer-standing glorification of Mexico’s
folk arts—was seamlessly integrated into the general ethos of the
display. The official guide made this clear enough, claiming that
Goeritz’s works “display[ed] the manual skill of the Indians and its
transformation in terms of contemporary artistic language.”30
Through these gestures, the Museum of Anthropology articu-
lated a clear message about Mexico to the world. One aspect of this
message stood out in particular. Many observers noticed the ways
in which the museum building and its permanent exhibitions
connected a romantically aggrandized pre-Hispanic past to the
triumphs—cultural, technological, and economic—of the López
Mateos administration. Because of the magnitude of the commis-

Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 111
sion, the museum has been the subject of considerable discussion
in Mexico, although it receives attention almost exclusively in iso-
lation from other contemporary projects.
The most influential contemporary critique of the museum came
from an official intellectual of the era, the poet Octavio Paz. In his
1969 book, The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, Paz was the
first to discuss the museum as the most significant work of Mexican
political propaganda built during the 1960s. At the museum, Paz
argued, “anthropology and history have been made to serve an idea
about Mexico’s history, and that idea is the foundation, the buried
and immovable base, that sustains our conceptions of the state, of
political power, and of social order.” Because the sequence of rooms
devoted to various periods of Mexico’s pre-Hispanic history culmi-
nated in the Aztec period, “the diversity and complexity of two
thousand years of Mesoamerican history [were] presented as a pro-
logue to the last act, the apotheosis-apocalypse of México-
Tenochtitlán. The regime [saw] itself transfigured in the world of
the Aztecs.”31 Paz believed this association was objectionable for a
number of reasons. The narrow glorification of this aspect of the
country’s pre-Hispanic history shut Mexico’s cultural diversity,
ancient as well as modern, out of the state-sponsored image of national
identity. Geographically, the celebration of central Mexico’s ancient
cultures as the core of national identity mirrored the extreme cen-
tralization of power in Mexico City to the detriment of the rest of
the territory. Additionally, Mexico’s one-party state took as its
model Aztec forms of rule. Based not on democratic principles,
they were instead sustained by the personal charisma of absolute—
and ruthless—rulers.
Paz’s critique has been echoed by a number of more recent
writings, all of which point out the museum’s fundamental role in
the propaganda apparatus of Mexico’s postrevolutionary state, one
in which anthropological discourse was paramount.32 As Claudio
Lomnitz argues, by the 1960s “Mexican anthropology had provided
Mexico with the theoretical and empirical materials that were used
to shape a modernist aesthetics, embodied in the design of build-
ings such as the National Museum of Anthropology.”33 Paz wrote
The Other Mexico in the wake of his resignation, in protest of the
October 2 massacre, from a post as ambassador to India. He based
the text on as a series of lectures he delivered at the University of
Texas at Austin exactly a year after the tragedy. Lost in the recep-
tion of the book, one of the two foundational narratives of the 1968
massacre alongside journalist Elena Poniatowska’s 1971 Noche de
Tlatelolco, is the fact that the museum was not the primary focus of
Paz’s critique.34 Instead, he saw the museum as part of a network
of monuments built in the years leading up to the 1968 Olympics
and massacre in the Mexican capital. His critique may seem overly

112 Grey Room 40

expansive, and Paz’s underlying argument ultimately folds the abuses
of the Díaz Ordaz regime into a nebulous definition of the Mexican
“national character,” thereby legitimizing its actions. Indeed, Paz
himself had been responsible for giving this reductive definition of
Mexicanidad aesthetic form in his earlier and better-known The
Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a treatise on national identity to which
The Other Mexico was something of a response. Worthy of a closer
look, however, is Paz’s ability to see in Olympic and non-Olympic
monuments fragments of a common ideological horizon.

|||||

If at the World’s Fairs and in the national network of museums

Ramírez had attempted to establish a globally palatable language
for midcentury Mexican nationalism, the Olympic project contin-
ued such efforts on a grander scale. Overseeing the Olympics was
the mammoth MOC headed by Ramírez and subdivided into a
number of smaller agencies. In each of the MOC’s agencies Ramírez
positioned collaborators from his previous commissions, including
Goeritz, thus creating out of the committee an extended version of
his already large office. Recruited also for the Olympic efforts were
several of the designers of his museums and pavilions, including
Iker Larrauri.35
Picking up where Ramírez’s pavilions and museums of the pre-
vious decade had left off, the primary focus of the Olympics as a
whole was cultural display. Ramírez wanted to distinguish the
1968 games from those that came before them by hosting a Cultural
Olympiad that began in January of that year, a full nine months
before the athletic competitions. The architect claimed that this
aligned Mexico ’68 with the Olympics’ ancient objectives while
honoring the country’s commitment to the promotion of culture.
With an eye on the global image economy, Ramírez by the late 1960s
had successfully branded Mexico as a champion of its own culture,
a claim that had precedents in the construction of the postrevolu-
tionary cultural apparatus of Mexico after 1910. Playing host at the
Olympics, however, Ramírez expanded this long-standing argu-
ment, attempting to position Mexico as a champion of the cultures
of others as well. In doing so, he adopted the rhetoric not so much
of previous Olympics as of World’s Fairs, particularly those that had
hosted his own pavilions in the recent past.36
Ramírez made his announcement of a Cultural Olympiad in an
August 1967 report addressed to president Díaz Ordaz. The upcom-
ing Olympics were to feature, he wrote,
a Cultural Program, which will consist of twenty events, like
the sports [competition]. Owing to Mexico’s pacifist tradition,

Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 113
 to the great value that culture has in human life, and to the
spirit that originally inspired the organization of the Games,
the Organizing Committee has invited every national Olympic
Committee to showcase its best scientific, cultural, artistic
and folkloric expressions alongside competition in sports.37
On the one hand, Ramírez’s statement makes clear that the MOC
saw the games as a forum where Mexico’s noninterventionist stance
in world affairs could gain new currency. As Zolov has noted, by
the late 1960s Mexico’s foreign policy had garnered global atten-
tion, mostly because, unlike many of its Latin American peers,
Mexico had never ceased to maintain diplomatic relations with
Cuba after that country’s 1959 revolution. On the other hand, when
seen in the context of mounting unrest within Mexico, the mention
of the country’s “pacifist tradition” is also relevant vis-à-vis the
home front; specifically, the increasingly militant activities of the
student movement. On the whole, Zolov has argued, the Cultural
Olympiad “comprised a vision of Mexico in which the nation was
perceived as a land where, on one hand, international traditions
demonstrated profound tolerance of political difference while, on
the other, indigenous cultural traditions were framed by and inter-
faced seamlessly with a forward-looking embrace of modern
values.”38 Zolov points out that all the formulations that defined the
Cultural Olympiad had sources in the broad cultural horizon of
midcentury Mexico. However, he neglects to point out that long
before the Cultural Olympiad was in the works these formulations
had been articulated in very specific ways around the lineage of
works of exhibition architecture examined here.
Current issues, however, factored into the Olympic design cam-
paign as prominently as older narratives. Along with other pressing
matters, for instance, the MOC addressed the concern of looming
violence in Mexico City. Least imaginative among Ramírez’s
responses to this anxiety was his idea to make images of white
peace doves visible in many parts of the city months before the
games began. He was also proud to announce that, for the duration
of the Olympics, advertising agencies were to remove all commer-
cial ads from the city, replacing them with slogans exalting the slip-
pery concept of peace.39 Peace was also the subject of Olympic
works in other media. As early as August 1966, Ramírez commis-
sioned a film that was to describe, in the words of Luis Aveleyra, a
member of the Cultural Olympiad team and an anthropologist
involved in the design of the Museum of Anthropology, “the true
essence of the concept of Peace among nations, understood in rela-
tion to biological and cultural determining factors.”40
Through 1968, events devoted to architecture, film, dance, visual
art, and nuclear research were organized as part of the Cultural

Mathias Goeritz. Route of

Friendship, 1968. Fondo Mathias
Goeritz, CENIDIAP-INBA,
Mexico City.

114 Grey Room 40

Olympiad. Goeritz persuaded Ramírez to appoint him director of
an International Meeting of Sculptors, the only event that was to
leave a permanent imprint on Mexico City’s urban fabric. Like few
others, this event exemplifies the anxious ways in which the urban
dimension of art and architecture came into dialogue with the
MOC’s ideological agenda. As part of a project known as “The Route
of Friendship,” fifteen artists selected by Goeritz and Ramírez to
attend the meeting were to complete monumental, abstract,
brightly painted works in concrete along the Anillo Periférico, the
highway surrounding the city’s southern edge that linked many of
the Olympic installations.
The idea for the route grew out of Goeritz’s interest in the cre-
ation of urban monuments. Most notable among his early works of
this sort are his Satellite City towers, which were designed with
Luis Barragán in 1957. Mario Pani, who developed this residential
subdivision outside of Mexico City, commissioned Goeritz and
Barragán to provide him with a monumental landmark to identify
his project in the public eye. During the early 1960s, Goeritz had
designed several similar landmarks and usually intended his works
to be perceived from moving vehicles on the road. Even more
important for Goeritz than their perception from the road was the
dissemination of his monuments as images in various media, a
process that he avidly encouraged alongside Barragán at the
Satellite City project.41 The Route of Friendship had more ambi-
tious, national-scale origins than any of his previous works, how-
ever. After the fact, Goeritz claimed to have first thought of it as a
network of sculptural clusters to be placed alongside two major
highways in Mexico, one traversing the country from north to
south, the other from east to west. In his words, “the idea was to
erect on these highways groups of towers or gigantic primary forms
. . . in underdeveloped or even in desert regions.” The
monuments, Goeritz believed, would bring about
urban development in such areas. “Around these
structures,” he claimed, “stations could be built,
beginning with hotels, gasoline stations and small
regional pre-Hispanic and popular art museums, in
order to become centers for automobile tourism.”42
Although these ambitious plans never materialized,
Goeritz’s Olympic project still proved most challeng-
ing to the MOC’s assumed role as the champion of uni-
versal culture. His choice of artists and works for the
route was controversial from the start. The sculptor
made a point of not having artists be sent on official
missions by their countries of origin.43 Fittingly for
Olympic discourse but inconveniently in terms of logis-
tics, Goeritz also marketed his selection of sculptors as

Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 115
a global one. It included, as he was eager to claim in interviews at
the time, artists “of every race and continent.”44
Coming up with a global roster of sculptors was not easy.
Finding African-American sculptors proved particularly difficult.
Among the people Goeritz asked for advice in his search was
Dorothy C. Miller, curator of painting and sculpture at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art. “Off hand I could not think of a Negro
sculptor who would be able to design a concrete construction thirty
to fifty feet high,” Miller wrote back, “but if there is one here I am
sure our staff will locate him for you.”45 From the start, geography
was as important as race for Goeritz, and his global ambitions took
him even farther away from home. To find a sculptor from Africa to
invite to Mexico, he wrote to Julian Beinart, then a professor of
urban planning at the University of Cape Town, and Jean-François
Zevaco, an architect based in Casablanca. Beinart was eager to
suggest a couple of names, but Zevaco was hard-pressed to think of
suitable Moroccan sculptors for the task at hand.46 “I am personally
convinced,” Zevaco wrote in a letter to Karel Wendl, secretary to
the International Meeting of Sculptors, “that [sculpture] does not
match up well now, or has for a long time, with the sensibility of
men from this country as a means of expression.”47
In the end, Goeritz succeeded both at finding a relatively diverse
array of sculptors for the project and at having the final result of his
efforts provide a set of permanent monuments. However, the MOC
was also responsible for more ephemeral displays. Ramírez com-
missioned Eduardo Terrazas, previously the resident architect for
the New York pavilion, to head the MOC’s Department of Urban
Ornament. The MOC’s cosmopolitan ambitions suited the young
architect well. Trained at Cornell University, Terrazas had worked
at the Paris office of Candilis, Josic, and Woods before his stint in New
York and had also worked under Fernando Gamboa in the design of
a number of international Mexican art exhibitions.48
These experiences defined Terrazas’s work for the Mexico City
Olympics. He is perhaps best known for his codesign, with Lance
Wyman, of the logo for the games. His intervention in rendering
Mexico City spectacular during the Olympics, however, was deci-
sive. As it had been in Goeritz’s Route of Friendship, color was
all-important in his effort, not least because the 1968 Winter and
Summer Olympics would be the first to be broadcast in color.
Terrazas’s idea to color-code the entire city, creating a system of
urban guidelines and a graphic language to direct visitors between
each of the Olympic venues, is strongly reminiscent of certain
aspects of Team X urban theory, which described the urban dweller
as the center of “webs” of circulation at the level of the street.49 At
the same time, Terrazas’s idea built upon a broader discourse
on Mexican color, a major element of the country’s image in the

116 Grey Room 40

language of tourism. “Mexico City, scrubbed, brash, vital,” Time
magazine claimed in an October 1968 article describing Terrazas’s
work, “is as bright and gay as a piñata party.”50

|||||

These urban strategies were only part of Ramírez’s ambitious ini-

tiative to reinvent Mexico City’s image through the Olympics. They
emerged clearly from the experience he and his collaborators had
acquired in the design of exhibition spaces, temporary as well as
permanent, over the preceding decades. A similar taste for urban
spectacle informed the creation of much of the Olympic infrastruc-
ture, which included such media-friendly buildings as Félix
Candela’s Sports Palace, a more than worthy successor to Pier Luigi
Nervi’s Palazzo and Palazetto of Sports built for the 1960 Rome
Olympics. Yet, just as powerful as the drive behind the construc-
tion of these facilities was the effort to rebrand the city’s existing
spaces as the Olympics approached.
During the buildup to the Olympics, the Plaza of the Three
Cultures, which would become the site of the tragic October 2 mas-
sacre, was construed by various fronts as the quintessential site of
Mexico’s cultural and political harmony. The space incarnated the
narrative of Mexican history also embodied by Ramírez’s national
monuments: the harmonious continuity between periods in history
clearly characterized as pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern. The
plaza was not designed specifically for the Olympics, but archival
information suggests that it was counted as one of Mexico City’s
Olympic venues. The exact Olympic events planned for this space
are not easy to discern. In any event, they were probably called off
in the wake of the massacre.51
In determining the afterlife of Olympic-era architecture in public
memory, however, the plaza has arguably played the most impor-
tant role. Moreover, a clear connection exists between the plaza and
the World’s Fair and museum exhibition spaces designed by
Ramírez and others. Ricardo de Robina, one of the main designers
of the Museum of Anthropology’s permanent exhibition, directed
most of the plaza’s planning, which also included Pani’s and
Ramírez’s direct intervention.52 An analysis of the space’s design
places it squarely within the discursive frame of the earlier exhibi-
tion spaces. The plaza agglomerated three paradigmatic structures,
all with the same Aztec name, Tlatelolco: the ruins of the mythical
last Aztec bastion before the fall of the empire, the sixteenth-
century Franciscan church built at the site after its fall, and Mario
Pani’s housing project. Completing the layout, Ramírez’s own
Ministry of Foreign Affairs Building, finished in 1966, linked the
new monuments of the Mexican state to structures construed as

Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 117
their predecessors.
For Paz, one of the few to have ever written about the plaza, the
space shared a direct ideological connection to the Museum of
Anthropology. These nationalist monuments had resulted from the
remapping of the city to serve the propaganda demands of Mexico’s
one-party state in the years immediately preceding the Olympics.
Paz wrote in The Other Mexico, “A few years ago, the regime trans-
formed [Tlatelolco] into a complex of huge low-rent apartment
buildings, and in doing so wanted to rescue the venerable plaza: it
discovered part of the pyramid and, in front of it and the minuscule
church, built an anonymous skyscraper: the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs.”53 Paz’s chronology may not be historically exact, and his
characterization of the Mexican state’s intentions may be overly
simplistic, collapsing together the motivations not only of the pres-
idential circle and architectural establishment in Mexico but also
of Mexico City mayor Ernesto Uruchurtu (1952–1967), who was
behind much of the modernizing push at the city government
level.54 That said, Paz’s recognition of the juxtaposition of architec-
tural typologies is telling, because the connections between ancient
and modern architecture at the plaza were heavily emphasized by
reports of the period. Their relationship was articulated in much
the same language used in Mexico’s international and domestic
exhibitions during at least the preceding decade. For a plaza that
would host the government’s most significant international institu-
tion and was hence a permanent exhibition about Mexico designed
at once for “local” and “foreign” eyes, this was fitting.
Pani’s journal Arquitectura/México was understandably enthu-
siastic about the plaza, heightening the historical dialogue to which
its architecture gave form.55 Construcción Mexicana claimed in
March 1967 that the site “couldn’t be any more adequate” for
Ramírez’s ministry. An article in the periodical enthusiastically
argued that the tower “provide[d] the salient
example of modern architecture within the Plaza
of the Three Cultures, becoming a vortex of inte-
gration of the remains of the pre-Hispanic and the
colonial [periods].” Ramírez’s building thus became
the “modern culmination of the [monuments] that
embody the clearly defined states of the nation’s
cultural history at the Plaza.”56
Pani’s buildings were at once part of and dra-
matically removed from the remnants of Mexico’s
past at Tlatelolco. Images underscoring this rela-
tionship were widely seen before and after the
massacre and the Olympics. The plaza graced the
cover of photographer Hans Beacham’s 1969 book
The Architecture of Mexico, which internationalized

118 Grey Room 40


Opposite: Hans Beacham.
The Architecture of Mexico,
Yesterday and Today, New York,
1969. Architectural Book
Publishing Company, New York.
Left: Salvador Novo. New
Mexican Grandeur, Mexico City,
1967. Archivo Salvador Novo,
Mexico City.
Right: Pasaporte ’68. American
Express tourist guide to Mexico
City published in The News,
Mexico City, 13 October 1968.
Félix Candela Architectural
Records and Papers, Avery
Library, Columbia University,
New York.
official identity discourses in Mexico by emphasizing the aesthetic
affinity between Mexico’s recent buildings and their alleged ances-
tors.57 The same view of the plaza—which, curiously enough, left
out Ramírez’s ministry—was featured as the cover of poet Salvador
Novo’s broadly publicized English edition of Nueva grandeza
Mexicana , a work commissioned by the state oil company PEMEX
to commemorate the Seventh World Petroleum Congress held in
Mexico in April 1967.58 Photographs of Tlatelolco were also dis-
seminated as part of the mass-media promotion of the Olympics. In
advertisements designed by Mexico’s Ministry of Tourism and pub-
lished in major world newspapers, photographs of the plaza were
presented to potential tourists as a condensation of the country’s
history, all available in a single place.59 An image included in an
advertisement in The News, an English-language newspaper pub-
lished in Mexico City, that appeared only two weeks after the
massacre and during the Olympics is among the most eloquent of
all mass-media representations of the plaza: coloring its monu-
ments in much the same palette Terrazas used and framing them
inside an American Express credit card, the image rendered the
plaza little more than a gateway into the seemingly innocent con-
sumption of Mexico.
Images were deceiving, however. Even before the Olympics and
the massacre, few things about Tlatelolco had been harmonious.
Pani’s project had resulted from the largest slum clearance scheme
ever executed in Mexico. Displacing thousands of residents of
northern Mexico City, the project was heavily criticized from its
inception. The massacre did not help its reputation, and the
broader reverberations of this tragic episode continue to define the
image of the Mexican Olympics and the architecture of the period
as a whole.
The mythologies wrought around the massacre have rendered
Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 119
the relationship between architecture and the traumatic October
events increasingly ambiguous. A 2007 essay by literary scholar
Rubén Gallo is a case in point. Writing about collectivism in
Mexican art in the 1970s, Gallo explains that “the sudden interest
in ‘the street’” that defined much of artistic practice during the
decade was “a reaction to the profound urban changes that affected
Mexico City after 1950.” Such changes, Gallo argues, included an
explosive growth in the city’s population coupled with “a torrent
of public works—freeways, expressways, overpasses, tunnels and
ring roads—that, much like Robert Moses’s network of highways
and bridges in New York, radically transformed the region’s urban
fabric.” In a nostalgic turn, Gallo claims, “a city that had once
been filled with flaneurs and lively streets rapidly became a mega-
lopolis of traffic jams, insurmountable cement structures, and
homicidal vehicles.”60
Gallo’s assessment of the modernizing forces at work in Mexico
City goes far beyond nostalgia. Indeed, Gallo establishes a causal
relationship between a vaguely defined idea of modernism in the
design of buildings and murder. “The attack against the street,”
Gallo claims, “led not only to widespread alienation but, in some
extreme cases, to death.” Gallo argues that the October 2 massacre
was “made possible, in part, by urban planning and architecture.”
As the military opened fire on the students, Nonoalco-Tlatelolco’s
“typically modernist elements” left the students particularly vul-
nerable because they stood “in a modernist panopticon, where they
could be surveyed from almost any point in the complex.”61
Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was designed with some of the classic mod-
ernist principles Gallo mentions in mind. While the accuracy of
Gallo’s architectural analysis may be debatable, the conceptual leap
that he establishes between Pani’s buildings and the events of
October 2 is not exclusive to his writings. In the context of a 2008
exhibition held in New York’s New Museum, such critics as
Cuauhtémoc Medina and Ana Elena Mallet discussed Tlatelolco as
a monument not only inseparable from the massacre but as emblem-
atic of the Mexican state’s loss of legitimacy and ultimate political
failure during the 1960s. Mallet, for instance, described the com-
plex as “a clear reflection of the [Mexican] government’s failure to
achieve modernity by issuing decrees and erecting buildings. As a
ruin, it stands as proof of haphazard attempts, of the omnipotent
presidential gesture that tries to summon forth the future with tons
of cement.”62 This indictment of architecture’s collusion with
power has been problematically extended to many of Mexico’s
Olympic-era buildings and designs. Built before the massacre took
place, many of these structures are today contradictorily perceived
as monumental attempts to erase the massacre from memory; few
in Mexico associate them with the athletic celebrations they hosted

120 Grey Room 40

or the architectural traditions upon which they built.63 Today
Terrazas admits that the design of Mexico ’68 has been overshad-
owed by memories of the massacre, constantly fueled as these have
been by representations in various media and in myriad intellectual
discussions over the last four decades.64
Forestalled by this problematic pairing, however, is a thorough
explanation of how these buildings, and indeed the architectural
culture of the era, fit into the longer continuum of architecture’s
relationship with politics, media, and the state in modern Mexico.
It is not that the massacre at Tlatelolco and the Olympics are not
connected, but the points of interaction between the two events and
their media afterlives are concrete enough to render nebulous judg-
ments of value less than effective for understanding their interrelation.
Here, I have attempted to trace a significant part of this relationship,
shedding light on the continuities that extend between midcentury
exhibition architecture and the urban strategies that preceded and
animated the 1968 Olympics. Further attempts to remap the image
economy that saw the articulation of various “new” and “interna-
tional” spaces at Mexico ’68 can illuminate for us not only the con-
tours of architecture and design’s compromised condition in
Olympic-era Mexico but help us remain watchful of their enduring
imbrication with the politics of global events in our day.

Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 121
Notes
I would like to thank the staff at the archives I visited over the course of my research
as well as my interviewees for their gracious assistance. I am also grateful to NYU’s
Institute of Fine Arts and the Pinta Fund for their generosity, which made my
research possible. For their comments on earlier drafts of this essay, thanks are
also due to the editors at Grey Room, my doctoral advisers Jean-Louis Cohen and
Edward Sullivan, and colleagues Deanna Sheward, Irene Sunwoo, Jennifer Josten,
and George Flaherty. I presented a different version of this essay at Columbia
University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in the
spring of 2009.

1. An exception is the Montreal 1967 pavilion, whose interior was designed by

Fernando Gamboa. Antonio García and Leonardo Favela designed this pavilion,
which sported hyperbolic paraboloid forms reminiscent of Félix Candela’s archi-
tecture in reinforced concrete. See “El pabellón de México en Expo ’67,” Construcción
Mexicana 8, no. 9 (September 1967): 14–16.
2. A partial exception to this is architect Ramón Vargas’s 1995 publication on
the pavilions and museums of Ramírez Vázquez, a book that merely rehashes the
official legends of the various works and provides little, if any, historical context or
interpretation. See Ramón Vargas Salguero, Pabellones y museos de Pedro Ramírez
Vázquez (Mexico City: Noriega Editores, 1995). Ariel Kuri has also discussed
Ramírez’s role as architect-politician during the Olympic Games, but his essay
presents a largely celebratory account of his tenure. See Ariel Rodríguez Kuri,
“Hacia México 68: Pedro Ramírez Vázquez y el proyecto olímpico,” Secuencia 56
(May–Aug 2003): 37–73. Kevin Witherspoon’s account successfully places Mexico
’68 within the context of twentieth-century sports history, but pays little mind to
matters of architecture or design. See Kevin B. Witherspoon, Before the Eyes of the
World. Mexico and the 1968 Olympic Games (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2008). Most recently, a 2008 exhibition in Mexico City revisited the
Olympic design campaign. The most significant museographic contribution to
date on the subject, it devotes considerable attention to Ramírez’s role in the cam-
paign’s organization but fails to address the all-important continuity with his pre-
vious works. See Diseñando México 68: Una identidad Olímpica , exh. cat.
(Mexico City: Museo de Arte Moderno / Landucci, 2008).
3. Although Ramírez received most of his commissions during the tenure of
president López Mateos, his work as the architect of Mexico’s international image
began even earlier. The successful completion of the National School of Medicine
(1953) at Mexico’s University City and the welfare agency headquarters (1954),
both state commissions, solidified Ramírez’s ties with the Mexican political estab-
lishment. In late 1956 Gilberto Loyo, minister of economics under President
Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–1958), appointed Ramírez and his partner Rafael
Mijares head designers of the Mexican pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair. By
December, a project for the pavilion had been sent to the fair. Rafael Mijares, “Reporte
de Viaje a Bruselas,” 26 September 1956, in Brussels Pavilion files, Archivo Ramírez
Vázquez (ARV), Mexico City.
4. Eric Zolov, “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow’: Mexico and the 1968
Olympics,” The Americas 61, no. 2 (October 2004): 159–188.
5. “Pedro Ramírez Vázquez,” Arquitectura/México 100 (1968): 65. Unless noted
otherwise, this and all other translations are by the author.
6. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern
Nation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 6. Tenorio-

122 Grey Room 40

Trillo’s book, the only to deal with the history of Mexico at the World’s Fair, pays
no mind to fairs during the second half of the twentieth century.
7. Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Rafael Mijares, “Pabellón de México en Bruselas,”
in Brussels Pavilion files, ARV.
8. Keith Eggener, “The Presence of the Past: Architecture and Politics in Modern
Mexico,” A + U Architecture and Urbanism 389 (2003): 22.
9. See Carlos Molina, “Fernando Gamboa y su particular versión de México,”
Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 87 (2005): 117–143. Gamboa is
also the subject of an exhibition that opened in December 2009 at Mexico City’s
Museo de Arte Moderno, titled Fernando Gamboa: La utopía moderna.
10. Rafael Mijares, interview by author, Puerto Vallarta, 17 August 2009.
11. Rafael Mijares to Oscar Urrutia, 25 February 1957, in Brussels Pavilion files,
ARV.
12. Some of the early opposition was doubtless a result of the fair organizers’
low expectations of what Mexico could offer. The plot of land assigned to Mexico
had been declined by representatives of Uruguay and Peru before it was offered to
the cultural attaché at the Mexican embassy in Brussels. Celestino Herrera to
Gilberto Loyo, 5 January 1957, in Brussels Pavilion files, ARV. In December 1956,
upon first seeing the Mexican project, J. Van Goethem, chief architect for the fair,
demanded that its size be drastically reduced because it threatened “to break the
architectural equilibrium of that sector of the Exposition.” J. Van Goethem to
Rafael Mijares, Brussels, 12 December 1956, in Brussels Pavilion files, ARV. Mijares
vehemently responded to the request by claiming, accurately, that the British
pavilion, located in the same sector of the fair, was significantly taller than most
and had not encountered any problems. “The main idea of our project,” Mijares
wrote back to Van Goethem, “is to render worthy . . . our pavilion by making it
15 meters tall, a height which, in relation to its built surface, seems to us well
proportioned, as the dimensions of our plot of land are relatively small.” Rafael
Mijares to J. Van Goethem, 15 December 1956, in Brussels Pavilion files, ARV.
Only after much negotiation was Urrutia able to protect the original design from
major downsizing.
13. Laurie Fish, “Beautiful Mexican Pavilion Stresses Unity of Mankind,” The
Seattle Times, 27 May 1962.
14. Robert Esken, “Mexico’s Fair Exhibit Shows Erstwhile ‘Siesta Land’ Awake
Racing for Century 21,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 24 April 1962.
15. For an analysis of the relationship between mural painting and politics in
Mexico, see Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico,
1920–1940: Art of the New Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1998). On Felguérez’s mural, see Juan García Ponce, Felguérez (Mexico City:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1976), 31.
16. Bruce Nicholson to Lawrence J. McGinley, 14 November 1963, in file P0.3
Mexico Foreign Participation, 1963, box 279, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations,
New York World’s Fair 1964–1965 Corporation records, Manuscripts and Archives
Division, The New York Public Library (hereinafter referred to as NYWF-NYPL,
with appropriate box, file, and/or folder information).
17. Allen E. Beach to Pedro Ramírez Vázquez and Rafael Mijares, 29 November
1961, in folder C1.011 Mexico Foreign, Construction, box 118, NYWF-NYPL.
18. Memorandum, by Bruce Nicholson to Allen Beach, 1 February 1963, in file
P0.3 Mexico Foreign Participation, 1963, box 279, NYWF-NYPL.
19. Jorge Canavati to Bruce Nicholson, 7 April 1964, in file P0.3 Mexico Foreign
Participation, 1963, box 279, NYWF-NYPL.

Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 123
 20. Eduardo Terrazas, interview by author, Mexico City, 17 July 2009.
21. Bruce Nicholson to Fernando Gamboa, 13 July 1965, in file P0.3 Mexico
Foreign Participation, 1965, box 279, NYWF-NYPL.
22. See James Johnson Sweeney, “A Head from San Lorenzo,” in The Olmec
Tradition, exh. cat. (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 1963), n.p. The
Olmec head would not be the last monumental stone sculpture exhibited in front
of the Seagram Building. In 1968, in an effort to raise awareness of the historical
importance of Easter Island’s monoliths, one of them was flown to New York and
placed in front of the building on a pedestal designed by Philip Johnson. See
Grace Glueck, “5-Ton Head from Easter Island Is Put on a Pedestal,” New York
Times, 22 October 1968.
23. Joyce Martin, press release, 19 April 1965, in file P0.3 Mexico Foreign
Participation, 1965, box 279, NYWF-NYPL.
24. “México Renueva a su perfil fronterizo,” Construcción Mexicana 5, no. 3
(March 1964): 16. The Ciudad Juárez Museum was originally intended to have peers
in the cities of Matamoros and Tijuana, but these were never built. These border
museums were part of the Programa Nacional Fronterizo (PNF), a government
initiative to enhance the region’s infrastructure. Perhaps unsurprisingly, all these
projects drew upon similar iconography. In 1965, for instance, a monumental entry
gate into Mexico was built under the auspices of the PNF in Tijuana. If Ramírez’s
museum had engaged the North American taste for advertisements, the gate, clearly
derived from Eero Saarinen’s 1962 Idlewild Terminal in New York’s La Guardia
Airport, responded to architectural images of U.S. hospitality. See “Una gran puerta
abre México en Tijuana,” Construcción Mexicana 6, no. 5 (May 1965): 21–23.
25. Ignacio Marquina and Luis Aveleyra, “Informe general de las labores desar-
rolladas durante el lapso inicial del proyecto, del 1 de enero al 31 de diciembre de
1961,” in Ignacio Marquina, Trabajos de planeación del M.N.A. (Mexico City:
Instituto Nacional de Antropología, Secretaría de Educación Pública and
CAPFCE, 1962), 3–4.
26. Iker Larrauri, interview by author, Mexico City, 23 August 2009.
27. See Christopher Thomas, The Architecture of the West Building of the
National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 26–27.
28. Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, “The Architecture of the Museum,” in Pedro
Ramírez Vázquez et al., The National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico: Art,
Architecture, Archaeology, Anthropology (Mexico City: Editorial Joaquín Moritz,
1968), 20.
29. Mathias Goeritz, “Manifiesto 1954,” in Mathias Goeritz, Arquitectura emo-
cional (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Museo de Arte Moderno,
1984), 53–57.
30. Ramírez Vázquez, The National Museum of Anthropology, 41.
31. Octavio Paz, The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, trans. Lysander
Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 108–110.
32. See Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y
salir de la modernidad (Mexico City: Grijalbo/Conaculta, 1990).
33. Claudio Lomnitz, “Bordering on Anthropology: Dialectics of a National
Tradition,” in Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 231.
34. For an analysis of both texts, see Diana Sorensen, “Tlatelolco 1968: Paz and
Poniatowska on Law and Violence.” Mexican Studies / Estudios Mexicanos 18, no.
2 (Summer 2002): 297–321.
35. Larrauri, interview by author, Mexico City, 23 August 2009.

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 36. Ramírez has long claimed that his Olympic work was informed by his expe-
rience at the Museum of Anthropology, but he neglects to mention his other exhi-
bition architecture in this light. See Tania Ragasol, “Lo que podemos hacer,” in
Diseñando México 68, 26.
37. Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, “Informe del Sr. arquitecto Pedro Ramírez Vázquez,
presidente del Comité Organizador de los Juegos de la XIX Olimpiada, a la Secretaría
de la Presidencia de la República, en Ocasión del tercer informe de Gobierno,”
August 1967, 93–94, in folder 39-200, box 705, Fondo Comité Olímpico, Archivo
General de la Nación, Mexico City (FCO-AGN).
38. Zolov, “Mexico and the Olympics,” 170.
39. Luis Suárez, “Ramírez Vázquez señala sus metas y propósitos: Gracias a la
Olimpiada se dará a conocer al mundo, con la magia de la comunicación moderna,
una imagen distinta del México manoseado por lo folklórico y pintoresco,”
Siempre, 15 March 1967, 20.
40. Luis Aveleyra A. de Anda to Santiago Genovés, 12 August 1966, in folder
41-121, box 763, FCO-AGN; emphasis in original.
41. For an account of media’s broader implications for the collaborations
between Goeritz and Barragán, and in the work of Barragán more generally, see
Keith Eggener, “Barragán’s ‘Photographic Architecture’: Image, Advertising and
Memory,” in Luis Barragán: The Quiet Revolution, ed. Federica Zanco (Milan:
Skira, Barragán Foundation, 2000), 178–195.
42. Goeritz later acknowledged that his project was highly similar to Otto
Freundlich’s 1936 idea for a “Route of Human Fraternity,” which consisted of two
roads with monumental sculptural enclaves traversing most of Europe. Mathias
Goeritz, “Sculpture: The Route of Friendship,” Leonardo, 3, no. 4 (October 1970):
397–407.
43. This choice spurred a set of confrontations, some of which seemed to
threaten Goeritz’s position. See “Tribuna de México pide: Destitución de Mathias
Goeritz, carteles de la Escuela Pictórica Mexicana y mover la escultura de J.
Moeschal,” Excélsior, 28 July 1968, in folder 5.12, vol. IV, Fondo Mathias Goeritz
(FMG), CENIDIAP, Mexico City.
44. S. de Icaza, “Mathias Goeritz: De artista a burócrata Olímpico,” Mañana ,
no. 1289 (11 May 1968): 44–45, in folder 5.12, vol. IV, FMG, CENIDIAP.
45. Dorothy C. Miller to Mathias Goeritz, 5 January 1968, in folder 41-429, box
777, FCO-AGN.
46. Julian Beinart to Mathias Goeritz, 8 June 1967, in folder 41-429, box 777,
FCO-AGN.
47. Jean-François Zevaco to Karel Wendl, 7 June 1967, in folder 41-429, box
777, FCO-AGN.
48. Eduardo Terrazas, interview by author, Mexico City, 17 August 2009.
49. See Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel, eds. Team 10, 1953–81: In
Search of a Utopia of the Present (Rotterdam: NAi, 2005).
50. “Sport: The Scene a/la Mexicana,” Time Magazine, 18 October 1968. Initially,
Terrazas wanted to paint entire pavement surfaces in Mexico City’s major streets
various colors, a scheme that proved unfeasible. For such locations as Ramírez’s
Aztec stadium (1966) and Candela’s Sports Palace (1968), two of the main Olympic
venues, Terrazas did manage to have the pavement surrounding the buildings
painted in vibrational patterns of bright colors. Eduardo Terrazas, interview by
author, Mexico City, 29 July 2009.
51. Tlatelolco is listed as one of the Olympic facilities in file 28-7, box 281,
FCO-AGN, which contains files on the venue.

Castañeda | Beyond Tlatelolco: Design, Media, and Politics at Mexico ’68 125
 52. Ricardo de Robina, “Plaza de las 3 culturas,” Arquitectura/México 94–95
(June–September 1966): 213–219.
53. Paz, Critique of the Pyramid, 106–107.
54. Most directly responsible for the creation of the Plaza was Guillermo
Viramontes, the head of the National Mortgage Bank, which funded Pani’s project.
Robina, “Plaza de las 3 Culturas,” 213.
55. See, in particular, Arquitectura/México 94–95 (June–Sept 1966).
56. “Torre de 24 pisos para la Proyección Internacional de México,” Construcción
Mexicana 8, no. 3 (March 1967): 11–13.
57. Hans Beacham, The Architecture of Mexico: Yesterday and Today (New
York: Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1969).
58. Salvador Novo, New Mexican Grandeur, trans. Noel Lindsay (Mexico City:
PEMEX, 1967).
59. For a discussion of one such image published in the New York Times in
September 1967, see Eric Zolov, “Discovering a Land ‘Mysterious and Obvious’:
The Renarrativizing of Postrevolutionary Mexico,” in Fragments of a Golden Age:
The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940, ed. Gilbert Joseph et al. (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 249.
60. Rubén Gallo, “The Mexican Pentagon: Adventures in Collectivism during
the 1970s,” in Collectivism after Modernism, ed. Blake Stimson and Gregory
Sholette (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 172–173.
61. Gallo, “The Mexican Pentagon,” 173–174.
62. Ana Elena Mallet, “Tlatelolco: Perpetual Past” (text prepared for the exhi-
bition Museum as Hub: Tlatelolco and the Localized Negotiation of Future
Imaginaries, New Museum, New York, February 2008), 3, http://www.museumashub.
org/sites/museumashub.org/files/AnaElenaMallet_Tlatelolco-PerpetualPast.pdf.
Produced for the same event, Cuauhtémoc Medina’s essay is also illuminating. See
Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Modernity as Resurrection” (text prepared for the exhibition
Museum as Hub: Tlatelolco and the Localized Negotiation of Future Imaginaries,
New Museum, New York, February 2008), http://www.museumashub.org/
sites/museumashub.org/files/CuauhtemocMedina_ModernityasResurrection.pdf.
63. Zolov, “Mexico and the Olympics,” 170.
64. Terrazas, interview, 17 August 2009.

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