DOMESTICATING THE GHOST: CONSTELLATIONS OF MEXICO, 1968 by James Suneil Sanzgiri B.F.A. Interdisciplinary Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art, 2011 submitted to The Department of Architecture in Partial Fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology June 2017 The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to dis- tribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. © 2017 James S. Sanzgiri. All rights reserved. SIGNATURE OF AUTHOR Department of Architecture, May 12, 2017 CERTIFIED BY Renée Green, Professor of Art, Culture and Technology Thesis Supervisor ACCEPTED BY Sheila Kennedy, Professor of Architecture Chair of the Department Committee on Graduate Students 3 THESIS COMMITTEE RENÉE GREEN Professor of Art, Culture and Technology, MIT Thesis Supervisor GLORIA SUTTON Assistant Professor, Contemporary Art History and New Media, Northeastern University Reader WILLIAM URICCIO Professor of Comparative Media Studies, Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, MIT Reader 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents 4 Abstract 5 Acknowledgements 6 INTRODUCTION 10 An Opening, An Apparition 12 A Minor Encounter 15 Thesis Question 16 Methodology 18 Why Write This Now 20 CHAPTER ONE 26 History and Resurrection 27 The Image in (the) Ruins 33 The Incarcerated Archive 37 Postscript on Narration 53 CHAPTER TWO 55 Memory and Control 56 The Apparatus 61 The Sight Machine 65 Chiastic Resistance 68 CHAPTER THREE 71 Hegemony and Its Paradoxes 72 Collective Memory 74 The Imaginary 77 The Abstract Institution of Everything 79 Radical Imagination 82 CONCLUSION 84 Left Melancholy 87 The Propaganda of History 90 BIBLIOGRAPHY 93 5 DOMESTICATING THE GHOST: CONSTELLATIONS OF MEXICO, 1968 by James Suneil Sanzgiri Submitted to the Department of Architecture on May 12, 2017 in Partial Fulfill- ment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology ABSTRACT Organized primarily as an essayistic method of investigation to accom- pany and supplement my thirty-minute short film AT THE TOP OF GRASS- HOPPER’S HILL, this thesis traces minor encounters or discrepant engagements1 between myself and and images of the 1968 state-sponsored student massacre in Mexico City. I adopt these engagements, most of which exist as encounters within state-sponsored institutions, to take 1968 and the Tlatelolco Massacre as a point of departure with which to navigate the density of such questions and problems as the production of collective memory, cultural heritage, disappearance, the ar- chive, history and authority, and above all how power and knowledge function within a hegemonic terrain. Through an analysis of the many manifestations of images surrounding the 1968 student massacre, including Hollywood-esqe adaptations and 16mm documentation of the event by the military themselves, I explore the role rep- resentation plays in political struggles as well as its potential co-optation by the state. Such co-optation I argue, perpetuates cycles of oppression that maintain the status quo; and within Mexico specifically, the nearly ninety-year rule of the PRI party. At its essence, this thesis pries open the inconsistencies of such repre- sentations within Mexico, 1968 and its aftermath. These questions are sparked by my long term considerations of theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Paul Virilio, and Michel Foucault. I have found my in- vestigations within Mexico indicative of their writings among a range of others that appear in this text. As such, this essayistic exploration stretches and drifts across many different disciplines, geographies, and figures. Thus, I develop a “constellatory framework” to expand an analysis of technologies of reproduction themselves towards their facility to impact national memory through circulation. Thesis Supervisor: Renée Green Title: Professor of Art, Culture and Technology 1 A term brought to my attention by Renée Green. Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant En- gagement: Dissonance, Cross-culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge,: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all of those that have made this work possible, most importantly Professor Renée Green whom I’ve worked with in depth over these past two years, and whose work and countless suggestions continue to be im- pactful and inspirational. I would also like to thank the other two members of my committee, Assistant Professor Gloria Sutton and Professor William Uricchio for their time and help. Many thanks as well to Mario Caro for his help with this work in my final semester. I would like to thank all of my mentors at Soma Summer 2016 in Mexico, whom first introduced me to Tlatelolco and the Palacio de Lecumberri. I would also like to thank all of my peers in the Art, Culture, and Technol- ogy program over these two years with whom I’ve grown, been influenced and challenged by, and gone through a number of major political shifts with - all of which this work would not be possible without. Most of all, I would like to thank my close friend Maribeth Keane for her inspiration as a community activist and healer, and whose encouragement throughout this process reminds me of the purpose of engaging in such difficult material. Finally, much love to my family for supporting my decisions and develop- ment as an artist in whatever path it takes. 7 8 “The body is imaginary, not because it lacks reality, but because it is the most real reality, an image that is ever-changing, and doomed to disappear. To dominate the body is to suppress the images it emits.” Octavio Paz, Conjunctions and Disjunctions, 1969 9 10 Introduction INTRODUCTION ON OCTOBER 2ND, 1968 in Mexico City, an estimated three-hundred students and civilians were massacred by the military and paramilitary forces following months of protest leading up to the first ever Olympic games held in a Spanish speaking nation. The student movement’s demands, including in- creased democratic oversight of the political processes, a dismantling of the one-party state, more transparency in government, and a demilitarization of the country at large, for starters, all followed decades of massively increasing rural and urban poverty, environmental destruction, political corruption, and manip- ulation of workers and peasants. Such results came as a consequence from the failures of postwar modernization that swept the nation.2 On August 1st, riot police (known as the granaderos) were called in to suppress protest marches of some 50,000 students, escalating tensions between police, military, students, and protesters, furthering governmental justification for occupying and invad- ing campuses across the city. On September 23rd, an increasingly resistant stu- dent population at the Polytechnic campuses prepared to defend themselves against military occupation. Fifteen students died and forty-five were injured.3 It was with the October 2nd protests, however, that gathered some 10,000 students and civilians in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Fig. 1) of the Tlatelolco archaeological zone in the city. This site in particular suffers a considerable den- sity of time, history and trauma. It is not only the plaza designed by the mod- ernist Mexican architect and urbanist Mario Pani (whose housing projects were built only two years earlier at Tlatelolco) but also the last site of the 1521 Aztec massacre, which by some accounts was a genocide of over 20,000 at the hands of Hernán Cortés.4 Tlatelolco is now an archaeological site housing not only the ruins of the eponymous Aztec city, but also of the Spanish Catholic church of Santiago de Tlatelolco built using the exact same stones extracted only fifteen years after the defeat of the Aztec empire. Students sought refuge in the halls of the church during the massacre, only to be lined up and executed in the church itself.5 Tlateloloco stands as quite literally an exhumation of trauma, and is it- self indexical to questions of memory and forgetting as the state controlled media of Mexico worked to obliterate visible traces of the ’68 massacre during the Olympics and thereafter. Officials who cleansed the blood and bodies that lay waste on the public square swiftly attempted to scrub the memory of the massacre from the tiles of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas the very next morning.6 2. Poniatowska, Elena. “The Student Movement of 1968.” The Mexico Reader: History, Cul- ture, Politics. By Gilbert M. Joseph. Durham, NC: Duke U, 2005. 555-69. 3. ibid. 4. Leon-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Trans. Ángel María Gari bay Kintana. Lysander Kemp ed. Boston: Beacon, 2006. 5. Poniatowska, Elena. “The Student Movement of 1968.” The Mexico Reader: History, Cul- ture, Politics. By Gilbert M. Joseph. Durham, NC: Duke U, 2005. 555-69. J.S. Sanzgiri 11 The regime of President Díaz Ordaz issued a report claiming violent pro- testors opened fire on the police, who simply defended themselves in reac- tion.7 Only four were initially reported dead with twenty injured, coming to a total official acknowledgement by the PRI of only twelve dead.8 Díaz Or- daz was widely congratulated as having successfully halted the student move- ment to maintain “peace” (with help from the United States government), and the memory of the massacre was quickly sanitized, buried and suppressed.9 The familiar narratives of student uprisings, the year 1968, and the eventu- al state repression of Socialist and Democratic initiatives during the global Cold War nightmares served to underscore a narrative of violence and corruption that has become the standard for many conceptions of Mexican history and politics. The parallels across nations during 1968 are a well documented phenomenon, including the mass genocide in Latin America that bore the name “los desapa- racidos”.