Domesticating the Ghost: Constellations of Mexico, 1968

DOMESTICATING THE GHOST: CONSTELLATIONS OF MEXICO, 1968

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.

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

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 accompany 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 archive, 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 representation 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 representations 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 investigations 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 thePalacio 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 development 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 manipulation 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 student 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 density of time, history and trauma. It is not only the plaza designed by the modernist 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 itself 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 protestors opened fire on the police, who simply defended themselves - inreac tion.7 Only four were initially reported dead with twenty injured, coming to a total official acknowledgement by the PRI of only twelve 8 dead. Díaz Or- daz was widely congratulated as having successfully halted the student movement 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 eventual 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”. It is a history that is not foreign to me, as the parallels also extend to the United States during this time, whom also bear the brunt of accountability for facilitating such violence. It is not merely the event of Tlatelolco, nor its brutality, repression, or revolutionary ideals, that struck me in my initial encounters of Tlatelolco. It is rather all of the embedded paradoxes that Tlatelolco, its precursors, and its aftermaths contain that fascinates me. But fascination is not enough. Often times I ask myself what compels me to write about such a dense topic as state repression, disappearance, censorship, and thwarted insurgency in Mexico.

My own background as a student activist and involvement in the Baltimore uprising in 2015, when popular racist narratives circulated in mainstream news outlets sought to discount, villainize and eradicate any amount of dissent, all inform the aims of my writings. At times, this work takes an intersectional approach calling upon texts that I find a particular affinity with in my bend towards socio-economic justice and its historical roots. It is a rich subject, and one that perhaps lends itself to consistent reminders of the past as it informs the present. Thus, much of my preoccupation with the past is driven by my desire to understand not only the world as it exists now, but what came before it. In essence, what world did I enter into when I was born and how was it formed? I structure these questions within the richness of 1968 as a pivotal global shift to which Mexico is but one lesser known example. There have been many analyses of Tlatelolco such as from the more predominant writers like Octavio Paz and Carlos Monsiváis, and even more so on the subject of disappearance, loss, and representation in general. I do not write to merely describe the events, although a preliminary description is helpful.

6- 9. ibid. 12 Introduction

AN OPENING, AN APPARITION

Memories of Tlatelolco were secretly kept alive by those students lucky enough to escape. It wasn’t until 1971 that journalist Elena Poniatowska’s La Noche de Tlatelolco published testimonies, eyewitness accounts, interviews, and clips from the daily newspapers to a much wider audience, offering a credibility to those whose memory of the massacre were played down or discounted. The book consists almost entirely of quotes and transcriptions of witnesses, students, organizers, workers and professors from the movement as well as clips from peri- odicals, newspapers, and headlines. In her brief two-page introduction she states,

These youngsters are coming toward me now, hundreds of them; not one of them has his hands up, not one of them has his pants around his ankles as he is stripped naked to be searched; there are no sudden blows, no clubbings, no ill treatment, no vomiting after being tortured; they are breathing deeply, advancing slowly, surely, stubbornly; [...] I cannot see their wounds, for fortunately there are no holes in their bodies, no bayo- net gashes, no dum-dum bullets; they are blurred figures, but I can hear their voices, their footsteps, echoing as on the day of the Silent Demon- stration; I will hear those advancing footsteps for the rest of my life…10

Thus the testimony becomes at its onset, a primary question for the organization of Tlatelolco. Differentiation between facts and truth, between what is experienced and how that experience is represented become a vital concern. The testimony, however, is always incomplete and produces only remnants, gaps, and lacunae,yet its volume gives way to authenticity.11 This, as we will see, has no less consequences for 1968, or the National Archives, than for the student kidnappings in Iguala, Guerrero in 2014. In essence, the entire question of the archive collapses with the testimony.

In the year 2000, the nearly seventy-year rule of the PRI party (Par- tido Revolucionario Institutcional) was temporarily interrupted by the election of Vincente Fox from the center-right PAN party (Partido Acción Nacional) to the presidency. Due to mounting pressure, Fox continued an investigation into the 1968 massacre, which the PRI refused and denied. 60,000, thirty- year-old sealed documents concerning the massacre from the Díaz Ordaz regime became available the previous October in 1999, to which President Fox ordered released in 2001.12 This is all to say that increasingly a memory of the massacre and of the student movement was slowly let back into public life.

10. Poniatowska, Elena. Massacre in Mexico. New York: Viking, 1975, pp. 3-4. 11. One thinks primarily on Giorgio Agamben’s writings on the laccunae, but my writing owes much to Renée Green’s writing on the subject where she describes absence existing, “... between what is said and what can be comprehended, between an event and its interpretation...” Green, Renée. “Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae.” Other Planes of There: Selected Writings. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. 271-88. and Agamben, Giorgio, and Daniel Heller-Roazen. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone, 2012. J. S. Sanzgiri 13

This process, as Luis Echeverría, the Interior Secretary during the massacre and subsequent president following the regime of Díaz Ordaz in 1970, was known as Echeverría’s “apertura democrática” or a “democratic opening”. In- stead of loosening a grip of the cultural industries at the time, Echeverría’s policy of apertura (allusions to the term’s similarity to photographic connotations here, should not go unnoticed) in fact officially sponsored “critical cinema” portraying the national-developmentalist state in a sometimes negative light, and thereby co-opting political dissent in a controlled structure.13 This apertura takes on another meaning here - a fissure, a crack; a prying open, not to democracy, but to an inconsistency that scars the memory of Tlatelolco. During his campaign for presidency, Echeverría ran a populist platform full of promises of reform, conceeding to popular demands from students. He even went so far as to ask for a moment of silence in rememberance of the massacre, which in 1971 he repeated during the Cor- pus Cristi massacre with nearly 120 students slaughtered once again at the hands of paramilitary forces. Luis Echeverría was later tried for genocide in connection with his involvement in the massacre, but in 2007 was aquitted of all charges due to a statute of limitations.14 As Octavio Paz writes in his introduction to La Noche de Tlatelolco, “The truth of the matter is that the primary beneficiary of the events of 1968, and very nearly the only beneficiary, has been the regime itself, which in the last few years has embarked upon a program of reforms aimed at liberalizing it.”15

The memory of the massacre began to propagate through an expanse of museums, television programs, novels, and music, many funded by the state itself. In 2007, a permanent exhibition dedicated to the memory of the massacre opened in the National Cultural University – a building that stands only feet from Tlatelolco itself and was previously the house of the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Hundreds of videos are collected and displayed from a wide range of sources (including Tlatelolco deniers to supposedly keep objectivity in check), as well as photographic installations, historical timelines with parallels to other nations’ political climates, and a work by Francis Alÿs.16 (Fig. 2) In 2015, Elena Poniatowska contributed to a temporary exhibition in the Museo Memoria y Tolerencia that rec- reated moments of the massacre in large-scale immersive installations, drawing comparisons to the 43 missing students from Iguala.17 Many attempts have been made at commemorating the massacre and the movement, both by the state and by private cultural institutions funded by banks the like, yet the question remains: how might such a commemoration, which always exists within a framework of cultural heritage, serve not those it commemorates, but those still in power?

As Professor of Latin American studies at University of Southern Califor- nia Samuel Steinberg writes in his recently published Photopoetics at Tlatelolco,

13. Baer, Hester, and Ryan Long. “Transnational Cinema and the Mexican State in Alfon- so Cuarón’s ‘Y Tu Mamá También.’” South Central Review, vol. 21, no. 3, 2004, pp. 150–168., www.jstor.org/stable/40039895. 14. Mckinley, James C. “Federal Judge Overturns Ruling Against Mexico’s Former Pres- ident in 1968 Student Killings.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 12 July 2007. Web. 05 May 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/americas/13mexico.html. 15. Paz, Octavio. Introduction. Massacre in Mexico. By Elena Poniatowska. New York: Vi- king, 1975, pp. xvi. Print. 14 Introduction

...1968 serves as the name for a broad assortment of demands that it can, with time, no longer represent. Rather than attempting to break this alliance of diverse demands by disarticulating the name that or- ganizes it, the state adds its own demand for a certain democratization and a certain freedom to this chain, slowly but unmistakably allowing the more obscure elements of this antisystemic demand to conjure away 1968’s terrifying specter or at least to domesticate its ghost.18

Steinberg, positions an analysis of the legacy of 1968 through works of cinema, poetry, testimony, archival photos, and artistic interventions that shadow the student movement in Mexico in relationship to a theory of the “event”, its reproducibility, and the political implications of such an act. Steinberg’s work whose secondary title is “Afterimages of Mexico 1968”, will be a recurring source throughout this thesis. Yet, I will be pursuing a slightly different path than Stein- berg while using some of his same sources – particularly the works of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Octavio Paz, and Elena Poniatowska.

17. While I am in debt to the work that Steinberg has done, his writing was brought to my attention after drawing very similar connection between the works of Walter Benjamin, Edu- ardo Cadava, Jacques Derrida, and other writers. This in addition to the inclusion of a small display of Jacques Derrida in the National Archives as we will see later, only attest to the uni- versality of such theorists as they apply so substantially to the inherant questions Tlatelolco and the archive provoke. Steinberg, Samuel. Photopoetics at Tlatelolco: Afterimages of Mexico, 1968. 1st ed. Austin, TX: Univer sity of Texas, 2016. pp. 27. J. S. Sanzgiri 15

A MINOR ENCOUNTER

I first encountered Tlatelolco while living in Mexico City in - 2016con tinuing research on the Second French Empire’s invasion in Mexico – another extremely popular history in the nation – for what would become the first chapter of my film AT THE TOP OF GRASSHOPPER’S HILL. Starting from a series of investigations surrounding Édouard Manet’s 1896 painting “The Ex- ecution of Emperor Maximilian”, including its relationship to questions of debt, regime change, and Imperialism (questions that held no less significance for our current time period). I eventually wound up at the site of Emperor Maximil- ian and his wife Empress Carlotta’s former palace in Mexico – the Castillo de Chapultepec.19 Upon researching more of the castle’s history, I find that its past life has a long trail leading back to the Aztecs whom considered the space a holy site, designating it Chapultepec – loosely translated as “Grasshopper’s Hill” in the Nahuatl tongue. After many iterations as a military college, as home to the U.S. invasion and the Battle of Chapultepec in 1847, as well as the Presi- dential residence of the despotic ruler Porfirio Díaz whose regime sparked the Mexican Revolution in 1910, the castle finally found its resting place as the Na- tional Museum of History. Thus, in this one space, many histories collapse and collide under the rubric of appropriation. This was just the beginning, as every where I looked in Mexico City, time and space compressed together - such as with the prison and the archive of the Palacio de Lecumberri and the Aztec Massacre of 1521 in the same site as the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco, which I explore further in Chapter One. For a filmmaker, such condensation and collapse provide immediate parallels to the medium in which we work.

It was precisely at this moment of my first visit to the castle that I encountered a small display in an exhibition at the National Museum of History where images and videos of the 1968 student movement were installed. Many questions resulted from such an initial shock in the National History Museum. Who was to benefit from such a display of 1968? While I was already concerned by the history of Tlatelolco, whose traces can be experienced in many parts of the city, this primary contact with a memory, so to speak, of 1968 within an institutional structure of the state sparked the impetus for the rest of my journey. How could the memory of a state-sponsored massacre that was once erased and censored, reappear in a state-sponsored museum? The images of the protestors appeared almost as a source of pride in the exhibition. It is precisely with questions of collective memory and forgetting, disappearance and archive, history and authority, image and intervention, time and repetition, that this thesis begins.

18. The history of Emperor Maximilian as a pupet ruler for Luis Napoleon III plays a significant in Mexican history as I explore briefly in the first chapter. Yet, as they appear in this thesis, the narratives of Emperor Maximilian and his wife Empress Carlotta do not feature a significant role in this work, while on the other hand they do serve as narrative devices that speak to the construction of history in the first chapter of my film. Emperor Maximilian and the proliferation of representations of his image, combined with the absence of his voice in my film, are relayed as stand-ins for history itself. 16 Introduction

THESIS QUESTION

This thesis, deals not only with the memory of Tlatelolco through its visual replications and permutations, but more particularly through examples of the institutionalization (and domestication) of the memory of the massacre by the state, the PRI (literally, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, also commonly referred to as “The Perfect Dictatorship”), and by the mainstream Left-wing. As a filmmaker and artist, I have been dumbstruck by the sheer volume of visual material that has resulted from the massacre and Mexico 1968 in general. At times, these images speak so directly to the medium of photography and film that I cannot but help to understand them in light of my own preoccupations with the politics of these mediums. Yet, it is not so much primarily just the visual material I am interested in, such as the films, documentaries, and photographs, but the per- mutation of those images – their placement and arrangement within institutional structures and what the implication of such placements might be.

Essentially, this work is driven by my desire to understand how a nation could simultaneously erase at one point, and then display at another, such a tragic moment in its history, and how such moments become normalized, allowing their casual display to effectively become instrumentalized. My question then, becomes one of how memory and history are mobilized, controlled, and diffused, and how that mobilization might reinforce and uphold the status quo. To question the use (and abuse) of history, then, is also to question the images that accompany them. To question the images that accompany history is to question the devices as such that deliver them to us. What image-based apparatuses affect collective memory, and how do those apparatuses develop over time? The second chapter of this thesis utilizes media theorists such as Vilém Flusser and Paul Vi- rilio not to directly answer questions about Tlatelolco, but rather to understand the importance of the camera in shaping the results of Tlatelolco. Each develops a theory of the interwoven fabrics of vision and communication, and the impact that the production and circulation of images has on society itself.

The very notion of collective memory might also be found in the concept of the “imaginary” which according to Benedict Anderson sheds light on how nationalism is formed – a question no less relevant to Mexico today than for any other nation with the contemporary rise of the global right-wing. Likewise, Mau- rice Halbwachs’s seminal work from 1950, On Collective Memory and Cornelius Castoriadis’s, The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975) examine the construction of the imaginary in relationship to the structures that question history and memory’s impact on the boundaries and limits of collective and individual thought.

Such questions bear witness to concerns from many different eras, geographies, and struggles. As I moved through each site, visiting and re-visiting each space multiple times over the period of a year, most of the writers I reference here in this thesis are brought together as they were recalled to me at the moment of my encounters. J. S. Sanzgiri 17

That is to say that this thesis marks the meeting of the culmination of my read- ings throughout my graduate studies as they were evoked in the duration of my experiences in Mexico City. As such, I have chosen a selection of writings from Émile Durkheim, W.E.B. DuBois, Ariella Azoulay, Allan Sekula, Eduardo Cadava, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wendy Brown, and Édouard Glissant, among others, not to locate the specific overlaps between their various fields, or to develop a treatise on each, but to understand how each speaks to the questions above, and how each produce further investigations into the density of time, the archive, and the production (or disruption) of linear narrative, and therefore the conditions for control.

Each text illuminates in ways that I will illustrate the socio-political nature of the circulation of images in collective memory and their subsequent co-optation by structures of authority to produce history. I do not offer a defini- tive account of Tlatelolco nor an exhaustive account of its perpetuations, instead I examine a plurality of opportunities to understand Tlatelolco within the histories and theoretical logic of image production and the politics of representation. At times, I juxtapose certain writers and theories seemingly unrelated to Tlatelolco or the history of 1968. Such juxtapositions exist for the reader to also contribute to this work by producing their own further questions in relationship to my analysis. Referencing and interweaving sources from sociology, anthropology, art history, film theory, and post-colonial studies, this thesis ultimately looks at how power and knowledge are intimately intertwined, not only following the work of Michel Foucault or Antonio Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony, but in the modes of production (and re-production) of images that follow power themselves. Put in another way by Steinberg, “Hegemony is nothing if not a consignation to an archive by a name that might gather what is otherwise incalculable.”19

19. Steinberg, Samuel. Photopoetics at Tlatelolco: Afterimages of Mexico, 1968. 1st ed. Austin, TX: University Texas, 2016. pp. 27. 18 Introduction

METHODOLOGY

This writing, as it develops, becomes a heuristic device for me to organize my various connections and findings that manifest primarily as a thirty-minute short film, and mimics the essayistic nature of the film itself. The thesis is an elaboration on my film as well as an attempt to parse through some of the density of this difficult subject not directly addressed in the film itself, and can be read along side it. These connections often times only briefly intersect, forming a node through only a date, space or even linguistic association they might share. They brush up against one another in a disruption of linear time and space that could be simply stated as mere coincidence for some, yet for myself, bear a tragic serendipity that hold rather pungent consequences. Through these nodes, this thesis as separate from the visual work, proposes a method of understanding these pungent serendipities and their visual legacies through the lens of collective memory and the production of history within a hegemonic terrain. Using this lens, my goal is to identify larger structures at work in the innate paradox of a government’s commemoration of a state-sponsored massacre that was censored and marked for erasure.

It is not my interest to exclusively charge the PRI regime with the atroc- ities of the state-repression and massacre of innocent students and civilians during the 1960 and 1970 decades. Such an indictment is perhaps too easy, and as the acquittal of genocide charges for Luis Echeverría in 2007 at the age of 78 have shown, demonstrate the unfeasibility for any governmental accountability or justice to these horrendous crimes. It is also not my intent to prove conclusively that memories of the 1968 student movement have been co-opted or inte- grated into the everyday fabric of the state due to mounting pressure or sways of popular opinion. Instead, my goal is to provide a method of connecting, integrat- ing, and drawing “constellations” in a Benjaminian sense, between the images, events, and the peripatetic permutations of Mexico in 1968 to produce perhaps overlooked associations among the visual dispersion of Tlatelolco and Mexico’s student movement including pop-culture and its proximity to official narrative. For myself, the intention has never been to answer or attempt to resolve the questions I raise, but rather to dwell in their complexity. This thesis, then, offers a vision of the multifaceted ways oppression manifests through collective memory and history within a hegemonic structure to in-turn perpetuate the status quo. Thus, as I will argue, this manifestation also functions in the daily circulation of photographs and moving images.

Many approaches could have been taken to this thesis, and I could have analyzed or written on a number of other more explicit examples of the co-optation and diffusion of revolution from other nations. But the fact remains that I did not encounter those moments. I did not spend time immersed in those nations, nor did their legacies call me and my practice as a writer and filmmaker. While I am still in debt to the work that has been done on such a subject, the more obvious psychoanalytic analysis of how trauma functions is not my primary lens of inquiry, although I have interspersed bits of both Lacan and Freud J. S. Sanzgiri 19

in some instances. As such, some texts and references in this thesis require a close reading, while others are used as nodes in my constellatory and peripatetic framework. This work is an unfolding. It is a journey that requires a level of commitment for the reader, who travels with the text as it starts in Mexico and unfurls through shifting landscapes, identities, and questions.

This thesis is not meant as an overview of Mexican history nor its political struggles. However, in order to place 1968 in a lager context, I place moments of the institutionalization of revolution within the post-Díaz development of the PRI, including minor characters such as the documentarian Salvador Toscano and the writer José Revueltas, commonly referred to as the “intellectual architect” of the ‘68 movement.

Interspersed throughout this thesis are screenshots from my film AT THE TOP OF GRASSHOPPER’S HILL. While a viewing of the film is not required, this thesis is meant as both a stand alone reading as well as a supplement to the film, with images to guide the viewer through a drifting narrative and an open conclusion. 20 Introduction

WHY WRITE THIS NOW

Why write this thesis now, one might ask? The increasing parallels particularly in the United States, my country of residence, cannot be ignored. In Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, Washington State, and Indiana, lawmakers are pushing legislation that would effectively turn public protests into a felony, with a bill legalizing drivers who “accidentally” run over protesters blocking traffic.20 Authoritarian regimes and nationalist fervor are on the rise across the globe, but in the United States in particular, images, media, and representation play a large role in facilitating the rise of these regimes, including modes of propaganda, spectacle, and distraction. The so-called “post-truth” fallacy, which many pundits have claimed is now our lot, gets at the heart of the way ideology and hegemony function, going hand in hand with larger Western epistemological crises. The era of “fake news”, a title which even itself has been co-opted and reversed upon centre-liberal and centre-right media outlets by the new regime, is perhaps another code word for cover-up and suppression.

In fact, the entire scope of co-optation of dissent within cultural industries in this country, while having a long history, are at an all time high. The network ABC just released this year a series directed by Gus Van Sant about the post-Civil Rights era LGBT movement called When We Rise (2017), a perhaps slightly up- graded and less “pinkwashed” version of the high-budget Stonewall (2015) film that came under severe criticism two years ago. (Fig. 3) This series came only weeks after the largest single-day organized demonstration in this country - the 2017 Women’s March.The recent Pepsi ad controversy marks only one other bla- tant example, although rooted in a much more specific terrain of corporately geared mass consumption. Other recent films such as Selma (2014) and The Birth of a Nation (2016), the high budget action-flick about the Nat Turner slave revolts, can be included in this question, although an analysis of contemporary pop-culture and big budget productions of socio-historical revolutions, movements, and protests are ultimately not what this thesis focuses on. Instead, in the second chapter, I refer to the Hollywood-esqe adaptations of Tlatelolco which exist in a very similar vein, including an upcoming film starring John Leguizamo called Tlatelolco68. It is also now, with the failures of the centre-right and centre-left democratic institutions of the neo-liberal era that many are turning back to the “heyday” of the 1960s - specifically 1968 - to look for inspiration. Perhaps this thesis offers a counter to that as well.

Likewise, the question of Mexico in most conversations in the United States today revolves around the mass deportation, immigration rights, and bor- der conflicts primarily controlled though the U.S. Immigration and Customs En-

20. “Lawmakers Push Anti-Protest Laws as Mass Resistance to Trump Sweeps U.S.” Democracy Now! N.p., 01 Feb. 2017. Web. 13 Apr. 2017, https://www.democracynow. org/2017/2/1/headlines/lawmakers_push_ anti_protest_laws_as_mass_resistance_to_ trump_sweeps_us J. S. Sanzgiri 21

forcement agency also known as ICE. Such issues are of the utmost importance, and anti-immigration agendas are in part responsible for the global rise of the ultra nationalist right-wing. Yet these issues do not play a significant role in this thesis.

The differences between the time periods should obviously be acknowl- edged. The United States had its own occurrences with the Kent State shooting in 1970, only two years after Tlatelolco (not to mention the domestic assassina- tions of Black Panther party members by COINTELPRO in the decade of the ‘60s). The United States involvement in the Tlatelolco massacre should also be emphasized. As a part of the global Cold War, the Nixon regime, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the FBI all put enormous pressure on the upcoming Olympics in Mexico City to suppress and prevent any anti-U.S. protests or sentiments during the games in alignment with the “international left”. Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría, in return, stated that “the situation will be under complete control shortly”.21 While the United States may not have pulled the trig- gers during the massacre, their “at any costs necessary” attitude was in full effect. This, however, did not stop athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos to give the Black Power salute during their medal ceremonies at the podium for which they were swiftly condemned. (Fig. 4) Additionally, it is well documented that Win- ston Scott, a high-ranking CIA officer known as “Our Man in Mexico” conducted numerous covert operations with the PRI regime from 1956 - 1969, feeding Díaz Ordaz highly exaggerated claims of the growing Communist threat in Mexico.22

It is ironic that Tlatelolco is also sometimes referred to Mexico’s Tianan- men Square. While the parallels between Mexico and China are striking during these two differnt time periods, such as the post-Maoist economic development that left an enormous gap between the rich and the poor, or the parallells that depict a one-party system in control of the press, such reductive claims at their best show the global scope of progressive or radical student dissent, like the name 1968 itself, whose echoes left few nations untouched. Yet, unlike Tianamen Square, the Tlatelolco massacre recieved very little exposure outside of the country and remains only a footnote to most accounts of 1968.23

21. Griswold, Deirdre. “Washington’s Role in Mexican Student Massacres.” Workers World. Workers-World, 20, Oct. 2014. Web. 13 Apr. 2017. http://www.workers.org/2014/10/14/wash- ingtons-role-mexican-student-massacres/#.WO--I1PytR0. 22. Morley, Jefferson. Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. 23. Photographic associations with the term exposure, once again, are included. 22 Introduction

(FIG 1.) Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City, Google streeview of the Aztec Tlatelolco ruins, the Spanish Santiago de Tlatelolco church, and Mario Pani’s modernist housing projects J. S. Sanzgiri 23

(FIG 2.) Students walking into the Memorial68 located across the street from the Tlatleolco site in the Centro Cultural Universitario de la UNAM residing in the old Foreign Affairs Ministry building 24 Introduction

(FIG. 3) Poster for ABC show When We Rise, dir. Gus Van Sant, 2017 J. S. Sanzgiri 25

(FIG. 4) USA Olympic athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith giving the controversial Black Power salute during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, courtesy Library of Congress 26

CHAPTER ONE J.S. Sanzgiri 27

HISTORY AND RESURRECTION

As I mentioned previously, the memory of Tlatelolco survives not only through journalistic investigations, cinematic portrayals, and documentarian exe- geses, but through its commemoration within institutions. Images accompanying images, media layered upon media. No longer is the question of Tlatelolco only over how the images appear, but also where they appear. What role does an image have in defining the space around it, and in turn how does the space, setting and architecture of where an image is located affect the meaning of an image?

A curious example is that of the Castillo de Chapultepec. One of the only castles in the Americas, the site stands as a relic of Imperial conquest and eventual defeat following the Second French Empire’s invasion in 1861 and eventual overthrow by the indigenous leader and would-be president Benito Juarez in 1867. This castle, in all of its thickness of time, was also home to the United States invasion (the battle of Chapultepec in 1847), the national observatory built in 1873 (itself a condition of empirical modes of vision), as well as the residence of the despotic Porfirio Díaz – a general in Juarez’s army whose tyrannical, yet economically expansive regime sparked the Mexican Revolution in 1910. The name Chapultepec comes from the Nahuatl word for “Grasshopper’s Hill”, as the land was indeed a holy site for the Aztecs. In its current instantiation, the Castillo de Chapultepec survives as the National History Museum of Mexico, established in 1939 after decades of unrest after the defeat of Díaz’s regime during the Mexi- can Revolution. The museum stands as an appropriate if not a somewhat retired material scene for leisure, tourism, and entertainment. It is not uncommon to witness live re-enactments of altercations between Emperor Maximilian, Porfirio Díaz, and Benito Juarez at the museum.

Curiously, within the architecture of the museum’s displays hides a memory of the student protest movements in 1968. Coincidentally, this exhibition marks the exact end point of the institutionally organized chronology of Mexican history (the end of history one might say, or of course refute) according to the museum’s diagrams. Large black and white printed images of protesters parade pridefully against a bright blue wall. (Fig. 5) The students, smiling, look directly into the camera, knowing perhaps their glances might one day be revived, re- juvenated, and displayed for all to see. As Walter Benjamin in his Theses on The Philosophy of History states,

The past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection. Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before? is there not an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today? have not the women, who we court, sisters who they do not recognize anymore?24

24. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Frankfurt School: On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin. Marxist Internet Archive, 2005. Web. 01 Dec. 2016, trans. Red- mond, Dennis 28 History and Resurrection

Benjamin continues, “If so, then there is a secret protocol between the gener- ations of the past and that of our own. For we have been expected upon this earth. For it has been given us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim.”25 This “Messianic time” Benjamin later states, is in direct contrast to his “homogenous empty time” which constructs Western forms of linearity (but also of its staticism) in the form of capitalist life. “Messianic time” underpinns the revolutionary potential of such a radically different experience of time - a simultaneous experience of the past and future in the instantaneous present.

It appears almost as if history ended in Mexico in 1968 according to this National Museum of History. Yet, within this display, there exists no mention of the military or paramilitary forces, nor of the involvement of the president and his counterparts, in the massacre or simply of the massacre itself. One could easily expect such silence, given the massive amount of resources spent on evis- cerating any trace of the massacre from public memory. Benjamin, commenting on the risk of history as becoming a tool for the ruling classes warns,

In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the Messi- ah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the vanquisher of the Anti-Christ. The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.26

Perhaps one explanation or interpretation for this mysterious absence of self-indictment by a state-sponsored museum would be the mutual understanding amongst a nation that passes down memories through shared narrative (as the formation of collective memory is explored by Halbwachs, as I discuss in Chapter Three), that an acceptable elucidation could occur. After all, what National His- tory Museum does not overlook massacres? The question becomes then, why put it there in the first place? The exhibition as it was promoted, was intended to be a history of the Himno Nacional Mexicano that would in essence also function as a history of Mexico in general. The exhibition traces the National Anthem from 1810 to 1968, from the birth of the independent Mexican state to the growth of Mexico as a rapidly industrializing capitalist nation. Generously advertised as a traveling exhibition in over seven indigenous languages with over four-hundred thousand viewers, the exhibition’s pretext looks at the revolutionary call to arms of the Himno Nacional’s lyrics. Yet disturbingly, the exhibition was also on display previously at the Palacio de Lecumberri, which as I will explore below, was the former prison that activists from 1968 were tortured in and now houses Mexico’s National Archives.

I recently returned to the Museo Nacional de Historia while attempting to gain more footage for my film. I was eager to revisit this exhibition to gain more context and background or explore moments I might have previously missed. Walking up to the castle, a foreboding feeling of uneasiness overwhelmed me. As I

25 - 26.ibid. J.S. Sanzgiri 29

approached the exhibition, only emptiness appeared. No displays, no walls or images, no sounds from the National Anthem – just silence. (Fig. 6) The emptiness of the castle’s hall appeared exactly as they had in a virtual Google Walkthrough of the Museum that I had explored only months earlier online. Unknown to me, the exhibition had only been temporary. Yet, the feeling of loss remained, as my primary objective was to re-film scenes of the exhibition that would play a pivotal role in my film. I felt foolish for such a feeling of loss and disappearance. The irony however struck me in a quite dramatic light – a double disappearance.

What does it mean to resurrect history? Is the mere act of viewing or of lis- tening to a past in a present context enough to bring forth the past in a “constellation like a flash of lightning” as Benjamin says in his Arcades Project?27 What does it mean to recognize a past as of one’s own concern in the present, to recognize it “in a moment of danger”? It is only two and a half years ago, in 2014 that a group of over a hundred indigenous students in the small state of Ayotzinapa, Mexico attempted to travel to Mexico City joining other protesters to commemorate the memory of the 1968 massacre. They did not make it to their destination. Local police and other paramilitary persons in conjunction with narco-trafficers sanctioned by the state from the city of Iguala, Guerrero ambushed their ve- hicles on route, firing upon the students, kidnapping and eventually torturing those who were not able to flee.28 The magnitude of the brutality of these tortures have been described by their visceral and gruesome imagery: pealed off skin and gauged out eyes, bodies left in dumpsters with skin burned off. The Mayor of Ig- uala, working with the Governor and local drug cartels, gave the orders to abduct and disappear the students. Twenty-two police officers, the Mayor, and his wife were arrested in connection with the kidnappings months later, the Governor resigned immediately, and the party that Mayor Abarca was associated with (the PRD, or Democratic Revolutionary Party) fell into disarray.29 They are now more commonly known as the Missing 43, their bodies, like the bodies of the students in 1968 were never found despite claims from president Enrique Peña Nieto that the ashes of their bodies were confirmed. Multiple independent human rights investigators have dismissed Peña Nieto’s official claims. It is with the Missing 43 that seizing hold of a memory of the past became a process of death itself. Photo- graphs of the faces of the students, once again, are not uncommon to witness on the banners in many demonstrations or protests across the nation. (Fig. 7)

Prompted by these kidnappings and the larger structures of violence from both narco-trafficing and U.S. and foreign imperialist domination, Sergio González Rodríguez, deftly embarked on his 2015 publication The Iguala 43 trac- ing the histories of violence in Guerrero and the larger Mexican territory by state and governmental corruption in collusion with U.S. regimes of influence driven by anti-Marxist and Lenninist rural organization. Rodríguez’s book, takes an in-

27. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 462-63. 28. Rodríguez, Sergio González. The Iguala 43: The Truth and Challenge of Mexico’s Disap- peared Students. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2017. Print. 29. ibid. 30 History and Resurrection

vestigatory approach to the 43 missing students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher’s College, a remnant of the revolutionary educational reform from the Socialist aftermath of the Mexican Revolution in the 1920’s, providing not only a thorough analysis of the events leading up to, during and after the abduction and torture of the students from Iguala, but but also in-depth history of radical left-wing movements (their goals, struggles, victories and consistent suppression) across Latin America to which the Ayotzinapa College was only one high-profile example. Rodríguez’s work puts the events in Guerreo in a larger context of the violence

… I ask myself why Anglo-American narrative relates the content of evil with individual acts committed by shadowy persons while making almost no reference to the political framework that makes them possible. The perversion that I am examining implies so much more than mere crime or an ambition for supremacy on the part of certain individuals: it infests the conventional order of the world in which we live.30

The same could be said about this thesis.

30. ibid. J.S. Sanzgiri 31

(FIG. 5) Images of the 1968 Student Protests displayed in an exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Historia

(FIG. 6) The empty hall where an exhibition featuring images of 1968 previously stood 32 History and Resurrection

(FIG. 7) Photographs of the 43 missing students from Iguala displayed on banners for protest marches, courtesy Archives of La Nacion J.S. Sanzgiri 33

THE IMAGE IN (THE) RUINS

To speak of a resurrection, or of a redemption, is also to speak if its ruins. Resurrection springs forth from ruins, and it is with the literal ruins of the Aztec empire that the finale of the 1968 movement fell only feet from. Fig.( 8, 9, 10) “There can be no image that is not about destruction and survival,” writes Edu- ardo Cadava in his opening lines to Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins, “and this is especially the case in the image of the ruin. We might even say that the image of ruin tells us what is true of every image: that it bears witness to the enigmatic relation between death and survival, loss and life, destruction and preservation, mourning and memory.”31 Cadava’s essay takes our familiar friends Walter Benja- min, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes to closely examine a photograph from an unknown photographer of three strangers sifting through the remnants of the bombed out Holland House Library from the Luftwaffe on London in 1940 (a day before Benjamin’s death as Cadava notes). (Fig. 11) It is in this photograph that Cadava sees the whole of the phenomenological and transcendental paradoxes, potentials, limitations, and burdens of the photographic image. It is here that history takes its final shape as a “constellation” in Benjaminian terms - a collapsing or “condensation” of past, present and future. Or more to my previous point, the formation of “Messianic time”. The image exists in all times at every moment - the present enacts a viewing of the past that will eventually be viewed again in the future. But it is also here that Cadava sees the importance of the image and it’s ability to disrupt linear time, to once again shatter the “empty homogenous time” that structures capitalist life. To shatter linear time through an image is to leave the image in ruins, to ruin the illusion of time, and to expose (all connotations of photographic development included) the artifice of historical representation.

Every image is an image of ruin because the representation of the past is both a deception – a disguise that masquerades as truth - and a catastrophe of loss that accompanies the shutter as it attempts to re-present a moment. It is a violence that says “I speak for others within this click of a button”. Every image is an image of ruin because we can never truly experience that which has occurred – the experience of an image is the experience of the impossibility of experience itself. As Cadava asks, “What can memory be when it seeks to remember the trauma of violence and loss? How can we respond to what is not presently visible, to what can never be seen within the image?”32

Sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel writes in a text from 1911, “In the case of the ruin, the fact that life, with its wealth and its changes, once dwelled here constitutes an immediately perceived presence. The ruin creates the present form of a past life, not according to the contents or remnants of that life, but

31. Cadava, Eduardo. “Lapsus Imaginis”: The Image in Ruins.” October 96 (2001): 35-60. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 1 Dec. 2016. 32. ibid 34 The Image in (the) Ruins

according to its past as such.”33 Ruins are synonymous with excavation, a digging of the past, revealing the sedimentation of time, history, and above all, trauma. Trauma is innate with the ruin. The burying of the past exists within a framework of repression that persists underneath the skin of the Earth and of the collective unconscious in psychoanalysis. Yet, of course, as Freud reminds us, these repressed and buried pasts resurface in moments of rupture, and rupture is precisely what 1968 aimed for. Ruins are also often referred to as “remains” - an excess, the detritus.34 Thus the concept of the “remains” also offers the question of its opposite - what was lost.

Along the walls of the old Foreign Affairs Ministry building, what is now the “cultural” branch of the National Autonomous University, are faces from another time - faces that are yet, at one and the same, of our time, of anyone’s time visiting the Plaza de la Tres Culturas. (Fig. 12) These faces - old faces, young faces, faces of sadness, of rage, of terror – are faces of the ruins. They are the faces of the fallen, of the disappeared, from the ’68 movement, and they live their lives in a photographic rigor mortis. Their glances wrap the perimeter of the University building, protecting it perhaps, or finally being able to see what they had not seen before from another perspective. They survey the Plaza of Three Cultures. The embedded faces of the disappeared meld together with the architecture of the building they were once massacred in front of, now destined to become the faces of the Janus, the ancient God who could see both into the past and into the future. As Cadava, quoting Derrida, says: “Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze.”35 It is now not the gaze of the students who ruins us, but us who ruins them.

33. This in some ways, predates Benjamin’s concept of the “constellation” by a decade. Simmel, Georg. “Two Essays: The Handle and The Ruin.” Hudson Review, 11:3 (1958: Au- tumn) p.371 34. See also, Achelle Mbembe’s writing on the archive as a surplus, excess, detritus and debt in the folllowing section, The Incarceraed Archive. 35. Cadava, Eduardo. “Lapsus Imaginis”: The Image in Ruins.” October 96 (2001): 35-60. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 1 Dec. 2016. J.S. Sanzgiri 35

(FIG. 8) Tourists walking through the Tlatelolco archaeological site, once a city center and marketplace for the Aztec Empire.

(FIG. 9) A pyramid at Tlatelolco built over 700 years ago, whose construction was said to add a new level every fifty-two years.

(FIG. 10) In 2009, an archeological dig found a mass grave hidden under Tlatleolco. Bodies and skeletons revealed traces of European contact from their burial arrangements. 36 The Image in (the) Ruins

(FIG. 11) Photograph of the bombed out Holland House Library in London, 1940, courtesy In- ternational Center for Photography

(FIG. 12) Photographs of the faces of missing students from the Tlatelolco massacre embedded on the artifice of the Centro Cultural Universitario de la UNAM - across the street from where they were murdered and only feet from the Aztec ruins. J.S. Sanzgiri 37

THE INCARCERATED ARCHIVE*

When one enters the National General Archives in Mexico City there is a distinct feeling of familiarity. Like a bank or an airport, armed guards ominously shepherd visitors in through the thuggish imperial gates that only forty years ago meant no return for those who entered. A similar feeling of no return might wash over one as they cross the entrance to the archives, signing waivers, surrendering credentials and identifications, and having their possessions locked away. The only material one is allowed to bring with them, however, is a camera – a small but illuminating detail that might carry further weight later on in this thesis.

Constructed and organized in 1900 by the dictator and president Porfirio Díaz, the Palacio de Lecumberri as it is still known, was originally designed as a Bentham inspired Panopticon prison, jailing any sort of political dissidents, petty thieves, or bodies deviant from the norm, including eventually the architect of the prison himself. (Fig. 13) The prison was built with only 804 original cells primarily to house political opponents of Díaz and his regime, but at various point of over-incarceration, some cells would fit up to eighteen prisoners each.36 The size of the prison itself was intended to be a brute demonstration to the world of the power of Díaz’s regime, and its architecture still remains a key trademark in the archive’s logo. (Fig. 14)

Torture, starvation and death were not uncommon to experience in what prisoners called “The Black Palace”. The prison continued through the 1960’s and 70’s where during the regimes of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría, hundreds of left-wing activists were once again jailed during the so called “Dirty Wars”. The prison was particularly effective during 1968, when the eyes of the world were on Mexico City watching the first ever Olympic games held in a developing nation. This precedent would later be repeated in many other nations during future Olympic games.

Yet it was Luis Echeverría himself who decommissioned the prison in 1976 during his apertura reforms.37 Ultimately, however, the decision to turn one of the longest consecutively running prisons in Mexico City into the National Archives marks a very conscious decision. As the Interior Secretary during the 1968 student protests, Echeverría was eventually charged with genocide in 2005

* A version of this essay was presented at the conferences “Under Super Vision” at the Art History, Visual Art, and Theory’s 40th Annual Graduate Symposium at the Univer- sity of British Columbia, and the “Environments and the Ecological Self” at the Visual Cultural Studies’ 11th Annual Graduate Symposium at the University of Rochester. 36. “El ‘Palacio Negro’ De Lecumberri.” El Universal. El Universal, n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2017. http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/metropoli/cdmx/2016/05/1/el-palacio-negro-de-lecumberri#imagen-1. 37. Sánchez, Luis Carlos. “Lecumberri, Atado Al Mito; Cuando La Penitenciaría Se Quedó Sin Presos.” Excélsior. Excélsior, 27 Aug. 2016. Web. 13 Apr. 2017. http://www.excel- sior.com.mx/nacional/2016/08/27/1113468. 38 The Incarcerated Archive

(although acquitted) after having given the orders to the military to fire on the crowd of protesters and students ly, before the Prison was deactivated, Echever- ría commissioned a film to be made about the prison in its current state, with his brother Rodolpho as the Director of Cinematography. (Fig. 13) Scenes of daily bureaucratic procedures of processing new inmates is contrasted by their conditions of living. The director, Aurturo Ripstein, specifically intended to portray the left-wing movements in Mexico at the time, many of whom were jailed at the prison.38 Attempting to interview a large number of inmates, Ripstein was unable to obtain but four interviews, all of whom were political prisoners whose interviews eventually made their way into Ripsteins 2001 film Los Héroes y el Tiempo given the orders to the military to fire on the crowd of protesters and students during the Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi massacres, culminating in the deaths of nearly 300 students and 150 students respectively.39 Curiously, before the Prison was deactivated, Echeverría commissioned a film to be made about the prison in its current state, with his brother Rodolpho as the Director of Cinematography. (Fig. 15, 16) Scenes of daily bureaucratic procedures of processing new inmates is contrasted by their conditions of living. The director, Aurturo Ripstein, specifically intended to portray the left-wing movements in Mexico at the time, many of whom were jailed at the prison.40 Attempting to interview a large number of inmates, Ripstein was unable to obtain but four interviews, all of whom were political prisoners whose interviews eventually made their way into Ripsteins 2001 filmLos Héroes y el Tiempo.

So, we arrive at a point where a man whose record entails two state-sponsored genocides designating one of the most feared prisons in the country the site of the new National Archives. Hundreds of thousands of bureaucratic papers dating back to the 1500s inhabit the now air-conditioned cells of the former prison where bodies once lay terrorized by their dormancy. Official personnel go about their business shifting papers from station to station, transgressing the borders of what previously were corridors separating various criminal offenders by their charges. Thieves with thieves, radicals with radicals, addicts with addicts, homosexuals with homosexuals. The archive wastes no advantage the architecture of the prison affords, exercising these chambers’ distant appendages by maintaining the classificatory separation of materials – photos with photos, maps with maps, family records with family records – a “privileged topology” in Jacques Derrida’s words.41 No seepage is found other than what a generous researcher might assemble. “In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any hetero- geneity or secret which could separate, or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of

38. Mckinley, James C. “Federal Judge Overturns Ruling Against Mexico’s Former Pres- ident in 1968 Student Killings.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 12 July 2007. Web. 13 Apr. 2017. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/americas/13mexico.html. 39. El Universal, Compañia Periodística Nacional. México. “Proyectan Sin Censura Lecumberri, El Palacio Negro.” El Universal. N.p., 10 Oct. 2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2017. http:// archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/443741.html 40. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 1999, pp. 462-63. J.S. Sanzgiri 39

gathering together,” writes Derrida.42 This gathering together is found nowhere better than with the huddled bodies in Lecumberri’s overcrowded cells and common areas. The consignation, consolidation, and sheer volume of bodies in the one, and documents in the other, give the prison and the archive an authenticity to its authority. It should be no surprise then, that within the Archivo General’s permanent introductory exhibition, a stand displaying images of young research- ers at work is complete with no other than quotations from Derrida’s own Archive Fever. (Fig. 17)

Power is innately embedded in the archive, the Greek archon that controlled and had access to the archive, guarded the public records as its sole ruler. They had the power to interpret - the voice of the nomos. Yet the archons needed a place to guard their documents, they needed a dwelling, a “domicilization”, a “house arrest” in Derrida’s words once more.43 Thus the archive was born. The archive has always innately had a physical and ontological property as a location, as an environment where one can command. The archive is a shelter, and to shelter is to conceal.

Yet, the very concept of the archive was once defined by the English his- torian V.H. Galbraith as a “secretion of an organism” in his work An Introduction to the Use of Public Records.44 Curiously, within the first few sentences of his lecture, he finds it fitting to describe the “overflow” of archival materials from the Public Record Office in England deposited to the jail at Cantebury. Thus, the prison and the archive find a natural camaraderie. The participation of other organizations, states, and “carceral networks”, towards the transportation and deposit of “overflow” is reminiscent of other events of the past - the colonization of Australia as punitive means against large numbers of people from England, or same process with the colony of Georgia in North America. Thus, it can be said that the bank- ing model of deposit and withdraw of the archive establishes its firm relationship to dominant forms of capitalist exchange as well as circulations of colonialist distribution of bodies themselves. If the archive results from the so-called secretion of the obsequious processes of the state apparatus’s refuse, what then might be the result of the secretion from the prison itself within the archive? In Gol- braith’s words, “… public records are like a skeleton, and from the dry bones we have to arrive at some conception of the living past: to see it as it was.”45 Perhaps, Golbraith did not anticipate his analogy to be quite so literal, but in the case of the Black Palace, the skeletons of these prison cells, where bodies rotted of starvation and torture, are re-activated every time a catalog number is called forth.

The living past of the Black Palace may be no more apparent than in the large vinyl printed historical images that cling to the windows of the National Archives. (Fig. 18) Yet with El Palacio de Lecumberri, these historical images linger - their temporality oozes into the walls of the archive, almost as a peaceful trans-

43. ibid. 44. Galbraith, V. H. An Introduction to the Use of the Public Records. London: Oxford UP, 1971. 45. ibid. 40 The Incarcerated Archive

fer of power between the two institutions. Our eyes look up at the watchtower from the same perspective as those of the fatefully incarcerated. Indeed, not only are there wall-printed images of the prison imposed on the building itself, but of course educational exhibits about Lecumberri’s history, with photos of inmates’ experiences and exchanges.

References to the similarities of the prison and the archive are of course not without precedent. Alain Resnais’s 1956 short film Tout la Mémoire de Monde or “All The Memory in the World” depicts the Bibliothèque Nacional in France as a living prison for books and the knowledge they contain. (Fig. 19a, 19b) In 2015, UNESCO titled Mexico’s National Archives’ collection of indigenous and colonial maps “Memories of the World” bearing a remarkable similarity to the title of Resnais’s film. As the film’s narrator states, “Faced with these bulging repositories, man fears being engulfed by this mass of words. To safeguard his freedom, he builds fortresses.”46 Continued reference throughout the film of the cataloguing, labeling, numbering, transporting and confining of the one bears re- semblance to the bodies archived (and disposed of) through bureaucratic means in Resnais’s film from only one year earlier – Night and Fog. (Fig. 21) No need to elaborate further on this immediate comparison from here.

Going back further, the prison can be traced in film history back to Thom- as Edison’s 1901 re-creation, nonetheless, of the execution of President McKinn- ley’s murderer Leon Czolgosz. (Fig. 21) Here, Edison appeals to the popularity of public execution spectacles, adding one central feature - long panning exterior shots of the Auburn Prison filmed on the day of the execution itself, all of which lead activist and writer Angela Davis to state in Are Prisons Obsolete? The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment. This has caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all around us. We do not question whether it should exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of imagination to envision life beyond the prison.47

Davis touches on an important point - one which can be referred to as the collective “imaginary” and the “image environment”. It is here that the central question becomes one of how images inform the environment for engagement with the construction of a collective past, or put in another way – how might it be possible to imagine, to form a new image of, the world outside of what already exists? The archive is principal in construction of the imaginary as the Cameronian political theorist Achille Mbembe explores in a text from 2002. Mbembe ties the connections between the archive’s relationship to debt (as in the inherited debris of

46. Toute La Mémoire Du Monde. Dir. Alain Resnais. Les Films De La Pleiade, 1956. DVD. 47. Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? An Open Media Book. New York City: Seven Sto- ries, 2010. An Open Media Book. 48. Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” Refiguring the Archive (2002): 19-27. Web 49. Foucault, Michel. “The Body of the Condemned.” Trans. Alan Sherridan. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. S.n.: Vintage, 1995. 27-28. J.S. Sanzgiri 41

the past) mass consumption, death, and the paradoxical threat the archive poses to the state itself. The transformation of the archive into a ritualistic practice, holds twofold functions for Mbembe – one of commemoration bending towards consumption, and the other with displacement, that is to say removal. The dead conjure up a past that has a power to “stir disorder” in the present, according to Mbembe.48 That is precisely why archives, in essence, are hidden.

To return to the relationship between the prison to the archive, of course above all, leads one to the question the relationship between power and knowledge. Quote Michel Foucault:

We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.49 Foucault continues, These ‘power knowledge relations’ are to be analyzed, therefore, not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free in relation to the power system; but on the contrary, the subject who knows, the objects to be known, and the modalities of knowledge must be regarded as so many effects of these fundamental implications of power-knowledge and their historical transformations.50

Foucault does not merely state that power is behind all knowledge, for if so then we would really be in trouble. Rather Foucault clarifies that the co-production of knowledge and power come from a place of validation and authority through their reciprocal proximity to one another. Foucault’s claims, which like much of his work have influenced an entire generation of thinkers, is not without its own consequences. The epistemological breakdown of the question of knowledge perhaps leads one to an important distinction of where one’s knowledge comes from - where is it found, and how did it get there? Yet such attempts for me become a distraction. It is less the knowledge that power produces and the power that knowledge produces that this work examines. Rather, it is how that knowledge is co-opted, reframed, and recirculated not in order to question a Western epistemological crisis, but to put into place once more Benjamin’s warning that, “…even the dead are not safe from the enemy if he is victorious.” Likewise, Fou- cault’s work has been so engrained within an academic cannon that, like the Der- rida quote displayed proudly in the Archivo General de la Nación’s introductory exhibition, a guided walkthrough tour of the archives produces Foucault’s name several times by the tour guide.

It should not go unnoticed, as I attempt to make clear, the similarities be-

50. ibid 51. Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (1986): 3-64. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 1 Dec. 2016 42 The Incarcerated Archive

tween the Panopticon of the Palacio de Lecumberri (perhaps the quintessential example of optical sovereignty), and the archival documents of the nation - not the least of which contains the dominating force of visual representation called the photograph. It is here that I would like to turn to a text written in 1986 by the artist, photographer and writer Allan Sekula. His sprawling sixty-four-page essay from October titled “The Body and the Archive” places the history of photography with developing modes of control and domination over what he calls the “deviant body” – the body that lay outside the “zone of normality”.51

The emergence of photography, as Sekula explores, coincides with the archival paradigm - birthed from technologies of surveillance for organizing, doc- umenting, and inspecting the criminal subject according to the racist practices of phrenology and physiognomy - all rooted in the ideology of eugenics. These classificatory practices were pioneered by the French Alphonse Bertillon, whose system of criminal identification relied on the reduction of bodies and their histories into a single card for the growing operations of police surveillance realities. (Fig. 22) Sekula’s second example is the British Francis Galton, who invented apparatuses for creating “composite portraiture”, exposing the faces of several individuals sharing similar characteristics (criminality, illness, race, etc.) in order to arrive at a single average type. “We are confronting, then, a double system: a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively. This double operation is most evident in the workings of photographic portraiture,” writes Sekula.52 Every portrait implicitly took its place within a social and moral hier- archy. The private moment of sentimental individuation, the look at the frozen gaze-of-the-loved-one, was shadowed by two other more public looks: a look up, at one’s ‘betters,’ and a look down, at one’s ‘inferiors.’ Especially in the United States, photography could sustain an imaginary mobility on this vertical scale, thus provoking both ambition and fear, and interpellating, in class terms, a characteristically ‘petit-bourgeois’ subject.53

Sekula continues,

We can speak then of a generalized, inclusive archive, a shadow archive that encompasses an entire social terrain while positioning individuals within that terrain. This archive contains subordinate, territorialized archives: archives whose semantic interdependence is normally obscured by the ‘coherence’ and ‘mutual exclusivity’ of the social groups registered within each. The general, all- inclusive archive necessarily contains both the traces of the visible bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, ce- lebrities, and those of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female, and all other embodiments of the unworthy.54

52 - 54. ibid. 55. This detail was brought to my attention during anther guided tour of the Palacio de Lecumberri only after I had already been researching the Bertillon identification cards. The syncronization of my own research into this phenomenon, and that of its literal application by Lecumberri, only added to growing fortuitous sensation. J.S. Sanzgiri 43

Through apparatuses of capturing, arresting, and statisticizing the human body through the portrait, the field of criminology flourished during the -19th cen tury coinciding with the late-enlightenment era scientifico-technical domain of “progress” and “reform”. The photograph became a prime source of ‘evidence’ in a whole range of scientific, technical, medical, legal, and political apparatuses, capable of making visible the human body through a permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance network. To be photographed was to be recorded as a subject of the state. Just as Foucault described, as a device of inscription, the camera helped to invent new forms of disciplinary knowledge, and in turn that knowledge was used to create the types of subjects to be studied. I bring up the case of criminology in order to underscore the vast application that this European technology had on other nations. As the Lecumberri prison was adapting to these new procedural developments, they employed the Bertillon identification cards with one fundamental change. Mexican criminologists noted that quite blatantly that if they did not revise this method, that according to Bertillon’s procedures, nearly all Mexicans would be indicative of the “criminal type”.55

Both the event and the archive are produced through the authority that each contains – the event in its archive, the archive in its contents. Each reciprocal move towards the establishment and consolidation of authenticity in one, gives power to the other. Thus, the archive becomes another method of performativity, that is to say a constructed series of signs and signifiers propelled in circulation and collectively performed. As Sekula states, this time in another essay from 1984, Archives then, constitute a territory of images: the unity of an archive is first and foremost that imposed by ownership. Whether or not the photographs in a particular archive are offered for sale, the general condition of archives involves the subordination of use to the logic of exchange. Thus not only are the pictures in archives often literally for sale, but their meanings are up for grabs... This semantic availability of pictures in archives exhibits the same abstract logic as that which characterizes goods in the marketplace.56

This abstract logic of the marketplace that Seukla speaks of is found in another term of Sekula’s – the “imaginary economy” that photography constructs.57 Yet, going back to Eduardo Cadava once more who picks up on a rather economically Keynesian notion, speaks on the efforts to “stabilize” the context of an image:

Time tells us that the event can never be entirely circumscribed or de- limited. This is why the effort to determine and impose meaning on the event recorded in this photograph, to stabilize the determination of its context – an act that involves reading what is not visible within the photograph – involves both violence and repression.58

56. Sekula, Allan. “Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital.” The Photography Reader, edt. Wells, Liz. London: Routledge, 2003. 442-52. 57. Sekula’s “semantic availability” is not unlike Jacques Lacan’s “freefloating signifiers” perhaps. 58. Cadava, Eduardo. “Lapsus Imaginis”: The Image in Ruins.” October 96 (2001): 35-60. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 1 Dec. 2016. 44 The Incarcerated Archive

Upon taking several guided tours of the prison and examining their exhibitions and displays it is apparent that the self-awareness of the Archivo General de la Nación becomes another added layer to this investigation. To see images of imprisoned, tortured and starved inmates displayed, once again, almost with pride, marks such a bold move, and in this author’s opinion, not a progressive one. Rather, these images are on display in the true sense of the word; they are parad- ed to visitors as the guests’ arms immediately reach into their pockets to snap a quick pic, perhaps providing conversation over dinner or at a party. (Fig. 23) As Sekula says again in his 1984 essay “Reading An Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital”,

Thus, most visual and pictorial histories reproduce the established patterns of historical thought in bourgeois culture. By doing so in a ‘popular’ fashion, they extend the hegemony of that culture, while exhibiting a thinly-veiled contempt and disregard for popular literacy. The idea that photography is a ‘universal language’ contains a persistent element of condescension as well as a pedagogical zeal. The widespread use of photographs as historical illustration suggests that significant events are those which can be pictured, and thus history takes on the character of spectacle.59 exhibiting a thinly-veiled contempt and disregard for popular literacy. The idea that photography is a ‘universal language’ contains a persistent

The order of the day for the National Archives of Mexico is once more not only to commemorate its past in all its terror and supremacy (with exhibitions designed in almost the exact same fashion as in the National Museum of History in the Chapultepec Castle), but also to lionize the memory of their most famous prisoner and Marxist icon, José Revueltas. Large photographs of Revueltas now adorn the corridors where he was once imprisoned, now imprisoned in another form. (Fig. 24) José Revueltas was a long established novelist, playwright, essayist, and political activist (and filmmaker it should be added), whose popular novelEl Apando was a document of his time imprisoned at the Palacio de Lecumberri. The novel, which takes its name from the terrifying cell where prisoners were kept in isolation for months, was eventually adapted into a movie of the same name in 1976 - the exact same year of his death and the prison’s decommissioning by Echeverría. (Fig. 25) Revueltas is more generally known as the “intellectual architect” of the 1968 student movement. His influential writings on “autogestión” or self-management (both in reference to workers’ self-management as well as for the students’ self-management towards active critical awareness), posed a significant threat to established labor, and institutional academia practices in the country.60 Thus, his writing and activism secured his place in the Black Palace.

60. (RC), Author Ruptura Colectiva, and José Revueltas. “Ruptura Colectiva (RC).” Ruptura Colectiva RC. N.p., n.d.Web. 13 Apr. 2017. http://rupturacolectiva.com/la-autogestion-aca- demica-jose-revueltas-compilacion-inedita/. 61. Poole, Oliver. “Quest for Truth in Torture Rooms of Mexico’s Black Palace.” The Tele- graph. Telegraph Media Group, 05 Aug. 2002. Web. 13 Apr. 2017. http://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/mexico/1403644/Quest-for-truth- in-torture-rooms-of-Mexicos-Black-Palace.html. 62. Poniatowska, Elena. “The Student Movement of 1968.” The Mexico Reader: History, Cul- J.S. Sanzgiri 45

The National General Archives do not so much simply reproduce the memory of a popular inmate, but rather co-opt and diffuse narratives through image that were once worthy of imprisonment themselves, now lauding the once threaten- ing figure of Revueltas.

In the year 2000, the nearly seventy-year rule of the PRI party was temporarily interrupted by president elect Vincente Fox from the centre-right PAN party who, due to mounting pressure and a populist campaign of human rights justice, continued an investigation into the 1968 massacre which the PRI refused and denied. Over 60,000 sealed police files concerning the massacre from the Díaz Ordaz regime became available the previous October in 1999, to which Pres- ident Fox ordered the release of in 2001.61 Activists flocked to the National Gener- al Archives where these new declassified documents were now located hoping to find any traces of justice. Those that have glimpsed the immensity of the records kept during those years report on the meticulousness and precision with which the officials responsible used to document and log the torture victims of those years, including through photography. It appears almost as if there was, again, a level of pride involved in the details of these now immortalized documents.

The student movement, despite its relatively basic Marxist demands and The student movement, despite its relatively basic Marxist demands and massive crowds, was eventually defeated not only by the regime through its militaristic repressive force, but also by the students’ inability to assemble, integrate, and align with larger workers’ movements.62 Opinion of the massacre in the immediate aftermath was molded by the state’s machines of influence, which justified the regime’s use of force against protesters to protect Mexico’s citizens against the growing “communist threat” according to which “strife and violence gave way to social progress” – not unlike how Benjamin describes the normalization of fascism through the “permanent state of emergency”.63 Thus, borrowing Giles Deleuze’s essay title “May ’68 Did Not Take Place”, Mexico ’68 takes on a double meaning. The momentum of the popular-student revolution was deemed a failed project (“an unrealized possibility for the birth of a new world”), and the students themselves (as well as the memory of the movement) were eviscerated, traces of which only exist as phantoms of their own image in film and photography. 64 Yet, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, “Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable.”65

63. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Frankfurt School: On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin. Marxist Internet Archive, 2005. Web. 01 Dec. 2016, trans. Red- mond, Dennis 64. Deleuze, Gilles, and David Lapoujade. “May ‘68 Did Not Take Place.” Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2006. 46 The Incarcerated Arvhive

(FIG. 13) The Palacio de Lecumberri prison inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, courtesy Archivo General de la Nación

(FIG. 14) Archivo General de la Nación’s trademark logo, courtesy Archivo General de la Nación J.S. Sanzgiri 47

(FIG. 15) Screenshot from El Palacio Negro de Lecumberri, dir. Arturo Ripstein 1976.

(FIG. 16) Screenshot from El Palacio Negro de Lecumberri, dir. Arturo Ripstein 1976. 48 The Incarcerated Arvhive

(FIG. 17) A small display at the entrance of the Archivo General de la Nación featuring a quote from Jacques Derrida

(FIG. 18) A worker entering in one of the archives, crossing through an image of the prison itself. J. S. Sanzgiri 49

(FIG. 19a) Screenshots from Alain Resnais’s 1956 film Toute la mémoire de monde, distribution: Claude Dau-

(FIG. 19b)

(FIG. 20) Still from Execution of Czolgosz, With Panorama of Auburn Prison, Thomas Edison, 1901. courtesy: Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division 50 The Incarcerated Arvhive

(FIG. 21) Film poster of Night and Fog, 1955. Dist. Criterion Collection. Courtesy: Wikipedia Commons. J. S. Sanzgiri 51

(FIG. 22) Example of the Bertillon system of identification. courtesy: University College, London

(FIG. 23) Visitors of the Archive taking photos of archival photographs of prisoners from the past 52 The Incarcerated Archive

(FIG. 24) Photographs of José Revueltas, the intellectual architect of the 1968 movement displayed near his original prison cell

(FIG. 25) Poster for El Apando written by José Re- vueltas, 1976. Dir. Felipe Cazals. Distribution: Excal- ibur Media Group J. S. Sanzgiri 53

POSTSCRIPT ON NARRATION

There is, no doubt, a long history of visual literacy for the masses pro- moting radical agendas in Mexico. One need not look much further than the murals of José Clemente Orozco or Diego Rivera, many commissioned by the government themselves - the ironies of which, once again become the very institutionalization, canonization, and eventual co-optation of this revolutionary past by the PRI enshrined in multiple places including the Museuo Nacio- nal de Historia.66 Thus, images function for a large population of Mexico, like in many nations, as an educational tool, and with such tools in the hands of a hegemonic one-party ruled regime, the current use of such images is put into question. Such is the basic nature of propaganda. Fragments of Mexico’s revolutionary past can be seen in many places in Mexico City, the least of which are the names of its roads. In a very minor note, one street which stands at the intersection at Tlatelolco is named after Mexico’s most famous anarcho-syndi- calist philosopher and activist Ricardo Flores-Magón. I bring this up in order to distinguish between commemoration and co-optation.67 Which of these Calle Ricardo Flores-Magón is in particular is up for grabs. Yet such ironies, like the general trend of this thesis, can reveal at times much more than they obscure.

During the years of 1910 – 1917 of the Mexican Revolution, filmmaker Salvador Toscano (whom served as the cameraman for the Lumiere Brothers in Mexico nonetheless) vigorously documented the unfoldings of the successive uprisings against Porfirio Díaz and the subsequent military coup of -Victoria no Huerta against his liberal predecessor Francisco Madero. Toscano amassed hundreds of hours on celluloid film of the “actualities” of the revolution, which eventually were compiled in the official feature-length documentary Memorias de un mexicano assembled by his daughter and released in 1950. Carmen Tos- cano, in recounting her father’s bravery in the face of the oppressive military regimes of Huerta, spoke about Huerta’s discovery of Toscano’s massive archive of film.68 Knowing its potential usage in resistance, Huerta ordered the films destroyed, to which Toscano narrowly escaped with only several of canisters of negatives with him before the soldiers burned the rest. This mythologizing by his daughter came at a time when Victoriano Huerta became the official villain, and rightfully so, of post-revolutionary historiography of the new PRI regime. Thus, Memorias de un mexicano gradually gained significant acclaim by - gov ernment authorities and state agencies to the point of its designation in 1967 by the National Institute of Anthropology as a ‘historical monument’ on par with the pre-Hispanic archeological sites and colonial buildings of the past. This

66. Siqueiros, David Alfero. “Art and Corruption.” The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics. By Gilbert M. Joseph. Durham, NC: Duke U, 2005. 492-99. 67. Such instances, of course, exist in many nations, including perhaps the Malcom X and Martin Luther King, Jr. roads, boulevards, and streets that can be seen in any major city in the United States. 68. Wood, David M.J. “Film and The Archive: Nation, Heritage, Resistance.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 2, 2010, pp. 162-174 54 Postscript on Narration

was particularly due to the film’s narrative justifying the modernizing- agen da of the post-revolutionary Constitutionalist regimes that by the 1940s were socially and fiscally conservative. Narrative serves the ones it is best suited for.

(FIG. 26) Screenshots from Toscano Archives: Preserving Mexico’s Memory, a short film using clips from Memorias de un Mexicano released on the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, 2010, dir. Octavio Moreno Toscano, courtesy: Fundacion Carmen Toscano J.S. Sanzgiri 55

CHAPTER TWO 56 Memory and Control

MEMORY AND CONTROL

So far, this thesis has dealt with the “visual diaspora”, that is to say the mi- gration, dispersion, and dissemination of, the name, images and bodies of “1968” and “Tlatelolco” in Mexico City in their present context. I use the word diaspora to denote a movement, as in the larger name of 1968 referred to as a “student movement”. The peripatetic nature of the images, ranging from the original 16mm military footage shot at the massacre that ends up in nearly every documentary of the event, to the photographs of students printed on vinyl and covering entire windows on a building’s skin, bring to light 69 the shifting contexts of these images, that for my part feels unrecognized. (Fig. 27) With that in mind, this analysis is concerned with where these images appear physically in the world - whether in the archives, museums, banners, or public buildings - including the images of José Revueltas, faces of the disappeared students, and images of the protests leading up to the massacre. For the sake of my argument, although explicitly separate by nature of the atrocity of the incident, images of the 43 missing students from Iguala are also included, whom as I’ve noted were on their way to commemorate the missing students of 1968 – thus, in this thesis, their images reside in the visual diasporic conditions of the name 1968. However, I have not included posters, propaganda, or any other possible printed visual legacies that were circulated and produced for activist purposes in the student movement of 1968, such an analysis would be of a different topic I believe. I have resigned my analysis to images proper – both photographically and cinematically, as documents or as evidence – a condition which rose, as I previously explored, with the advent of new forms of control mechanisms that used the photograph as ‘evidence’ in a whole range of scientific, technical, medical, legal, and political apparatuses, capable of making visible the human body through a permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance network. To be photographed was to be recorded as a subject of the state.

At the current site of Tlatelolco, I interviewed a man who was playing guitar by a memorial to the disappeared created in 1993.70 His guitar was adorned with stickers with famous slogans, chants, faces and drawings of fists, chains, mouths and above all, the big numbers ’68. He spoke of his guitar as having par- ticipated in the protests itself as he intermittently broke out into protest song after protest song. Below him however, and surrounding the memorial, were DVDs, CDs, books, framed photos, and dispersion posters all in some form or another related to 1968. (Fig. 27) Through a dispersion and dissemination of the moving image of Tlatelolco at the same site, the propagation of this memory and event exist side by side, championed by their most known form – the people.

In a 1975 interview with Michel Foucault from the film journal Cahiers du

69 As is the literal definition of an image. 70. The year before, I might add, the rise of the Zapatistas and the neo-liberal transformation of the Mexican state. Why such a monument should appear at such a time might warrant further investigation at another moment J.S. Sanzgiri 57

Cinéma, he states: There’s a real fight going on. Over what? Over what we can roughly describe as popular memory. It’s an actual fact that people—I’m talking about those who are barred from writing, from producing their books themselves, from drawing up their own historical accounts — that these people nevertheless do have a way of recording history, or remembering it, of keeping it fresh and using it. This popular history was, to a certain extent, even more alive, more clearly formulated in the 19th century, where, for instance, there was a whole tradition of struggles which were transmitted orally, or in writing or songs, etc. Now, a whole number of apparatuses have been set up (‘popular literature,’ cheap books and the stuff that’s taught in school as well) to obstruct the flow of this popular memory. And it could be said that this attempt has been pretty successful. [...] Today, cheap books aren’t enough. There are much more effective means like television and the cinema. And I believe this was one way of reprogramming popular memory, which existed but had no way of expressing itself. So people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been. Since memory is actually a very important factor in struggle (really, in fact, struggles develop in a kind of conscious moving forward of history), if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles. Just what the Resistance was, must no longer be known... 71

Foucault’s claims, while seemingly quite obvious get at a clarifying point in my argument. If the battle over memory is over control, what does control offer? For one, it offers a context in which a memory is brought forth. Omission or inclusion of certain details can shift these contexts; it can flip context on its head, overturn- ing preconceived notions of what might be possible, or on the other hand eradicate such possibilities. Such potentials offer a site of resistance as much as they offer suppression and domination. Slipping between contexts, shifting, modify- ing or displacing an image or concept within its supposed fixed condition are key tropes in the artist’s lexicon. The simple act of repositioning can illuminate or reveal deeper insights that may have been obscured by an original context, as we will see with the case of Frederick Douglass. Such repositioning invites new meaning where previously there might have assumed to be only one.

What would a true memory of the Tlaltelolco massacre look like? Is one even possible? If all archives and all testimonies are inherently incomplete, at what point does representation break down? Whether the self-commemoration of the memory of the massacre and the student movement by those involved in the movement themselves, or who grew up during that time, is successful or not (success being attributed to awareness) is of another question. The fact remains that the distribution of media that supposedly describes, analyzes or simply reproduces the massacre and its precursors, all come from a particular mechanism of production that may or may not be by the people themselves. Some

71. Foucault, Michel, and Cahiers Du Cinema. “Film and Popular Memory.” Radical Philos- ophy 11 (1975): Web. 17Apr. 2017. 58 Memory and Control

of the films, such as El Grito (1968) as I previously mentioned, were produced, filmed and edited promptly by the students themselves during in 1968.72 Others, such as Tlatelolco: Las Claves de la Massacre (2003) were produced by independent non-profit media companies such asLa Jornada and Canal 6 de Julio whose slogan is “images without censorship”. More importantly, however, would be an analysis of the Hollywood-style, cinematic, big budget adaptations of Tlatelolco such as Tlatelolco, Verano del 68 (2012), Borrar de la Memoria (2007), and the upcoming Tlatelolco68 starring John Leguizamo. (Fig. 28) Such films exert an overtly simplified, romanticized, and always fictional portrayal of the events in 1968, yet always veer on the side of sympathy with the left, often depicting the government and military with extreme disdain. As Samuel Steinberg says of “Tlatelolco cinema” it,

...thinks through a certain duration, claims as its object the very beginning and end of Tlatelolco itself; through motion, it constantly brings us to this beginning and back to its end. History is framed, relinked, re- bound to the logic of its progressive flow, and recent criticism has sought to at least partially affirm that narrative.73

To look at these images, that is to say the reproductions of 1968 in their various forms, is also to look at the means through which history and its visual legacies are produced. To say that Tlatelolco and 1968 are one of the most popular memories and histories of the 20th century in Mexico would be a fair as- sessment I believe. However, like any major trauma, wound, or scar in a nation’s past, these memories have a way of becoming abused, inflated, and overindulged, which is not to say that a level of magnitude is not required for an event whose memory was promptly erased in the following years, but to say that the overex- posure (photographic connotations, once again included) of this event may lead for many to become disillusioned, skeptical, and perhaps dismissive of 1968 and its implications. What then becomes the incentive for the continued deployment of 1968’s narratives, commemorative or otherwise? What purpose does the continued circulation of 1968’s revolutionary messages and subsequent suppression, erasure and resurrection serve on a national level? These questions also beget another: who, besides the people, is spreading the memory of 1968? It is known, I must point out again, that some activists of the 1968 era whom were imprisoned during Echeverría’s presidency were given amnesty after being hired on in official governmental positions in Echeverría’s regime.74 The brazen abundance of encounters one can experience with the name 1968 in Mexico serves as an almost literal opposite of what was intended by the PRI regime in 1968 and the following years. Yet how is it that such dreams of activists of the post-1968 era quickly turned into such a nightmare? What does it mean to fight for the memory of an injustice so strongly that it becomes reabsorbed and normalized into the very fabric of everyday life to the point of exhaustion? I would be tempted to use here

72. Steinberg, Samuel. Photopoetics at Tlatelolco: Afterimages of Mexico, 1968. 1st ed. Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2016. pp. 7. 73 - 74. ibid. J.S. Sanzgiri 59

to talk about the memory of 1968 using the phrase “beaten over one’s head” if it weren’t so precise in its metaphorical violence.

(FIG. 26) 16mm footage of the massacre filmed by the military themselves. Courtesy: Archive.org 60 The Apparatus

(FIG. 27) DVDs displayed against the Monumento a la ‘68

(FIG. 28) Screenshot from Tlatelolco Verdano del ‘68 in which the main character looks through photographs she has taken, which are famous photographs taken at the actual massacre, dir. Carlos Bolado, 2013. Courtesy: Prodisc J.S. Sanzgiri 61

THE APPARATUS

To quote Louis Althusser, “An ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material.”75 For Althusser, the apparatus and its materiality, much like Foucault’s dispositif,76 is not just a singular entity that exerts power and ideology by and of itself, but is an entire structure, system and network of power relations that constitutes, perpetuates, reinforces and cir- culates an ideology (in Althusser’s case, that of capitalism, in the case of Mexico, national-developmentalism). Above all, this chapter deals with communication. As such, I will look at the historical developments that enable communication to flourish through a visual and cultural means, and therefore run the risk of being co-opted, exploited, and weaponized. Thus, the apparatus that I examine, is indeed the camera and the networks of meaning it produces. To look at the history of the camera is to look at the history of vision and its relationship to violence.

Vilém Flusser, the Czech-born and Brazilian based writer and philosopher, theorized in 1983 how important image-based apparatuses were in shaping the reality around us, and their eventual consequences if allowed to proliferate. In a slim text called Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Flusser writes about the way the apparatus of the camera directs our actions through the medium of photography – the click of the button, the tripod, the processing, the lenses themselves – become the very rules of the game that end up producing the images we associate with an author’s sense of agency.77 For Flusser, it is not the camera that works for us, but us who work for the camera. This reversal of the relationship between the camera and its operator, instead of enhancing questions of personal ideology, shifts the discourse towards questions of the inner workings of the camera itself as well as the structures that produce the rules of those very cameras (“...that of the photographic industry that programmed the camera; that of the industrial complex that programmed the photographic industry; that of the socio-economic system that programmed the industrial complex; and so on.”78) Central to Flusser’s argument is the way the camera apparatus produces, creates, changes, and shifts meaning all within the very confines of a predetermined set of actions that a user (or functionary in Flusser’s terms) is able to “play” with. In his words,

75. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an In- vestigation).” ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ and Other Essays. Marxists.org, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2017. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm 76. For Giorgio Agamben, the dispositif is found wherever control can be said to take place. Any mediation then, is a form of control with which the dispositif is found. For my purposes, vision is the penultimate element of control. Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009: p. 14. 77. Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion, 2000. 78. ibid. 62 The Apparatus

Power has moved from the owner of objects to the programmer and operator. The game of using symbols has become a power game – a hierarchi- cal power game. Photographers have power over those who look at their photographs, they program their actions; and the camera has a power over the photographers, it programs their acts. This shift of power from the material to the symbolic is what characterizes what we all the ‘information society’ and ‘post-industrial imperialism’.73 at their photographs, they program their actions; and the camera has a power over the photog-

“Images,” according to Flusser, “are mediations between the world and human beings. Human beings ‘ex-ist’, i.e. the world is not immediately accessible to them - and therefore images are needed to make it comprehensible.”80 This compre- hensibility took a massive shift with the invention of writing and eventual mass literacy according to Flusser. As he continues to make broad sweeping claims about the universal shift in consciousness with the invention of writing (and recorded history), he arrives at his distinction between “traditional images” and “technical images”. Traditional images such as paintings, drawings and imitations or likenesses of the world were replaced with texts, books, newspapers, and flyers resulting in traditional images to lose their influence on daily life. Texts eventually became too hermetic and were left to the elite while the masses were fed “cheap texts”. Thus, as Flusser argues, “To prevent culture from breaking up, technical images were invented – as a code that was to be valid for the whole of society.”81 Precisely what technical images might be, Flusser does not explain as there are no direct examples, but as far as one can extract, the technical image functions on behalf of all photography, both amateur and professional specifically because of its reproductive capacities.

One of the more pertinent of Flusser’s examples of how the technical image functions is through its circulation in the world, illuminating the impact images have on our shared reality:

Technical images are surfaces that function in the same way as dams. Traditional images flow into them and become endlessly repro- ducible: They circulate within them (for example in the form of posters) […] And cheap texts, a flood of newspaper articles, flyers, novels, etc. flow into them, and the magic and ideology inherent within them are translated into the programmed magic of technical images[…] Thus technical images absorb the whole of history and form a collective memory going endlessly round in circles. Nothing can resist the force of this current of technical images - there is no artistic, scientific, or political activity which is not aimed at it, there is no everyday activity which does not aspire to be photographed, filmed, videotaped. For there is a general desire to be endlessly remembered and endlessly repeatable. All events are nowadays aimed at the television screen, the cinema screen, the photograph, in order to be translated into a state of things.82

Technical images are thus the means by which collective memory is orga-

79 - 82. ibid. J.S. Sanzgiri 63 nized, and the organization of technical images is produced by the entirety of the industries behind them. All of this may seem somewhat obvious or images as mirrors of the world, displaying the world the way it really is. If this idea is to continue, and is left unexamined, Flusser might contend, the danger leads to an agreement that this is the only way the world must be; immutable, fixed and predetermined. Yet, when speaking of images, we can extend many of these arguments to media in general, without which I would not be writing this thesis even now. Media are the primary division between humans and the world, yet as I have just stated, many mistake media for the world itself.

Etched towards the bottom of the monument to 1968 at Tlatelolco, where I encountered my guitar wielding friend, an engraving reads: “Who are they? How many are there? Not a one. Not a trace of any of them the next day. By dawn the following morning the Plaza had been swept clean; The lead stories in the papers were about the weather. And on the TV, on the radio, at the movie theaters the programs went on as scheduled, no in- terruptions for an announcement, not a moment of reverent silence at the festivities. (Because the celebration went right on, according to plan.)”83 (Fig. 29) While the state controlled media were tightly silenced, the existence of photographs, films, and texts as a media, eventually surfaced and were disseminated both by the state and the people. What then can we make of media when silence and absence turn to proliferation and abundance?

Yet, going one step further, media - as the German theorist Fried- rich Kittler quotes Marshall McLuhan - are loosely defined as “the inter- secting points (Schnittstellen) or interfaces between technologies, on the one hand, and bodies, on the other.”84 Thus, it is not only glory or glorification that media enhances, but the enhancement of the body itself. It is in the capturing of the Tlatelolco massacre on film by the military itself that the bodies of the students quite literally intersect with the technology of the 16mm camera. Seen from another angle, it is the bodies of the military that enable the movement of the students to be captured. Thus, the camera becomes a prosthetic of not only the hands and eyes of the military, but of their weapons as well.

83. The engraving on the monument is taking from a poem by Rosario Castellanos titled “In Memory of Tlatelolco” 84. Kittler, Friedrich A., and Anthony Enns. Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999. Cam- bridge, UK: Polity, 2012. Print. 64 The Apparatus

(FIG. 29) Monumento del Tlatelolco at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, created in 1993 with names of missing students, courtesy: Wikicommons J.S. Sanzgiri 65

THE SIGHT MACHINE

The history of development of the camera is also the history of the development of new military technologies of seeing. Three cameras of the mid and late 19th century known separately as the Revolver Camera (1862), the Photographic Revolver (1874) and the Chronophotagraphic Gun(1882) were directly modeled after and inspired by their counterparts: the Colt revolver, the machine gun, and the rifle.85 (Fig. 30) Around this same time in 1880, the verb “to take” conclusively overturned the terminology “to receive” an image, and the verb “shoot” became synonymous with “take”.86 Colonial-militarism pervades the history of the image. Paul Virilo’s War and Cinema comes of much use in this regard, summarized in his preface to the English edition:

From the original watch-tower through the anchored balloon to the re- connaissance aircraft and remote-sensing satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye’s function being the function of a weapon. [...] Thus industrial production of repeating guns and automatic weapons was thus followed by the innovation of repeating images, with the photogram providing the occasion. As the video signal supplemented the classical radio signal, the video camera further extended such ‘cinematography’ and allowed the adversary to be kept under remote surveillance in real time, by day and night.87

Virilio goes on to explore just how inextricably linked histories and pre-histories of cinema and photography are with tactics of war. Mixing subjects such as D.W. Griffith, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Joseph Goebbels, with aerial photography, Hiroshima, aviation, and searchlights, Virilo demonstrates that at the core of advancements in military strategy are spectacle, deception and illusion - the key tenets of cinema and photography. In essence, cinema and war are about manipulation whether through space and time on screen, or through the manipulation of visibility of of one’s troops. Increasingly, war became a battle of hide and seek as Virilio says.88 The adage of art making visible the invisible takes on an entirely new meaning here, as forms of surveillance became the primary means of seeing. The lighting of actors in the studio began to follow the lighting the terrain of the battlefield and of enemy forces. Aiming, targeting, mapping, and tracking movement of ‘the enemy’ all have their analogous counterparts in cinema - the tracking, panning, zooming in and out with the camera. The screens pilots used aboard aircraft started to resemble the screens in televisions, a comparison very readily equivalent in today’s modern drone warfare. “There is no war, then, without representation...” he claims.89 At the center of Virilio’s argument is not just

85. Silverman, Kaja. The Miracle of Analogy, Or, The History of Photography Part One. Stan- ford, CA: Stanford UP, 2015. 86. ibid. 87. Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Lon- don: Verso, 1989. 88 - 89. ibid. 66 The Sight Machine

question of representation but the essential characteristics of perception and televisions, a comparison very readily equivalent in today’s modern drone warfare. “There is no war, then, without representation...” he claims.90 At the center of Virilio’s argument is not just question of representation but the essential characteristics of perception and vision itself following Maurice Merleau-Ponty stating, “The problem of knowing who is the subject of the state and war will be of exactly the same kind as the problem of knowing who is the subject of perception.”91 As with most of Virilio’s writings, everything comes down to speed, and it is the aim so to speak, of the militarized progress of technology in advanced capitalist nations to collapse the gap of instantaneity.

Just as weapons and armour developed in unison throughout history, so visibility and invisiblity now began to evolve together, eventually producing invisible weapons that make things visible - radar, sonar, and the high-definition cameras of spy satellites. [...] The problem, then, isno longer so much one of masks and screens, of camouflage designed to hinder long-range targeting; rather, it is a problem of ubiquitousness, of handling simultaneous data in a global but unstable environment where the image (photographic or cinematic) is the most concentrated, but also the most stable, form of information.92

It is one thing to analyze the militarization of vision, the violence of perception, and the tactics of the gaze. But might the gaze also be offered as a site of resistance? A large portion of my argument in this thesis revolves around dis- secting the notion of the immutable nature of our world. Pictures, both moving and still, are generally thought to render the world as the way it is; as an index or analogue to what already exists, and therefore can not exist in any other way. In this sense, it is not hard to see how images of violence normalize violence, images of state repression in one form beget state repression in another. Given that war is so intimately intertwined with representation as Virilio points out, does re-pre- senting a subject cast light on an injustice, or merely serve to solidify a truth sometimes too difficult to bear? As Oliver Wendell Holmes, inventor of the ste- reoscope, says in 1863 commenting on the devastation of the American Civil War captured through the lens of the camera, “The field of photography is extending itself to embrace subjects of strange and sometimes of fearful interest.”93

90 - 92. ibid 93. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “Visual Culture of the American Civil War.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Doings of the Sunbeam,” Atlantic Monthly (1863) Visual Culture of the Amer- ican Civil War. American Social History Project, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2017. http://civilwar. picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/presentations-about-visual-media/photography/oliver_wen- dell_holmes_doings_of_the_sunbeam_atlantic_monthly_1863/i/30/ J.S. Sanzgiri 67

(FIG. 30) The Chronophotographic Gun - the early prototype for what would become the movie camera. Invented by Étienne-Jules Marey, courtesy: Getty Images 68 Chiastic Resistance

CHIASTIC RESISTANCE

I take a moment here to divert from Tlatelolco and 1968, and offer instead the case of Frederick Douglass - the prolific American writer, abolitionist, social reformer, and not so coincidentally, the most photographed man of the 19th century. A staggering 160 official portraits of Douglass were taken throughout the course of his life. (Fig. 31) As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explores in his essay “Freder- ick Douglass’s Camera Obscura”, Douglass used the power of photography much like he used his oratory skills - to reverse the long-standing, rampant, racist ste- reotypes of black people.94 One of Douglass’s favorite rhetorical tropes, according to Gates, was the chiasmus - the repeated reversal of two or more words or grammatical constructions in a row (“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man”).

And as chiasmus always entails a form of reversal, its potential political uses are as great as its aesthetic uses […] Here, rhetoric is called upon to reverse the world’s order, the order in which the associations among slave and black and white and free appear to have been willed, fixed, and natural. To reverse this supposedly natural order of things, to show that what seemed fixed was actually arbitrary (and evil), Douglass seized on the political potential inherent in this figure of reversals as the overar- ching rhetorical strategy of his carefully crafted first book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself, which can itself be read as an extended chiasmus.95

The Chiasmus uses the logic of what already exists and overturns it, offering a world in which the logic of one still holds up to the logic of its inverse. If x is true because of this and that, then this and that must be true because of x. There is an interdependency at play. “Douglass’s job, the political work of his rhetoric, is to strip away the veil behind which this universe of illusion operates, defining its functional processes and machinery and unveiling its systems, apparatuses, thereby subverting its claims to be natural and fixed.”96 Says Gates. It is, in essence, Douglass’s goal to prove that the world and a black man’s place within it is not predetermined, that it is not finite, not forever destined to exist the way it does now - that the status quo can be overcome. “The apparatus of the camera obscura is the optical counterpart of chiasmus,” Gates explains,

…literally the x at the back of the box, the mechanism that reproduces, rotates, and reverses a scene, transforming it into an image flipped 180

94. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura: Representing the Anti- slave Clothed and in Their Own Form.” Critical Inquiry 42.1 (2015): 31-60. JSTOR. Web. 21 Apr. 2017. 95 - 96. ibid. J.S. Sanzgiri 69

degrees. […] The camera obscura is the device that turns the natural, visual world upside down. It is the device that made photography and the camera possible.97

It may not be surprising then, that Douglass considered photography to be a space to reverse this current world order. If Douglass, a former slave, could not only write three full length auto-biographies, but also poise himself in the most familiar, and popular, guise of 19th century - the photographic portrait - then by its own logic, a black man is worthy of honor, of glory - a key feature in the distribution of media as I have previously explored. Media function predominatly as mediums of glorification, and anyone or anything presented in media become in essence a glorfied subject. On the other hand, as Sekula stated earlier, media are always capable of both representing “honorifically” and “repressively”. Douglass un-anchors the very notion that honorific portraiture is worthy of only the white male type. Yet, it was not enough to have one portrait. The volume of Douglass’s visual legacy throughout his life amounted to nothing less than a sheer testament to the variety of life that a black man can endure from youth to death. “Douglass used photography in the same way, registering through image of himself after image of himself that the Negro, the slave, was as variable as any human being could be, not just in comparison to white people, but even more importantly among and within themselves…” writes Gates.98

Stuart Hall, the leading figure of the cultural studies movement, has written extensively about how media manufacture a representation of the world through an ideological lens that naturalizes and maintains that vision of the world, largely going unnoticed by functioning unconsciously in the mind of the viewer.99 Such is the task of analysis and critique. As questions of the burden of representation emerge, it is Douglass who actively, although subtly, tested these waters in the 19th century American consciousness. To bring up the case of Douglass, whose visible traces are but one unique example, is not to necessarily bring ties or connections between the abolitionist movement and the 1968 student movement, but to recount the ways photography, at its most basic functioning level, traced back to the camera obscura, can be said to reverse the order of the world. It is here that my argument turns. That this reality is not fixed, not limited to the way it is now, or the way it was before, is where representation plays a fundamental role. It is not merely a question of accuracy or of truth, representation is a choice, it is a decision. Of course, to represent is not enough to overturn the present order of the world, nor of the past. Yet images can provide even a seed or glimpse into a world not as the way regimes of the past or present will it to be. Or rather, images can be read in that way, and in a way that if a context is shifted just slightly enough, a new world appears.

97 - 98. ibid. 99. Hall, Stuart. “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and The Media.” Gen- der, Race, and Class in Media a Critical Reader. By Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez. Thousand Oaks (Calif.): SAGE Publications, 2015. N 70 Chiastic Resistance

(FIG. 31) Composite photographic portraiture of Frederick Douglass, courtesy: Wikipedia J.S. Sanzgiri 71

CHAPTER THREE 72 Hegemony and Its Paradoxes

HEGEMONY AND ITS PARADOXES

Like I explored in the previous chapter, film and photography as popular mediums of expression radically enhanced communication and the creation of a new production of meaning. I have outlined how that production of meaning, when in the hands of a specific few, following Antonio Gramsci, can utilize the reproductive capacities of such mediums as a means of control, specifically within the realm of dissemination. As we will see in this chapter, how, when, and how often an image is disseminated or repeated can lead to its inclusion in the factors that shape collective memory. Thus, this chapter exists to position my previous arguments in a larger sociological context with Maurice Halbwachs’s 1950 publication of The Collective Memory and Benedict Anderson’s vital work Imagined Communities, both to then be thought of in relation to Ariella Azoulay’s 2012 book Civil Imagination and Cornelius Castoriadis’s 1975 book The Imaginary Institution of Society.

Yet, it might be one thing to analyze the relationship between hegemony and collective memory. It might be another to analyze how the boundaries and limits of collective memory and the collective imaginary impact and eventually define what is possible within a society, or said in another way: how might collective memory and imagination impede our understanding of social change? Here my argument broadens, and my theoretical net is cast quite widely. This chapter, while composing the most substantial arguments in my thesis, yet still limited in many regards, attempts to tear away at the veils of the many structures in this world. In that regard, it is a perhaps impossible task, yet one that I still maintain is vital to my argument. If the memory of Tlatelolco exists quite simply as a paradox (or perhaps a number of paradoxes… a Russian doll’s worth, maybe), then it is important to understand how that paradox can be understood in light of the myriad of forces contributing to the role memory plays in upholding the hegemony of corrupt, capitalist life. There is no arguing in the amount of corruption involved with Tlatelolco, nor is there any argument that Mexico does not have a hegemonic structure in place (the nearly ninety-year rule of one single party), whose violence can be seen not only in 1968, or 2014, but even in its very conception as an “institution” in 1929.

To return to the question of Mexico is not just to ask questions about disappearance and return, or oblivion and abundance, but to see how such a now omnipresent narrative of state violence might become the narrative of 1968, and therefore the narrative of the present order through normalization and inheritance. The sheer volume of protests that occur regularly over the Ayotzinapa kidnappings and disappearances of the 43 missing students from Iguala alone prove that there is a large population still not willing to accept such normalization. These are paradoxes, and as such my argument requires a close examination not just of the example of Mexico in 1968 but how how popular history, collective memory, and the entire realm of the socio-political imaginary are constructed. J.S. Sanzgiri 73

There are many things I have chosen not to examine in detail in this thesis, such as the rise of the Zapatistas and the EZLN, or of the other major insur- rectionary moments in Mexico’s history since their major revolution in 1910. This thesis hinges on the examination of co-optation and absorption, such as with the institutionalization of revolution within the “perfect dictatorship” of the PRI. As it is known, absorption and co-optation are at the heart of late capitalist life. That is how capitalism functions, incorporating more and more difference into its logic and scale including anti-capitalist tendencies. It is vital then, I believe, to understand how forces such as collective memory and the social and political imaginary work not only under capitalism, but under a system as in the case of Mexico under a one party rule.

Ultimately, the question is asked, can a society know itself outside of its own present conditions? Is it possible to escape the prison of the collectively organized structure of the imaginary-symbolic-real paradigms? As the conclusion of the second chapter attests, photography is perhaps but one way. Can imagination itself be used to counter prevailing forms of the collective imaginary? 74 Collective Memory

COLLECTIVE MEMORY

Social cohesion at its best, provides members of a community the ability to continue. Continuity, in turn, means that things can stay the way they are; an insurance that no failures, fissures, or cracks will disrupt not the flow of “progress”, but rather maintain the status quo. “Progress” it might be added, is just another formula constructed within the realm of collective memory. One of the primary ways continuity and cohesion are preserved is through the past. Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of the field of sociology, initially explored these concepts through the uses of rites, rituals, and commemoration in the collective consciousness of religious life. His observations led him to conclude that rites “serve and can serve only to sustain the vitality of these beliefs, to keep them from being effaced from memory and, in sum, to revivify the most essential elements of the collective consciousness.”100 This revivification of the serving and sustaining beliefs aids the cohesion of society.

Durkheim laments how ritual has disappeared in modern life and the resulting losses give way to “transition and moral mediocrity” in his words.101 Per- haps bearing in mind Gramsci’s notion of the interregnum, Durkheim states, “In a word, the old gods are growing old or already dead, and others are not yet born.”102 Modernity was not only a process of disenchantment, but a lack of inevitable “creative effervescence,” in his words, which would serve as a “guide for all humanity”.103 While Durkheim’s work, along with Max Weber and Karl Marx, were vital to understanding the question of “what is a society?” they were just as important in understanding society as a construction. Durkheim in particular with his thoughts on collective consciousness, a term first introduced by Durkheim and stands in relationship to Marx’s “class consciousness”, states: “The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness.”104 Belief is but one way collectivity can be understood.

Another such example, one which was posed toward much debate as soon as it was written, was introduced by Durkheim’s protégé, Maurice Halbwachs, who was also an early student of the great philosopher of time, Henri Bergson. Halbwachs effectively combined both Durkheim and Bergson’s theories into a

100. Durkheim, Émile. “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.” The Collective Memory Reader. By Jeffrey K. Olick,Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 136-38. 101. ibid 102. In Quaderni del carcere; here quoted after Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 276. 103 - 104. Durkheim, Émile. “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.” The Collective Memory Reader. By Jeffrey K. Olick,Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 136-38. J.S. Sanzgiri 75

“collective memory”. Halbwachs’s theories were concerned with how societies remembered and how the past was constructed and re-constructed, once again, in order to achieve a fraternity of sort to produce social cohesion. Thus, due to Durkheim’s influence, one could understand Halbwachs’s work as examining the way the present is perpetuated based on the past, not by its past as such, but by the inheritance and propagation of a social and cultural collective memory - memory shared by a given community. Halbwachs speaks of how our memory is embedded within the memory of a whole. In his words, “While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember. [...] The succession of our re- membrances, of even our most personal ones, is always explained by changes oc- curring in our relationships to various collective milieus—in short, by the transformations these milieus undergo separately and as a whole.”105 This “individual as group” formation draws its influence of course from Durkheim.

Yet, only a few lines further in his extended essay The Collective Memory, Halbwachs explores a very important distinction in his work - the difference between memory and history. As he states: “Collective memory differs from history in at least two respects. It is a current of continuous thought whose continuity is not at all artificial, for it retains from the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of the groups keeping the memory alive. By definition it does not exceed the boundaries of this group.”106 And here he differs from Durkheim, as Durkheim claims a lack of interest to be the primary loss of ritual: “When a given period ceases to interest the subsequent period, the same group has not forgotten a part of its past, because, in reality, there are two successive groups, one following the other. History divides the sequence of centuries into periods, just as the content of a tragedy is divided into several acts.”107 For Halb- wachs, then, history is mere artificial construction, dissected into epochs, periods, even days, when specific empirical shifts can definitively said to have taken place. This is not the case with memory, especially of the collective sort. As Halbwachs beautifully illustrates once more, “...the men composing the same group in two successive periods are like two tree stumps that touch at their extremities but do not form one plant because they are not otherwise connected.”100 The past is never fully gone, as Halbwachs explains, nor is it still fully present. It no longer exists, but has been absorbed into the memory of the present, yet only “extends as far as the memory of the groups composing it.”108

In an earlier text from 1924 titled “The Social Frameworks of Memory” Halbwach states quite clearly, “... it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories.”109 Thus, it is society first and foremost that the production of memory occurs, and therefore memory is constrained to its societal limits. But once more,

105. Halbwachs, Maurice. “The Collective Memory” The Collective Memory Reader. By Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 139-50. 106 - 108. ibid. 109. Halbwachs, Maurice, and Lewis A. Coser. “The Social Frameworks of Memory.” On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago, n.d. 37-40. 76 The Imaginary

what is to be made of the past as it exists within the collective, what happens when it is brought forth either in my mind or another’s? Halbwachs concludes his early work with these thoughts,

... in reality the past does not recur as such, that everything seems to indi- cate that the past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present. It is necessary to show, besides, that the collective frameworks of memory are not constructed after the fact by combinations of individual recollections; nor are they empty forms where recollections coming from elsewhere would insert themselves. Collective frameworks are, to the contrary, precisely the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society.110

Here we come upon a vital statement bearing another similarity to Gramsci’s formation of hegemony where “civil society” extends itself by manufacturing consent, not through coercive force.111 Therefore, collective memory is bound by the instruments (frameworks) that are in accord, and only in accord, with the predominant thoughts of a society. Halbwachs’s usage of the term “predominant” carries double weight, as it refers to quite obviously the prevailing and over- arching consensus of a society. Yet, viewed in a different context, Halbwachs’s statement could be read as pre-dominant, that is to say, collective memory is reconstructed before dominance. It is then that added layers and structures of oppression and control are added on top of what already exists to finally reconstruct the past in accord with the present.

110. ibid. 111. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 276. J.S. Sanzgiri 77

THE IMAGINARY

In an essay from 1882 titled“What Is A Nation?”, Ernst Renan, the French philosopher and political writer, begins the preliminary work for the founda- tion of what would become Benedict Anderson’s opus Imagined Communities.112 Much like Émile Durkheim, Renan takes to his concern the heart of what unites a people as a nation. His conclusion is that it is the act of sharing, of having in common, is what binds a community into belief. It is the fraternity of a past experience, no matter if one has forgotten or remembered that past, that gives the criterion for the rule of a nation in the wake of the dissolution of feudalism. As he states:

More valuable by far than common customs posts and frontiers conforming to strategic ideas is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage and regrets, and of having, in the future, [a shared] programme to put into effect, or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped together [...] and, indeed, suffering in common unifies more than joy does. Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort. A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.113

A solidarity through grief, in both tragedy and glory, is a case in point for this thesis. Much like the events of September 11th, 2001 in the United States, grief and tragedy swept a nation into a fever of patriotism that was to be amped up, utilized, and literally weaponized. Such an analysis lends itself most obviously to that particular example in the United States, although many other examples can be cited throughout the entire history of the US - that is precisely the point. Trauma and collective memory sustain nations over time. Just how many members of a nation need to participate in this “large-scale solidarity” is of question. The events of 9/11 and Tlatelolco should not be necessarily compared side by side, or even at all, but as this thesis is concerned with the case of Tlatelolco, the magnitude with which each event has been commemorated and memorialized to preserve a collective sense of the past, still remains.

It is not without note that against the onslaught of state repression against a progressive student demonstration in Mexico City stood the backdrop of the Olympics - perhaps the penultimate example of the “imagined community” that Benedict Anderson theorizes.114 Nationalism is by no means limited to the “alt-

112. Renan, Ernst. “What Is A Nation?” The Collective Memory Reader. By Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 80 - 84. 113 - 114. ibid. 78 The Abstract Institution of Everything

right” or far-right regimes of influence as many would have it now. It is in effect how all nation-states function. According to Anderson, the imagined community, “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”115 Anderson, for his part, utilizes a multiplicity of approaches to his arguments, beginning with (and perhaps most applicable to my thesis) an analysis of a sort of media critique of the advent of print-based capitalism and its resulting scales of global influence in the formation of nationalism. Nationalism would not be possible if not for the printed word, and as such, control over the printing presses in Mexico in 1968 was of vital importance for the PRI.

One of my more favorite passages in Anderson’s work elevates the newspaper to the status of the imaginary binds between global society and its readers: “What is the essential literary convention of the newspaper?” Anderson asks,

If we were to look at a sample front page of, say, The New York Times, we might find there stories about Soviet dissidents, famine in Mali,a gruesome murder, a coup in Iraq, the discovery of a rare fossil in Zim- babwe, and a speech by Mitterrand. Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each other? Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently, without the actors being aware of each other or of what the others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition [...] shows that the linkage between them is imagined.116

A continued reference throughout Anderson’s work is to the “homogenous empty time” that Walter Benjamin theorizes in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, which opened the beginning of my first chapter. The novel and the newspaper both depend upon this very “homogenous, empty time” which Benjamin refutes, and which Anderson more recognizably calls “calendrical time”. Going back to Durkheim’s analysis of rituals, once again, Anderson quotes Hegel as observing that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers. Thus, ritual is one of substitution, and Durkheim’s “creative effervescence” might not be so far off as it might seem. Is the newspaper, then, Durkheim’s “guide for all humanity?” As Anderson writes, “The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.”117

While all of this might be in line with my previous arguments, it has not up until this point gone any further than a historical analysis of the perpetuation of the present order. Perhaps though, another method altogether is necessary. Nationalism is but one product of the imaginary.

115. Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. 116 - 117. ibid. J.S. Sanzgiri 79

THE ABSTRACT INSTITUTION OF EVERYTHING

The Greek Marxist philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis’s volume of writings titled The Imaginary Institution of Society published in 1975 provide alternate insight into just how deep the concept of the imaginary travels.118 First it must be said, as Castoriadis begins his pervasive critique of both orthodox Marxism and capitalism, that all structures of society begin in the abstract. Capitalist economy in particular, is essentially a system of abstract but quantifiable relations which in turn determine the exchange and distribution of values. It can be said that capitalism takes form in the imagination. Classically, revolution was thought to take place at the height of tensions between the struggle over productive forces of labor, given the seemingly infinite reproducibility of incremental developmental forces of production, i.e. labor and technology. This is given that the superstruc- ture of society were not in and of themselves a construction in the overwhelming functioning of the imaginary apparatus. In Castoriadis’s words: “These super- structures are no more than a fabric of social relations, neither more nor less ‘real’, neither more nor less ‘inert’ than the others, and just as ‘conditioned’ by the infrastructures as the infrastructures are by them, if the word ‘conditioned’ can be used to designate the mode of coexistence of the various moments or aspects of social activities.”119 It is Castoriadis’s claim that all thought that ever occurs in society will itself be limited to our understanding of society as it exists. The imaginary is essence is a prison.

Could one boil down Castoriadis’s arguments into the age old Cartesian argument of Descartes with the formation of the mind/body split paradigm?

Without consciousness, there is neither life nor reality [...] In other words, there is a correspondence as well as a difference between what people do or experience and what they think. And what they think is not only the arduous elaboration of what is already there, following breath- less in its tracks. [...] History is just as much a conscious creation as it is an unconscious repetition.”120

To compartmentalize or collapse Castoriadis’s arguments to the Cartesian paradigm would not only be incorrect, but also would be to ignore the entire history that precedes him. Which is precisely why I bring him up now, after Durkheim, Marx, Halbswachs, Renan, and Anderson, not to compare him but to develop a genealogy and lineage in this work, perhaps one he would even immediately disown. Castoriadis’s argument relies heavily on the works of Jacques Lacan for which the structure of language plays a huge role. In the form of the sign-signi-

118. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. 119 - 120. ibid 80 The Abstract Institution of Everything

fier-signified relationship, Castoriadis argues all of society has and always will predominantly exist and perpetuate itself in the realm of the symbolic, to which the imaginary is intricately tied:

“Institutions cannot be reduced to the symbolic but they can exist only in the symbolic; they are impossible outside of a second-order symbolism; for each institutions constitutes a particular symbolic power structure, a religion - all exist socially as sanctioned symbolic systems. These systems consist in relating symbols (signifiers) to signifieds (representations, orders, commands, or inducements to do or not do something, consequences for actions - significations in the loosest sense of the term) and in validating them as such, that is to say in making this relation more or less obligatory for the society or the group concerned.”121

Thus, language becomes the primary method of transference of power between the institution and society, sometimes against its own will. Castoriadis briefly brings up the case of the use of the term “People’s Commissars” replacing the old “Council of Ministers” when the Bolsheviks seized power during the Russian Revolution. Lennin was very unpleased with the use of the old term “Council of Ministers” with its connotations from the bourgeois regimes of the past, thus Trostsky invented the terms “People’s Commissars” and, for the whole government “the Soviet of people’s commissars” to which Lennin thought was truly revolutionary. Yet, to what extent was this new, Castoriadis asks? The eventual separation between the organized masses and the administration only returned to the institutional form previously existing in history. Thus, Castoriadis concludes, “The revolution was creating a new language, and had new things to say; but the leaders wanted to say the same old things with new words.”122 Such conclusions can extend to the PRI as for many other supposed revolutionary regimes.

Picking up on the Martinican intellectual and writer Édouard Glissant’s beautiful and painful reading of the imaginary, the Argentinian writer and theorist of decoloniality, Walter D. Mingnolo positions a “geo-political” read of the imaginary.123 He writes that the history of modernity cannot be thought outside of the history of coloniality - that the two existed side by side in the creation of the trans-atlantic slave trade and are inseparable because of their interdependence. Such, claims yield much potency for the history of colonialism in Mexico as well. This, however, does not stop modern theorists of globalism or post-modernity from eliding or playing down these contentions. “Consequently, the modern world system is only conceived from its own imaginary, and not from the conflic- tive imaginary that rises up with and from colonial difference.”124 Thus the modern globalized imaginary is inherently connected to the colonial imaginary, and cannot be separate from it as such. It is once again, a mere swapping of names. To

121 - 122. Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. 123. Mignolo, Walter D. “Coloniality at Large: The Western Hemisphere in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity.” CR: The New Centennial Review 1.2, Borders / Americas (2001): 19-54. JSTOR. Web. 21 Apr. 2017. J.S. Sanzgiri 81

sum up the perhaps penultimate example of the imaginary (race, and of course gender it might be added) is Édouard Glissant’s introduction to his Poetics of Re- lation which I quote here in its entirety and leave without comment:

“Thinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. It informs the imaginary of peoples, their varied poetics, which it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realized.

Culture is the precaution of those who claim to think thought but who steer clear of its chaotic journey. Evolving cultures infer Relation, the overstepping that grounds their unity- diversity.

Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge becoming. One cannot stop it to assess it nor isolate it to transmit it. It is sharing one can never not retain, nor ever, in standing still, boast about.”124

124. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 2009. 82 Radical Imagination

RADICAL IMAGINATION

Before it appears that this thesis is branching out too far, I want to revisit my original question of how collective memory aids and upholds the status quo. I believe this section has adequately given a perspective on that question. Yet the follow up question remains: if the status quo is upheld collectively, then what does that mean for social change? What does that means for the ability of society to transcend and escape cycles of oppression? If all of society, every institution, and every thought that has ever or will ever be constricted to that society in all of its limitations, is a construction - that it is constructed in the imaginary as I have attempted to illuminate - what is left? What happens when everything becomes an illusion, a process that has been in place for the entirety of civilization?

This brings me to my final reference for this last chapter, Ariella Azoulay’s 2012 book Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. Azoulay effectively calls for an act of solidarity, of sharing, and partnership that comes into the act of imagining a new horizon in which to coexist. Within her first few opening pages she states, “What is at stake is not the simple exercise of imagining something in one’s own mind’s eye, for example. Rather, I am concerned with the capacity known as ‘political imagination,’ that is to say, the ability to imagine a political state of being that deviates significantly from the prevailing state of affairs.”125 She goes on to continue throughout her introduction with references to the be- heading of the monarch Louis XVI in the French Revolution claiming, “...the imaginative ability to sketch out a new reality was bound to the effort to shake off the shackles of a state of perception that accepted the prevailing regime - the monarchy - as an incontestable fact.”126

Photography is central to Azoulay’s premise, as her title suggests. Her analysis of photography’s early histories is in line with much of what I discussed in Chapters One & Two, with an emphasis on the subject/object relationship between the gaze and the author, yet she specifies a key difference - the occurrence of the “special event” that takes place three times - once in front of the camera, once before the camera, and once in front of the photograph. Our present act of viewing is in and of itself an event, in addition to the event captured by the camera, which often times is different than the event taking place. Here we find a key link between my first reference and my last, Steinberg’s formation of the “trace event” of Tlatelolco, his “photopoetics” defined as a “making with light”, and Azoulay’s differentiation between the “photographed event” and the “event of photography”.127 She summarizes her agitation with the usage of a photograph by saying, “... a photograph of us taken without our knowledge might come to affect us with as much potency as if we had encountered the photograph itself.”128

125. Azoulay, Ariella, and Louise Bethlehem. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Pho- tography. London: Verso, 2012. 126 - 128. ibid. J.S. Sanzgiri 83

In effect, Azoulay critiques the idea that a photograph of a person, event, or occurrence does not take place with a sense of agency critiques the idea that a photograph of a person, event, or occurrence does not take place with a sense of agency within the act of being photographed. She argues that the awareness and omnipresence of photography that coincided with the emergency of the “photographic consciousness”, have normalized and conditioned the behaviors of the body to comply with hegemonic systems of power.129 As I discussed with Allan Seukla’s essays on “The Body and the Archive”, to be photographed was to be recorded as a subject of the state. Azoulay effectively reverses this equation on itself, stating that in the case of Palestinian non-citizenry (which remains the central subject of her entire oeuvre) if to be photographed is to be a subject of the state, then photography ostensibly enacts a new type of citizenship.

129. Azoulay, Ariella, and Louise Bethlehem. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Pho- tography. London: Verso, 2012. 84

CONCLUSION J.S. Sanzgiri 85

CONCLUSION

Before this work is over, there are still many questions left unanswered. In a recent conversation with one of my colleagues, they stressed their belief that history always involves a level of abuse in its conception - that there was no history that was not used. I can not argue with that point, as it actually bears similarity to arguments in my third section, and is emphasized in my conclusion. Yet, this is precisely why I chose the example Tlatelolco and Mexico in 1968 as my main reference, for it is there that history is not only used and abused but it was also momentarily eradicated until its resurgence brought the memory and history of this tragedy back by popular demand. History is not merely about power; it is about paradox. It is about contradiction and confusion just as much as deception. More than anything else, it is about the entire social and political paradigm of any given society that collectively decides when and where a memory of history appears. George Orwell once famously wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”130 I think it is still more complex than that.

I began this thesis by stating that it was not my intention to continue to simply charge the PRI with the atrocity of their crime, nor to prove definitively that they in fact co-opted a memory of a massacre they committed, used perhaps for their own purposes. I have, up until now, sought to produce a schema for understanding the various discourses that contribute to my peripheral analysis. But, just to entertain those thoughts, why indeed might the memory of Tlatelolco and Mexico in 1968 appear in such places as Mexico’s National Museum of His- tory, the National General Archives, and the National Cultural University? One might easily spot the similarities in these institutions’ names. Many other colleagues have also suggested I actually give inquiry to these institutions and find a representative to interview to get the “official” account of why such a historical display of 1968 should appear end of the chronological ordering of history in the National History Museum? Upon further investigation, if one looks at a Google Walkthrough of that museum, the exhibit is mysteriously missing. (Fig. 32) This led me to revisit the museum itself months later, only to find the same void that appeared in the Google Walkthrough. Of course not just the display of 1968, but of the entirety of the historical display. The walkthrough is dated to 2013 - the year after the PRI regained power. This is all to say that either the exhibition was either simply not on display at that time, or the decision to put 1968 in the National Museum of History took place during the return of the PRI. One could see the regime of the PRI conceding to popular opinion by the time they took back the office after 2012 after two consecutive losses under an uninterrupted seventy-year rule.

130. Orwell, George, and Erich Fromm. 1984: A Novel. NY, NY: Signet Classics, 2015. 86 Conclusion

It has been well documented that during Echeverría’s apertura reforms that a number of left wing activists imprisoned in the Palacio de Lecumberri were given amnesty if they agreed to join Echeverría’s regime. Thus, the absorption of dissent happens once again, as these protestors entered naively into a corrupt system perhaps thinking they can make a change, or just flat out ran with the literal life-saving opportunity. Another colleague has pointed out that it is entirely possible that the reason the display exists is not to necessarily co-opt, but to sincerely pay tribute to this moment in Mexico’s recent history as a demand quite possibly from one of Echeverría’s assimilated leftists, many of whom still are in office. To find out why and who initiated the commemoration and canonization of Mexico in 1968 folded back into a state-funded museum, is one question. But to provide a wide cast theoretical framework and lens for such as question, is an entirely different one. Such was the aim of this project.

(FIG. 32) Google Walkthrough of the Museo Nacional de Historia where a display of the 1968 student protests previously existed J.S. Sanzgiri 87

LEFT MELANCHOLIA

Before I truly conclude my thesis, I add a few last thoughts to the case. As I just mentioned with the previous inmates whom assimilated into Echeverría’s regime, a memory of 1968 and Tlatelolco are largely held by both the contemporary and old mainstream left wing. Yet for all of its importance as a student led Marxist movement in Latin America (the first ever student-led movement in Mex- ico it should be added) and for all its attempts to create rupture and demand a more open government, the 1968 student movement was a failed revolution. This is not to say that because of the massacre that certain changes did not come at an institutional level, but as a society the revolution never came to pass. To say that it would have occurred without the disturbing level of government repression remains to be seen.

Yet still now, as with the man I met at the site of Tlatelolco bearing DVDs and CDs with the name ‘68 and images of Che Guevara adorning the steps of the monument to the disappeared, there is a large level of nostalgia amongst members of the left in Mexico City as I have observed. This is not to say that they are immobile - as massive demonstrations against government corruption occur at a healthy rate. Who are these people? For many of the youth, the education of Tlatelolco and 1968 starts at an early age. Screenings of the film Rojo Amanecer, one of the first films to come out about the massacre itself (delayed until 1989 for censorship, still) is regularly screened in classrooms, according to another colleague.131 (Fig. 33)

I turn now to a text by Wendy Brown from 1999 (and with it a minor self-indictment on my part at times in this work), that follows a critique of the nostalgia of 1968 (in Mexico and in the world, really). The title of Brown’s essay is “Resisting Left Melancholy,” a term which comes from our friend Walter Benjamin.132 In it, Brown combines Benjamin’s critique of the objectification of Left-wing desire, the commodification of revolutionary potential into fetishized knowledge and yearning, and Freud’s concept of melancholia which describes the process of loss and mourning. It is as if the Left has lost something and is mourning over it, which as Brown writes, can lead to a dangerous self-indulgence. The left suffers “with the sense not only a lost movement but a lost historical moment; not only a lost theoretical and empirical coherence but a lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits.”133 Brown also takes a very important source for her refutation of “left-wing melancholy”, Stuart Hall’s work The Hard Road to Renewal, a dense

131. The film takes place entirely inside of theNonaclo-Tlatleolco housing projects, all without ever showing the massacre of the students, nor of the protestors on the ground. The film becomes a space of pure theatre, leaving the horrors of of the massacre unfulfilled by image - only sound. 132. Brown, Wendy. “Left-Wing Melancholia.” Loss: The Politics of Mourning. By David L. Eng. Berkeley: University of California, 2008. N. 133. ibid. 88 Left Melancholia

work confronting the advent of neo-liberalism during the Thatcher era and the crisis of the left. Hall sees the rise of Thatcher-Reaganism as a symptomatic and not a cause of the failure of the Left’s “anachronistic habits of thought and fears and anxieties about revising those habits”134 referring to the Left’s dismissal and susof cultural and identity politics in this era (one which has tellingly come back to haunt us now). Brown goes on to work around Benjamin’s terminology which signifies in her words, “a certain narcissism with regard to one’s past political sus- picion of cultural and identity politics in this era (one which has tellingly come back to haunt us now). Brown goes on to work around Benjamin’s terminology which signifies in her words, “a certain narcissism with regard to one’s past political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation.”135

If the contemporary Left often clings to the formations and formulations of another epoch, one in which the notion of unified movements, social totalities, and class-based politics appeared to be viable categories of political and theoretical analysis, this means that it literally renders itself a conservative force in history-one that not only misreads the present but installs traditionalism in the very heart of its praxis, in the place where commitment to risk and upheaval belongs.136

While the lessons of the past can teach us many things, it is their romanticization that brings a challenge. Like with many student led Marxist/Socialist/Lenninist movements of the 1960s and ‘70s, the Mexican student movement, like I’ve mentioned, largely failed to coalesce with other movements going on at the time, specifically workers movements. As Elena Poniatowska writes,

The students never really managed to communicate with the workers, they did not share a common language, because for the majority of them, even today, the problem of working class is a problem they have only read about in books; they can feel it, but they do not know it. […] So the student problem did not concern the working class very closely, and it was confined to the closed circle in the halls of higher learning…137

Yet as she continues, she delivers one last important frame of reference, that once again becomes vital for this thesis: “... The lack of politicization, the disinforma- tion published in our blessed press - whose principal task is to deliver blows of amnesia from one day to the next - did not favor the movement of ‘68. The reports on television were always condemnatory. Our country returned to its silence…”138 Perhaps the blows of amnesia occurred in two-fold, the erasure of the massacre of Tlatelolco, and now as it is commemorated across the nation, the amnesia of why the movement did not last.

134. Brown, Wendy. “Left-Wing Melancholia.” Loss: The Politics of Mourning. By David L. Eng. Berkeley: University of California, 2008. N. 135 - 136. ibid. 137. Poniatowska, Elena. “The Student Movement of 1968.” The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics. ByGilbert M. Joseph. Durham, NC: Duke U, 2005. 555-69. 138. ibid. J.S. Sanzgiri 89

(FIG. 33) Screenshot from Rojo Amanecer, dir. Jorge Fons, 1989, Courtesy: Cinematográfica Sol S.A. 90 The Propaganda of History

THE PROPAGANDA OF HISTORY Another title for this work could have simply taken a cue from W.E.B. Du Bois’s chapter “The Propaganda of History” in his essential work Black Recon- struction in America from 1923.139 Du Bois asks what American children are being taught about Reconstruction after the Civil War in school, to which, through a meticulous statistical analysis and a healthy amount of quotes culminated from primary source textbooks, historians, and public speeches, he rather blatantly concludes that history is continually being falsified in order to further a white-su- premacist agenda. At this time, Du Bois was a professor at Atlanta University deep in the Jim Crow south. He understood the need for struggle in scholarship, and refused the cool, collected, and detached “objectivity” of academic life. He also understood the risk of academics in becoming the mere “grammarians” of the present order of power.140

Du Bois brings up a number of cases where reconstruction and the Civil War were being taught as complete failures and the faults of black people; that, “Harriet Beecher Stowe brought on the Civil War,” and, “the chance of getting rid of slavery by peaceful methods was ruined by the Abolitionists,” that “Recon- struction was a disgraceful attempt to subject white people to ignorant Negro rule.”141 It is here that Du Bois concedes (and I quote at length):

War and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds. It is the duty of humanity to heal them. It was therefore soon conceived as neither wise nor patriotic to speak of all the causes of strife and the terrible results to which national differences in the United States had led. […] If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with the accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation. If, on the other hand, we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish. [...] Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mis-

139. Du Bois, W. E. B.”The Propaganda of History.” Black Reconstruction in America; an Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966. 711-23. 140. Wynter, Sylvia. “A Black Studies Manifesto.” Forum N.H.I. Knowledge for the 21st Centu- ry. Knowledge on Trial 1.1 (1994): 3-71. 142. Du Bois, W. E. B.”The Propaganda of History.” Black Reconstruction in America; an Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966. 711-23. 143. ibid. J.S. Sanzgiri 91

takes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?144

I can think no more painful and poetic of a way to summarize the complications of this most difficult subject. By no means do I intend to make a direct connection between the oppressive structures of white supremacy as they function in the American historiographical apparatus and the commemoration and co-optation of Tlatelolco’s legacies, yet Du Bois’s words give no better reading of my arguments. For it is in my belief that history is not doomed to repeat itself lest history and collective memory are left dominated by the powerful, and the devices as such that deliver knowledge to us are left unexamined.

I began by stating the aims of this thesis to provide a the constellatory framework to help understand, from a wide theoretical and historical fabric of perspectives, how history and memory, power and knowledge, the image and its apparatuses, are all intertwined in a reciprocal relationship that uphold the existing relations of understanding time, “progress”, vision, and mediation to authen- ticate, confirm, and uphold the status quo. The case of Tlatelolco stands as my focal point to ground the various arguments and connections I make to because of the “visual diaspora” of material produced after the event(s) of 1968.

For myself, to look where the visual commemorations and disseminations of the narratives surrounding the bloody, horrific, effects of state repression manifest, is to look at how collective memory and popular history can be exploited, co-opted, appropriated and marshaled, perhaps not to overtly serve an ideological function, but rather operate on such subtle and muted ways that appear par- adoxically both honorifically and repressively once again in Alan Sekula’s words.

This thesis has in part sought to explore the illusion that cycles of oppression can not be broken and that social change is seemingly impossible. If images of upheaval, insurrection, and revolution can be expropriated by the state, what does it mean to have those images re-absorbed into the fabric of everyday life? Do images of state-violence beget more violence by normalization? If so, then what would the absence of images attest to?

Towards the end of her preface to La Noche de Tlatelolco, Elena Poniatows- ka states her objective: “This chronicle tries to follow the trajectory of the student movement of 1968, not to redeem its errors, but… because no homage to that great moment in our history is excessive.”145 History, however, is perhaps nothing but excess; it is the surplus of the past as it flows over into the present. And as our present becomes increasingly flattened by its crushing density, understanding the construction of those narrative processes where context is not only produced, but adapted to suit the needs of those in power, becomes a method which a potential alternative can occur.

145. Poniatowska, Elena. Massacre in Mexico. New York: Viking, 1975, pp. 3-4. 92 Bibliography J.S. Sanzgiri 93

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