by
James Suneil Sanzgiri
B.F.A. Interdisciplinary Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art, 2011 submitted to
The Department of Architecture
in Partial Fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology
at the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology June 2017
The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to dis-tribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created.
© 2017 James S. Sanzgiri. All rights reserved.
SIGNATURE OF AUTHOR
Department of Architecture, May 12, 2017 CERTIFIED BY
Renée Green, Professor of Art, Culture and Technology Thesis Supervisor
ACCEPTED BY
Sheila Kennedy, Professor of Architecture
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
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents
Abstract
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
An Opening, An Apparition
A Minor Encounter
Thesis Question
Methodology
Why Write This Now
CHAPTER ONE
History and Resurrection
The Image in (the) Ruins
The Incarcerated Archive
Postscript on Narration
CHAPTER TWO
Memory and Control
The Apparatus
The Sight Machine
Chiastic Resistance
CHAPTER THREE
Hegemony and Its Paradoxes
Collective Memory
The Imaginary
The Abstract Institution of Everything
Radical Imagination
CONCLUSION
Left Melancholy
The Propaganda of History
BIBLIOGRAPHY
4
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15
16
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20
26
27
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37
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65
68
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4DOMESTICATING THE GHOST:
CONSTELLATIONS OF MEXICO, 1968
O
rganized primarily as an essayistic method of investigation to accom-pany and supplement my thirty-minute short film AT THE TOP OF GRASS-HOPPER’S HILL, this thesis traces minor encounters or discrepant engagements1between myself and and images of the 1968 state-sponsored student massacre in Mexico City. I adopt these engagements, most of which exist as encounters within state-sponsored institutions, to take 1968 and the Tlatelolco Massacre as a point of departure with which to navigate the density of such questions and problems as the production of collective memory, cultural heritage, disappearance, the ar-chive, history and authority, and above all how power and knowledge function within a hegemonic terrain.
Through an analysis of the many manifestations of images surrounding the 1968 student massacre, including Hollywood-esqe adaptations and 16mm documentation of the event by the military themselves, I explore the role rep-resentation plays in political struggles as well as its potential co-optation by the state. Such co-optation I argue, perpetuates cycles of oppression that maintain the status quo; and within Mexico specifically, the nearly ninety-year rule of the PRI party. At its essence, this thesis pries open the inconsistencies of such repre-sentations within Mexico, 1968 and its aftermath.
These questions are sparked by my long term considerations of theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Paul Virilio, and Michel Foucault. I have found my in-vestigations within Mexico indicative of their writings among a range of others that appear in this text. As such, this essayistic exploration stretches and drifts across many different disciplines, geographies, and figures. Thus, I develop a “constellatory framework” to expand an analysis of technologies of reproduction themselves towards their facility to impact national memory through circulation. Thesis Supervisor: Renée Green
Title: Professor of Art, Culture and Technology
1 A term brought to my attention by Renée Green. Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant
En-gagement: Dissonance, Cross-culturality, and Experimental Writing. Cambridge,: Cambridge
University Press, 2009.
by James Suneil Sanzgiri
Submitted to the Department of Architecture on May 12, 2017 in Partial Fulfill-ment of the RequireFulfill-ments for the Degree of Master of Science in Art, Culture and
Technology
6
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I
would like to thank all of those that have made this work possible, most importantly Professor Renée Green whom I’ve worked with in depth over these past two years, and whose work and countless suggestions continue to be im-pactful and inspirational. I would also like to thank the other two members of my committee, Assistant Professor Gloria Sutton and Professor William Uricchio for their time and help. Many thanks as well to Mario Caro for his help with this work in my final semester.I would like to thank all of my mentors at Soma Summer 2016 in Mexico, whom first introduced me to Tlatelolco and the Palacio de Lecumberri.
I would also like to thank all of my peers in the Art, Culture, and Technol-ogy program over these two years with whom I’ve grown, been influenced and challenged by, and gone through a number of major political shifts with - all of which this work would not be possible without.
Most of all, I would like to thank my close friend Maribeth Keane for her inspiration as a community activist and healer, and whose encouragement throughout this process reminds me of the purpose of engaging in such difficult material.
Finally, much love to my family for supporting my decisions and develop-ment as an artist in whatever path it takes.
“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
INTRODUCTION
O
N OCTOBER 2ND, 1968 in Mexico City, an estimated three-hundred students and civilians were massacred by the military and paramilitary forces following months of protest leading up to the first ever Olympic games held in a Spanish speaking nation. The student movement’s demands, including in-creased democratic oversight of the political processes, a dismantling of the one-party state, more transparency in government, and a demilitarization of the country at large, for starters, all followed decades of massively increasing rural and urban poverty, environmental destruction, political corruption, and manip-ulation of workers and peasants. Such results came as a consequence from the failures of postwar modernization that swept the nation.2 On August 1st, riotpolice (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 increasinvad-ingly resistant stu-dent population at the Polytechnic campuses prepared to defend themselves against military occupation. Fifteen students died and forty-five were injured.3
It was with the October 2nd protests, however, that gathered some 10,000 students and civilians in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Fig. 1) of the Tlatelolco archaeological zone in the city. This site in particular suffers a considerable den-sity of time, history and trauma. It is not only the plaza designed by the mod-ernist Mexican architect and urbanist Mario Pani (whose housing projects were built only two years earlier at Tlatelolco) but also the last site of the 1521 Aztec massacre, which by some accounts was a genocide of over 20,000 at the hands of Hernán Cortés.4 Tlatelolco is now an archaeological site housing not only the
ruins of the eponymous Aztec city, but also of the Spanish Catholic church of Santiago de Tlatelolco built using the exact same stones extracted only fifteen years after the defeat of the Aztec empire. Students sought refuge in the halls of the church during the massacre, only to be lined up and executed in the church itself.5
Tlateloloco stands as quite literally an exhumation of trauma, and is it-self indexical to questions of memory and forgetting as the state controlled media of Mexico worked to obliterate visible traces of the ’68 massacre during the Olympics and thereafter. Officials who cleansed the blood and bodies that lay waste on the public square swiftly attempted to scrub the memory of the massacre from the tiles of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas the very next morning.6
10 Introduction
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,
The regime of President Díaz Ordaz issued a report claiming violent pro-testors opened fire on the police, who simply defended themselves in reac-tion.7 Only four were initially reported dead with twenty injured, coming to
a total official acknowledgement by the PRI of only twelve dead.8 Díaz
Or-daz was widely congratulated as having successfully halted the student move-ment to maintain “peace” (with help from the United States governmove-ment), and the memory of the massacre was quickly sanitized, buried and suppressed.9
The familiar narratives of student uprisings, the year 1968, and the eventu-al state repression of Socieventu-alist and Democratic initiatives during the globeventu-al 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 precur-sors, 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 out-lets 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-econom-ic justsocio-econom-ice and its historsocio-econom-ical roots. It is a rsocio-econom-ich 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.
12 Introduction
M
emories 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,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 ex-isting, “... 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.
AN OPENING, AN APPARITION
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 re-gime 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
This process, as Luis Echeverría, the Interior Secretary during the mas-sacre 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
an-other 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 presi-dency, 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 si-lence 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 it-self. 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
Steinberg, positions an analysis of the legacy of 1968 through works of cine-ma, 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.
...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 allow-ing the more obscure elements of this antisystemic demand to con-jure away 1968’s terrifying specter or at least to domesticate its ghost.18
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,
I
first encountered Tlatelolco while living in Mexico City in 2016 con-tinuing research on the Second French Empire’s invasion in Mexico – anoth-er 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 pastlife 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 ev-ery 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 en-countered 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 in-stitutional 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 ques-tions of collective memory and forgetting, disappearance and archive, history and authority, image and intervention, time and repetition, that this thesis begins.
A MINOR ENCOUNTER
18. The history of Emperor Maximilian as a pupet ruler for Luis Napoleon III plays a
sig-nificant 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
T
his 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 ma-terial 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 trag-ic 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 ques-tion the use (and abuse) of history, then, is also to quesques-tion the images that ac-company them. To question the images that acac-company 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 mem-ory’s impact on the boundaries and limits of collective and individual thought.
Such questions bear witness to concerns from many different eras, geog-raphies, 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.
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 na-ture 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 exhausdefini-tive 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 contrib-ute 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,
18 Introduction
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 den-sity 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 collec-tive 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 conclu-sively 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-opta-tion and diffusion of revoluco-opta-tion from other naco-opta-tions. But the fact remains that I did not encounter those moments. I did not spend time immersed in those na-tions, 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 prima-ry lens of inquiprima-ry, although I have interspersed bits of both Lacan and Freud
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 com-mitment 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 strug-gles. 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 con-clusion.
20 Introduction
W
hy write this thesis now, one might ask? The increasing parallels par-ticularly 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.20Authoritarian 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 cen-tre-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-cul-ture 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-WHY WRITE THIS NOW
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
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. pro-tests 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 coun-try 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.
(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 22 Introduction
(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
(FIG. 4) USA Olympic athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith giving the
controversial Black Power salute during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, cour-tesy Library of Congress
26
HISTORY AND RESURRECTION
A
s 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 even-tual defeat following the Second French Empire’s invasion in 1861 and eveneven-tual 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 eco-nomically 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 mem-ory 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 resur-rection. 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
25 - 26.ibid.
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-in-dictment 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
approached the exhibition, only emptiness appeared. No displays, no walls or im-ages, 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 “constel-lation 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 rec-ognize 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 commemo-rate 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.
30 History and Resurrection
30. ibid.
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 move-ments (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 individ-uals: it infests the conventional order of the world in which we live.30
(FIG. 5) Images of the 1968 Student Protests displayed in an exhibition at the Museo Nacional
de Historia
32 History and Resurrection
(FIG. 7) Photographs of the 43 missing students from Iguala displayed on banners for protest
THE IMAGE IN (THE) RUINS
T
o 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 WalterBenja-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 his-tory 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 trau-ma 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 pres-ent form of a past life, not according to the contpres-ents 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.
34 The Image in (the) Ruins
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.
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 frame-work 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 an-other 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
(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
construc-tion 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.
(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.
THE INCARCERATED ARCHIVE*
W
hen 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 pri-marily 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 de-veloping 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-ne-gro-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.
(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 con-ditions 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 inter-views 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, specif-ically 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 po-litical prisoners whose interviews eventually made their way into Ripsteins 2001 film Los Héroes y el Tiempo.
So, we arrive at a point where a man whose record entails two state-spon-sored 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, homo-sexuals with homohomo-sexuals. 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
as-semble. “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.
gathering together,” writes Derrida.42 This gathering together is found nowhere
better than with the huddled bodies in Lecumberri’s overcrowded cells and com-mon 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 con-trolled 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
ar-chive 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 “over-flow” 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 secre-tion 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 star-vation 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.
