68, the movement that triumphed in the future. Time, events and memories in Mexico

Abstract

During the summer of 1968, Mexico experienced a relevant student movement that, having as its center the vindication of civil liberties and the defense of the rule of law, ended tragically on October 2 with the massacre operated by the government of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. This article focuses on the Mexican 68 from three interrelated perspectives: the event itself, its memories and the temporality of the narratives. The first part reviews what happened in the summer of 1968 in Mexico, showing the importance of the event, as well as the repressive state response. In a second moment, the different memories existing between 1969 and 2018 are studied from their emergency contexts in the public space. The objective of the article is to review the student movement and its memories from the different temporal registers, that is, through the prism of time. The main finding is that the present, the past and the future are in continuous movement and, apparently, they pass perpetually from existence to non-existence: if originally 1968 was a lived present, over the years it has become a past capable of being known, and through its successive memories it was brought and read from new political presents. The student movement was militarily defeated on October 2 in Tlatelolco: fifty years later it triumphed symbolically in the future.