Framing Questions: The Role of the Editor in Elena Poniatowska's La noche de Tlatelolco

Abstract

Elena Poniatowska, French-born Mexican journalist and author, is widely recognized for her substantial contributions to the growing body of Latin American testimonial and documentary narrative. Her many published works include short stories, novels, hundreds of interviews, chronicles of contemporary life and book-length nonfiction texts. Characteristic of her writing is the imprint it bears of the dialogue which Poniatowska has actively sought out and sustained with all sectors of Mexican society throughout her more than 30 year career as a journalist. This dialogue with the other is both the point of departure for her investigation and a structuring device which informs the text. As a journalist she has had ample access to the most prominent figures of Mexican culture and politics. Palabras cruzadas (1961), a selection of her interviews done between 1954 and 1961, includes pieces based on conversations with Lazaro Cardenas, Diego Rivera, Alfonso Reyes and Juan Rulfo. In the summer of 1982 she interviewed all seven candidates in the presidential election campaign, and those interviews have been published under the title of Domingo siete (1982). But it is her particular dedication to recouping the silenced voices of the marginalized and oppressed which has defined her position as a writer and her critical stance toward the institutions of political, economic, and cultural authority in Mexico. In works such as Hasta no verte, Jesu's mino (1969), La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), GabyBrimmer (Brimmer and Poniatowska, 1979), Fuerte es el silencio (1980), and Nada, nadie: Las voces del temblor (1988), Poniatowska has opened up public discourse to members of oppressed communities.' Literature of protest and denunciation is not, of course, a new phenomenon. However, Elena Poniatowska has demonstrated courageously a special