Museo del universo: los juegos olímpicos y el movimiento estudiantil de 1968 by Ariel Rodríguez Kuri

Abstract

Reviewed by: Museo del universo: los juegos olímpicos y el movimiento estudiantil de 1968 by Ariel Rodríguez Kuri Juan Alberto Salazar Rebolledo Museo del universo: los juegos olímpicos y el movimiento estudiantil de 1968. By Ariel Rodríguez Kuri. Mexico City: El Colegio de México-Centro de Estudios Históricos, 2019, p. 457, $17.00. In 2018, in the context of the burgeoning revisionism of the student movement of 1968 in Mexico on its 50th anniversary, the collective Lagartijas tiradas al sol made a video performance called The past never dies, it is not even past. The short movie began with a message aimed at the old 1968 militants: "We have tried to create social movements like yours and we did not succeed. […] We know that until the last participant of 1968 dies, we will not be free. And we are running out of patience. So, if you are not dying… We are going to kill you." Within the same revisionist atmosphere, Museo del universo, by the historian Ariel Rodríguez Kuri – who was not a direct participant of the movement, but only witnessed it as a child – presents an original interpretative reading of the Mexican 1968 by considering together the student movement and the Olympic Games of that year as part of the same process, arguing that "both constituted a revolution in the way of communicate, signify, and say in Mexico" (38). Lagartijas's message intersected with the historiographical revisionism around the Global Sixties field, and specifically on the Mexican 1968. A series of works by scholars like Eric Zolov, Vanni Pettinà, Renata Keller, Camilo Vicente, Jaime Pensado, and Rafael Rojas, among others, have recently illustrated that Mexican authoritarianism in that year contradicts the so-called exceptionalism of Mexico among the Latin American Cold War. Rodríguez Kuri definitely does not kill the last participant of the 1968, as Lagartijas threatened, but he does try to put an end to an idealistic view of the student movement as a break in history. More a "cairn" than the beginning of an era – as many of the former mobilized students have repeated in their writings until now – '68 becomes a sign in the road (412-413). This is Rodríguez Kuri's motivation to ask the question that drives his study: Who cared about what happened in Mexico City in 1968, and who still cares about it? Namely, what conditions inhabit the memories about that event, and where? These questions remain open as proposals for new ventures on the Mexican 1968 historiographical revisionism. Across an introduction, eight chapters, and a conclusion, Rodríguez Kuri presents a social reading of 1960s Mexico City. He offers a diagnosis of the thoughts and feelings of the urban middle classes, and their ups and downs among the political spectrum, configuring the public sphere according to their veering interests (16). Within the first chapter, the historian emphasizes what is political in sports, showing how the assignation of Mexico City as host for the XIX Olympic Games depended on how Mexican diplomacy drew on a "favorable international juncture" (69) related with the Third World politics that would become a Mexican trend in the next decade. This nationalistic focus was on display in the internal [End Page 572] motto among the organizers of the Mexican Olympic Games that were supposed to be "[adapted] to the city" (101), unlike the previous editions in which other countries invested huge quantities of money, as the second chapter shows. An architect, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez stars in the second chapter as the author of Mexican Olympics' identity. Incorporating cultural events along with the sportive ones, he tried to make a "visual, auditive, sensitive, and cognitive representation of the Global 1960s–a museum" (90), confronting to some extent the cultural nationalism established by the post-revolutionary Mexican regime since the 1920s, a "major rupture" (91) with the self-absorption of the previous references in the regime's cultural policies, as Rodríguez Kuri points out. The contestation between conservatism/nationalism and renovation/cosmopolitanism is also the topic of the third chapter, revolving around the intellectual debate on the reconstruction of Mexico's cathedral after a fire destroyed...