Protests of Engagement: Dignity, False Love, and Self-Love in Mexico during 1968

Abstract

A few thousand young Mexicans were standing together in large groups in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco in downtown Mexico City to remember the massacre which had brought the student movement of 1968 to a sudden end ten years before. Many turned their heads upward to the balcony of a residential building that faced the plaza to hear Carlos Monsiváis, a well-known intellectual who had savored the protests, tell them that they “no longer saw the state as a tyrannical and omnipresent father.” Still another ten years later, many of them, and others as well, read the words of Hugo Hiriart, a promising young journalist in 1968, who claimed that the students had “dared to lead in a frontal and uncompromising opposition to the paternal and authoritarian Mexican state.”