Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda, and the 1968 Olympics

Abstract

Through 1996–1997, I routinely visited Mexico City's Lagunilla market to haggle with a vendor who had a cache of 1968 baubles. Being a grad student, I could afford few trinkets, but eventually I acquired the Lance Wyman–designed embossed treasures of an ashtray and some pins. During that same period, I photographed the 1968 student activists' reimaginings of Wyman's Olympic logos to challenge the ruling regime. These finds and images, however, were quixotically overshadowed by tours that I took with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) School of Architecture grad students. Having a limited architectural vocabulary in either English or Spanish, I learned the great architects and their projects. Over time, I came to recognize their work and their detailing without reading the plaques that adorn buildings in Mexico listing the names of architects (and civil engineers) and hailing their genius. Reading Luis Castañeda's exquisite piece of scholarly writing brought me back to 1968, and his work has further enhanced and complicated my rudimentary knowledge of graphic design, art, architecture, culture, and politics of the long 1968.With an art historian's eye and an architect's attention to detail, Castañeda analyzes how the Mexican state harnessed the intersections of developmentalism and propaganda to construct the people's social, economic, political, and cultural behaviors. In the 1960s, architects and designers took on the roles of spokespeople or proxies for the state in systematic ways to create these “image economies” that citizens, tourists, and scholars continue to enjoy. Through the text, Castañeda studies and articulates the significant national and international roles that architects and designers took when designing exhibitions and pavilions at the world's fair to showcase Mexican culture and modernity. Men such as Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Rafael Mijares, Félix Candela, and Mario Pani, as well as their teachers, students, and protégés, built upon the works of other great architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, Oscar Niemeyer, and Eero Saarinen while collaborating with James Johnson Sweeney, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, to display Olmec heads. These and other Mexican designers number among the greatest modern architects of the twentieth century, and these cultural agents transferred those skills and achievements to the design of such cultural gems as the National Museum of Anthropology, UNAM, the Camino Real, and the Olympic stadiums. Here architects and designers collaborated with the ruling party to create spaces and public art that educated the masses and prescribed what it meant to be Mexican.The celebration of Mexican culture and the cosmic race ultimately led to the design of modern practical spaces such as the metro system and housing units. Castañeda offers an important discussion of change over time in Tlatelolco, suggesting that Nonoalco-Tlatelolco was and remains an urban disaster and that with it Pani built a failed dystopia atop a city that had existed and thrived for centuries. While the newspaper ads that I read beckoned families to live in the modern and clean units there, Castañeda documents an urban design wreckage much like those of Robert Moses. In these spaces, the aesthetics of a modern complex designed for the lower middle class within the ever-growing Mexico City displaced individuals of that same socioeconomic background who already lived and worked in the area. In 1968, this modern marvel that surrounded a colonial church and a few remaining ruins enclosed and trapped its residents and student protesters in violent altercations with the police and military.While building on recent cultural histories of 1968, Castañeda's methodology moves between the best examples of anthropological, sociological, and historical research. He employed interviews with designers and architects, he visited the sites and photographed the works, and he researched the places, designers, and politicians in countless archives. While scholars have focused on the achievements of the architects and their designs, Castañeda also explores the dissenting voices. More significant to the reader, he assembles images of the structures and designs that he carefully analyzes.In accessible and well-written prose, this is a complex and rich text that adds to the body of knowledge by positioning the multiple significances of modern architecture, design, and art within political culture and the state building and glorification of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. The work enhances the historiography of 1968 because Castañeda positions the tension between the places, sites, and architects and designers who as state actors during a series of watershed events in the 1960s far exceeded design competition expectations.