Testimonio as Metahistory in González de Alba’s Los días y los años

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Luis Gonzalez de Alba’s Los dias y los anos (1971), written entirely behind the walls of Lecumberri, following the student massacre in Tlatelolco. In it, Gonzalez de Alba narrates his life behind bars. He describes in detail the continuation of the student movement in prison. He also gives an account of the events leading to the student massacre from an insider’s perspective. This work acts as a history of a movement that will be discarded by the dominant discourse. As such, it acts as a preserved history, one that fills the void left by the official PRI discourse and acts as a metahistory of the PRI’s articulation of the nation as it bears witness to the mechanisms that were responsible for the unarticulation of Tlatelolco in the PRI’s construction of nation in the decades following 1968.