Lessie Jo Frazier

Mexico '68: Defining the Space of the Movement, Heroic Masculinity in the Prison, and "Women" in the Streets

who has collaborated will tell you—is in some ways a lot more work than going it alone, but also certainly more rewarding. Partial funding came from the University of Chicago and the University of South Carolina. We thank Mary Kay Vaughan and the two HAHR readers for their extraordinarily provocative comments and suggestions. We benefited from John French’s invitation to present this work at Duke University’s Latin American Labor History seminar in April 2002, where we especially gained from comments by Susan Gauss, Jeffrey Gould, Mark Alan Healy, Daniel James, Jocelyn Olcott, and Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes. We also thank the participants of the other seminars and conferences where we have presented portions of this work: the Five Colleges Mexican Studies Workshop (2002), especially Pamela Voekel, Kristin Pesola, and Velma Garcia; the Seminario Nacional Movimientos Estudiantiles Mexicanos en el Siglo XX (UNAM, Mexico, D.F., 2001), especially Silvia Diaz Escoto; the 2001 LASA meetings, in particular, Ann Blum, Elizabeth Maier, Edward McCaughan, Barry Carr, and Eric Zolov; Eileen Boris, the commentator on our panel at the 2001 Social Science History Association meetings; and the 2002 European Social Science History meetings. We thank Kathryn Litherland for extraordinary editing, Jeanne Barker Nunn for editorial assistance, Jodi Barnes for research assistance, and John Coatsworth, Peter Guardino, and Friedrich Katz for initial and ongoing encouragement. Our initial research in 1989 was facilitated by Sigfrido Reyes, Sara Lovera, Elena Urrutia, and Ilan Semo. While in Mexico (1999), we appreciated support from Gabriela Cano, Graciela Hernandez, Francisco Zapata, and El Colegio de Mexico. Most of all, we thank Mari Carmen Fernandez for over a dozen years of hospitality, friendship, and incisive feedback, as well as all the people with whom we conducted oral histories in Mexico City. Without their willingness to discuss their experiences, we would have no project.

Introduction Love-In, Love-Out: Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in ’68

Nineteen sixty-eight was a pivotal year on a global scale. In cities throughout the globe, young people took over streets. They blockaded buildings, verbally and symbolically attacked state political apparatuses and projects, and challenged conventional imperialist world orderings. Patriarchal states made investments in youthful masculinities, and representations of youthful male martyrs took on symbolic importance that crossed national borders. Some movements embraced an incommensurable politics of desire, and organic relationships sprung up between movements usually thought of as disparate. Above all, the possibilities and limitations for political agency were intrinsically gendered. Yet despite the role of gender and sexuality in political agency in 68, the growing scholarship on the period still underestimates their importance.

Talking Back to’ 68: Gendered Narratives, Participatory Spaces, and Political Cultures

In 2001, we attended a Mexico City conference on twentieth-century student activism, featuring four prominent leaders from the 1968 movement.1 Student movements, they claimed, were central to Mexico’s push toward democracy, a centrality linked to the university as a particular kind of civic space and bringing together those who are—in their words—“informed,” “intelligent,” and trained to make decisions based on “reason”—all traits commonly associated with middle-class masculinity. We listened, struck by how different these men’s narratives were from the stories told to us by women participating in the movement, which we would present later at the same conference.

Afterword Michele Zancarini-Fournel (Translated by Deborah Cohen and Lessie Jo Frazier)

I thank the editors for inviting me to comment. I see this as a transcontinental exchange in the spirit of reciprocal dialogue and knowledge. Lately I have been calling for a sociopolitical history—rather than the French form of cultural history where studies of gender and sexuality are usually situated—to foreground the force of events, engagements, and political ruptures called 68. Explaining this call to unite the two strains requires a brief synopsis of French interpretations of 68 with attention to what can be obscured by apparently similar terms in their uses on both sides of the Atlantic given serious disjunctures between the two continents in ways of thinking about questions of sexualities, race, and class.

Forging Democracy and Locality

The chant from a 1990 human rights demonstration I participated in highlighted a litany of places in Chile where the remains of the victims of the military dictatorship had been recovered: Mulchen, Lonquen, Laja, Pisagua, and Colina. We marched through the streets of the capital, Santiago, proclaiming, “It wasn’t a war, it was a massacre, all were assassinated,” and finally, “They spilled the blood—now they want to erase their guilt. There will be neither pardon nor forgetting in the earth— Pinochet is guilty. Justice and punishment for all of the guilty,” indexing the struggle over whose history of the dictatorship would achieve credibility and which governing regimes would be considered legitimate. Upon the conclusion of its 1973 to 1990 rule, the Chilean military claimed to have won a civil war fought against the forces of global communism, while the human rights movement referred to a long, national history of the repression of the Chilean people. The exhumed bodies became artifacts of this struggle over history as forensic anthropologists traced the stories of torture and execution encoded on the corpses. Each additional mass gravesite mapped out the topography of state terror.