Anachronic 1968: The Stela of Tlatelolco and Critical Pre-Columbianism

Scholars and essayists frame the student movement of 1968 as a watershed moment in Mexican history. Every year on October 2, thousands march through Mexico City's streets to honor the protestors killed at the hands of the government in Tlatelolco Square and connect historic state violence to contemporary injustices. The Stela of Tlatelolco, the modest monument erected in 1993 to commemorate 1968, is a similarly palimpsest design in a palimpsest plaza. Tlatelolco Square layers a pre-Columbian archeological site with a colonial church and a modernist housing development. The Stela takes a pre-Columbian form and superimposes it with student movement graphics and a partial list of the dead. Since its unveiling, a chorus of voices has denounced the Stela as a failure: anachronistic in its monumentality and inadequate in its list of only twenty victims. This paper, in contrast, argues for the importance of the Stela in 1993. In that year, the government impeded the Truth Commission’s access to vital documents and the Plaza remained unmarked. The monument was thus a means of seeking justice for the present. As an alternative to notions of "collective memory," I propose the concept of "afterlives" to describe the contestatory processes through which artists actively mobilize history (1968, 1521) to reshape their own contexts (1993). The Stela also employs a "critical pre-Columbianism," attempting to wrest Mexico's indigenous past from state theatricality. In so doing, it allows us to visualize time as non-linear, looping, and unruly.