ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1968, on the eve of the Olympic Games, Mexico City high school and university students mounted a struggle for dialogue, transparency, and freedom of expression against an authoritarian one-party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—state. For years, analysis of Mexico 1968 has been in the hands of its leaders. They agree that despite the immediate tragedy, the movement detonated a long, uneven, incomplete democratization of Mexican politics, society, and culture—particularly in Mexico City. As scholarship multiplies on Mexico in the long 1960s—on protest movements outside the city, state bread-and-stick policies, struggles within the PRI—the centrality of the Mexico City uprising to the democratization process will be scrutinized. The chapter explores the education of a boy who came from a poor immigrant family, trained and worked as a radio technician, and experienced the sixties ferment as a student at La Esmeralda painting school just prior to 1968.
