In 1968 a street and media-savvy democratization movement led by students emerged in Mexico City. The 68 Movement was targeted in a state-sponsored massacre at a massive new housing complex ten days before the city hosted the Olympic Games. Both the complex and the mega event were symbols of the country’s rapid modernization but also decades-long political disenfranchisement and urban redevelopment that rendered citizens “guests” of the government and its allies. In spite of institutional denial, censorship and impunity, the massacre remains a touchstone in contemporary public culture thanks to the public memory work of survivors and narrators among Mexico’s intelligentsia. Hotel Mexico asks: How was urban space—material but also literary and cinematic—harnessed as a recalcitrant archive of 1968 and continues to serve as a framework for de facto modes of justice. The 68 Movement’s imaginary and tactics are interwoven and compared with other efforts, both official and countercultural, to reevaluate or renew Mexico’s post-revolutionary modernity: in architecture, urbanism, literature, visual arts, and film—among them, Mario Pani’s housing complex Nonoalco-Tlatelolco (1958–64), kinetic environments created for the 1968 Olympics, and David Alfaro Siqueiros last major mural, The March of Humanity (1964–71).
In 1961, the Mexican government launched the Programa Nacional Fronterizo (Pronaf) in partnership with the country's economic elites, a precursor to the state's more widely known border industrialization project. Pronaf was ostensibly an urban beautification program targeting nine cities at the Mexico-US border, led by former Ciudad Juárez mayor Antonio Bermúdez and with architecture supervised by Mexico City–based modernist Mario Pani. However, as this article argues, Pronaf sought to better integrate the borderlands to the national market and political structure at a moment of crisis. The state's capitalist modernization plan of import substitution industrialization, which produced the so-called Mexican Miracle in the 1940s, was showing signs of strain. Greater consumption of products made in Mexico, based on a more patriotic identification by citizens at the border, would buttress the “Miracle,” which had initially ignored these very citizens based on metropolitan perceptions of their lack of allegiance to Mexico and affinity for the US. Understanding spectacular architecture to have not only a didactic but an affective function, Pronaf deployed a network of soaring, Jet Age–inspired built environments. These parabolic hyperboloid environments, accompanied by a hyperbolic rhetoric from Bermúdez, sought to convince border residents of the “beauty” and “desirability” of national culture and the fluidity of the national market just as their socioeconomic mobility came under greater government scrutiny. Pronaf piloted an affective infrastructure that desired to channel border residents’ citizenship and consumption toward the reproduction of the political and economic status quo, eventually setting the stage for neoliberal transition.
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