3
La Onda
Mexicos' Counterculture and the Student Movement of 1968

Precisely at a moment when the baladista movement appeared to be draining rocanrol of its driving forces, the Beatles arrived and changed everything. As elsewhere in the world, the British invasion of Mexico signaled a definitive shift in the musical direction of rock 'n' roll toward what increasingly became known simply as rock . Musical composition and performance style changed dramatically, as a new level of competition swept across the Atlantic and raised the stakes of teenage tastes. Pushed aside were crooners and twisters alike, replaced with the more irreverent postures of the new rockers. In Mexico, once again the association of English with authenticity became inextricable from the new rock product. The containment of rock 'n' roll via its Spanish-language domestication now entered into crisis as audiences increasingly demanded "the real thing," anxiously emulating the new fashions and gestures of defiance by groups once more introduced by transnational capital. By 1968, as the cultural industries wrestled with the contradictions of containing the images and sounds of the psychedelic revolution, families and government alike discovered that the emergent counterculture had laid the basis for turning patriarchy on its head.

The British Invasion and El Arte De Fusil

If the British invaded North America via the Atlantic, in Mexico they came via the Rio Grande. Starting around late 1964, a new wave of bands literally versed in the emergent rock scene abroad descended on the capital from the northern provinces in search of record contracts and broader audiences. Accustomed to performing for tourists in nightclubs along the border, these bands bowled over Mexico City crowds with their adept English-language renditions of the latest rock sensations. Overnight, Spanish-language re-

fritos became trite, second-rate efforts compared with the "originals" that these new bands performed. In fact, as the novelist and rock musician Federico Arana recalls, these "frontier armies," as he labels them, created an economic crisis for other bands. In order to defend their commercial turf, the older bands found themselves in competition with musicians whose mastery of English was far superior. "In sum," Arana writes, "this was a crisis for us rockers, as we had quite a bit of work to catch up on. All of those middle-class consumers of records from the latest British superstars were dying to hear 'live' hits such as 'Twist and Shout,' 'Girl,' 'I Saw Her Standing There,' etcetera."^[1] With names such as Los Dug Dugs, Los Yaki, Los Belmonts, Los Apson, Tijuana-5, and Javier Batiz and His Famous Finks, these new bands dramatically transformed the cultural scene emanating from the capital.

These exact English-language covers of the original became known as fusiles or el arte de fusil , literally "the art of projection" (from the verb fusilar , "to take aim"). As greater importance was placed on access to the originals, a concept of authenticity explicitly grounded in English-language performance and the imported album, the idea of the refrito was disparaged, and record companies were forced to shift their approach accordingly, though they still resisted breaking free of the formula of Spanish-language covers. On studio recordings, all groups were still pressured by the companies to sing Spanish refritos; this was the only way bands could expect air-play for their songs. But records pressed in Mexico now generally included both English and Spanish translations (as well as credits, something that had been neglected earlier) of the song titles. Moreover, liner notes addressed the significance of what lay inside, as with the 45 rpm single of the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black": "The Rolling Stones hold the trump card among all of the other interpreters of modern music: their authenticity. They're authentic in how they play, sing, dress, speak, behave in public or any other situation; in how they select their repertoire, make their [musical] arrangements, and devote themselves wholly [to what they do], from their image of wanton abandon to the depths of their thinking."^[2] Whereas earlier the lyric content had been less important than the musical rhythm—allowing for the wide success of the refritos, which often took liberties in their translations from the original—now what was said became as important as how it was said.

But in live performances, audiences increasingly demanded a more "authentic" version of the tunes they were hearing, which required singing in English. The novelist and critic José Agustín, in praising the quality of Los Dug Dugs—a band from Durango that built a reputation based on its pre-

cise interpretations of foreign rock, especially the Beatles—wrote that the band's performance of certain difficult songs in fact "exceeded the original versions."^[3] This striving to perfection in English may be explained partially by the fact that while middle-class youth yearned to be a part of the global counterculture, their lived experiences were in fact defined by cultural marginalization. Magazines widely disseminated images, lyrics, and stories about the rock movement abroad, and radio stations began to play selected hits of the new music. Yet unconditional access on demand was out of the question, except perhaps for the upper classes: due to high tariffs, records were still exceedingly costly and difficult to come by. Moreover, the prospect of seeing a well-known artist perform live was virtually nil. Seen from this perspective, the mimicking of foreign rock styles and intonations was not only an attempt to belong to a global movement; it also became an act of defiance against a cultural and political structure that limited and denied access to rock as (world) popular culture.

The route by which Los Dug Dugs came to Mexico City and achieved fame is instructive of this process. Armando Nava, the band's lead guitarist, singer, and flautist, explained how he went to Tijuana with a group he had first formed in high school. On the border they found work playing at cabaret theaters catering to tourists. "We started off playing music in Spanish, but then played in English too," he said. As band leader, he immersed himself in Beatles songs and, despite his lack of English, managed to learn the lyrics. When he felt the group's repertoire was perfected, the band headed for Mexico City in the hopes of striking it big. In the capital they literally became agents for the introduction of music that was defined above all by its scarcity. Describing the market for rock in Mexico City, Nava recalls that it "was virgin in terms of the music we brought with us.... They hadn't heard this music before. For example, we started [our first concert] with the Beatles, 'You've Got to Hide Your Love Away,' and the crowd went nuts. Nobody played those things."^[4] In fact, Los Dug Dugs' introduction of the Beatles' repertoire preceded the arrival of Capitol Records, the Beatles' label, which did not establish a subsidiary in Mexico City until 1965, after the Beatles were already a worldwide sensation.^[5] Up to that point, the Beatles' catalog was distributed locally by Musart, a company not particularly known for its rock selection. As Nava explained, "Music in English became extremely popular in Mexico, but it took forever for what was known [abroad] to arrive.... For example, we already had the albums. We brought them directly from the United States and would learn the music before it even came here. Then when we played it we were the ones who made it popular, even before it was on the radio.... That was an important

factor in why Los Dug Dugs became so well known."^[6] It was precisely this lack of access to rock as a mass cultural phenomenon that reinforced a sense of cultural distancing and hence the urging by fans to "get closer" to the original.^[7]

The problem of access was due above all to the high tariff barriers that discouraged mass distribution. One informant who grew up in Cuernavaca, an hour's drive south of Mexico City and where rock was even less available than it was in the capital, recalled how the limited availability of rock transformed the acquisition of a new album into a communally experienced event: "[Our music came] from people who went to the United States. We were always trying to track down those people who traveled back and forth to tape another record.... Buying [albums] wasn't very widespread. It wasn't very easy. So, [people's collections] were like treasuries.... If someone got a new record it was a question of getting together to listen to it at whichever house had the best record player and comment on it, admire it."^[8] From the industry's perspective, the tariff walls meant that record sales required a lengthier process of reproduction from the original master. As Enrique Partida, who worked with Polydor Records (now Polygram) relates, "Music wasn't really imported [by record companies] then like it is today, with the compact disc. Everything was done in Mexico. The master tape was brought to Mexico, and the record was produced with art on the album cover and everything. Importation [by the companies] was rather limited [because of high tariffs]. So, the process [of producing an album from the master] took between six months and a year ... That is, with the exception of the Beatles [after 19651]."^[9] This process imposed a rationale of economic efficiency that inevitably compromised the integrity of the original album. A song's availability depended on the company's decision to acquire the master (determined by licensing agreements and presumptions of the local market for a particular artist), which in itself could mean up to a year's delay. Moreover, the record companies were quite content to reproduce composite albums or simply 45 rpm singles of an artist's hits—which could be exploited on an individual basis—without regard to the orientation of the original album's presentation.

The record companies understood the demand for rock clearly enough, but their marketing strategy closely followed the trajectory of an earlier musical product. What they failed to grasp was the longing of fans for greater access and the need to "get closer" to the authentic rock commodity. It was not only the song that now mattered but, ultimately, access to its authentic presentation as well.

Thus, album covers and even song titles were often deformed through

translation or simple misspelling, according to the whim or, more generally, ignorance of the local producer. In a period when the album cover itself would become increasingly integral to the concept of the record as art commodity, access to a second-rate version reinforced a sense of cultural marginalization. As Armando Blanco, later founder of Mexico City's first rock-paraphernalia shop, Hip-70, dedicated in particular to the importation of foreign rock, commented, "Many times [the record companies] changed the tracks, or from two records they produced only one, thus wrecking what was traditional and sacred concerning the album cover and the movement itself—above all, the spirit that was under way."^[10] Hence the massification of a rock concept embodied in the images, discussions, and available sounds linked to the rock phenomenon occurring abroad contradicted the limited accessibility of rock as a commodity within the reach of the middle classes. Moreover, the marketing of rock music occurred without regard to an authentic replication of the original rock commodity itself. Rock music's consumption was thus doubly fetishized: first because of the nature of rock as a mass cultural commodity (that is, the masking of production that occurs in the studio); and then because of the inherent distancing of Mexican rock consumers from the original product (a situation that distorted the exchange value of the rock album still further).^[11]

Though the public had only limited access to the actual recordings, the impact of the British invasion was felt nonetheless, especially in the transformation of radio programming. Local bands continued to receive airplay for their covers, now mostly ballads, but other stations dedicated time exclusively to the original, a change of vital significance for a younger generation coming of age. As Jaime Pontones, now an important rock disc jockey in Mexico City, recalls:

I remember listening to Radio Mil, where they played Los Teen Tops, Los Rebeldes del Rock—all of those groups—and one day, I changed the station and came upon Radio Capital ... and I started to hear what was already being played on Radio Mil, only in English! And suddenly, after hearing "Jailhouse Rock" in Spanish, I now heard how it sounded in English. I was totally blown away! And I think that happened to a lot of people of my generation; that is, they passed from Los Teen Tops and whatnot to the first "English Wave" around 1964 or so.^[12]

Being close enough to actually see the Beatles or the Rolling Stones in person—or the countless other groups that heralded the rock revolution—was highly unlikely. Mexican audiences instead would have to remain content with the simulacrum performances of local bands that, by necessity

and default, emerged as the interpreters of a countercultural consciousness exploding around the world.

The Cafes Cantantes

The most important performance spaces for rock were the numerous youth clubs that had mushroomed throughout the capital by 1965. As already noted, these clubs had a dubious image in the public mind-set, where they were connected with rebeldismo, despite their generally innocuous reality. Their existence remained dependent on the benevolence of the authorities. But if in the early 1960s the cafés had served as an alternative space set apart for youth, with the switch to rock performance in English their entire ambiance began to change. For it was here in the cafés that middle-class youth could truly experience the sensation of belonging to a universal rock movement that was denied to them at so many other levels. This sensation was conveyed, above all, in the performance style of the scores of bands that now filled the clubs' rosters. The clubs were still essentially juice bars, but those in attendance began to imagine themselves as part of a more cosmopolitan world.

Compared with Spanish-language rocanrol, whose restrained provincialism came to remind audiences of their Third World entrapment, live performance in English allowed musicians and audiences alike to project themselves onto a fantasy space of a universal rock movement. It allowed them to believe, at least momentarily, that they were indeed with the Doors, Cream, or some other world-famous band. As Manuel Ruiz explained, going to see a group perform at a café cantante was as close as one could be to the real thing: " [You went there] if you wanted to hear good rock, if you wanted to hear an identical copy of the hits in English, but live. Here [in Mexico] you would never dream of seeing the Beatles, the Animals, the Stones—never! But there [in the cafés] you could close your eyes and hear the exact same songs played live, only by bands generally from Tijuana."^[13] Eréndira Rincón, who admits that she was not enamored with rock at that point, nevertheless describes hearing this music performed live:

It was interesting, like it left you anxious to keep hearing more. You wanted to know what they were saying, and how what they were saying meshed with music that was so different from what you were used to hearing. I mean, you heard it [on the radio], but not much. At that time there was a lot of Mexican rocanrol, and everything was pretty homogeneous sounding. There weren't any original ideas, and everything was like a great mass of similar music. The other was different, let's say more stimulating.^[14]

Mexican fusiles could replicate—indeed, exceed , in the words of José Agustín—the original. This was no small feat. It soon became a source of pride among musicians and some promoters, who viewed this as evidence of Mexicans' global integration. As Iván Zatz-Díaz sardonically recalled, "I remember this very solemn announcement on the radio talking about Los Dug Dugs and how they became the first group to be officially accepted as having mastered the sound of the Beatles. That Los Dug Dugs sounded like the Beatles. And that was a 'great moment of pride for Mexicans,' that this little Third World country could have a group that was recognized as sounding just like the pinnacle of what the civilized world had to offer."^[15] For all but the most linguistically inclined, the poorly articulated lyrics were mostly indistinguishable and, at any rate, nonsensical to a Spanish-speaking audience. Still, English lyrics were routinely printed in rock magazines, and this undoubtedly made song content that much more accessible. More importantly, as in the first period of rock 'n" roll in Mexico, English was considered an inextricable part of the feeling produced by rock: shouts of "Hey," "Oh yeah," "Right on," and other cues might be heard in live performances, suggesting not only the popular accessibility of the new argot—like what "Darling" and "Baby" meant to a generation earlier—but also the significance of a fantasy space of vanguard participation. "When you discovered the song in the original it sounded much cooler when they said 'Oh, yeah!' instead of the Spanish, 'Oh, sí!' ... It sounded younger, rebellious, cool," noted one informant.^[16]

By 1965 the atmosphere of the cafés was changing, as a certain level of drugs and alcohol entered the environs and an atmosphere of desmadre edged aside an earlier emphasis on diversión sana (healthy diversion). Johnny Laboriel of Los Rebeldes del Rock describes these changes from the perspective of one who stayed with the style of rocanrol against the forces of the fusil:

It wasn't the public itself that was changing, but the mentality of the people. Alcohol started to be introduced, and people began to get really wild, jumping up to dance on stage, throwing things and creating all sorts of chaos. That's when the government began to realize that [the clubs] were a hazard, that rock 'n' roll had gone from being something healthy to something unhealthy and noxious. People took advantage of [rock] as a pretext for their desmadres and sexual exploits—screwing in the bathroom and that whole scene.^[17]

Laboriel's view that rock was returning to a state of desmadre reflected a sense that, as in the 1950s, an older generation was losing control over the direction of youth. His argument that drugs and sex infiltrated the am-

biance of once-tranquil juice bars was no doubt partially true, though also reflective of his own biases. At any rate, this image of youth run amok was again exploited by the authorities. As Manuel Ruiz, an ardent patron of the clubs, argued:

The president [Díaz Ordaz] didn't like the fact that rock had become the focus for kids ... and they began to make up all sorts of bullshit and lies [about the clubs]. I mean, I went to a lot of cafés cantantes and it was just not true what they began to say about prostitutes going there and that drugs were sold and whatnot.... There was marijuana, but it wasn't yet in style. People barely knew about it, and no one had it. Nor had psychedelics arrived yet.^[18]

In offering an unmonitored social space not only for middle-class youth but for upper-class and, one suspects, to a degree lower-class youth as well, the clubs posed a new threat to adult society. The cafés were distinct, for instance, from the adult-oriented cabarets (which also faced the constraints of a curfew after 1959).^[19] "If you wanted an atmosphere where you could feel free, talk about what you wanted, do what you wanted, dress as you wanted, then you had to go to a place where you could hear rock," explained Ruiz. The noise of the cafés was youths' noise, not the shouts of parents or the admonitions of teachers and work supervisors. As one journalist described it:

The music doesn't stop. Scarcely the last syllable fades away from "I Am a Believer" [sic ] when already the first from "They Coming to Take Me Away" [sic ] jumps out, reiterative, on top of one another with the throat of the singer accelerating from a trot to a gallop. Those present get excited. Some hum softly. Others mark the rhythm with their palms on top of the table or with their heel on the floor, or shake their hips in their seat or, if their enthusiasm really bursts forth, they raise their hands, roll their eyes and shout the consecrated cry, "ye-ye-ye-yeee!"^[20]

The clubs thus served as a kind of transcultural performance space where the styles, gestures, and sounds of the youth culture from abroad were transposed for a Mexican audience, who relished their imagined shared identity with other youth from the First World. In the words of one editorialist, the clubs were "considered hotbeds of new values."^[21]

Since the first clean-up sweeps by Mayor Uruchurtu in 1959, the cafés had always been an open target for arbitrary raids and closures by police. As one author has written, "the formula that reunited youth and live rock music was a direct ticket to incursions, closings, and police abuse."^[22] Scattered throughout the city, the cafés suffered accordingly. Through political

connections and bribes, some were able to operate despite harassment, but in general their existence was always precarious.^[23] Then, in early 1965, the government launched a series of overnight raids on some twenty-five clubs throughout the capital, stating officially that "the only objective is to complete its fight against noise."^[24] To this, however, was added the familiar claim that the clubs "foment 'rebellion without a cause' that leads to a heightened level of juvenile delinquency among us."^[25] In an explicit acknowledgment of how English-language performance had once more become associated with rebellion, the cafés were also condemned for abetting "the loosening of customs by means of the perverted imitation of those negative aspects of foreign language usage which are totally in conflict with the idiosyncrasy of our population."^[26] Not surprisingly, the raids were universally praised by the press, which tended to view all unsupervised, youth-oriented spaces with suspicion. Calling them "centers of perversion and activities by evil-doing groups," one newspaper editorialized: "It is not self-serving moralism to applaud the indefinite closure of these centers, as they are the readiest means for corruption and have enjoyed a certain impunity, sheltering themselves under the falsehood that they served as centers of 'healthy diversion' [diversión sana] for youth. Nothing is more false than that."^[27] Several days later the newspaper continued its diatribe against the cafés, calling them "places where, each afternoon and every night, delinquent youth come together ... in order to make their criminal plans." Calling the raids "an administrative act in the public interest," the article uncritically supported the government's position. "These closings are based on exhaustive investigations, effected by specialized inspectors; they are not arbitrarily dictated, as that would be a grievance against the constitutional guarantee of liberty of commerce and work."^[28] Such editorializing indicated that the discourse of rebeldismo was never entirely discarded and, in fact, served as a convenient pillar of support for government actions. Perhaps it was not mere coincidence that the closures came at a moment when (as in 1958–1959) unauthorized strikes—this time by medical students—confronted the incoming administration of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. In any event, for both youth and the working classes, it was an ominous indication of the limits on expression that the new regime would tolerate.

Countercultural Stirrings

Closing the cafés was a stopgap measure at best, though it did have the immediate effect of limiting live rock to the elite nightclubs. Still, the real

challenge to authority was already fermenting in the home. This challenge was incipient and still principally stylistic, though a few years later, when the right political conditions were met, it would have more profound implications. In short, fashion was becoming politicized, and rock music, in particular, was again becoming a wedge against traditional social values and a vehicle for free expression. While foreign rock provided the crucial reference points for this rebellion, local rockers successfully transcribed this music for a native audience, in turn grafting a hybrid sound and image that directly served the needs of the middle classes. "Rock," explains Manuel Ruiz, "was a tool." And Mexican rock was a handmade instrument: "It wasn't just some copy, but I'm telling you it sensitized us. All of that [foreign influence] was transferred to your national reality, and it made you rebel against whatever got to you. Like it got to you that you couldn't dress as you wanted, and you felt better because that's how you saw other people looking, like in the photographs of your idols."^[29] In fact, the changing image of rock—the shaggy hair, psychedelia, and irreverent and aggressive posture of many of the new bands—had already become a rising concern for parents who feared the influence of foreign mass culture on their children. In an editorial entitled "Rights of Adolescence" parents were warned about the "idols of the 'New Wave,' " epitomized by the Beatles (appearing in an accompanying photograph with their patented weird expressions). "Your children will venerate these new groups, for which we cannot find the appropriate adjective," the editorial stated. Though the writer did add that "not everything about them must be censured and, when you do it, be constructive."^[30] Shortly thereafter the cover of Jueves de Excélsior featured a caricature of a Mexican rock group, varying in skin tone from dark to light. Unstyled, matted hair, faces and bodies grossly twisted, the appearance of one even suggested that of a transvestite. The text succinctly explained: "The 'Mexican Beatles.'"^[31] Once again, the emasculization of rock performers became a response to the threat of cultural subversion. "We live in an age of clay gods, of false values that arise from styles and whims," expressed another writer. "It is necessary to educate [youth] in spiritual, moral, and intellectual matters before it is too late."^[32]

This new round of criticism underscored the difficulties that the cultural industries would have in promoting the new rock sound. On one hand, there was a need to accommodate the rapidly changing styles of youth. The market was changing, and so too must the companies in order to keep pace. On the other hand, however, encouraging bands to pursue an image of anguished rebellion was an invitation for censorship from parents' associa-

tions and perhaps even the government. By late 1965 various television programs—including Hulaballoo [sic ], Yeah yeah , and Discoteque a gogo —were geared to lip-synched rock performance (some were even reportedly using English-language lyrics) that "rous[ed] the live studio audiences to a screaming, jerking fury."^[33] To be safe, however, record producers insisted on continued control over record content, despite the activities of bands in live performance. With Los Yaki, for example, whose lead singer raved and swaggered on stage like Mick Jagger, Mexican bands were able to project a more aggressive posture in accordance with the changing times. As the liner notes from one of the group's albums read, "As soon as 'Los Yaki' enter the recording studio the atmosphere is transformed; Benny [the lead singer] begins the disorder, followed by [the rest of the band]. A drum-beat mixed with a joke [from the band] and a few guitar chords are sufficient to electrify the atmosphere, contaminating producers and recording technicians present in the studios. This same phenomenon is found everywhere they play, which is exactly the reason why 'the aggressive sound of Los Yaki' is so popular."^[34] Others, however, kept to a clean-cut image to avoid police harassment and safeguard their careers. "Wherever we found ourselves," a member of the Los Desenfrenados (The Wanton Ones) said, "the authorities intervened and, on various occasions, even wanted to book us, thinking that we were 'rebels without a cause' and not artists."^[35] While rebellion sold records, the mass media nevertheless sought to promote an image of rock as anything but disreputable.

Once more, a discourse of contained rebellion that stressed the diversión sana of rock returned. For example, in an article on the band, Los Sparks, they were quoted as saying: "We are not REBELS , but just want to enjoy ourselves without harming anyone." Referring to the group as one whose music was "distinctive, aggressive, and with great impact," the article also noted it was the first rock band to play at the Veranda Bar in the "elegant Hotel María Isabel," in the capital district.^[36] In a review of another band, Los Apson, a writer called the group "five kids full of enthusiasm, anxious for glory, and already with a hefty bank account that allows for the meeting of certain whims, though always for the benefit of the group."^[37] More-over, in an effort to contain any doubt that Los Apson were malinchistas (cultural traitors), the writer added, "The culture of the North seeps from their pores, and although they're a little bit influenced by North American customs, they are more Mexican than pulque."^[38] Finally, looking to counter an image of rock as increasingly disorderly and irreverent, an article on the famed Los Locos del Ritmo emphasized that "they are not crazy [but] just

five dynamic, happy, and enthusiastic students in a dignified, clean, and honest career." Asked what his greatest ambition in life was, the lead performer, Rafael Acosta, replied: "To become a man in every respect."^[39]

All the same, the politics of hair and the subversive influence of an emergent hippie movement abroad was becoming a central issue in Mexican society. At first the Mexican press treated the hippies as a strange yet fathomable "problem" facing industrialized nations alone. A June 1965 cover drawing for the magazine Jueves de Excélsior , for example, showed a longhaired couple walking a sheepdog; wearing sandals and smoking a pipe, the man has an expression of starry-eyed thoughtfulness, while the woman looks dazed, perhaps drugged. The context of the scene is identified by the text: "New York 1965." In a subtle play of language, however, the text continues: " 'Existentialism' is no joke" (El 'existencialismo' no es una tomadura de pelo).^[40] Using the equivalent expression for "pulling one's leg"—"tomando el pelo"—the text suggests that the fad of existentialism had traveled beyond the philosophers, instilling in youth their critical ideas of identity and existence. Indeed, the influence of such philosophers and novelists was apparent among a growing sector of university youth. As José Agustín writes, "In reality these youth were a hybrid of existentialists and beatniks, but in Mexico they became known as 'existentialists! I imagine that's why they called the cafés by the same name, as well as any 'strange-looking' young person."^[41]

While the setting was New York City and not Mexico City, already there were small groups of youth, mostly politically conscious students from the middle classes, who had openly begun to defy societal norms of fashion as a vehicle for self-expression and criticism. As Eréndira Rincón recalls about this period:

I began to dress as I wanted to. For example, we used to go to school in huaraches, which was considered extraordinary.... On the buses people looked at you strangely, and they'd say things to you, aggressive things under their breath. But that only made you feel like you had an identity.... It allowed you to identify yourself with a culture that you considered more authentic, not a copy of something else ... Because people in the countryside still use huaraches. So it was like wearing your credo and going against the majority of people in the city, who were imitating the gringos.^[42]

But imitating the gringos was itself becoming an issue of concern for adults, as the proliferation of commodities and images from the counterculture abroad steadily redefined the reference points for being "cool" versus "square" in youth's search for new identities and self-expression.

For boys, being cool meant breaking free of the mold of the societal father, whose values were inscribed not only in his manicured appearance but also in his proper language and the music he listened to: "You had to dress 'like this' and have your hair 'like this' because if not, you were going to look like a bureaucrat, a manager, anything but a young person. You would look like a señor. In fact, it was pretty common back then if you saw someone who wore short hair, conventional clothing, and listened to baladas románticas to say, 'Oh man, that guy looks like a señor.'"^[43] The disheveled look of the new rock bands introduced a fashion rage for long hair on boys that, despite its relative tameness in 1965–1966, rapidly became a litmus test for familial confrontations. As Manuel Ruiz continues:

When I was twelve or thirteen years old, every week my father went to the barber, and so every week he took me along with him for a haircut too. But I started to rebel. Around 1965 I saw photos of the Rolling Stones, and I looked in the mirror and said, "No way." The hair on the Stones at that time wasn't even that long, really, but compared with mine it was like I had a crewcut.... So I said to my dad, "Dad, I don't want to get my hair cut like that," and my dad said, "It doesn't matter if you like it or not, because you're going to get it cut." And that happened in most middle- and lower middle-class homes.

For many middle-class girls, the need to be free by defying traditional stereotypes of what it meant to be a lady were equally pressing: "You would feel really down if, for example, someone compared you with 'your cousin Lupita,' like by saying, 'Wow, you and your cousin Lupita are so alike.' That was horrible, because you had to be you, and nobody else.... That was the idea of individualism: being original, rejecting what was expected."^[44] When another article on the transformation of the posadas appeared in late 1966, the issue had gone beyond mere irreverence for tradition, as suggested by the headline "Posadas a go go."^[45] Now the line that had formally divided the sexes was itself dissolving. At the root of this threatening transformation was rock music: "Boys and girls are barely distinguished by their dress, since both wear pants and long hair, amusing themselves by making grotesque contortions to a background 'noise' of drums, electric guitars and bass, which they call music." In an interesting detail, the author noted that couples did not follow one another's steps or a male lead, as in the past. Rather, "[e]ach one jumps and moves in his own way until exhausted."^[46] Thus even the fundamental structure of dance was disappearing, in which girls no longer had to wait for a boy's invitation and individualism prevailed over partnership.

Figure 6.
"Which One Is the Woman? Which One Is the Man?"
Source: Jueves de Excélsior , 22 September 1966. Used
by permission.

The Arrival of the Hippies

By mid-1967 an additional factor was causing alarm among adults: the steady influx of young foreigners who identified themselves as hippies. This was reflected, for example, in a 1966 cover of Jueves de Excélsior that depicted a young couple as foreign tourists at the beach (see Figure 6). The man is decked out in green tights, a flowered shirt, and sandals. The woman is wearing red tights and a striped shirt. Their gender is discerned only by our privileged frontal view: breasts are the immediate sign of difference be-

tween them. From behind, however, the opposite would seem to be true; his hair is long, while hers is short. Leaning on the wall facing their backs are two older men, with mustaches and hats (though not sombreros). The accompanying text reveals their dialogue: "Which is the woman? Which is the man?" Gender confusion is further highlighted by the couple's exaggerated hand and body motions; both are also shown smoking.^[47] If the drawing suggested a trivializing of countercultural fashion, the issue was becoming anything but so for Mexican society.

Mexico had in fact long been a country of attraction for bohemian travelers, dating back to the postrevolutionary fervor of the 1920s and providing new appeal for beatniks in the 1950s.^[48] In 1955 a New York banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson, along with his wife, Valentina, and a photographer, Alan Richardson, visited the Mazatec Indian village of Huautla de Jiménez in the highlands of Oaxaca. Under the guidance of a local shaman, Wasson and the others encountered the powerfully hallucinogenic mushrooms known locally as los niños santos or teonancatl .^[49] Whereas for the Mazatec the mushroom's power was highly respected and sought only under conditions of infection—physical or spiritual illness—and guided by a curandero (medicine man), beginning with Wasson outsiders began to seek out this powerful natural drug for purely experiential reasons. As María Sabina, the renowned curandera who gained fame as a result of Huautla's sudden exposure, related, "Wasson and his friends were the first foreigners who came to our village in search of the niños santos ... [but] they didn't take them because they suffered from some bad element. Their reason was that they came to find God. Before Wasson, nobody took los niños simply to find God. They were always taken to cure the sick."^[50] Spores from the fungus, newly identified by Wasson as Psilocybe mexicana , were brought to Paris, where they were artificially cultivated. Then in 1958 the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman created a synthetic of the active hallucinogenic ingredient contained in the mushroom, naming it psilocybin. The future basis for LSD had been discovered.^[51] Huautla de Jiménez was placed on the psychedelic road map and forever changed.

The first youth from the United States filtered into Huautla as early as 1962, but their numbers increased and their origins diversified after 1964.^[52] By the summer of 1967 more than seventy were living there, mostly from the United States but also from Canada and parts of Western Europe. Some had been directly influenced by the article Wasson wrote for Life Magazine . They came in search of an indigenous experience, despite the fact that they did not generally speak Spanish, much less the indigenous Mazateco lan-

guage spoken by most of the local people. They rented cabins in the surrounding villages for weeks and even months at a time, living meagerly, at times reduced to bartering for food, and always in pursuit of the mushrooms. "Never, as far as I can remember, were the niños santos eaten with such lack of respect,"^[53] recalled María Sabina in describing the abuse of ritualistic mushroom consumption. She continued: "It made no difference to them [the hippies] if they chewed on them in the shade of the coffee trees, on top of a boulder, or on a mountain trail."^[54] Living frugally, the hippies contributed little to the local economy; once they discovered how to find the mushrooms themselves, even local vendors lost out.^[55] This was not the class of tourists the government aimed to attract with the approaching Olympics, though, ironically, the romanticized folkloric image used in tourist advertising and cultural promotion had fashioned an appealing image of an exotic, "lost" Mexico waiting for rediscovery.^[56] As one writer noted, "At the same time that Mexico increases its importance and attractiveness as a center for tourism, it suffers along with the majority of other great cities of the world from the invasion of undesirable visitors, of foreigners who abuse the traditional hospitality of our country and the tolerance of our laws."^[57] Huautla, especially, had become a "magnet for 'tourists' " who "in reality are disoriented, eccentric, ridiculously dressed, shaggy-haired, bearded, malodorous youth, who aren't interested in the natural beauty of the Sierra Mazateca, nor are they really students, attracted in the interest of scientific investigation, as they claim."^[58] A few Mexicans also showed up during this period, mostly it appears, from the upper classes. Alfredo Díaz Ordaz, son of the president, was reportedly one of them.^[59] By 1969 scores of Mexican youth would also be found amid the hippie population.

If from the locals' viewpoint the hippies contributed little to the economy and showed utter disrespect for indigenous beliefs, from the hippies' perspective their indigenous experience was transformative. Through their selective appropriation of different aspects of local culture—food, dress, rituals—the hippies literally reinvented themselves by repudiating, at least ideologically, the capitalist culture of their native metropolises. "All forms of modernist art and thought," Marshall Berman tells us, "have a dual character: they are at once expressions of and protests against the process of modernization."^[60] On one hand, we must locate our understanding of the hippies in this light, for the flight away from modern capitalist culture would ultimately, inevitably lead these individuals back to that same modern culture, only on different terms. On the other hand, travels by the hippies also occurred in the historical context of a profound shift toward a

postmodern consciousness. This involved rejection of the "codifications of modernism ... based on a teleological view of progress and modernization."^[61] The hippies reflected a radical critique of everyday life that drew on new aesthetic strategies and techniques to explore the "contradictions and contingencies [of the modern world], its tensions and internal resistances to its own 'forward movement.'"^[62] The entire modern notion of bounded wholes and delineated identities was thus directly challenged by the hippies, in a process that involved the techniques of reappropriation and cultural fusion. In their superficial emulation of native dress and ritual, the hippies became a living bricollage of cultural meanings, incorporating styles and philosophies of native peoples in ways that ultimately served to enhance their own modern selves.

Describing the central market of Huautla as resembling "Greenwich Village of New York or Piccadilly Circus of London," one writer expressed his bafflement at the seeming contradictions in hippie fashion: "The strangest part about their ostentatious colors and designs is that they've added the shirt and trousers made of coarse cloth used by the aborigines. The girls, in general, wear 'shorts,' miniskirts, or pants in the plaza but, according to what we've been told, there hasn't passed a day that some don't show up practically in their underwear."^[63] Appearing in the early fall of 1967 on the front page of the widely-read newspaper Excélsior , the article catalyzed government action. Less than two weeks later the Department of Interior Affairs forcibly ejected thirty-six hongadictos (mushroom addicts) from the Huautla area. "All of these pernicious foreigners were 'hippies,' dirty and long-haired, some of whom appeared nearly insane because of drug abuse.^[64]

The hippies, however, did not disappear readily, and by the spring of 1968 renewed reports of long-haired, unkempt, drug-taking youth appearing not only in Huautla but Acapulco and Mexico City as well led to cries of a veritable invasion.^[65] Mexico's largely conservative press reacted strongly to the negative influence of "so-called 'hippies' " which one writer summed-up as, "unkempt, unproductive, shaggy, [and] queerly dressed." He continued, "[W]ith those outrageous displays, [their] indolence, slovenliness, overgrown beards, and absurd garments, they pretend to live peacefully, being exotic to conceal their vagrancy and rebellion against work [and] wholesome values."^[66] In the streets of the nation's capital the rising tide of foreign hippies was causing a special sensation. "The 'hippies' are multiplying, " exclaimed the text under a photograph of a psychedelia-donned couple in Mexico City: "We find them in the streets, the main avenues, the Alameda [a downtown park], the 'zona rosa.'"^[67]

The Zona Rosa was a multiblock shopping and café district frequented especially by tourists and the upper class. Reportedly baptized the "Pink Zone" by the iconoclast artist José Luis Cuevas, the district prided itself on its cosmopolitan atmosphere, and local businesses actively cultivated an aura of the avant-garde. Drawing on Marshall Berman's description of the Nevsky Prospect of nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg, the Zona Rosa also became "a kind of free zone in which social and psychic forces could spontaneously unfold," presenting the denizens of Mexico City with "a prospect of all the dazzling promises of the modern world."^[68] Here tourists and Mexicans with spending money could shop for imported fashions and records, experience the sounds of native rock bands, attend gallery openings featuring performance "happenings," converse at the numerous outdoor cafés, and purchase authentic "folk art" by indigenous street vendors. In June 1967 Cuevas used the Zona Rosa to unveil his "ephemeral mural," which he meant as an implicit critique not only of the muralist movement itself (whose longevity Cuevas openly rebuked) but also of the monopolization of wall space used by the PRI for political propaganda.^[69]

The Zona Rosa soon gained a reputation for its countercultural air as well as for being a haven for long-haired, drug-smoking, foreign hippies whose "example is pernicious,"^[70] as one editorialist admonished. Beginning in February 1968 the judiciales (federal Judicial Police), notorious for their brutality and corruption, began a "campaign to clean up the [capital] city of dangerous 'hippies,' marijuana smokers, drug traffickers, and LSD addicts." Foreigners caught by police in what Jueves de Excélsior viewed as "laudable raid[s]," mostly carried out in the Zona Rosa, were transported to the airport, "where they are placed on the first available flight so that they can live a life of indifference and vice in some other place."^[71] Mean-while, efforts to contain the influx at the source led to "precise instructions" given to border officials and airport immigration agents not to allow into the country "dirty, long-haired North American youth."^[72]

The "pernicious example" that hippies set for Mexican youth was an even more serious problem. It was bad enough that "the fads and music of the hippies [are] exported," as one editorialist commented with obvious reference to the burgeoning rock movement, "but [now] also hippies of flesh and blood" were flooding the country.^[73] In fact, while foreign hippies were living representatives of the countercultural avant-garde, their stylistic emulation of indigenous cultures introduced an image of modernity that reflected a composite of "modern" and "folkloric" traditions. As middle-class Mexican youth copied this image of the avant-garde as it emerged abroad, they unwittingly reabsorbed elements drawn from their own cul-

tural traditions. One might see this process as an ethnically complex double mirror: mestizo youth began to copy Anglo hippies who were copying indigenous Mexicans. By traversing the Mexican countryside and making a fashion statement out of using huaraches, long hair, indigenous dress, and hand-crafted jewelry, the hippies were inadvertently revalorizing Mexico's indigenous population in the eyes of urban middle-class youth. As one editorialist astutely noted, "If one argues that long hair has become a 'national' issue, there's already the locks of [Aztec chiefs] Cuauhtémoc and Cuitláhuac to persuade [youth] to let their own grow."^[74] Yet when the leftist cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis first took note of this "Mexicanization of the hippies," as he put it in early 1968, he harshly criticized them as imitative and inauthentic: "Of what great [material] abundance can the Mexican hippies [claim to] deny? Against which high technology do they protest in the name of love?"^[75] Lost in this critique was an understanding that a revalorization of indigenous culture had opened up an important psychic space for dissent. This opening offered Mexican youth a vehicle that was both modern and culturally relevant. It allowed youth to invent new ways of being Mexican, ways that ran counter to the dominant ideology of state-sponsored nationalism.

Mexico's Rising Counterculture

By early 1968 the fashion of social protest among a growing population of youth from the middle classes had become a matter of public debate and concern. The fact that the outward manifestation of this protest was located in fashion and a new jargon—rather than traditional street protests, as activists and intellectuals on the left would have preferred—made such youth an easy target for criticism. One author, for instance, offered a critique of the cafés cantantes—where "the strident music stuns, the prolonged enclosure bloats, the stunned state deviates, the bloatedness debilitates"—while urging: "It is not for robust youth to enter into a cave but to come out into the open air, to march into the sun."^[76] The view that rock culture not only distracted political energies but also reinforced subservience to foreign values became more pronounced as Mexico's rock movement spread. In an article entitled "The New Generation," Carlos Monsiváis denounced what he considered "an imported generation that is more or less measured by the speed at which it reproduces fashions." He continued: "[I]t is a Derived Generation, which shouldn't surprise us given the semi-colonial conditions of the country. It doesn't possess its own idols or engender its own autonomous lifestyles.... Everything is imported: the

fashions, songs, protest buttons, ties, dance styles, wide belts, miniskirts, heroes, radicalisms, rejections and approvals."^[77] There was truth to this, of course. A countercultural fashion imported on the wings of transnational capital had become widely commercialized by early 1968.

Indeed, the business of appealing to the demands of the youth market were dramatically affecting the attitudes of media executives and record agents, who themselves began to "change their image from staid business stalwarts to hip modern trend-makers."^[78] At about this point an important split began to emerge between the local and transnational companies, with the former adopting a more cautious strategy and the latter aggressively pursuing new musical styles. For instance, while Orfeón stuck with its consecrated baladista artists, Capitol Records was actively engaged in cultivating "new talent and new trends" as part of a coordinated effort "to find [musical] voices to express Mexican youth's frustrations, fears and restlessness."^[79] As André Midani, president of Capitol Records of Mexico, was quoted as saying in the summer of 1967: "We are not interested in the Mexico of yesterday nor the Mexico of today. We are interested in the Mexico of tomorrow. We are creating an image of [a] youthful company in tune with the now generation. The young in Mexico are fighting off the old traditions. They belong to the new wave sweeping the world. Mexican kids are just as hip as kids anywhere in the world. And Capitol wants to be as hip as the kids."^[80] In fact, the company reportedly went so far as to hire two psychologists whose job it was "to study and analyze talent, to appraise whether it has the necessary spark to project to the youth of today."^[81] Pursuing this more radical image of youth directly contradicted the terms of an earlier hegemonic arrangement, which had strictly delimited the boundaries of rebellion presented by the cultural industries. With their often direct connections to television and radio (where payola was often the norm), the record companies were principal leaders in this movement. As one report noted, record-company executives could "be seen in the go-go cafes, rock clubs and 'in' neighborhoods, dressed in mod outfits at debuts, talking to the kids, picking up preferences and carrying them back to the office."^[82]

As elsewhere in the world, youth readily identified with the new feeling of rock music. Groups such as the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles captured the sentiments of a generation in revolt against tradition. As Todd Gitlin writes from the U.S. perspective, "Coupled-up love had long been a staple of pop music. Now, for the first time, the normal culture of teenagers was becoming infiltrated by grander ideals: freedom, license, religiosity, loving community. Blurry as the pop images were, they added up to intimations of a different way of life."^[83] Lis-

tening to this music, participating in private and (more likely) group experiences, and discussing the meaning of the translated lyrics and how one felt about the changing times, war, violence, the repression of governments and the movements for liberation all refashioned the cultural setting of leisure for youth universally. Having reached into numerous corners of the globe, rock now belonged to everyone, and nationality was no prerequisite for participation. "Rock," noted José Agustín in his 1968 book, La nueva música clásica , "cannot be limited by borders but develops in every country, acclimating itself to [local] characteristics. Rock is not the patrimony of the United States, even though it first surfaced there."^[84]

The changing cultural sensibilities of Mexican middle-class youth were marked not only by what kind of music they listened to but also by how they wore their hair, what kind of clothes they put on, what language they used, what they read, and in general what their attitude toward authority was. By late 1967 this new style and attitude of rebellion had acquired a societal label: La Onda. Literally meaning "the wave," La Onda in fact connoted a modern sense of movement and communication, as in radio or television "wavelength."^[85] As the young novelist José Agustín, whose iconoclastic novels La tumba (1964) and De perfil (1966) launched a new generation of writers, wrote, "Above all, an onda is movement, and as such, is change.... la onda is also energy, or is associated with it, as in the electric, electromagnetic, or hertzian waves; and as we know, these electric waves allow for communication (telegraph, telephone and/or television)"^[86] . The word itself apparently first surfaced in the early to mid-1960s, when it was used to refer to "a plan, a party, an ambiance"^[87] offering the possibility of diversion, communication, and, especially, rock music. The term stuck, while its meanings expanded. For example, it evolved into a pronoun for "thing," as in "pass me that onda." By the late 1960s, variations on the term formed the foundations of a new hip jargon among youth, as in "Qué mala onda" (What a bad trip, deal, person, etc.) or "Qué buena onda" (What a cool trip, deal, person, etc.), language that was widely circulated among the middle classes, especially, and that served as boundary markers between the generations. In fact, Monsiváis compared the ondero to Norman Mailer's hipster in the United States, arguing that La Onda represented "a new spirit, the repudiation of convention and prejudice, the creation of a new morality, the challenging of proper morals, the expansion of consciousness, the systematic revision and critique of the values offered by the West as sacred and perfect."^[88] Monsiváis preferred to use the label sparingly, arguing that La Onda described only a handful of "radical, vanguard" rebels; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (the seventeenth-century dissident nun)

and Demetrio Vallejo (leader of the 1958–1959 railway workers' strike), Monsiváis indicated, had also been onderos in their own right. But this definition was too parsimonious, on one hand, and yet too overreaching, on the other, to properly suggest what La Onda was coming to mean. For La Onda was rapidly emerging as Mexico's own countercultural movement, grounded in a fusion of native and foreign rock music, literature, language, and fashion. If this was indeed a colonized generation of youth, stupefied by the rhythms imposed from abroad, La Onda held out the possibility of a critical cultural consciousness. For this was a new transnational and trans-cultural era, as Monsiváis himself noted, in which "Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Allen Ginsberg, Fidel Castro, and Mick Jagger"^[89] all rested on like pedestals of significance.

As the signs, images, and commodities associated with an increasingly radical youth counterculture abroad proliferated, the line between rock as fashion and rock as social protest was becoming blurred. Certainly La Onda's outward manifestations readily lent themselves to commodification, as in a 1968 advertisement for the Valiant car featured in the rock magazine POP . The advertisement features a woman with long, blond hair in a minidress playing a guitar with the text of her "song" placed within a psychedelic-stylized bubble: "Valiant has the same fire as my heart.... Valiant is the boldness of youth.... Valiant is a thrill!"^[90] In fact, POP —which first appeared in February 1968—epitomized La Onda's accelerated commercialization and the exploitation of youth's yearning to feel part of a universal movement. With its psychedelic covers, advertisements for paraphernalia of the rock generation (stylized guitars and mod outfits, for example), feature articles on local and foreign bands (arranged in a pastiche from hard rock to romantic baladistas), and an advice column for distraught youth, POP openly proclaimed itself the vehicle for a new generation: "This isn't just 'another magazine,' because POP is like you ... POP is young, happy, and enthusiastic. POP is 'in' and en la onda . POP is psychedelic. POP is crazy about the Beatles, the Monkeys, and the Rollin' Stones. But POP also likes Los Yaki, Los Belmonts, and the Rockin' Devils.... Angélica María, Enrique Guzmán, Julissa, César Costa ... POP is fascinated by the new youth styles of both girls and guys. POP knows all about the latest rock 'n' roll records."^[91] If La Onda was conditioning sectors of middle-class youth to social protest, POP promoted itself as the standard-bearer of the counterculture as style. When one reader, for instance, complained that his parents did not understand why he liked "to dress in the latest fashions ... let my hair grow and dress like a hippie," the magazine's advice columnist responded: "Dear Hippie: You should try to understand

that your parents come from another era. On the other hand, if you like how the hippies look, don't try to imitate their dirty aspects, but only the folkloric parts. I advise you to make a deal with your parents: if you get good grades in school, then they should allow you to let your hair grow a little. If you put it to them this way, you'll see it will work."^[92]

The argument that imitating the "folkloric parts" of the hippies was somehow more appropriate is indeed interesting, for it was precisely this aspect that ultimately offered the most radical critique of Mexican society. At the time, however, this turn to indigenous culture (ironically, in an attempt to be seen as modern) could still be trivialized, and at one point it was literally caricatured by POP . In a later cartoon featured in the magazine, for instance, an Indian woman draped in a rebozo is depicted selling huaraches: "Specially priced for hippies."^[93] As one female informant from an upper-middle-class conservative family relates:

The new fashions were very tempting. It was a change that liberated you from being "properly dressed," with your clothes always being ironed, a handbag, a ribbon in your hair. The hippie was totally carefree in appearance, and you tried to adopt that aspect to a certain point.... But I was never an authentic hippie. I mean, I had my hippie symbols, the long, straight hair, even the headband at times. I used makeup sometimes, bracelets, a shoulder bag.... [My parents] let me dress like that, but within limits. If they needed you present in their society, you had to arrive properly dressed. And they'd say, "You can't wear that, save it for when you go out with your friends." ... So you had to go dressed up like some doll.^[94]

But in other households the fashion of rebellion, especially for men, became a vehicle for challenging one's parents, in particular the authoritative voice of one's father. As Manuel Ruiz explained, "Your parents asked you why you wanted to wear your hair like a girl. They asked you: 'Are you a girl or a homosexual?' They couldn't believe that you'd wear the same jeans all week long. And if your father told you your pants looked greasy or smelled, then it was like he did you a favor by telling you that. Because that's want you wanted to achieve."^[95] Thus if La Onda was about keeping pace with the styles of youth abroad, it also introduced fashion as a vehicle for breaking free of traditional roles and challenging buenas costumbres, the "proper family values" of respectable society.

The Breakdown of Containment

As rocanrol had served the modernizing aspirations of the middle classes a generation earlier, so La Onda coincided at one level with Mexico's self-

promotion as a modernizing nation, in tune with the transformation of attitudes and fashion throughout the world. This was reflected, for instance, in a widely quoted interview in which President Díaz Ordaz stated his defense of long hair, the miniskirt, and other youth fashion statements as falling within the boundaries of free expression. In April 1968, in a three-paragraph article in the New York Times under the heading, "Mexican Leader Sees No Harm in Hippies," Díaz Ordaz is quoted as saying: "Everyone is free to let his beard, hair or sideburns grow if he wants to, to dress well or badly as he sees fit, so long as he does not harm others' rights or break the law."^[96] If the president was looking to bolster an image of Mexico as a tolerant, open society on the eve of world attention focusing on the Olympics, his words may have had an impact. This was reflected, for example, in a letter to the president written, strangely enough, by a U.S. serviceman stationed at Fort Bragg: "It was a great pleasure for my friends and me to read the comments attributed to you in the New York Times .... We feel that your thinking is in perfect harmony with the finest traditions of democracy, and this is especially heart-warming today when so much of the world is controlled by facist [sic ] and communist dictators."^[97] In fact, the association between rock and modernity was so intertwined that while most of the cafés cantantes remained closed, other clubs geared toward tourists and the elite continued to do a healthy business. As one report on the capital noted, "Nightclubs are not for the poor or [the] peso counter."^[98] Many of these clubs were located in the Zona Rosa, while elite hotels, such as the newly opened Aristos or the Hilton Belvedere also offered steady work for select bands. As a reporter described one such performance:" [A] good rock group, clean-cut in red blazers, blasts away to a floor full of well-dressed young people and a couple in formal wear."^[99] Thus, while for the middle classes La Onda came to be defined in terms of struggle—for access to rock performance, for the right to dress up in the latest fashions, against the threat of police harassment because of long hair—for los juniors of the elite, La Onda became a badge of privileged access, a passport to being "in" without fear of reprisals.

If circumscribing the rock gesture was central to the hegemonic arrangement between the cultural industries and the state, this arrangement was rapidly coming undone as La Onda pushed against the logic of containment. "Naturalizing" Elvis Presley in the guise of Enrique Guzmán had once been possible, but accomplishing the same for Jimi Hendrix would not be easy. For in contradistinction to the highlighting of pubescent angst reflected in early rock 'n' roll, by 1968 rock had been "converted into a dignified,

complex and revolutionary musical quest," as José Agustín described it.^[100] Though younger artistic directors at the transnationals pushed to stay on top of the rapidly transforming youth market, producers at Telesistema were less anxious to accommodate the psychedelic revolution. According to Luis de Llano Jr., who, in 1969, as director of promotion at Telesistema, launched a video-rock program, "La Onda de Woodstock," the old guard at Telesistema "was not interested in longhaired people."^[101] This conservative stance was eroding, however, as the logic of rock demanded a relaxation of strict controls over image and performance. Perhaps the most vivid example of this broadening of market sensibilities was the avant-garde rock-performance television program ¡1, 2, 3, 4, 5 a Go-Go! shown live weekly for a brief time on Telesistema. Launched in early 1968 by Alfonso Arau and afterward continued by the Chilean filmmaker, Alexander Jodorowsky, the program integrated rock music and theater to produce spontaneous television performance.^[102] As one witness-participant described an episode, "Los Dug Dugs explode with Magical Mystery Tour, and we start to paint without any idea of what's going on.... [D]ogs are barking into the amplifiers, [and] a zapatista ... transforms his face while singing in English.... [A]t the guitarists' feet and wearing a tambourine for a halo, some dude is playing the flute while simultaneously beating a pre-Hispanic drum.... Next Thursday at 7 P.M . on Channel 5 maybe we'll again enter the electronic, ephemeral, panicked euphoria."^[103]

With the closing of the cafés, middle-class access to live rock performance became more irregular. Not until 1968 did live rock for the masses find a new commercial outlet, an ice-skating rink at the southern end of Insurgentes Boulevard, a commercialized strip not far from the UNAM. This seemingly odd location to showcase rock makes better sense, at least ideologically, if we view ice skating as associated with an inversion of the underdeveloped tropics. The rink, in fact, became a weekly meeting ground for displaying the accouterments of modernity.^[104] Every Sunday "the authentic youth," as one writer described them, would gather to listen to live rock by groups like Los Dug Dugs. "Boys and girls in Beatles and Hindu fashions [and] huge mustaches" gathered around, we are told. "Groups with miniskirts and necklaces" made up the crowd, as youth with "skates tossed over the shoulder [wore] a look of intense suaveness on their faces."^[105] If these youth pursued La Onda as a fashion statement, they did so increasingly at the risk of enraging their parents and testing the boundaries of buenas costumbres that still defined societal values.

Many university students regarded this fashion with cynical scorn, if

not distrust. Foreign rock itself was generally held in high esteem—part of the universal vanguard culture with which students around the world now identified—but Mexican rock was mostly derided or ignored altogether. In part this was because of rocanrol's close affiliation with elitist pretensions. Mexican imitators, especially the more recent bands that performed in English, seemed to many a pathetic attempt at copying gringos. Moreover, the PRI-financed porras (pseudo-student groups that often functioned as infiltrators and agents provocateurs) were known to support rock concerts on school campuses, making the Mexican bands (if not the music itself) somewhat suspect. Meanwhile, the Cuban Revolution had reawakened interest in Latin American culture and an outward posture of ideological distinctions drawn along the lines of musical taste. "Everyone, all of us began to be interested in music from Latin America and Mexico, in what was happening in Latin America," recounts Oscar Chávez, a Mexican folk singer who came to prominence during this period.^[106] Radio UNAM, the official university station, devoted a quarter of its musical programming to Latin American folk music; the rest was classical music.^[107]

The UNAM's newly opened Popular Culture Center, which united students from different universities in the city and around the country, stayed away from rock despite sponsorship during the center's first year in existence of "bossa nova, jazz, corral poetry, [and] social and protest music."^[108] Eréndira Rincón, later a participant in the student movement, spoke about the relationship between rock and folk on the UNAM campus: "In general, you'd find both Latin American music and rock, but not at the same event. Never. That's because, supposedly, the publics were different, though in reality they were the same. We were always the same people, but the idea was [that the music] was directed at one group or the other."^[109] Indeed, the tone of a lone rock review—of Cream's Disraeli Gears album—featured in the official student newsletter suggested that rock music was taken seriously by many students.^[110] Ironically, the sheer inaccessibility of the original rock album had helped to elevate foreign rock to the plane of high culture. This was also reflected, for instance, in an avant-garde dance performance sponsored by the General Office of Cultural Diffusion of the UNAM in the summer of 1968 titled "Beatlemima" and set to "the most selective of modern popular music," including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.^[111] Thus, on the eve of the student movement of 1968 a grammar of youth rebellion that incorporated discourses of a Latin American folk revival, rock music, and revolutionary struggle was widely disseminated. Though class and ideological differences still characterized youth in gen-

eral, such a grammar had nonetheless laid the foundation for the transcendence of such differences in the name of a common movement.

The Student Movement of 1968

The formation of a student strike committee—Comité Nacional de Huelga (CNH)—formed the structural backbone of the student movement that erupted at the end of July 1968. Like the movement itself, the formation of the CNH was essentially a spontaneous event, unrelated in any direct manner with other political groups or activities.^[112] This is not to say that the student movement came together in a vacuum: despite the overall appearance of political tranquillity, confrontations between university administrators, government security forces, and students at numerous campuses had escalated around the country since student participation in the massive union strikes of 1958–1959.^[113] Indeed, the convocation of a national student conference in 1963 had led to the formation of the Central Nacional de Estudiantes Democráticos, a broad-based movement for university and political reform. At the same time, the impact of the Cuban Revolution catalyzed a more radical wing of student activism advocating a guerrilla strategy of revolutionary insurrection. Yet during the 1960s these two distinct, if at times complementary, wings of student activism neither anticipated nor directed the massive protests that rocked the nation's capital during the summer and fall of 1968.^[114] In fact, the CNH ideologically repudiated any affiliation with formal political organizations (either student or opposition political parties), a position that ultimately contributed to the movement's strengths as well as weaknesses.^[115]

As Charles de Gaulle had famously discounted the possibility of student unrest in France, so too did Díaz Ordaz reject the likelihood of protests in Mexico, even as capital cities around the world began to feel the reverberations of the Paris uprising and the "Prague Spring." The approaching Olympics were heralded by the PRI-dominated mass media as evidence of the nation's transformation from a bandit-ridden, agrarian economy into a modern, industrialized nation. But the Olympics also placed into sharper relief the dictatorial nature of decision making and the distorted economic priorities of the regime. For many students and labor activists, a well-known history of police repression against those who openly questioned the political status quo belied Mexico's proud international image as a progressive, democratic nation. As world attention began to intensify in the context of the approaching Olympic games, the stakes of protest and

response increased exponentially. Perhaps that explains why a series of relatively inconsequential events among disparate student groups in the capital at the end of July—a rumble between rival school gangs; a march celebrating the Cuban Revolution; a protest against earlier police incursion of a vocational school—triggered the massive unrest that unfolded.^[116]

Police repression related to the above incidents catalyzed an immediate response by student representatives from the UNAM and the Polytechnical Institute, who together drew up a preliminary list of demands and discussed the notion of organizing a general student strike. As word of the meeting spread, students at university-affiliated high schools and vocational schools around the capital spontaneously declared their solidarity, capturing several city buses (a familiar tactic of student activists), which were used to blockade streets. Police and army infantry pursued the protesters, firing tear gas and clubbing heads with rifle butts. Just after midnight the following day (30 July), the government responded with a disproportionate use of force: bazooka blasts forced open the baroque wooden doors of the San Ildefonso High School, located in the downtown district where numerous students and teachers, many of whom were wounded, had taken refuge. The invasion of the UNAM-affiliated high school not only violated the constitutional protection of school autonomy but also led to dozens of injuries and arrests, including of neighborhood residents, some of whom had poured boiling water onto soldiers in an attempt to prevent them from entering the school. On 1 August, the president appealed for reasoned submission in his famous "extended hand" speech: "Public peace and tranquillity must be restored. A hand is stretched out; Mexicans will say whether that hand will find a response. I have been deeply grieved by these deplorable and shameful events. Let us not further accentuate our differences."^[117] At the same moment, however, Javier Barros Sierra, the widely respected rector of the UNAM, led a march of some 80,000 students down a principal avenue of the city. Signs reading "The outstretched hand has a pistol in it" signaled the students' cynicism toward dialogue; a coffin marked "Dead Government" was paraded about. Within a week, a formal strike committee was formed to represent more than 150 public and private high schools, colleges, vocational schools, and universities throughout not only the capital but with links to schools in the provinces as well. If the strike had begun as a movement of solidarity by students in the capital who were fed up with arbitrary repression, with the formation of the CNH the movement now looked to broaden its constituency to incorporate other sectors around the country.^[118]

Formalized in the CNH, the student movement actually pushed for lim-

ited, reformist goals. Unlike student movements in the United States or France, for instance, the Mexican movement did not advocate a distinctively radical social or political agenda.^[119] Rather, student demands and discourse were carefully structured in terms of respect for the 1917 Constitution, which contained guarantees of free speech, democratic process, and economic redistribution. Yet the sheer audacity of students to invoke these rights implied that the regime—the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party—had shortchanged the population in fulfilling the goals of revolutionary upheaval some fifty years earlier. As one student leader remarked, "Our arms were the Constitution; our ideas; our peaceful, legal demonstrations; our handbills and our newspapers. Were these the arms of hard-liners? Of course they were. Here in our country anything that represents a spontaneous movement on the part of the people and of students, an independent popular organization that forthrightly criticizes the despotic regime that unfortunately rules our lives, is considered dangerously militant."^[120]

Six demands formed the actual framework of the students' official petition:

1. Freedom for political prisoners

2. Elimination of Article 145 of the Penal Code

3. Abolition of the riot police (granaderos)

4. Dismissal of the Mexico City chiefs of police

5. Indemnification for victims of repression

6. Justice against those responsible for repression

If we assess these demands, we note that they encompass both local concerns (dismissal of the police chiefs) and national ones (freedom for political prisoners). Nowhere did they call for the resignation of the president, much less cancellation of the Olympics. But in their directness and simplicity, they challenged the very legitimacy of the ruling party to govern justly and democratically.

The six demands constituted a series of petitions that embodied the students' rage at the authoritarian nature of Mexican politics. One category of petitions concerned the material and legal basis for years of government repression. Thus the first three demands called for a freeing of political prisoners (with particular emphasis on the jailed railway leader Demetrio Vallejo, whose image was often displayed by protesters), dismantling of the hated granaderos, and the annulment of antiquated legislation that provided a quasi-legal basis for government repression. The latter referred to Article 145 of the federal Penal Code, the so-called social-dissolution clause

that dated back to World War II efforts to fight internal subversion instigated by the Axis powers. The article provided for harsh penalties against those who "in word, writing, or by whatever other means propagate ideas, programs, or conduct that tend to produce rebellion, sedition, riots, disorders, and the obstruction of the functioning of legal institutions."^[121] This category of demands underscored the absence of guarantees for public dissent and the utter lack of due process. A second category addressed the legal accountability of public officials tied to recent repression and justice for families and victims of government violence. This amounted to an implicit critique of a political and judicial system that, monopolized by the PRI, negated the possibility of democratic representation and legal oversight.

Finally, the movement insisted that all political dialogue regarding these demands be made public; that is, within full view of the mass media. This was a tactical decision meant to avoid the mistakes of other groups in the past which, in settling for closed-door negotiations, had discovered the government's agility at dividing and conquering. But if the demand was tactical in that it aimed at avoiding cooptation, it also had strategic implications. For by settling on nothing less than a public dialogue with the president, the students meant to underscore the utter absence of legislative recourse, despite the formal dressings of a competitive party system. Furthermore, such implicit attacks on the centralization of power called into question the moral authority not only of the ruling party but also of the president himself, a position that directly violated the unwritten rules of protest politics in postrevolutionary Mexico. As a recent work on the subject argues, what gave the student movement its historical significance was the protesters' irreverence for a political system that negated the existence of a civil polity.^[122]

In actuality, the tone of the movement resembled a cross between the early civil-rights marches in the United States and the more contemporaneous marches in Paris, Prague, Berkeley, and elsewhere, in which solemnity mixed with festivity and a shared protest culture was evident.^[123] Men marching in short hair and suits were accompanied by those in long hair and jeans; women in dresses accompanied those in pants and miniskirts. In part, this diversity reflected generational differences. But it also reflected the eclectic cultural sensibilities of the student population, influenced on one hand by the history of student activism and on the other by the rock revolution. Evelyn Stevens's description of the UNAM campus in the midst of the movement as a "discreet and decorous version of the Woodstock spirit"^[124] is thus revealing. At the UNAM, gatherings organized around folk-music performances, political theater, poetry readings, and collective

mural paintings all formed an integral aspect of student-movement culture.^[125] The raising of political consciousness associated with the student movement reinforced the place of Latin American folk music over rock, which was still more strongly identified with youthful diversion than with serious political struggle. But foreign rock's close associations with the avant-garde and ties to student-movement culture elsewhere in the world kept it from being condemned as imperialist, except perhaps by the most radical elements. Even in the midst of the struggle rock found its place on the UNAM, as one participant recalled: "When the university had been taken over by the students and you were there for two straight days, well sure, you played music over the loudspeakers to make the time go by, and that's when you heard a lot of rock."^[126] Yet if rock music was not central to the Mexican student movement in the way it was in the United States during antiwar protests, it nonetheless had an important contributing role. Mexican performers may have been derided as would-be rockers by student leaders, but the fomenting of a rock counterculture by these local bands was an inextricable aspect of La Onda's broader development. And it was through La Onda that so many young people were sensitized, in the language of one informant, to be outspoken against arbitrary, patriarchal authority.^[127] Jaime Pontones, in his early teens at the time of the student movement, recalls his attitude:

I was very young and didn't have any clear sense of political reality, but I supported the youth, the students. This was because Díaz Ordaz was a shithead, as were all the police; because they persecuted people with long hair; they repressed those who smoked pot; because they didn't allow rock; because they were a bunch of shithead moralists. I didn't understand much about the movement except that they were from the UNAM, that they were students and youth, and that they listened to rock.^[128]

In fact, though many middle-class households forbade or pressured their children not to get involved, the influence of La Onda was clearly present in appeals to join the movement. As Manuel Ruiz, who ultimately stayed clear of the movement, recalls:

One of the student leaders or someone would come by and push you and your group of friends, saying, "Isn't it true they don't let you walk around with long hair? Isn't it true they don't let you listen to rock? Isn't it true they don't let you dress like you want to? Isn't it true there aren't any places to listen to rock? Isn't it true the education system is rotten and all the teachers are bad? Well, come on and join the strike! We're going to unite and take over the streets!" And in my opinion,

that's how the student movement got started.... But I knew it was a waste and wasn't going to change anything, except get a bunch of students killed.^[129]

At the same time, the movement further entrenched brewing conflicts in the home, as many students were forced to choose between following their conscience and obeying the directives of their parents.

This was especially true for women.^[130] Female participants in the student movement found themselves confronted not only by the obstacle of overcoming the privileged male terrain of political organizing but also by the much stricter demands of parents prohibiting their involvement. If La Onda had begun to open up a new realm of personal freedom, experienced in the shortening of skirts and the wearing of pants, the student movement radicalized that experience by placing women on an equal footing with men. While more traditional divisions of labor occurred—women generally were responsible for organizing meals for returning brigades—women also found themselves on the front lines, having their voices heard and sharing the dangers of repression with their male cohorts. For these women, participating in the movement was nothing short of a totally transformative experience, which instilled self-respect and led to the questioning of traditional gender values. One woman, for example, broke up with her boyfriend, who had stayed clear of the movement and criticized her participation. The notion that women were to be protected by men was cast aside not only by the realities of social protest but by the ideology of a democratic movement as well: "We fought shoulder to shoulder [with the men] and we couldn't see any difference between what were our roles and battles and what were theirs.... In this period we were all androgynous. We were brave fighters, the same as any man.... We didn't see any difference in what we needed as women and what men needed."^[131] If women were successful at carving out a respected role as participants and even leaders, conflicts at home were often more traumatic. Numerous parents could not relate to the fact that their daughters were involved in a public protest, that they returned home after dark and even spent the night in strangers' homes, that they had found a voice which would not be readily silenced. In some cases, women found themselves thrown out of the house by parents who "refused to permit their homes to be considered 'like a hotel.'"^[132]

Despite such challenges, the class, generational, and gender diversity of the student movement was its strongest asset. This diversity reflected the more profound impact of student strategizing, which sent upper- and middle-class activists into working-class neighborhoods and in turn forced

a transformation of cultural values in an effort to create a unified front. Class boundaries were transcended not only in spatial terms but linguistically and stylistically as well. Where La Onda had been defined by its hip but still essentially tasteful jargon, the process of reaching out to youth from other social classes not only distributed this jargon more widely but also, at the same time, broadened its vocabulary as it incorporated slang from the lower classes. As one student at the Polytechnical Institute remarked, "At Poli I never heard expressions like 'mummies,' 'squares,' people 'on the right wave length' [onderos], and so on.... Maybe they use that kind of language at the UNAM, but it seems more like the jargon of intellectuals or small groups hankering to be part of the Movement, to be 'in.' When we talk among ourselves at Poli, we use the crudest sort of language, bricklayers' language."^[133] Words such as cabrón, desmadre , and chingar entered into student vocabulary, a shift that Evelyn Stevens noted when she pointed out that "the 'filthy speech' revolution ... had apparently spread to Mexican campuses." "Profanity and obscenity emerged in the discourse of the protesters," Stevens described, "with the expected effect on their elders."^[134]

At the same time that La Onda was radicalized by direct contact with working-class culture, its constituency was expanded to include lower-class youth, who were made to feel a part of this universalizing rock movement. Indeed, even some of the social barriers that had once kept upper- and middle-class youth from fraternizing were overcome, as students from different class backgrounds found they shared a common language in La Onda. Thus the pretense of youth solidarity had the important impact of rupturing the rigid class lines that had traditionally separated one group from another (geographically and socially), in turn temporarily masking the realities of economic difference.

Perhaps the strongest indication that rock could no longer be contained within the boundaries of mere entertainment and that La Onda had moved beyond a fashion statement was an editorial in POP that exhorted its readers not to partake in the "cowardly" demonstrations then being carried out by students:

NOW YOU'RE A CITIZEN ! ... The days of being a "rebel" are past. Now you're a MAN .... And men are RESPONSIBLE for their acts.... Don't listen to demagogic agitators because YOU ARE NOT SHEEP, BUT MEN . Don't take to the streets and commit crimes against your Country; that will be left to the half-wit "rebels." [N]ow you are MEN for real and must concern yourselves with CONSTRUCTION , never with destruction.^[135]

Urging readers that "the days of being a 'rebel' are past" revealed the underlying conservative ideology of the magazine, despite its proudly psychedelic orientation. Yet containing La Onda as a symbol of modernity was no longer possible; it had now become a source of empowerment.

Student Strategy and Tactics

The organizational strategy of the movement took various forms, which reflected both the centrality of student energies and the need to overcome the preponderance of government propaganda disseminated by the mass media against them. Student activists worked hard to cast the movement as fundamentally democratic in its goals, especially to counter government claims that "subversive elements" were underwriting the unrest. With institutional channels for reform—elective office, state bureaucracies, large sectors of the press—monopolized by the direct influence of the ruling party, protest politics necessarily shifted onto the terrain of the everyday and became a battle for the hearts and minds of the citizenry. This was done, for instance, by forming numerous "people-to-people brigades" that took their message directly to the bureaucrats, workers, housewives, and others they met on the streets, in marketplaces, at the entrances to factories, on public transportation, wherever they might be heard. The students handed out leaflets listing their demands and appealed to a language of constitutionality. They also collected donations; contributions helped to fund the cause and counter accusations of foreign support. With the participation of students from the Fine Arts Theater, street theater modeled on the "happenings" staged in Berkeley and elsewhere also became part of the tactical repertoire. Such students formed groups that role-modeled different sectors of the population in staged street confrontations designed to draw an unsuspecting public into a debate over student activism.^[136] When the government utilized a discourse of rebeldismo in an attempt to identify student actions (such as painting graffiti and commandeering buses) with wanton violence, the movement responded with a poignant display of discipline: During the so-called Silent March on 13 September, tens of thousands of people paraded mutely down a principal avenue in the capital, many with adhesive tape over their mouths. As one placard stated: "To The People of Mexico: You can see that we're not vandals or rebels without a cause—the label that's constantly been pinned on us. Our silence proves it."^[137]

A second strategy employed by the students was to "poach" on government-ritualized domains in an effort to reappropriate their meanings.^[138] Such spaces included, for instance, the Angel of Independence statue and,

most importantly, the Zócalo (central plaza), "the neurological point of monopolized ritual space."^[139] The temporal transformation of the Zócalo from a regimented parade ground reserved for ceremonial design into a festive, declamatory, public meeting ground was profoundly symbolic in its implications. "We had to take over the Zócalo; we had to deconsecrate the Zócalo—and we did, three times," explained one student protester.^[140] At the same time that "taking command of the streets" aimed to disrupt the parameters of meaning assigned to public places, students also reappropriated national heroes long incorporated into the official pantheon. This gesture of reappropriation, however, did not come instinctively. Initially, in fact, the faces of Zapata and Villa were discarded in favor of Che Guevara and Mao Zedong, who served as symbols of revolutionary utopianism around the world. As one participant commented, "I never thought of Zapata as a student symbol, an emblem. Zapata has become part of the bourgeois ideology; the PRI has appropriated him. Maybe that's why we chose Che as our symbol at demonstrations from the very first. Che was our link with student movements all over the world! We never thought of Pancho Villa either. His name never even crossed our minds!"^[141] But when the press used such references to international revolution as a pretext for slandering the movement (the red-and-black strike flag was raised in place of the Mexican flag in the Zócalo after one demonstration), student leaders pushed for a purging of such symbols and instead urged the adoption of Mexican symbols and heroes. New orders from the strike committee now implored: "Let's have no more vituperative slogans, no more insults, no more violence. Don't carry red flags. Don't carry placards of Che or Mao! From now on we're going to carry placards with the portraits of Hidalgo, Morelos, Zapata, to shut them up. They're our Heroes. Viva Zapata! Viva! "^[142] This decision was profoundly significant, for it reflected a direct challenge to the PRI's monopoly of the symbolism of Mexico's revolutionary heritage. By parading images of Villa, Zapata, Juárez, and others the students implicitly questioned the government's right to speak in their name, while suggesting that they instead had the right to do so. If earlier commentators had feared the replacement of such national heroes by the likes of James Dean and Elvis Presley, this reappropriation suggested an ironic inversion of their concerns. Now the nation's revolutionary heroes were being used against the government itself.

Finally, student strategy confronted the legitimacy of the Revolutionary Family by directly mocking the president's moral authority to speak for all Mexicans. This irreverence took various forms, including the rewriting of revolutionary corridos, the biting sarcasm of lithographs that cleverly drew

on familiar public images, and the liberal use of graffiti, which often incorporated language and slogans drawn from other student movements worldwide.^[143] In fact, many students openly expressed their feelings of solidarity with other such movements, as articulated in one CNH document: "We are conscious of our historical vision: to transform reality, to transform society. And in this task we are not alone. For the first time youth from around the world are identifying with one another in this common task."^[144] In one example of this irreverence of taking on the old order, a poster displayed a superimposition of the president's profile (whose jutting jaw and protruding upper teeth lent themselves easily to caricature) over that of a gorilla donning a riot helmet, thus suggesting the barbarity of state force. And in a remake of a commercial ditty, the students chanted:

Tell me, tell me, Gustavo,
Tell me why you're a coward,
Tell me why you've no mother,
Tell me, Gustavo, please tell me.^[145]

Still another banner read: "Free tuition for granaderos enrolling in literacy classes."^[146] "Suddenly the old rules no longer applied," writes Evelyn Stevens. "I saw buses speeding down the avenues, their sides painted with the slogan 'Death to Díaz Ordaz.' "^[147] But despite the seriousness of the students' cause, or perhaps because of it, protest was often characterized by a "carnivalesque spectacle,"^[148] a sight common in the inversion of any hierarchical order. Observing a moment in which the police chief and a granadero were burned in effigy while others paraded around a coffin labeled "dead government," Stevens noted that "[i]n spite of the raucousness, there was no violence; the crowd was in excellent humor, in a mood to find each incident hilariously funny, as at a circus."^[149]

The Massacre at Tlatelolco

With the approaching Olympics, the stakes were raised for both sides to resolve the deepening crisis. Contrary to the government's claims that the students sought a disruption of the Olympics, the movement in fact aimed to leverage world attention to address its calls for greater democratization. Nonetheless, as the students' sense of empowerment grew, the regime feared the mounting embarrassment and disruption of public order. Then, in mid-September, the army directly occupied the main UNAM campus and, several days later, the Polytechnical Institute as well, thus once more violating the constitutional protection of university autonomy. Scores of students were rounded up and imprisoned; many others were forced to go

underground.^[150] At the Polytechnical Institute, pitched battles took place between the army and students. The heightened repression was taking its toll on the movement; meetings drew fewer participants, and the leadership hoped for a solution prior to the Olympics.^[151] On 1 October the army withdrew from the UNAM (though remaining at the Polytechnical Institute). The next day representatives of the CNH met with government officials to discuss a resolution to the conflicts, but the meeting went nowhere and, if anything, proved to be a government tactic to divide the leadership.^[152] Already there were signs of a radicalization of strategy by some members, who now carried weapons and advocated armed revolt; several of these members, it was later revealed, turned out to be government-paid provocateurs. By this point, the movement was heavily infiltrated by federal security agents. A march had been planned for that afternoon (2 October) to protest the continued occupation of the Polytechnical Institute, but at the last moment the leadership decided to cancel the march—word had spread that the army was massing its forces along the planned protest route—and to hold a meeting at the Plaza of the Three Cultures instead. The change in tactics meant that the demonstrators became sitting ducks for the military.^[153]

The plaza where the scheduled meeting was to be held was set in the midst of a massive public housing project called Tlatelolco. The plaza itself acquired its name because of the juxtaposition of pre-Conquest Aztec ruins with colonial and postrevolutionary architecture. Located just north of Mexico City's center, the site was a compromise meeting ground for student participants from the various schools and universities. It was also home to scores of middle-class workers, housewives, and children, including students. The meeting that evening drew between 5,000 and 10,000 people, many of whom were simply residents of the apartment complex. But as the meeting began it became increasingly obvious to the leadership that something was wrong. Unidentified people tried to enter the balcony where the main speakers were staged. Notes were passed to the speakers that the crowd was full of judiciales posing as spectators; in fact, members of the Olympic Battalion (trained for security at the Olympics) were placed throughout the crowd. Later it was discovered that journalists, who were given privileged access to the balcony, were also infiltrated by government forces. Suddenly a helicopter began to circle overhead, and two flares were dropped. Within moments shouts rang out from the crowd as army troops filed into the plaza from the street, blocking off the only route of escape. Soldiers began to fire point-blank at the crowd, killing and wounding men, women, and children at random. To this day, the events of that evening

have remained etched in the memory of all Mexicans as the Massacre of Tlatelolco.

Accounts of the massacre itself are still largely dependent on oral histories, as the official story remains shrouded in secrecy and denial. It remains unclear, for instance, who gave the orders to send in the army, though it was widely assumed that Secretary of Interior Affairs Luis Echeverría was directly responsible. Subsequent interviews, however, have suggested that orders may actually have come from Defense Secretary General Marcelino García Barragán, who was determined to clear up the "political mess" produced under civilian watch.^[154] For its part, the government maintains that student sharpshooters targeted army troops, provoking a response. In fact, armed provocateurs had infiltrated the movement by that point and may, indeed, have fired on either the army or the crowd. Some members of the CNH also carried weapons for defensive purposes, but at Tlatelolco the balance of forces made armed resistance folly; weapons were quickly discarded to avoid discovery by the army.^[155] Foreign journalists present for the pending Olympics put the number of dead at more than 200, while official figures admitted only to 49 (including an army captain).^[156] Hundreds were wounded. To prevent an accurate count, the military cordoned off hospitals and morgues, and many people were simply "disappeared." In the subsequent hours soldiers continued their offensive by conducting apartment-by-apartment searches throughout the Tlatelolco complex for people in hiding. Those who were arrested were taken first to a military base and then to the Lecumberri prison, filling its cells far beyond capacity. Those who were not captured went farther underground or into exile.^[157]

The students had generated a considerable amount of support for their struggle, reaching into broad sectors of the middle and working classes in the capital.^[158] For their supporters, the students acted as the moral conscience of the nation, assuming the risks of confrontation in pursuit of a goal of social justice and democracy. But in their efforts to forge a common front with unions and the peasantry they also discovered the depth of state corporatist control and the impact of official propaganda used against them. In fact, while many Mexicans supported the students many others viewed their actions with alarm and undoubtedly agreed with newspaper and television reports of agitators, communists, and, especially, wanton youth. For a broad segment of the population, the empowerment of youth had come at the expense of adults' own sense of disempowerment and humiliation. "This is about a challenge of adults' capacity for comprehension, a defiance of their imagination and of their experience at governing," one editorialist wrote on the eve of the massacre in an article appropriately titled: "Youth

Power: The Parricides."^[159] Indeed, while many parents (especially those from the lower middle classes) supported their children's participation, for many others the students' brazen assault on public authority only mirrored outrage at challenges to patriarchal control in the home. One public employee's comment that "It's the miniskirt that's to blame"^[160] no doubt summed up the attitude of many adults. "If they ask me what the student movement of 1968 was all about," one participant wrote two decades later, "I could tell them that it was the history of how a son rebelled against his government because he could not confront his father, while a president who felt impotent against his own son's rocker lifestyle took revenge against hundreds of students."^[161]

One day after the massacre the PRI-controlled Congress voted on a resolution approving the use of force to quell the students. Outside the Congress more than 500 mothers protested against the army's continued occupation of the plaza at Tlatelolco. Blame for the "disturbances" was quickly placed on communists and other foreign "agitators." The state, writes César Gilabert, "made sure there were no victims, only culprits."^[162] Two weeks later the Olympic games opened, with a conservative and compliant press praising the advances of Mexico's modernization. As more arrests assured the effective dissolution of the movement, it became clear that the government would permit no further organizing against it. With no hope of continuing, on 4 December the CNH officially disbanded. But tanks and guns could not easily erase the memory of what had transpired or contain the spirit of free speech and democratic values the student movement had embodied. The regime might recapture the places where its institutions and public figures had been mocked and challenged, but it could not as easily contain the continued symbolic resistance to its authority. For the students' activism and the massacre that put an end to it had affected "the consciousness of a generation and [signaled] the beginnings of the demystification of the country."^[163]