a mistake seeking out my new partnership exclusively in the idea of form and divorcing myself from subject matter. The fact is that one day I reached the palpable point of exhaustion between vital content and literary expression.
Living for several years in Paris, London, and Venice, I searched for the new alliance in my own vocation. I found it, just maybe and just fleetingly, in a funeral chant to the modernity that was wearing all of us out, Europeans and New World Americans alike. We were going to suffer a change of skin, like it or not. The upheavals all over the world in the 1960s did not help me; they only made it obvious that youth was elsewhere, not in a Mexican author who in the crucial year 1968 had turned forty.
But that was also the year of the massacre in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City and of the Tlatelolco killings. The unpunished murder of hundreds of young students by the armed forces and government agents brought all Mexicans together, despite our biological or generational differences. It united us, I mean, in terms not only of political parties but of grief. At the same time, it divided us according to whether we supported or opposed the governmentâs behavior. The writer José Revueltas went to jail because of his participation in the movement for reform. At a Freedom of the Press Day dinner, MartÃn Luis Guzmán, the novelist of the Mexican Revolution, praised President Gustavo DÃaz Ordaz, who was responsible for the slaughter. Octavio Paz resigned his ambassadorship in India. The poet Salvador Novo intoned an aria of thankfulness to DÃaz Ordaz and our national institutions. In Paris, I circulated petitions demanding amnesty for Revueltas and condemnations of the violence with which the government, lacking political answers, had so bloodily responded to the studentsâ challenge.
The students were no more or less than the children of the Mexican Revolution that I had explored in my first books. They were the youth educated by the revolution, which taught them to believe in democracy, justice, and liberty. Now they were asking only for that, and the government, which had supposedly emanated from the revolution, answered them with death. The official argument until that moment had been: Weâre going to pacify and stabilize a country ravaged by twenty years of armed conflict and a century of anarchy and dictatorship. Weâre going to provide education, communication, health, and economic prosperity. For your part, you citizens are going to allow us, in order to attain all that, to postpone democracy. Progress today, democracy tomorrow. We promise. That was the pact.
The kids of 1968 asked for democracy today, and that demand cost them their lives, but it gave life back to Mexico.
I expected the new writers to translate all this into literature, but I did not exempt myself from a hard look: I accused myself of a complicity and blindness that kept me from participating in a better way, more directly, in that parting of the waters in modern Mexican life that was 1968. My recurring nightmare was a hospital where the authorities banned the studentsâ parents and relatives, where no one bothered to tie a tag to the naked toe of a single corpse â¦
âWeâre not going to have five hundred funeral processions here tomorrow,â said a Mexican general. âIf we allow that, the government collapsesâ¦â
There were no processions. There was a common grave. My wife, Luisa Guzmán, sent me tranquil but secretly anguished letters: âI was rehearsing in the Comonfort theater in the Bellas Artes complex, just opposite Tlatelolco, when I began to hear a lot of shooting. I saw the government helicopters mowing down students and ordinary people indiscriminately. It went on for more than an hour, and when I left the theater the students threw themselves at me and the other actors, shouting, âTheyâre killing your children!â
Living for several years in Paris, London, and Venice, I searched for the new alliance in my own vocation. I found it, just maybe and just fleetingly, in a funeral chant to the modernity that was wearing all of us out, Europeans and New World Americans alike. We were going to suffer a change of skin, like it or not. The upheavals all over the world in the 1960s did not help me; they only made it obvious that youth was elsewhere, not in a Mexican author who in the crucial year 1968 had turned forty.
But that was also the year of the massacre in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City and of the Tlatelolco killings. The unpunished murder of hundreds of young students by the armed forces and government agents brought all Mexicans together, despite our biological or generational differences. It united us, I mean, in terms not only of political parties but of grief. At the same time, it divided us according to whether we supported or opposed the governmentâs behavior. The writer José Revueltas went to jail because of his participation in the movement for reform. At a Freedom of the Press Day dinner, MartÃn Luis Guzmán, the novelist of the Mexican Revolution, praised President Gustavo DÃaz Ordaz, who was responsible for the slaughter. Octavio Paz resigned his ambassadorship in India. The poet Salvador Novo intoned an aria of thankfulness to DÃaz Ordaz and our national institutions. In Paris, I circulated petitions demanding amnesty for Revueltas and condemnations of the violence with which the government, lacking political answers, had so bloodily responded to the studentsâ challenge.
The students were no more or less than the children of the Mexican Revolution that I had explored in my first books. They were the youth educated by the revolution, which taught them to believe in democracy, justice, and liberty. Now they were asking only for that, and the government, which had supposedly emanated from the revolution, answered them with death. The official argument until that moment had been: Weâre going to pacify and stabilize a country ravaged by twenty years of armed conflict and a century of anarchy and dictatorship. Weâre going to provide education, communication, health, and economic prosperity. For your part, you citizens are going to allow us, in order to attain all that, to postpone democracy. Progress today, democracy tomorrow. We promise. That was the pact.
The kids of 1968 asked for democracy today, and that demand cost them their lives, but it gave life back to Mexico.
I expected the new writers to translate all this into literature, but I did not exempt myself from a hard look: I accused myself of a complicity and blindness that kept me from participating in a better way, more directly, in that parting of the waters in modern Mexican life that was 1968. My recurring nightmare was a hospital where the authorities banned the studentsâ parents and relatives, where no one bothered to tie a tag to the naked toe of a single corpse â¦
âWeâre not going to have five hundred funeral processions here tomorrow,â said a Mexican general. âIf we allow that, the government collapsesâ¦â
There were no processions. There was a common grave. My wife, Luisa Guzmán, sent me tranquil but secretly anguished letters: âI was rehearsing in the Comonfort theater in the Bellas Artes complex, just opposite Tlatelolco, when I began to hear a lot of shooting. I saw the government helicopters mowing down students and ordinary people indiscriminately. It went on for more than an hour, and when I left the theater the students threw themselves at me and the other actors, shouting, âTheyâre killing your children!â
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