La noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de historia oral (Massacre in Mexico) » (2nd Edition)

Elena Poniatowska (México, 1933) es, sin lugar a dudas, la más importante escritora mexicana. Como narradora, ha abierto caminos nuevos y explorado temas de los que nadie hablaba. Así ocurre en Hasta no verte Jes7uacute;s mío, una voz distinta en nuestra historia contemporánea; en Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, probable inicio del boom de Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo, y más tarde en su magistral novela, Tinísima, Premio Mazatlá:n 1993. Ningún cronista ha tenido mayor influencia en el México posterior a 1968. La noche de Tlatelolco la consagró a los ojos del público tanto por su sensibilidad cuanto por su valentía.

During the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, 10,000 students gathered in a residential area called Tlatelolco to peacefully protest their nation's one-party government and lack of political freedom. In response, the police and the military cold-bloodedly shot and bayoneted to death an estimated 325 unarmed Mexican youths. Now available in paper is Elena Poniatowska's gripping account of the Tlatelolco tragedy, which Publishers Weekly claimed "makes the campus killings at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 pale by comparison." "This is a story that has not been effectively told before," said Kirkus Reviews. "Call it the grito of Tlatelolco, a cry of protest and the subjective manifesto of Mexico's suppressed, potentially explosive, middle-class dissenters." In this heartbreaking chronicle, Elena Poniatowska has assembled a montage of testimony drawn over a three-year period from eyewitness accounts by surviving students, parents, journalists, professors, priests, police, soldiers, and bystanders to re-create the chaotic optimism of the demonstrations, as well as the terror and shock of the massacre. Massacre in Mexico remains a critical source for examining the collective consciousness of Mexico. As Library Journal so aptly stated, "While the 'Tlatelolco Massacre' is the central theme of this study, the larger tragedy is reflected, and we see a nation whose government resorts to demagoguery rather than constructive action while it maintains and protects the privileged position of the new 'revolutionary' elite." Octavio Paz's incisive introduction underscores the inability of the Mexican government to deal with the socio-economic realities of the Mexican nation. Students and scholars of Mexican culture, historians, sociologists, and others who seek to interpret aspects of that country's national reality will find this book to be invaluable.

Publishers Weekly

Poniatowska reports on the massacre of 325 unarmed Mexican students who were peacefully protesting police repression one week prior to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. PW called this ``heartbreaking. . . . A massive chronicle that builds to the night of the Tlatelolco massacre in an accumulation of skillfully crosscut eyewitness accounts.'' Photos. (Dec.)