Art and Social Movements: Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán

The 1968 Mexican student movement continues to inspire analysis in history and in the social sciences, whether scholars examine it in terms of gender, the rise of the Right, the middle class and its politics, music, or the political implications of the uprising. The Mexican Olympic Committee hoped to introduce the world to its country’s art and culture; it never planned on hosting its global fiesta in the midst of a social protest that ultimately challenged the establishment, whether it was political, cultural, economic, literary, or artistic. The student movement, of course, was not planned: young people across the Federal District of Mexico City did not come together years or even months prior to the games to plan a strike concurrent with the Olympics. The strike was a short- lived contingency of a revolutionary narrative that the ruling elites constructed in the wake of the Mexican Revolution in which all...