Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the '68 Movement by George F. Flaherty (review)

Over the past twenty years, a major trend in Mexican historiography has been the gradual dismantling of the notion that the Partido Revolucionario Institucional's (PRI) seventy-year dictatorship was peaceful. Cultural, political and labor historians alike have repeatedly demonstrated that the party had to rely on localized forms of coercion to retain its political hegemony. Scholarship seeking to uncover the hidden violence of the dictatorship has shifted the focus away from the most infamous and visible instance of state-sponsored repression: The Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, which occurred ten days before the opening of the Summer Olympic Games, an international event that was supposed to showcase Mexico's modernity to the world.

George F. Flaherty's Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the '68 Movement returns the spotlight to this crucial event. In order to write a comprehensive history of the massacre, Flaherty contextualizes the movement within a larger narrative of state-sponsored control as the disconnect between the political elites and the general body politic started to grow. By placing the massacre within the larger context of the state remaking the capital in the 1960s, Flaherty emphasizes the ideas of distance and space, and uses them to consider why this disconnect occurred. These renovations were partially a result of being awarded the 1968 Olympic Games, but Flaherty argues that the government's main motivation behind these projects was to more effectively control the movements and bodies of Mexico City's residents. Thus, his study is one that combines political and urban history to provide a deeper explanation as to why and how the protests occurred in 1968.

Flaherty uses the hotel as a metaphor to illustrate his model for how modern authoritarian states interact with their citizens. Like hotel managers, the PRI treated Mexicans as guests who had to follow certain rules and were only allowed access to certain spaces, while others were off limits. Accordingly, Mexicans were expected to exercise their political will on a small and monitored stage. When guests started to chafe against these restrictions, the owners of hotel—the PRI in his metaphor—would punish them and attempt to force them back into spaces deemed acceptable. For the thousands of Mexicans that were forcibly displaced during the preparations for the 1968 Olympic Games, this was a physical reminder that they had no say in the decisions made by the state. For Flaherty, this disconnection between the government and its citizens was the main issue driving the protests that were ultimately shut down. Protesters wanted to reinvigorate their relationship with their government and forcibly retake control of their dwellings.

Flaherty's seven chapters are organized thematically, each chapter a self-contained essay pertaining to specific aspects he finds important in understanding why students protested in 1968. They move back and forth chronologically, since it is impossible to isolate an individual work of art or urban renovation without providing a deeper context. Flaherty believes this architecture reflects the multiple ways in which the '68 Movement and its narrators deployed novel ways of seeing and moving through the city. This creates the sense that his project is open-ended, just as the Tlatelolco massacre remains open to interpretation today.

The main contribution of Flaherty's book is his inclusion of a vast selection of non-traditional sources that he has collected. By using these sources to make his arguments, he taps into popular ideas that the '68 Movement, a title he used to describe everyone that participated in the various protests, was created to document the massacre. These range from testimonies pieced together written by protesters in the infamous Lecumberri prison (now the Archivo General de la Nación) in his opening chapter, to David Alfaro Siqueiros' public mural, March of Humanity on Earth and Toward the Cosmos, painted in 1964–71 (Chapter 5), and documentaries produced by film students (Chapter 6). Such sources are necessary because traditional archival materials surrounding...