Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy by Susana Draper (review)

The year 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the student movements of 1968 in Mexico and elsewhere. But far from commemorating an event, the date draws our attention to the fact that the movement and its demand for greater freedom and democracy are not over. In 2012 the #YoSoy132 movement invoked the legacy of the great mobilization of the students in the 60s and denounced that the struggle had been fossilized and placed in a museum, manipulated by the media. And two years later, ’68 appeared again in the political imaginary, this time through the figure of Tlatelolco and the impunity of the crimes committed by the state in the forcible disappearance of 43 students of the Escuela Normal de Ayotzinapa. The literary critic and Princeton professor Susana Draper began writing her book, 1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy, when the #YoSoy132 movement sparked the hope of change in political cycles and, as she was finishing it, the Ayotzinapa crimes elicited a massive outcry and social unrest in Mexico and around the world. In this context, Draper chose to conceptualize 1968 as an effect and not as a single point of origin or fixed moment in history marking a crucial event. Appealing to the figure of the encounter as a light that flashes and crystallizes different memories of the movement, her project illuminates unexpected connections by tracing critical constellations between instants of collective freedom in the dialectics between the open past and the present.

A constellation is an imaginary trace, the drawing of lines between different flickering points in a “multiplicity of concepts, images, bodies, and memories” (x). Brief instants of encounter, these flickering points have no fixed or essential identity. A constellation only acquires its shape through the eyes of the observer who articulates the connections of a series of events that are not immanently linked and are not necessary moments in the development of history. Tracing a constellation is a voluntary act of willing to pass from singularities and experience to its narrativization and plural practices of writing, visualization and subjectivation. As a singular-plural notion, constellations—of freedom and democracy—can be read in Draper’s book at two levels: first, at the level of how the polyphony of voices in the 1968 movement in Mexico did not limit themselves to specific groups or territories, but rather followed a desire for social connectivity, interweaving many threads in the social fabric; and, second, in Draper’s own work as a critic whose task is generating critical constellations between works and figures from different decades that do not follow the pattern of dominant figures of memories and testimonies around which narratives of ’68 have usually been constructed. 1968 Mexico is not another account of the student movement nor an analysis or interpretation of its political implications or social effects. Draper’s interest does not lie in reconstructing the events to pile up yet another volume in the annals of Tlatelolco. Instead, she revisits certain debates, literary and philosophical texts, practices and creative exercises that have been shadowed by the conventional history that centers on the testimonies of the broadly recognized leaders denouncing the repression and silencing of critical voices. She is interested in tracing an alternate history of questions and reflections that became possible after ’68.

One of the most important features of 1968 Mexico that should not go unnoticed is that it puts forward the argument that philosophy and literary criticism can provide us with keywords that function as sites of reflection and interrogation of discursive practices that open or close meanings in politics, going beyond what she calls the “monopoly over meaning, over what can and cannot be said” (39). The power of words and images is to narrate the possibility of change and historicity of the present in dialogue with the past and the relationships of learning that we establish “between pasts and presents, times and places, which all of a sudden connect and generate critical constellations” (xiii). Resignifying and putting into...