Women Guerrilla Fighters of the Mexican Dirty War

At the very top of the photo you can see the man climbing up.

Mexico City’s Anthropology Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and Zoo are all located within walking distance of one another in a tree-covered area of the capital. Yesterday, Mexico City native Salvador Castañeda took me me to visit the Anthropology and Modern Art Museums, and then showed me around a bit of the Coyoacán district – an area near the university. Also, I learned the Mexican slang word órale, meaning “wow!”

Papantla dancers (or flyers) were performing outside the Anthropology Museum when we arrived. Four men in traditional costumes climbed to the top of a 90-foot pole, tied their feet to one end of a rope that was attached to the pole, and hung upside-down while they were spun in the air. A fifth stood at the top of the pole playing a drum. The performance is a pre-Hispanic tradition that originated when the indigenous Totonaca peoples wished to call upon their gods to send them rain. Skip to 0:50 in this video to see how it happens:

The Museum of Modern Art is relatively small, with no more than about 4 or 5 exhibit rooms, but the art rotates frequently. The Neomexicanismos exhibit seemed to hold the museum’s most “modern” or recent works, including:

A picture taken at the Zocalo metro stop in Mexico City by photographer Francisco Mata Rosas.

A close-up of a self portrait by highly regarded Mexican artist Julio Galán.

Las dos Fridas by Frida Kahlo at the Modern Art Museum.

Upstairs were some slightly older works by world renowned artists including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Interestingly, I’ve heard a lot of skepticism about Frida Kahlo’s work here – the accusation that her art was not excellent enough to deserve the type of popular attention it has received or, if she is to receive that kind of attention, then many other lesser known artists ought to as well. Frida Kahlo hype certainly runs high in the States.

The anthropology museum, by contrast with the modern art one, was huge. After entering a main hall, the museum opens up into an outdoor plaza with exhibit buildings on all sides. In a park-like area outside one of these buildings, there is a pseudo-tropical forest area with reconstructed ruins.

Salvador in front of one of the pre-Hispanic building replicas.

It really did feel like a rainforest.

A bit of a drive from the two museums, Coyoacán is a young and lively neighborhood. There’s a central building that’s something like a “town hall,” a church, a park, a kiosk, many restaurants, and an indoor artisans’ market.

Coyoacán's town hall - or a space similar to a town hall anyway.

Salvador and the kiosk.

The glass wall of a restaurant next to the plaza showed me what a tourist I am.

Tuesday was my first truly touristy day. We took the Mexico City metro from Revolución, near La Casa, to the Tlatelolco stop a few blocks away from La Plaza de Las Tres Culturas. This plaza was the site of one of the defining moments of the Mexican Dirty War: the Tlatelolco massacre of October 2nd, 1968.

Professor Gómez and I in front of the Tlatelolco museum.

1968 was the year of Mexico’s first Olympic Games. It was also the year that citizen unrest, and especially student protests, reached new levels in Mexico City. Increasing economic stratification and political repression had angered many workers and university students. The policies of PRI president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz were coming under popular attack. In an attempt to hide his country’s divisions from the international community, Díaz Ordaz decided to take aggressive steps to silence protesters.

Tlatelolco is not located at the heart of Mexico City nor is it considered a particularly dangerous neighborhood. A cathedral sits on the plaza and apartment buildings line one side. Opposite the apartment towers, on the far side of the plaza, sit ancient Aztec ruins that have been excavated and opened to tourists. It came as a great shock to residents and peaceful protesters when, on October 2nd in the year of Mexico City’s Olympic Games, the Mexican military opened fire upon what had nearly always been a safe and relatively quiet section of the city.

Professor Gómez in front of the Aztec ruins. The ruins sit below the level of the plaza in an excavation site.

Professor Gómez and a gentleman who has lived at the Tlatelolco apartments long enough to remember the massacre - '68 wasn't that long ago.

Evidence uncovered since the massacre suggests the following story: the PRI regime wished to send a strong message to political dissidents that activism against the government would not be tolerated, and thus planned the Tlatelolco massacre meticulously. Paramilitary forces dressed as civilians and mingled with the crowd, only recognizable to one another by the white bandanas they wore on their hands and arms. When they received a signal, these forces started firing at the army, making it appear as though the protest had turned violent. The army, acting now in “self-defense,” charged the plaza, killing bystanders and protesters alike. The number of dead remains highly contested and it is likely that the Mexican government has suppressed evidence that might yield an answer. Although the massacre’s organizers placed cameras at several key points around the plaza prior to October 2nd, those tapes have never been released and it remains a mystery why the cameras were installed at all. Although the government has estimated 20-30 deaths, others have estimated hundreds. It is difficult to know. A large, beautiful museum located next to the plaza now commemorates the tragedy with film and photo displays of the period as well as artistic representations of how the massacre unfolded. A stone monument on the plaza also recognizes the dead of Tlatelolco.

This is the apartment balcony where student leaders would have stood to make their speeches for the rally of October 2nd, 1968. This is also a nice view of the cathedral from the apartment towers.

A view of the plaza from one of its adjoining apartment towers. The ruins sit in the grassy area on the far side, and the cathedral to the left. Out of the camera frame, but also to the left, sits the Tlatelolco museum.

Ex-guerrilla fighters Alma Gómez and Lourdes Quiñones await Astrid Hadad's performance at El Vicio.

Astrid Hadad performs at El Vicio in one of her famously showy costumes.

The guerrilla women arrived at La Casa de Los Amigos the afternoon of Friday, July 15th and immediately began filmed interviews and discussions about their experiences in the Mexican Dirty War. By the following evening, Saturday at 9PM, most conference participants were ready to relax and enjoy the company of their old friends in a more casual venue. That night, everyone piled into two vans that brought us across the city to El Vicio, or “The Vice,” a performance space and bar where highly acclaimed Mexican artist Astrid Hadad was scheduled to sing.

With about 50-60 chairs arranged around a small stage, El Vicio’s atmosphere was intimate, close, and – once the performance began and a stagehand starting piping fake smoke onto the stage at regular intervals – a bit hazy. A live band sat immediately in front of the audience to the right of the stage, and waitresses served guests at narrow tables in front of their seats.

Astrid Hadad is not just a singer, and neither is she ever referred to as strictly an actress or a comedian. She blends song, dance, satire, and showy costumes to produce a humorously outrageous critique of Mexico’s politics and its sexist culture. Far from being a popular icon or a mainstream figure, Hadad has garnered a following among audiences closer to Mexico’s political and cultural outskirts.

Astrid Hadad dancing and singing at El Vicio

Before Hadad took the stage, a comedian in a conservative, black dress and grey wig opened the show, admonishing audience members for their ‘liberal’ behaviors. To the increasing laughter of onlookers, she picked out individuals from the crowd, demanding to know why they were even attending a performance at a place like El Vicio. When Professor Gomez was called upon and explained her research about the Dirty War, the comedian declared the whole conflict una leyenda urbana or “urban legend” and the audience, including the guerrilla women, burst into laughter. Sadly, the woman’s parody of a conservative political view on the Dirty War all too closely resembles the Mexican government’s official line on the issue: that is, a refusal to acknowledge state violence committed during the period, a refusal that, in some sense, amounts to a denial that the conflict ever occurred.

Hadad’s show opened with a video recording of El Calcetín, a song that comically suggests Mexican machismo culture treats women like socks, or as objects to be disposed of once they’ve been worn out.

Her live performances included Altares de plata pura, in which she sings about the Spanish greed for silver, and the violence Europeans perpetrated against indigenous Latin Americans in order to obtain it. Her costume at first appears to be a temple of silver, but she opens it to reveal a bleeding heart and skeletons.

She also proposes a rethinking of Malinche, the young indigenous woman who served as the translator of Hernan Cortés and thus, according to the popular view, helped Europeans conquer Latin America. The song was titled Yo la mala, yo Malinche.

At the end of her performance, Hadad made a shout-out to the guerrilleras in the audience, and on the way home the women noted with glee that she had not said ex-guerrilleras, but rather referred to them as guerrilla fighters of the present.