THINKING BACK TO THE STUDENT REVOLT

...It is absolutely essential for any attempt at genuine reform in Mexico...

...From the very beginning the students demonstrated a remarkable talent for political action...

...The end of the 17th century was a relatively felicitous era in our country's history...

...This is why the summons to "democratize" the country immediately gained the support of the majority of the population belonging to the urban sector...

...uninterrupted economic development despite a high rate of population growth...

...The most resounding tribute paid us was that by President Kennedy, who unhesitatingly proclaimed that the Mexican regime was a model for all of Latin America...

...this revolt, however, was not really a revolutionary act, but an instinctive explosion...

...ED...

...The military attack on them was not only a political act...

...Our history is as rife with caudillos as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico are infested with sharks...

...In reality, our poor Revolution had long since been the victim of a twofold takeover: it had been co-opted politically by the official government Party, a bureaucracy that is similar in more than one respect to the Communist bureaucracies of Eastern Europe, and it had been co-opted economically and socially by a financial oligarchy that had intimate ties to huge American corporations...

...it also assumed the quasi-religious form of chastisement from , on high...

...I do not know, however, whether anyone has noted one thing that to me is the most characteristic feature of this entire chapter in our history...

...And the 150 OCTAVIO PAZ Indians: "Death to the Spaniards who are eating up our corn...

...Their acts were real...

...Divine vengeance...

...But it is that very fact which betrays the major difference between the disturbances of 1692 and those of 1968: whereas the principles on which colonial society was based could provide no answer to the crisis of 1692, the principles on which present-day Mexican society is founded are capable of providing, if not a solution, at least the beginning of a 152 OCTAVIO PAZ solution, to our problems...

...In 1692 a shortage of corn caused an uprising among the common people—Indians, mestizos, and even impoverished creoles—and for the first time in its colonial history Mexico City was the scene of serious disturbances as the poorer classes rioted in the streets...

...A deep dissatisfaction in the face of the paralysis of the political system that had taken root after the violent phase of the Mexican Revolution had to come to an end (the PRI was founded in 1929...

...The golden dream of the Viceroyalty ended in a sudden blaze of fire...

...The attitude of the Mexican government was even more disconcerting—and even less forgivable...

...the wave of hope and generous idealism generated by these youngsters breaks against the wall of sheer power, and the government unleashes its murderous forces of violence: the story ends in a bloodbath...

...no city on the New Continent, "including those in the United States, possesses scientific centers as large as those in Mexico...

...Democratization" is far from being the final solution, naturally, but it is the right path to follow in order to examine our problems in public, discuss them, propose solutions to them, and organize ourselves politically so as to ensure that these solutions are effectively implemented...

...This is the real explanation of the terrible violence visited upon the students...

...the birth of a sizable middle class...

...It can be traced back to a kind of petrification of the public image of the head of the nation, who ceases to be a mere man and becomes an idol to be worshiped...

...Unlike the Hispanic and Latin-American pattern of dictatorship by caudillos, Mexican authoritarianism is legalistic, and the roots of this legalism are religious in nature...

...Nor does it have the fantastic self-consistency of an imaginary reality such as we find in works of fiction...

...and finally, as in the 17th century, an overall atmosphere of peace and calm, as though each and every sector of the population were in perfect agreement, from labor leaders to bankers and members of the higher echelons of the institutionalized Revolution to the procounsuls of the big international corporations...

...This attitude has profound historical roots...

...But the crisis within the Mexico that is modern and developed assumed even more dramatic and crucial proportions when the student movement bared what lay concealed behind it: the other Mexico, the Mexico in rags and tatters, the millions of desperately poor peasants and the masses of the underemployed who emigrate to the cities and become the new nomads of our day—nomads wandering about the urban desert...

...If it does so, it will regain its political imagination...

...What these events represent is the contradictory reality of history— the most puzzling and the most elusive reality of all...

...The record of the Mexican Student Movement of 1968 tells a story of buoyant collective fervor that soon takes on darker overtones...

...As for the right: for a long time now the Mexican bourgeoisie has had no ideas—only self-interests...

...their interpretations were imaginary...

...Those groups that are eager for change in Mexico should begin by taking steps in the direction of their own democratization, that is to say, making free criticism and debate the practice within their own organizations...

...the modest and moderate nature of the students' demands, which might be summed up in the word democratization, a heartfelt aspiration of the Mexican people ever since 1910— all of this was evidence both of the students' maturity and of their instinctive political wisdom...

...This society nonetheless turned out to be more fragile than the monuments it erected...

...And what is more: they should examine their own consciences and criticize their own attitudes and ideologies...

...But while these virtues and talents were quite obvious on the tactical level, they seem to evaporate from the moment that we hear the students begin to ponder the perspectives that lie ahead for the movement, its goals, and its import within the twofold context of the history of Mexico and the current world situation...

...but they thereby failed to see the difference in objectives and tactics and above all the different class structures involved in the two movements, and hence did not appreciate the entirely different significance of these two episodes...

...Almost all historians regard these riots of the year 1692 as a forerunner of the battles for independence a hundred years later...

...To communicate with others, we must first learn to communicate with ourselves...

...Only when it is answered will the country recover its confidence in its leaders and in its institutions...

...These principles borrowed from abroad were those of the Enlightenment as they had taken shape in the two revolutions that served as a model for the independence movements in Spanish America: the French and American Revolutions...

...The heirs of our revolutionaries had at last received Washington's benediction...

...The riots in Mexico City, however, revealed a rift that ran through the very heart of Mexican society...

...The following essay forms the bulk of the Introduction Octavio Paz, the distinguished Mexican poet and essayist, has written for Elena Poniatowska's Massacre in Mexico, a book to be published this spring by Richard Seaver/Viking, copyright° 1975 by the Viking Press, Inc...

...As in 1692—and again for very different reasons—it was political demands that became the prime concern...

...the increased number of jobholders and the rise in the standard of living of the working class...

...In place of tactical and strategic realism, what we find at this juncture are 148 empty formulas, rigid programs, dogmatic oversimplifications, vacuous high-flown phrases and slogans...

...It proved to be unbelievably blind and deaf...

...Once the authorities had recovered from their initial shock, they unleashed pitiless forces of repression that cast a dark shadow over the waning years of the 17th century in Mexico...

...The intellectual regeneration of the left will be possible only if it sets aside many of its ironclad formulas and humbly listens to what Mexico is really saying— what our past history and our present are saying...

...It is yet another expression of the machismo, and above all of the pre-eminence of the father in the Mexican family and in Mexican society...

...or as many beautiful buildings, which would not look at all out of place in the most elegant streets of Paris, Berlin, or Saint Petersburg...

...There was an irreconcilable contradiction between the Catholic-monarchic universalism and the particularism of the Indians and mestizos who had risen up in rebellion...

...their insistence on holding a public dialogue with the government, in a country accustomed to wheeling and dealing between various power figures behind the scenes and secret string-pulling by corrupt, conniving leaders in high government circles...

...Hey, you sisters...

...Doubtless the poverty of our scientific and philosophical tradition has the same origin as our shallow democratic tradition...

...In 1968 the Mexican political system was plunged into crisis...

...in its glaring light colonial society discovered its other half, its hidden face: an Indian, mestizo face, an angry, bloodspattered face...

...And exhorting each other to bravely enter the fray, since there was no Cortez on the scene this time to conquer them, they stormed into the plaza to join the others and throw rocks...

...The theatrical drama that they were writing in the pages of history was not the same one that they were reading...

...Creole society saw its own splendor and solidity reflected in its churches and palaces: gold altars and gilded salons, heavy cement foundations, and walls of stone...

...But it represented a posthumuous triumph for the Mexican Revolution...

...Around 1950 the groups holding the reins of power in the economic and political sphere—including the majority of technicians and many intellectuals—began to feel a certain sense of self-satisfaction about the progress that had been made since the consolidation of the post-Revolutionary regime (1930): political *The difficulty that the Hispanic and Lusitanian countries have experienced and are continuing to experience in their effort to adopt democratic principles and adapt them to their own situation ought to be the central concern of historical and social studies in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal...

...Thanks to the remarkable development of agriculture, and even more particularly of mining, a class of wealthy "creoles" (that is to say, descendents of Spaniards who had been born in Mexico) had come into being and was flourishing...

...Their immediate discovery of direct democracy as a method of bringing new life to the movement while at the same time keeping it in close touch with its primordial source, the Mexican people as a whole...

...In their eyes, acknowledging the mere existence of the student movement would have been tantamount to self-betrayal...

...An intellectual paralysis has overtaken the Mexican left, at present the prisoner of simplistic formulas and an authoritarian ideology that is even more pernicious than the bureaucratic sclerosis of the PRI and the system that concentrates political power in the hands of a president who is a mere party appointee...

...In 1690, creole society saw itself reflected in its baroque palaces, its convents, and its private schools...

...Colonial society suddenly found itself trapped in a blind alley: there was no solution available within the religious, philosophical, and political constructs that served as its foundation...

...Foreigners were equally impressed by the city, and even as late as at the dawn of the 19th century Baron Alexander von Humboldt wrote...

...For all these reasons, the "democratization" that the students were seeking in 1968 continues to be a legitimate demand and a pressing task...

...There is a great deal of talk about our economic underdevelopment, and in recent years this underdevelopment and our dependence have been used as convenient excuses for all our failings and shortcomings...

...If not, will our country be obliged to wait, as in 1692, for yet another century...

...Democracy may be roughly defined as that free arena in which criticism takes place...

...This act of bold defiance took the government by surprise, for it was not accustomed to seeing its authority challenged...

...The most essential criterion is the degree of development of intellectual and political criticism...

...But both its blindness and its deafness stemmed from its inability to face up to what was happening...

...It is they who are the past, the present, and the future of Mexico...

...Heretofore, civil disturbances had been limited to local rebellions in the provinces, and the uprisings in the north were seditious acts by tribes not yet subjugated, not yet evangelized and converted to Christianity...

...The Institutional Revolutionary party is not a majority political party: it is Unanimity itself...

...Mexicans have been asking themselves this question since October 1968...

...So what are these Spaniards doing here anyway...

...Unlike the uprising in 1692, it was not a movement of the lower classes but of students, the middle class, and intellectual groups...

...but at the same time it would be an untruth to maintain that they are all that is required...

...In 1968 this apparent consensus fell to pieces, and the other face of Mexico was suddenly revealed: a generation of angry young men and women and a middle class bitterly opposed to the political system that had ruled the country for 40 years...

...its origins lie in the country's Aztec and colonial past...

...It was as though the Mexico of 1968 were a metaphor of the Paris Commune or the attack on the Winter Palace: Mexico was Mexico, and yet also another time and another place—another reality...

...In the case of the events of 1968, how can we help but be reminded of the so-called Disturbances of 1692...

...There are hosts of arrogant theologians and stubborn fanatics among us: their dogmas are as resistant to change as stone...

...But the Mexican working class failed to snatch up the torch held out to them: it proved as indifferent as the working classes in the countries of the West and in the United States to similar appeals and similar hopes of changing the system...

...THINKING BACK TO THE STUDENT REVOLT 151 stability...

...While Spain was falling into a more and more profound political and social torpor that was to last for nearly two centuries, New Spain was prospering...

...Why...

...Almost all these young people thought that they were participating in a movement that in reality was quite different from the one that they were actually participating in...

...Another world had been built upon its ruins: those rebelling against the Viceroy shouted their protests in Spanish, and worshiped the same God as their oppressors...

...By so doing, we will not, of course, find the answer to all our questions...

...An ambitious, enterprising, devoutly religious class eager to flaunt its prosperity: thanks to its generous contributions, splendid civic and religious buildings were erected, lining the streets of every city in the country...

...There are unquestionably certain similarities between the disturbances in Mexico in 1968 and those in 1692...

...This is our country, isn't it...

...A return to the world antedating the Spanish Conquest was impossible: it had been completely destroyed, along with its princes and its priests, its gods and its pyramids...

...These events really happened, but their reality does not have the same texture as everyday reality...

...The creation of a democratic tradition in Mexico is just as important and just as urgent a problem as economic development and the struggle to achieve genuine equality...

...Hordes of men came rushing down that street where I was standing (and down all the others that led into the public squares...

...None of the principles, neither of the two universalisms—the Spanish Empire and Roman Catholicism—that had served as the cornerstone of colonial society could serve as a principle of reform...

...The modernity of a country cannot be measured solely, or even primarily, in terms of the number of factories and machines it possesses...

...Exemplary punishment...

...and a deep dissatisfaction as well at the turn taken by the social program of the revolutionaries, which had degenerated into a policy of "development" that had benefited only a small minority...

...Five years have since gone by, and we still have not succeeded in creating an independent democratic movement that can offer any real solutions for the enormous problems confronting our country...

...There was no lack of praise of our country on the part of foreigners...

...Or to put it more precisely: the solution lay not within but without the ideology of New Spain...

...The attitude of the student leaders and that of the government, for instance—to cite just two examples...

...A number of them were persuaded that there was a direct connection between the railway workers' movement in 1958 and their own movement ten years later...

...What were the reasons behind this massacre...

...The Spaniards had unsheathed their swords, but they stopped in their tracks for the same reason that kept me standing there as though rooted, to the spot: because the blacks, the mulattos, and all the raggle-taggle plebes were shouting: "Death to the Viceroy and all his henchmen...

...The truth of the matter is that the primary beneficiary of the events of 1968, and very nearly the only beneficiary, has been the regime itself, which in the last few years has embarked upon a program of reforms aimed at liberalizing it...

...It is not surprising that the inhabitants of New Spain should regard Mexico City as "the head and capital of the American continent," as Singuenza y Gongora himself described it, and call it, out of a sense of pride not unlike that of Bostonians a century and a half later, "the new Rome...

...In a word, in the Mexico of 1968, men once again made history with their eyes blindfolded...

...Translated by HELEN R. LANE THINKING BACK TO THE STUDENT REVOLT 153...

...As with all historical events, the story of what took place in 1968 in Mexico is a tangled web of ambiguous facts and enigmatic meanings...

...But this has not been the case at all, and however incredible it may seem, we still do not know why democratic institutions have not proved viable in the majority of our countries...

...But since the world of New Spain is the immediate antecedent of the world we live in today, our colonial past enables us to establish certain THINKING BACK TO THE STUDENT REVOLT 149 parallels with our present...

...This colonial culture reached its apogee in the second half of the 17th century, and among the many remarkable talents it produced were two outstanding figures: Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a poetess whose genius is recognized the world over, and the historian and mathematician Carlos de Singuenza y Gbngora...

...As the uprising in 1692, the 1968 movement lacked any sort of precisely defined ideology...

...The students were seeking a public dialogue with those in power, and these powers responded with the sort of violence that silences every last voice raised in protest...

...The rioting had turned into something more than a protest against the scarcity of corn and taken on subversive political overtones...

...It would be morally wrong to ignore these reforms or minimize their importance...

...the Indian women shouted to each other in their own tongue, "let's join in this battle with happy hearts, and God willing, we'll be rid of the Spaniards, so it doesn't matter at all if we die without making a last confession...

...But criticism of others must be accompanied by self-criticism...

...It would be unfair, however, to compare the baroque art of the 17th century, which even in its most deliriously extravagant flights of fancy was an exquisite art, with the megalomaniacal style of post-Revolutionary Mexico, conceived and executed in the very best tradition of Stalinist art...

...it was simply that they refused to see or to listen...

...The similarities between these two chapters in our history are, as we shall see, no less significant than their differences...

...We have proved incapable of drawing up a coherent and viable program of reforms and of creating a national organization...

...And only then will it recover its self-confidence...

...It was not that our government officials were blind and deaf...

...The uprising of 1692 was a rebellion against the power of the Viceroy and Spanish domination...

...For the most part, peace reigned throughout this immense territory, with only sporadic disturbances in the provinces and occasional uprisings by brave Indians in the far north of the country, which was still not completely under the control of the authorities in the capital...

...No, the real remedy is not to be found in a reform from the top downward, but rather from the bottom upward, a reform strongly backed by an independent popular movement...

...The spontaneous and healthy negation of 1968 has not been followed by any kind of affirmation...

...The Mexican political system is founded on a single implicit, immutable belief: the President of the Mexican Republic and the official government Party are the incarnation of the whole of Mexico...

...Others were quite certain that the middle-class student movement would be followed by worker and peasant movements: history as a relay race...

...The people raided the storehouses, poured into the main square of the city, burned the official archives, and threatened to set fire to the very seat of Spanish colonial power, the Viceroy's palace...

...It would be fruitless to study this revolt in depth in the hope of discovering any sort of idea on the part of these rebels as to what Mexican society should be like once the power of the Viceroyalty had been done away with...

...in 1960, the post-Revolutionary society saw its image in its factories, its ranches, its Hollywoodstyle mansions, and its colossal monuments commemorating glorious Revolutionary victories and Revolutionary heroes...

...Its negation contained no element of affirmation...

...In both cases there was a sudden awakening from a dream, from the illusion of genuine prosperity and social harmony...

...impressive completed public-works projects...

...I do not deny that underdevelopment and dependence do indeed exist in our countries, but I also note that very few people have troubled to ponder the question as to whether or not there is any relation between this underdevelopment and our political life...

...I have always considered it necessary to look back to our colonial history in order to have even a partial understanding of the Mexico of today...

...Yet another century was to go by before Mexicans would begin a slow, hesitant, timid search for the principles of another sort of universalism and attempt to apply these principles to our reality—with very little success, moreover...

...The President is not only the highest political authority: he is the incarnation of all of Mexican history, Power itself in the form of a magic substance passed on from generation to generation in unbroken succession, from the first Tlaotoni down through the Spanish viceroys to each president as he takes office...

...Accustomed as they are to delivering only monologues, intoxicated by a lofty rhetoric that envelops them like a cloud, our presidents and leaders find it well-nigh impossible to believe that aspirations and opinions that are different from their own even exist...

...As in 1692, though for different reasons, it was a direct expression of the general dissatisfaction of the country as a whole...

...What must be done is to create an alternative altogether different from the PRI, something that thus far the traditional opposition parties in our country have been unable to accomplish...

...The morality of a wrathful God the Father Almighty...

...Those who are impatient must be reminded what development in the form of a sort of forced march imposed on a people by bureaucratic socialism has meant in the past and continues to mean today: such artificially speeded-up development has been achieved only at the cost of immeasurable physical suffering and moral degradation...

...The testimony of Singuenza y Gongora, who witnessed these disturbances, is as impressive as Elena Poniatowska's...

...The disturbances of 1968 suddenly brought to light the deep split within that area of Mexican society that might be described as the developed sector, within that predominantly urban sector, that is to say, which includes almost half the population of the country and in the last few decades has undergone a more and more rapid progress of modernization...