Duke Ellington & The Mexico City Massacre 1968
It was the evening of October 2; the sun was bright and the air felt fresh. The students had gathered in order to walk toward the Casco de Santo Tomás to continue the protests that fueled the student movement during the summer of 1968. My father and his friend were walking around the plaza that day selling small pieces of student propaganda, the revenue of which was used to support the movement. As they were walking, several speakers took the microphone to address the crowd, and one of them said, “Attention, we are surrounded by the army… there are [army] buses parked in the streets . . . in order to avoid provocation, we are ending this rally, and let’s disperse.” The rally continued and shortly after that, flare lights lit up the sky while a line of army soldiers appeared at the edge of the plaza and opened fire on the students. Those who were close to the avenue ran towards the building where the speakers were; however, after a few seconds, my father and his friend noticed that no one was falling. Instead of scattering wildly they slowed down to help some people in the crowd, asking them to be careful and keep moving. They noticed on the other side of the plaza a group of people that they had seen earlier in the evening. These men were muscular with an army-style haircut, but curiously wearing jackets with the university logo, a fashion not often sported by students at that time. More interesting, my father said, was that they had a white ribbon tied on one of their hands. They fired guns toward the army but seemed careful to show their white ribbon-wrapped hand first. My father and his friend continued running, but people were lying on the ground and they could not run anymore, so they went to one side of the plaza and entered a small building. As they entered, he remembers hallways full of people and a bunch of heads moving. All doors inside the building were closed and they couldn’t move forward. They made their way outside and encountered a classmate who was crying. A couple of soldiers were helping her and left her with them. It was then that he saw how the soldiers were mounting tripod-based machine guns, a development quickly followed by the loud bursts of bullets. They shot at and into the building, and different from the earlier shots, these sounds were followed by the distinct whistling noise of the bullets traveling through the air. It was then, of course, that people really started to fall.
In Mexico, the saying “dos de octubre no se olvida” (don’t forget October 2nd) resounds in the collective consciousness of the old and young alike, evoking the memory of the student massacre on that date in the plaza of Tlatelolco in Mexico City. Three days before, on September 28, and only a few blocks away, Duke Ellington—already known in Mexico as “El rey del jazz” (The King of Jazz)—inaugurated a series of concerts in the Palacio de Bellas Artes as part of the cultural programming to accompany the Olympic Games. These concerts were promoted by the Mexican government and sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, which partnered with the U.S. State Department to promote American music abroad as a tool of cultural diplomacy. As many among Mexico’s political elite attended the concert, tensions in Tlatelolco brewed,resulting in a clash between students and police three days later. I learned about both jazz and the Tlatelolco massacre from my father. He was a first-year student of medicine when the events took place. A self-identified Marxist and an avid jazz listener, my father in his younger years was both antimilitary and anti-American, someone with a general leftist political ideology who on one hand spent time in his early career as a fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C., and on the other denounced U.S. interventions in the world and its political influence in Mexican domestic affairs. I asked him once how he negotiated these mixed feelings about Mexico’s northern neighbor, in particular his liking of jazz music that, at least in the U.S., is considered a truly American art form. To my surprise, he replied: “Well, jazz is not music of the United States. Music of the U.S. is country music. Jazz is music from the black community in the U.S.”[1] His response illuminated the path for this research. Students during 1968 were subject to many political and cultural forces, different versions of leftist approaches, some moderate and some more radical. Much has been written about the student movement, the year 1968, and in general about the global sixties. Grand narratives around student movements have prevailed, yielding simplified or positivistic approaches to the subject in what Allier-Montaño describes as the “historical centrality” of the 1968 student movement.[2] Often these narratives and discourses are co-opted by a few prominent voices or by institutionalized versions. These grand narratives of unified -isms regarding the 1960s have failed to identify the nuances I describe in this essay regarding not only political orientations, but convergences of racialized discourses on both sides of the U.S.- Mexico Border. I aim to contribute to the many elements of what Susan Draper refers to as “constellations of freedom and democracy.” In her book, 1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy, Draper invites us to “blaze new paths through figures and voices that have been pushed to the margins, with the aim of configuring another kind of constellation that would encompass points that these other memories of continuation of ’68 made possible.”[3] Here I incorporate lengthy accounts of the events, not only to provide the reader with a sense of the time and the issues at stake but also to contribute to the reconfiguration of historical memory, one that incorporates figures pushed to the margins, participates in a field of struggle for conflicting modes of signifying the past, and interrupts and influences the present with a more expansive, singular past.[4] In doing so I examine how students such as my father reconciled their civil activism against U.S. interventionist policies with their attraction to some aspects of American popular culture; how the United States federal government tried to convey the idea of an inclusive and fair society by sending musicians who themselves were victims of social inequity; how the American Civil Rights movement connected with the Mexican Student Movement of 1968; and finally, how Mexico’s own racist heritage informed the reception of (mostly) African American musicians in Mexico. I argue that neither paradoxes nor seeming contradictions account for the fluidity of social activism on both sides of the border and its connections with playing and listening practices of jazz; rather I look at this social phenomenon as a type of what ethnologist Josh Kun calls an audiotopia, a musical space of differences where contradictions and conflicts don’t cancel each other out, a kind of identificatory contact zone…
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