The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans and Intangible Heritage

Content Objectives: Investigating Two Massacres, 448 Years Apart

We will use Mexico City as a proving ground for a performance based approach to history, culture and geography in the world language classroom. Elements of the unit are adaptable to any level, but it is designed with the intermediate and advanced Spanish classroom in mind. We wish to preserve the emotional engagement and immediacy by evoking modes of work, play, and performance familiar to the students. At the same time we wish to increase intellectual rigor and development of collaborative skills beyond what is normally encountered in "culture" lessons. Students must read, write, reflect, perform, and critically discuss the texts in question. Lessons will, to the extent appropriate, incorporate technology and digital literacy skills. Above all, we will engage students with the idea of "deep time," ¹ the past that is not forgotten, as Faulkner would say, because it is not past ².

We'll take the role of detectives and examine two mass killings within blocks of each other 448 years apart: the 1968 massacre of mostly university students at the Plaza of the Three Cultures at Tlaltelolco, and the Massacre of the Main Temple, or Toxcatl Massacre, a Spanish-led slaughter of Aztec priests and nobles in 1520. Were these mass murders calculated, rational actions, or did the cascading violence come from a breakdown of discipline, command and control? Were the events inevitable?

If we choose to view these incidents as scripted public performance, or as inevitable cyclical patterns of death, the parallels are chilling. At the Massacre of the Great Temple, the Spanish closed the off the exits to the courtyard of the Great Temple cut down the cream of the Aztec nobility and priesthood as they danced in the courtyard of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, turning a religious ceremony that normally entailed a handful of human sacrifices into a slaughter of thousands.

In 1968, government forces closed off the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, scene of the last stand of the Aztec Empire, where five to six thousand Mexicans had gathered to protest against the government. Troops attacked the demonstrators with tanks, machine gun fire, and helicopter-borne sharpshooters, but, according to a coroner's report the majority of victims died of bayonet wounds ³— by the blade, like the Aztecs felled by the Spanish in 1520 and 1521. Octavio Paz linked the Tlatelolco massacre not to the Spanish conquistadores but to the bloody rites practiced at the site in prehispanic times, calling the killings a "ritual sacrifice," saying, "They tried to terrorize the population using the same methods of human sacrifice as the Aztecs." ⁴ If we approach history like the "walls and floors" approach to archaeology prevalent in parts of South Europe, digging straight down to the floors and following them to the outlines of the building, ⁵ it's easy to see inexorable patterns of history, if we so wish. Careful historical detective work, carefully sifting through strata, may reveal something altogether different.

Students will present their summative interpretations of each unit as performances of primary source materials in Spanish. Through the course of their investigation of the Tlatelolco massacre they'll see one performance based on the work of investigators and will perform their own individual performances, dramatizing testimony collected by Elena Poniatowska. At the end of their investigation of the Massacre at the Main Temple and the Night of Sorrows segment students will select excerpts of testimonies and compose an ensemble performance piece to show their understanding and interpretation of the historical record. The ensemble pieces will reflect different emphases to illustrate for students the ways that historians derive different meanings from interpretations of the same source.

Cities, as Shanks and Pearson note, are multitemporal. ⁶ Cities that survive to maturity do so as a palimpsest, a parchment scraped off and rewritten over and over, leaving behind traces legible to the careful reader. The taxis of contemporary London, for example, run in places twenty feet above the old Roman roads. ⁷ Good archaeologists are detectives with trowels, carefully interrogating strata, layer by layer. ⁸

The historical record is layered as well. Students will excavate the layers of the historical record approach the testimonies in reverse historical order, like archaeologist/detectives. They will discover that, as in archaeology, layers of strata may be disturbed. Ruins may be bisected by entrenching work, subsequent road construction, or the site may be bulldozed outright. ⁹ In our textual evidence, some work that takes precedence chronologically in terms of production entered late into the historic record, and so was seen and understood in light of later accounts published earlier.

History, Intangible Culture, and Pains That Don't Go Away

When we talk of the intangible heritage of place, we like to talk about festivals and recipes, about dialects and patterns of life. Not all intangible heritage is pleasant, though. The patterns of interaction between social groups of unequal position are part of intangible heritage, too. Of all kinds of culture, this kind of culture is wholly the product of history but remains entrenched whether we recall the history or not, like—as I get older—the old injuries that I have forgotten but my back still remembers.

It's here a sense of deep time is especially important. When we look at the ferocity of the events of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, I think it's naïve to look at the makeup of the two groups in the crowd and think that the events of 1520 had nothing to do with them at all. The protestors were urban, Spanish speaking, and, in relative terms, advantaged; the Olympic Battalion were largely recently recruited from the ranks of rural indigenous youth. ¹⁰ Some of the protestors carried placards comparing the troopers to farm animals: "Veterinarian! Vaccinate your grenadier!" ¹¹ I don't believe in catharsis, payback, or chickens that come home to roost. I do believe in pains that just don't go away.

Watershed events like these present unique opportunities to study culture in the language classroom. I will issue a plea to teachers to handle the details with some sensitivity. Some of the details in the primary sources are graphic and may upset some students. We want the students to engage emotionally; we don't want to harm them.

The Tlatelolco Massacre, 1968: Ten Days to the Olympics

The market square at Tlatelolco was the heart of an Aztec city state eventually absorbed by the larger city of Tenochtitlán. The square and surrounding temple complex was the site of the emperor Cuatemoc's last stand against the Spanish, the site where Aztec rule was finally crushed on August 13, 1521 after an eighty four day siege. A stela in the former market square of Tlatelolco reads: "August 13, 1521/Heroically defended by Cuahtémoc/Tlaltelolco fell in the power of Hernán Cortés/Neither a triumph nor a defeat/it was the painful birth of the mestizo people/that is the Mexico of today." Today it is the Plaza of the three Cultures, flanked by Aztec temple ruins, a colonial church, high rise housing projects and the former offices of Mexico's Foreign Ministry, a building which now houses a museum commemorating the events of 1968.

The wave of youth unrest of 1968 came to Mexico City. A series of July street clashes between police and young protestors chafing under the authoritarian rule of the PRI escalated from rocks to Molotov cocktails to the burning of city buses. Hundreds of high school students barricaded themselves inside a secondary school affiliated with UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. ¹² President Díaz Ordaz took the unprecedented step of ordering the military to intervene.

After the army blasted its way into the school with a bazooka on July 29, 1968, popular support swelled. ¹³ Subsequent marches saw up to half a million demonstrators. On September 1, Díaz Ordaz issued a threat to use the armed forces to suppress the marchers, ¹⁴ but September 13 saw a silent march of 200,000 to 400,000 demonstrators. ¹⁵

Mexico City was not the only city facing youth protest that summer, but it was the only city about to host the first Olympics in the developing world and the first Olympics in a Spanish speaking country. There was a real concern the protests could disrupt the Olympics. U.S. officials met with the Mexican president. The Olympic chief informed Díaz Ordaz the Olympics could be cancelled if the protests continued. Olympic Battalion swept university campuses for dissidents. By the end of September, the bulk of the student leadership of the protest movement was in custody. ¹⁶

On October 2, ten days before the Olympics were to begin, the last holdouts of the student movement rallied in the Plaza of the Three Cultures at Tlatelolco. The protest only attracted 5,000 to 6,000 protestors, outmatched by 8,000 troops and police. According to Sergio Aguayo, author of a book on the events, Díaz Ordaz had a proven strategy for suppressing protest: instigate violence, but only enough violence to justify a decisive crackdown. He stationed sharpshooters from the presidential bodyguard to fire on and provoke the Olympic Battalion, who were under orders not to shoot. He would accept injuries or a few deaths, but hadn't placed an order for a slaughter. ¹⁷

Violence is unpredictable. At 6:10 PM, a helicopter circling overhead dropped two flares—the signal for the snipers. One of the first wounded was the general of a paratrooper battalion. Pandemonium broke loose. Counting the exact number of dead is difficult; most of the bodies were incinerated at the camp where thousands of demonstrators were detained. According to Ross, the best count is 325 dead. ¹⁸

The Toxcatl Massacre, 1520: In Cold Blood, or "Out of His Head"?

In the spring of 1520, a band of mostly Spanish soldiers of fortune and their Tlaxcaltec allies had been living since November in the palace of Emperor Montezuma II in Tenochtitlán. The situation was an uneasy one. Before coming to Tenochtitlán, the Spanish had gone to a neighboring city, Cholula, an Aztec ally, under a pretense of peace. Having invited the populace to assemble in the main plaza, the Spanish stationed guards at the exits and slaughtered the Chololtecs wholesale. The massacre may have been a preemptive move to intimidate possible enemies, or, as Ross Hussig argues, may have been a coup orchestrated by Cortés' Tlaxcaltec allies. ^{1 9}

The Spanish held the emperor hostage, but their tiny force was at the mercy of a city of 200,000 people in a metropolitan area that held from one to over two and a half million people. The Tlaxcaltecs had warned the Spanish that the Aztecs would sacrifice and eat them. Tlaxcala supported the Spanish against the rival Aztecs, but could withdraw their support at any time. Then, Cortés received word that the Spanish governor of Cuba had sent a vastly superior force under Pánfilo Narváez to arrest him on charges of treason.

Cortés, to save his head, had not choice but to confront the Spanish force on the coast. Taking the bulk of his troops, he left his captain Pedro de Alvarado in charge of a garrison of eighty soldiers to hold the palace. Cortés easily overthrew Narváez—again, through deceit—and appeared to be in a strong position. He even persuaded the army sent to arrest him to join his own forces.

However, things went badly back at Tenochtitlán. The Aztecs had asked Alvarado permission to celebrate the festival of Toxcatl and he had assented. When all the nobles, priests, and elite warriors were assembled and unarmed, and the dancing and singing in the courtyard of the Main Temple neared a fever pitch, Alvarado and his men sealed off all the exits and slew the assembled celebrants, eight to ten thousand of them. Cortés and his men returned to find the Spanish garrison besieged. They ended up fleeing the city in a disastrous running battle on June 30, losing over one thousand Tlaxcaltec allies, 860 Spanish soldiers, and five Spanish women. ^{2 0} Why had Alvarado done something so rash? Some said gold; some said fear of a plot. Ross Hassig believes it was a move to preemptively liquidate the leadership of the highly professional Aztec army. ^{2 1} Cortés' secretary speculated it was a plot motivated by greed for the gold ornaments of the dancers, but noted that others say he was told the Aztecs were planning a surprise attack. He leaves open the possibility that Alvarado may have been simply "out of his head." ²²