Tlatelolco, 1968: student activities
Day 1:
We will start by examining the site of Tlatelolco via Google Earth, Google Maps, and Bing Maps. Once I've guided students through an overview of the site, students will be allowed to search for photo of the area. Students will be asked to find pictures of the church where Sahagún trained Aztec nobles as seminarians and conducted his ethnographic work, pictures of the former Foreign Ministry building, now a museum, and photos of the high rise housing complex that rings the square. Students will also be asked to identify Aztec ruins, including the stone pedestals of the famous tzompantli or Aztec skull racks. We will give students a few moments to explore online using a classroom set of laptops. I'll ask students to compare the stonework of the Aztec ruins with the stonework of the colonial church. (It's the same stonework—the church was built with indigenous labor using stone taken from the Tlatelolco temple complex.)
Finally, students will be asked to find the stela commemorating the fall of the Aztec Empire and the stela memorializing the demonstrators killed in 1968. We will discuss these inscriptions and students will be given the readings for the next day.
I have decided to include some readings in English—the students' need for detailed and nuanced information in some areas exceeds their linguistic capacity. We will not take class time for these, however; these they will read at home. As homework for Day One students will read Chapter 9 of John Ross' El Monstruo, "City of Dread and Redemption," 27 which deals with the events of 1968.
Day 2
Students will discuss the readings from the previous evening and will write summaries in Spanish of what they have read. Students will read excerpts of the 2006 government report on Mexico's dirty war dealing with the events at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. In groups, they'll compare the information contained in the official report with the information Ross conveys to ascertain how much the two reports coincide. Did John Ross' book and the 2006 report have sources in common, or did they reach their conclusions independently? Have students work in small groups. Let students use a graphic organizer such as a Venn diagram to process the information.
Day 3
Students will watch and discuss Rojo amancer, a dramatic adaptation of the events of October 2, 1968. Students will be asked to make note of and to be ready to discuss details they have encountered in the reading that appear in the film, and will also be asked to identify any discrepancies they see.
Days 4-6
Students will be assigned a collection of excerpts of oral histories of the Tlatelolco massacre taken from Elena Poniatowska's book La noche de Tlaltelolco. In small groups, students will take turns practicing these live as dramatic readings, making full use of body language and facial expression. Later, students will choose a testimony to record as a digital audio performance. In Spanish, students will journal on the difference between the two performances, the live full body performance and the digital voice only performance, and will discuss the different choices they had to make to convey meaning in the two different media.
On Day 6 the group will unravel the mystery of Sócrates Amado Campos Lemus. This student leader emerges as a tragic character through Poniatowska's 1971 interviews, but the 2006 report casts him in a different light. 28 Students may be asked to craft two different readings of the Poniatowska interviews with Sócrates: one, without the assumed knowledge of the findings of the 2006 report, and another assuming full knowledge of the whole story. Students will explain how they would perform the readings differently.
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