Rojo amanecer: the image problem of Tlatelolco 1968

Abstract

This text raises a discussion about the lack of vehicular images of the historical memory of the 1968 massacre at Tlatelolco. Fifty years after the massacre occurring on October 2, 1968 in Mexico City, there have been no reconstructions of identity-shaping visuals around this event, considered a turning point for the modern Mexican State. This is in contrast to the abundant imagery created around the Mexican Revolution, the founding event of Modern Mexico, or the splendor of modernization, handily characterized by the film industry during the Miguel Aleman presidency. Using as a case study the film Rojo Amanecer by Jorge Fons, written by Xavier Robles and Guadalupe Ortega, we can problematize this visual language as well as contextualize it as a fiction that, eventually, would contribute to the referential images of the event, while at once recognizing the images’ symbolic weight does not refer to immediate memory nor do they form part of a visual discourse of that October night. We believe this absence is due to the breakdown of the memory of the third generation after the event, a phenomenon that Marianne Hirsch has called postmemory, an analytical concept used to explain the intra- and transgenerational processes and barriers.