From Publishers Weekly
Poniatowska reports on the massacre of 325 unarmed Mexican students who were peacefully protesting police repression one week prior to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. PW called this ``heartbreaking. . . . A massive chronicle that builds to the night of the Tlatelolco massacre in an accumulation of skillfully crosscut eyewitness accounts.'' Photos. Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Spanish

FROM THE PUBLISHER

During the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, 10,000 students gathered in a residential area called Tlatelolco to peacefully protest their nation's one-party government and lack of political freedom. In response, the police and the military cold-bloodedly shot and bayoneted to death an estimated 325 unarmed Mexican youths. Now available in paper is Elena Poniatowska's gripping account of the Tlatelolco tragedy, which Publishers Weekly claimed "makes the campus killings at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970 pale by comparison." "This is a story that has not been effectively told before," said Kirkus Reviews. "Call it the grito of Tlatelolco, a cry of protest and the subjective manifesto of Mexico's suppressed, potentially explosive, middle-class dissenters." In this heartbreaking chronicle, Elena Poniatowska has assembled a montage of testimony drawn over a three-year period from eyewitness accounts by surviving students, parents, journalists, professors, priests, police, soldiers, and bystanders to re-create the chaotic optimism of the demonstrations, as well as the terror and shock of the massacre. Massacre in Mexico remains a critical source for examining the collective consciousness of Mexico. As Library Journal so aptly stated, "While the 'Tlatelolco Massacre' is the central theme of this study, the larger tragedy is reflected, and we see a nation whose government resorts to demagoguery rather than constructive action while it maintains and protects the privileged position of the new 'revolutionary' elite." Octavio Paz's incisive introduction underscores the inability of the Mexican government to deal with the socio-economic realities of the Mexican nation. Students and scholars of Mexican culture, historians, sociologists, and others who seek to interpret aspects of that country's national reality will find this book to be invaluable.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Poniatowska reports on the massacre of 325 unarmed Mexican students who were peacefully protesting police repression one week prior to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. PW called this ``heartbreaking. . . . A massive chronicle that builds to the night of the Tlatelolco massacre in an accumulation of skillfully crosscut eyewitness accounts.'' Photos. (Dec.)

Criticas

Essential reading for those interested in the Tlatelolco massacre or state repression in Latin America, this 1971 journalistic account by the award-winning novelist reports on the massacre of 325 unarmed Mexican students, workers, and teachers who were peacefully protesting police repression one week before the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Poniatowska (1932- ) skillfully constructs the buildup to the night of the massacre through compelling firsthand accounts of those who witnessed one of the worst cases of Mexican state repression. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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