And They Didn’t Shut Up: Prison Narratives of the Mexican Dirty War
Keywords:
Mexican Dirty War, Guerrilla Warfare, state violence, prison literatureAbstract
After the repressions of the student movement of 1968 in Tlatelolco square on October 2nd of 1968 and the Corpus Christi massacre on June 10 of 1971, many young participants of the movement decided to take up arms against the Mexican government due to the rejection of the state to negotiate social movements’ claims for democracy and social justice. Although the Tlatelolco massacre was the most visible repression event and remains in collective memory, systematic state violence before and after the repression of October 2nd has been overlooked and just relatively recently scholars have started to study this period. Unlike intellectuals’ response to the Tlatelolco massacre, which produced a literary narrative and poetic works, the guerrilla warfare was addressed by few intellectuals and constitutes a gap, which can be filled by the testimonial and literary texts written by former guerrilla members. In this sense, I propose that literary and testimonial texts that revisit the period of the Dirty War, and that are not part of the canon, shed light upon the construction of official history and memory. The first part of this article addresses how state violence took place under a democratic regime before and after the repression of the student movement of 1968, and how the visibility of Tlatelolco massacre overshadowed other repressions that were part of a systematic counterinsurgent program. The second part of this article contrasts the literary representations of the student movement of 1968 with the little attention that the lettered city had to address the issue of state violence and the guerrilla warfare. In this sense, the first texts written by former guerrilla fighters are relevant not only for their testimonial value and the harsh conditions in which they emerged, but also for the intrinsic debate these texts put on the table: what is consider to be literary and their right to speak and write their own experiences. The third part analyzes some narrative and poetic strategies of representative texts written by former guerrilla fighters. Selected poems of David Zaragoza and Agustín Rosales –collected in the anthology Sobreviviremos al hielo (1988)– symbolically deconstruct and dismantle the machinery and articulations of carceral power. In the same token the novel ¿Por qué no dijiste todo? (1980) by Salvador Castañeda represents violence and torture through the reduction of the subject to bare life and through mediation, as observed in the recurrent use of the rat as an unstable and contingent image.
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