1968 - Mark Kurlansky [193]
As the economy experienced its seemingly miraculous growth, year after year, there was an increasing suspicion that the distribution of this new wealth was grossly unfair. In 1960 Ifigenia Martínez, a researcher at the economics school, conducted a study that showed that about 78 percent of disposable income in Mexico went to only the upper 10 percent of Mexican society. No one had ever scientifically researched this before, and the results seemed hard to believe, so others, such as the Bank of Mexico, repeated the study but got the same results.
Such research was just the statistical explanation for an observable phenomenon: In fast-growing, rapidly developing Mexico, there were a lot of unhappy people. Starting in the late 1950s a series of protest movements emerged—peasant movements, a teachers union protest, a Social Security doctors’ strike, and, in 1958, a bitter railroad workers strike. They were quickly crushed, with everyone either co-opted, imprisoned, or killed. Ten years after the railroad strike, its leader, Demetrio Vallejo Martínez, was still in prison.
Yet in 1968, as the Olympics approached, there was only one group that the PRI did not have under its control, and that was students. The reason for this was that students as a political force was a new concept in Mexico. The students were a product of Mexico’s new economic expansion. After World War II, the growth rate in Mexico City began accelerating. By 1968 Mexico City was one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, its population increasing at about 3 percent each year. Typical of the pyramid-shaped demographics of rapidly developing countries, a very large percentage of the Mexican population, especially the Mexico City population, was young. And with a growing middle class, Mexico had more students than ever before, many of them crammed into the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, and the National Polytechnic Institute, on vast, sprawling new campuses in the newer parts of a capital city that swallowed miles of new area every year.
These students, like those in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, and so many other places, were acutely aware that they had more economic comfort than their parents. But in the case of Mexico, they were also aware that they had been the recipients of a growing economy that had not benefited many of the people around them.
Roberto Escudero, who became one of the student leaders in 1968, said, “There was a big difference between our generation and our parents’. They were very traditional. They had received benefits from the Mexican revolution, and Zapata and others from the revolution were their heroes. We had those heroes, too, but we also had Che and Fidel. We saw the PRI more as authoritarian, where they saw it as revolutionary liberators.”
Salvador Martínez de la Roca, a small, scrappy-looking blond man known to everyone as Pino, also was a student leader in 1968. Born in 1945, he was studying nuclear physics at UNAM in 1968. Pino was a norteño, a Mexican from the northern states, where the United States is much closer and its cultural impact far greater. “In the 1950s we loved Marlon Brando in The Wild One and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause,” he recalled. “We were more interested in American culture than our parents. In the fifties students wore shirts and ties. We wore jeans and indigenous-style shirts.”
To him UNAM also showed him more of the world. “The Cine Club at UNAM showed films that were not available anywhere else in Mexico—French films, the first film I ever saw about lesbians, Easy Rider. There was a cultural rebellion. We loved Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammad Ali and Angela Davis, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger,” he said. Songs of the civil rights movement such as “We Shall Overcome” were well known, and Martin Luther King, especially after his death, had a place in the UNAM student pantheon of heroes in proximity to Che and Zapata. The Black