NARRATIVAS MARGINALES Y GUERRA SUCIA EN MÉXICO (1968 ...

NARRATIVAS MARGINALES Y GUERRA SUCIA EN MÉXICO (1968-1994)
Aurelia Gómez de Unamuno, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2008
Ten days before the 1968 Olympic Games, the Mexican Government violently
repressed a massive Student Movement as a result of its unwillingness to negotiate
with social sectors that had been adversely affected by the modernization process of
the “Mexican Miracle”. After the repression, the government projected an image of
stability and progress under the so called “apertura democrática”. Nonetheless
during the decade of the seventies, Mexican citizens experienced state violence, and
a counterinsurgency war known as the Dirty War, in which subversive groups who
were considered dangerous for the National Security —university students and
professors, campesinos, and guerilla fighters— were systematically targeted.
Narrativas marginales y guerra sucia en México is framed between two
grassroots social movements that represent watershed events in Mexico’s political
life: the Student Movement of 1968, and the Zapatista guerrilla uprising in 1994.
This dissertation addresses the issues of political marginality, state violence,
representation of torture and political imprisonment, construction of official history,
and individual and collective memory. To shed light on the issue of political
imprisonment, I analyze the novel ¿Por qué no dijiste todo?, and the prison dairy
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