The intersection between the Street, Resistance, and Memory

La resistencia ve en el pasado lo que ha escapado de la memoria, escarba en ella los olvidos, no reivindica un pasado eternicado inamovible, sino la fuerza del olvido en tanto signo.

Resistance looks for in the past what has escaped from memory, scratches within it the absent, it doesn’t claim an immovable eternal past but the force within the forgotten.

M.I. García Canal

In 1978, the identity-less repetitive image of La Niña began appearing in the streets of Mexico City. The image of the girl was taken from a photo in the newspaper, which then was photocopied and thus created a blurred identification of her identity, leaving her outline to be the only permanent element in the picture. This technique, undertaken by the artist’s collective, Grupo Suma, quite literally disappeared the subject. By placing the image of La Niña on various surfaces throughout the city, Grupo Suma reminded the viewer of the pictures that are photocopied and secretly kept in archives in government offices: the faces of the disappeared. The image of La Niña recalls a tragic time in Mexican history, when thousands of students were killed, and many disappeared in downtown Mexico City at the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968 – a brutal response to student protests. She was the reminder of that tumultuous time and all of those who participated in the social movements and protested ten years before. She was an active device that surfaced forgotten memory.

La Niña/La Desaparecida. Series of 48 photographs, silver, gelatin and wood. 20x25cm

The Tlatelolco Massacre occurred on October 2, 1968, when Mexico’s authoritarian government enforced violent retaliations against a peaceful student protest. The country was set to host the 1968 Olympics, and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Mexico’s president at the time (1964-1979), saw this as an opportunity to showcase the nation’s economic growth and stability. But in the time leading up to the opening of the Olympics, students had been protesting the Mexican government in massive numbers in the streets.  The students were angry at the economic and political repression of the government, particularly against labor unions. They protested peacefully, wrote their demands formally in various documents, gathered signatures from the various school departments, and occupied the streets as a space for their demands to be heard. It wasn’t the image that Ordaz wanted to portray of an ideal Mexico of progress and development. He wanted the protestors off the street, according to him “the political resources had been emptied out – force must be hurried and applied” (Alvarado). On October 2^nd, 1968, ten days before the start of the Olympics, government troops turned La Plaza de las Tres Culturas into a brutal graveyard. Ordaz did everything in his power to erase any evidence. Even after several years, the massacre was not spoken of either by government officials or the mainstream press and there was no judicial recourse for families of the victims.

Three students and a soldiers gather in Mexico City on October 2, 1968. (Héctor Gallardo, Wikimedia Commons)

As the years passed, there was a continuity that preceded the massacre in 1968. From 1965 to 1996 the country endured a system of a single political party (PRI) that self-proclaimed to be “revolutionary” that fought anyone that was against the government with a strategy called guerra sucia (dirty war), a set of repressive military and political measures that attempted to dissolve any political defiance against the Mexican state. José López Portillo became Mexico’s president from 1976 to 1982. He promised to renew the country’s morale without accomplishing it – this period ended with the devaluation of the currency and the nationalization of banks. People remained angry at “la falacia de nuestra riqueza y prosperidad merced a la expansión petrolera[1]” (Elizondo 33).  According to the acclaimed writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. Although the country is supposed to be ruled by a democracy, Vargas Llosa mentions in a 1990s intellectual debate, that it is in fact that a

camouflaged dictatorship that doesn’t appear it. It holds every characteristic to be one: the permanence, not of a man, but of a political party (PRI). A political party that is immovable, a party that offers enough space for critique in the quantities that favors it, because it will only confirm that it is a democratic party that by all means will suppress. (Vargas Llosa)

In the context of this political regime of democratic dictatorship, more than 30 contemporary artist groups emerged in Mexico, of which one of the most important was Grupo Suma. The group was established at the Academy of San Carlos – at the National School of Visual Arts at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City (UNAM, 1976-1982). They met at the Visual Muralist Investigation Workshop taught by Ricardo Rocha, an artist and professor who is now known as an influential journalist. Some of the best-known artists in the group were Paloma Díaz Abreu, Patricia Salas, and Mario Rangel Faz. While their work is conceptual and activist in so many facets, the group primarily engaged the street as their site for creation and inspiration. Their manifesto states that their main point of departure was: “the street man – with his unceasing anguish and growing loss of identity. Our interest in interpreting and transforming the urban reality is due to its importance as a site for economic, politic and cultural decision and as a site of major human settlements.” (Grupo Suma). They challenged the aesthetics of bureaucracy of this urban reality and aimed for una propuesta callejera (a street protest – a series of street interventions.) They worked with office supplies, copy printers, cheap materials, craft paper, etc., and brought them to the streets to denounce the state. La Niña became the most emblematic of their street interventions.

According to art historian Ana Torres, in her essay “Imágenes en Colectivo: Grupo Suma (1976-1982),” La Niña, is a piece that “represents the dirty war” (115). La niña/La desaparecida is a symbol that stood present during the 10-year mark march of the massacre on October 2^nd, 1978. The stencil was created with a cutter and cardboard and the image was marked throughout the city along with the words “Oct. 2.” This technique allows for the image to be repeated unceasingly and to be present on the surface that it has been sprayed on until the authorities have it removed. The intention was not to leave something permanent but to play with its ephemeral characteristics, to “allow the presence of the image to live with its’ absence. […] La niña es una desaparecida, it’s the silhouette that evokes and imagines the absentee, it’s a memory niche of a body that is missing.” (Torres 116)

In her essay, “La resistencia entre la memoria y el olvido,” researcher María Inés García Canal describes every form of resistance as the vital energy for any society to exist. For her, resistances appear as a result of “a discomfort that is registered on their bodies, in their actions and thoughts” (34). This act of rupture is called to disturb the established order and the acquired truths. For her, it is an act that must be “untimely, unexpected, inopportune, extrinsic to the continuity of habits and routines” (García 37). The young artists that participated in Grupo Suma took part in student movements, were aware of assassinations, the disappeared, and lived under a camouflaged military dictatorship. They abruptly appropriated the public space with images made to denounce the government and to show their rejection of institutionalized spaces. This generated ways of resistance against political, cultural, and artistic norms.

Grupo Suma was interested in creating artworks that spoke to everyone, not only to an elitist few. The multiplicity agent of the stencil created a greater distribution within the “different sectors of the population; that is why we paint on fences that are on main streets, along with the murals in universities and schools” (Grupo Suma). Their discomfort not only had to be spoken of, but they sought to create an active change. They took advantage of the materials that they used and pushed to create a different narrative within what was being told to el pueblo, they believed that “it is necessary to question the images that play a part in the people’s atmosphere to the point of transforming them; the enormous amount of information that we receive from commercial mechanisms denies communication when partially showing reality” (Grupo Suma). Mexico’s government had manipulated its way into making people believe that none of this had really happened. Mexico had tried to erase the massacre, given that the camouflaged permanence of its’ political party would say that there was never a dictatorship. For Grupo Suma, resistance was a rupture of that established memory. Two different versions of memory emerge: the official history of harmony and accomplishments and a repressed history of shadows, oblivion, and forgotten memory. If not addressed, this repressed history becomes a memory of phantoms and shadows. Grupo Suma gives form to these shadows through La Niña. García proposed that,

it [resistance] becomes a force, a sign: it attempts to bring back to memory the forgotten and situating them in their historic dimension with the purpose of building another history from the forgotten […] ‘Memory then begins to unearth the hidden, something that was left behind not because of forgetfulness but rather something that has been carefully and deliberately disguised and covered’, writes Foucault. (39)

The repetitive action of imprinting what the government attempts to make people dissipate from their memory, makes Grupo Suma a revolutionary group of artists. How does one address the disappearances? They forced presence on the streets. What La Niña achieved was to intervene in public space and claim the history of the massacre erased by the state.

There is an historiographic void in recognizing the significance of Grupo Suma – they seem to have been “forgotten” or rather disappeared from contemporary Mexican art and history studies, as well as internationally. Ana Torres and the group of researchers who worked on Imágenes en Colectivo: Grupo Suma (1976-1982), and their accomplishments are the exception. Mari Carmen Ramírez, who has written one of definitive texts on Latin American activist work of the 1960s and 1970s, makes no mention of them. In her essay Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960-1980, which focuses on Brazil and Argentina, she posits how Latin American conceptualism emerged on its own as they responded to site-specific issues in their own urban centers. Their conceptual responses no longer concerned an isolated elite group of artists. They applied anti-discursive strategies that rather spoke to cultural issues and urged a collective solution. While this perfectly describes Grupo Suma, Ramírez briefly mentions the existence of groups formed in resistance to state repression in Mexico, yet she names none of them. As the group writes in their manifesto, “the activities within Grupo Suma are directed towards the investigation of newer forms of expression within the urban context that respond to the necessities of most of the population.” (Grupo Suma)

I was particularly interested in researching what Grupo Suma had done since I grew up thinking that there was not a big contemporary scene of Mexican artists. As a Mexican-born emerging curator, I hear more often of international artists that live in Mexico but that are not born Mexican, taking advantage of the growing gentrification in the city and the overall support and recognition that international artists receive in the country. It is time to push the boundaries and work on building a greater Mexican contemporary scene – to work with memory, for Mexico is full of anger and nostalgia for those who are missing. The narrative repeats itself – this is not just about Grupo Suma remembering the massacre but also about a young curator remembering them. In an attempt to activate our presence and to remember the forced disappearances of students, working people, and artists, I want to name everyone who participated in Grupo Suma. Collectivity is important, so I must end this paper with an act of resistance against the void of forgetfulness and lack of archives. In recognition of: Luis Vidal, Arturo Rosales, Jaime Rodríguez, Jesús Reyes Cordero, Santiago Rebolledo, Armando Ramos Calvario, Ernesto Molina, Gabriel Macotela, Armandina Lozano, René Freire, José Barbosa, Óscar Aguilar Olea, Paloma Díaz Abreu, Oliverio Hinojosa, Alfonso Moraza, César Núñez, Hiram Ramírez, Mario Rangel Faz, Patricia Salas, Guadalupe Sobarzo, and Alma Valtierra.