Mexico City, 2 de Octubre

I was in D.F. for a week, during the anniversary of the massacre of October 2nd, 1968. Our guide for the trip is a friend of the director of our program. Her father was there in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas on the day that the army entered a student protest and opened fire. He spoke to us on our first day in the city and mostly did not talk about his part in it but instead gave a more general history of the student movement that preceded and followed that day.

That day the demonstration was planned, he told us, for the afternoon, and since these things were always late, he went to buy an extra pair of underwear. But when he got back to the plaza in Tlaltelocl, the soldiers were there with the bullets and the people were running and they were screaming. So I was saved, he said.

But later Frida, his daughter, told us that the story did not stop there, that his closest friends were in that square and his mother also. He dove in and tried to save them. Many of his friends died.

After he spoke we entered a museum about the movement of 68, and then I couldn´t see him. Frida later told us he had to leave because the exhibit was bastante pesado for him. Too heavy, too hard, too much.

D.F. was about a lot of other things for me too. There was a club near our hostel that felt like San Francisco and there was lots of juice and coffee and walking through different neighborhoods, in awe at the size of the small piece of the city I had seen. My favorite neighborhood was Coyoacan, where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera´s house is.

And then on the 2nd of October there were manifestaciones in the plaza in Tlaltelocl and also in the Zocalo near my hostel. My friends and I went there and the people kept coming and coming into the square. 2 de Octubre no se olvida, is what they said. And occasionally there would be panicked moments of running, but mostly it felt big and essential, though we were out of place in many ways, and felt it.