Chapter 2 scrutinizes Tlatelolco, site of the October 2 massacre. Its literary, photographic, and cinematographic representations by such authors as Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Nacho López, and Fernando del Paso, mediate between the realm of “compulsory visibility” of a modernizing Mexican state and its shadowy byproducts. The first is embodied by the discourses of transparency and hygiene of modern architecture in the Mario Pani’s Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex. The second is the spectral social body inhabiting the hub of the national railroad network at Tlatelolco—that is, self-constructed settlements and tenements of the migrant underclasses, overlooked by the State and eventually displaced by the modernization projects. This blindness and exclusionary practice of the modern technocratic administration is also manifest in the highly managed character of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas erected on the Tlatelolco site, demonstrating the limited scope of de facto citizenship in Mexico. At the same time, the opacity of the site tests the limits of history writing in general.
