A Tale of Two Women
Tlatelolco today
Monastery of Santiago, Tlatelolco
The cloister of the Monastery of Santiago Tlatelolco is white. Now a Convent, it was formerly the college where Bernardino de Sahagún taught. Nearby are the excavated ruins of a great pyramid and the old church of Santiago (Saint James, patron saint of the conquistadors). They stand in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures) and it’s a reflective spot. It was here, in the Plaza, on the night of October 2, 1968, that the Mexican government ordered the killing of hundreds of students in the Tlatelolco massacre. Some say the death toll was in the thousands but the consensus is about 200-300 killed, not counting the hundreds of wounded. Octavio Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest and it has since become a metaphor for the human rights atrocities committed under successive Mexican regimes in the Sixties and Seventies.
