This event is free with Museum admission. No additional tickets are required.

Major historical events have given Tlatelolco its distinctiveness. A significant site since the Aztec period, in the twentieth century the area was closely identified with the modernist urban planning ambitions of Mexico in the early 1960s, student demonstrations and killings before the 1968 Olympics hosted by Mexico, and the fatal 1985 earthquake, which proved many of its modernist structures to be architecturally unsound. Despite of its historical relevance, Tlatelolco as a neighborhood has been constantly reinterpreted and transformed constantly in the quotidian. This open discussion, hosted by Museum as Hub Fellows Melissa Amezcua and Elisa Díaz, questions how a neighborhood community deals with extraordinary events in daily life and how sudden and tragic events are absorbed and transformed by and from within the community, characterizing the social and cultural mutation of a site.

This open discussion elaborates upon the exhibition, “Tlatelolco and the localized negotiation of future imaginaries,” organized by the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, and on view in the fifth floor Museum as Hub space until May 4, 2008.

Melissa Amezcua, born in Guadalajara, Mexico, has worked on different collective research projects concerned with democratic processes in contemporary Mexico. She is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. Amezcua’s research focuses on political sociology, social theory, and interpretative methods. In addition to the analysis of the political, she is interested in the implications of estrangement within communities, practices of exclusion, and a discursive analysis of legitimating notions such as “the people” in twentieth century Mexico. Amezcua is currently collaborating on a project on associational life and spaces of sociability in nineteenth century Latin America. She is a Museum as Hub Fellow until May 2008.

Elisa Díaz, born in Tabasco, Mexico, worked in Tlatelolco for two years. With a background in international relations, she holds a M.A. in political science from the New School for Social Research, where she is completing her Ph.D. Díaz’s research focuses on contemporary continental political theory, international immigration, identity politics, and sovereignty. Her dissertation explores the tension that outdated classical conceptions of sovereignty and identity cause at border areas, transforming them into buffer zones and spaces of exception. Last year Díaz presented the paper “The Border Between the Spectacle and the Myth” at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Chicago and taught a class on International Migration at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. She is a Museum as Hub Fellow until May 2008.