Mexico City's Olympic Games

During the past two decades, the 1968 Summer Olympics have attracted singular attention in the field of Mexican sports history. Claire and Keith Brewster, Kevin Witherspoon, Ariel Rodríguez Kuri, and others have scrutinized the diverse political, economic, and cultural repercussions of the first Olympic Games held in Latin America. They have focused on Mexican elites’ struggle to win the bid, the motivation behind the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its president, Avery Brundage, in celebrating the games in a developing nation, and the relationship between the games and the student movement that erupted almost simultaneously in the Mexican capital.Axel Elías's monograph adds a new dimension to this well-established body of historiography by shedding light on an actor that has largely been overlooked: the Mexican citizenry. Along with the IOC and the government, ordinary people also played a crucial role in the “crafting” of Mexico 1968 through their everyday politics, by either criticizing or supporting the event and its concomitant values. This “bottom-up” approach represents the most distinctive feature of Elías's research.Excluding the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, and the conclusion, the body of this book consists of five chronological chapters covering the period from 1963 to 1968. However, the author unconventionally “play[s] with scales” (quoted in p. 5). That is, each chapter has its own thematic focus, methodological approach, and time frame that ranges from several years to just 11 days. This dynamic structure, which alternates macro- and micro-level perspectives, makes the book engaging and enjoyable to read.Chapter 2 discusses the process of bidding and the preparations. While the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) regime wished to portray the 1968 Olympics as the pinnacle of the “Mexican Miracle” that was raising the country to a “developed” status (p. 60), the IOC authorities saw an opportunity in bringing the Olympic torch to a “small-scale” and “developing” nation in order to circumvent the Cold War rivalry (p. 78). This argument is not original, but Elías's point is that both the IOC and the government tried to guarantee that their respective notions of Olympism appealed to Mexican citizens. Chapter 3 analyzes the period from July to October 1968, when student protests began and escalated. Although protesters never called for a boycott of the sports event, the public emergence of dissatisfied youths and repressing state authority did conflict with the image of a peaceful Mexico that the government wanted to showcase. The following two chapters zoom in on the days before and during the competitions. After the Tlatelolco massacre, an “Olympic truce” was reached between students and government representatives, securing an Olympic Games “free of political demonstrations.” While some citizens embraced nationalistic rhetoric seeking to model “Mexican hospitality” to the world (p. 177), others “performed” their dissatisfaction by jeering at governmental figures in the stadium (p. 191). Methodologically, in these two chapters the author moves toward a “history of emotions” approach by highlighting the importance of fear, anger, joy, and other affective states experienced by both critics and supporters (p. 46). The narrative ends with chapter 6, which deals with the post-Olympic political legacies for the three actors involved.Elías's ambition to apply a “bottom-up” perspective is unequivocally coherent and plausible. However, this ambition is not always achieved. This is particularly clear in chapter 2, where there is a lack of robust historical evidence regarding citizens’ reactions to the government's and the IOC's expectations. The oral interviews—which are essential for constructing an alternative narrative to the “institutional” perspectives often inherent in archival sources—are not exploited to their full potential. For instance, one interviewee mentions an internal struggle within the PRI that hindered preparations (p. 125); this point could have been explored further.More importantly, the book scarcely references Mexican sports and politics outside the relatively short period from 1963 to 1968. Despite the growing body of literature on Latin American Olympism, there is a historiographical disconnect between early Olympic history, which traces Latin American Olympic involvement and its relation to national politics in the early twentieth century (with one example from Mexico being Ana Laura de la Torre Saavedra's 2020 book Cruzadas olímpicas en la Ciudad de México: Cultura física, juventud, religión y nacionalismos, 1896–1939), and later Olympic history, which was largely shaped by Cold War diplomacy and geopolitics. These two strands of historiography should be bridged in the future to illuminate the continuity and change in the Latin American Olympic movement.Despite its limitations, this book provides important information regarding the 1968 Olympic Games and their significance to Mexican history. Therefore, it will be of interest to any scholar studying the intersection of culture and politics. It also makes an important contribution to the burgeoning field of global sixties studies, as it deals with unique global-local dynamics in one of the most crucial years of the twentieth century. Although Mexico City's Olympic Games is not a definitive study of this topic, it encourages us to delve deeper into the politically charged history of Olympism

Citizenship · Geography · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society

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