The Influence of Communismġ6 By the late 1960s communism remained at the forefront of Mexican political discourse, but still often in heteroglossia fashion. This article seeks to identify those discourses and the points at which they influenced the events of 1968. Most prominently in the watershed year 1968, when Mexico hosted the Olympic Games and experienced its most significant social protest movement in a generation, the conflicting discourses of the Cold War took center stage. The Cold War became a primary discursive arena in which this struggle was waged in the 1960s. That Revolution, as embodied in the 1960s by its institutionalization (the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI) and revolutionary nationalism, was an ongoing struggle between the government and the popular classes and their advocates for control of the national agenda. In doing so the multiplicity of texts within the Cold War context fractured the bipolarity the superpowers had worked so assiduously to maintain.ħ In this environment where bipolarity had given way to conflicting discourses and an increasingly multivocal understanding of the Cold War, Mexicans began to view the Cold War, its combatants, and its battles through the lens of their own Revolution. Taken together, heteroglossia and carnivalization posit a world in which Third World peoples appropriated the rhetoric, ideologies, and symbols of the Cold War for their own purposes. Thus, in carnivalesque fashion, Mexico by the 1960s, had begun to reframe the Cold War not as a contest between communism and capitalism, but as a contest between the nations that were internationally dominant and those that were dominated. The resulting multivocal dialogue was at once destabilizing and complicating for the superpowers. Their voices became part of the global policy discussions of the day. This concept illustrates the processes occurring in Mexico and throughout the Third World as countries began to contextualize the Cold War and learn how to exist, even succeed, within it. Carnival or carnivalization involves the destabilization of the center, the normal, and the regular through the addition of multiple points of view. 4 As such heteroglossia is an apt concept for analyzing the Mexico of 1968 and, arguably, the ways in which the Cold War was experienced in the Third World in general.Ħ In addition to heteroglossia, Bakhtin provides another concept useful for analyzing the Cold War in the Third World during the 1960s. In a state of heteroglossia, the meaning of all utterances is defined by the context. Bakhtin characterizes heteroglossia as a situation in which context is more important than text. As a result, Mexicans viewed the Cold War not as a principled crusade, but as an example of aggression by imperialist states whose financial and military power allowed them to dominate less developed countries.ĥ The Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin provides a theoretical framework through which the dynamic relationships between the superpowers and Third World nations, in this case Mexico, can be understood. Mexicans, and Latin Americans in general, on the other hand took a much less critical view of communism and were less likely to associate all things communist with the Soviet Union. The United States government and a significant portion of its citizenry considered communism an evil force in the world, one that must be combated with all available ideological, military, and financial means. For the United States the Cold War was a global struggle against communism as embodied by the totalitarian Soviet state. Practically, however, their methods for reaching this goal were not so far apart, both involving the assertion of their military and economic power over the world’s weaker and poorer nations. Thus, both superpowers had essentially the same broad agenda, but diametrically opposed ideologies governing how to achieve it. Conversely the Soviet Union similarly advanced improvements in the material quality of life for the world’s poor, but through the communist system. For the United States the route to progress lay in modernization through democratic capitalism, involving bringing the world’s poorer nations into the international economy and elevating the living conditions of their people. Within this context, the superpowers engaged in a global struggle for nothing less than “the soul of mankind,” each advancing their own agendas for the betterment of all. 2 The Cold War world was governed by the bipolarity established and enforced by the United States and the Soviet Union.
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