The Spanish word for enough, Basta regularly challenges the status quo, at one point early in Book I suggesting that the violence implicit in giving a child a toy gun is nothing compared to the violence of paying someone four hundred pesos a month - about thirty-two dollars. No longer living there, Basta returns often to chat with the maids. The significance of the moniker becomes clear once we learn about Itzel’s heroic act, carried out on the day of the Tlatelolco massacre.Ĭompleting the triangle is Sebastian, nicknamed Basta, an economics student Nauta falls in love with at the pensión where she is rooming, a house owned by a family named Oronsky. An odd name to give a blond Hungarian Jew, Itzel was the Mayan goddess of medicine and midwifery. Nauta meets a woman she calls Itzel, an Auschwitz survivor twenty years her senior, in art class at an American university near Toluca, capital of Mexico’s Central State. involvement in Viet Nam and from which spun off the violent Weather Underground. While there she was also a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which led the fight against U.S.
Nauta O’Brien, the narrator, a self-labelled Brooklyn tomboy with a penchant for knives, has come to Mexico from the University of Chicago, where she was a National Merit Scholar. If one could distill Itzel I and II to its essential core - a difficult operation to perform on a story that is a blend of fiction and autobiography, linguistic and historical analysis, feminist and indigenous people’s critiques of patrimony and colonialism - it would be to call it a love triangle. Dunster’s Award for Fiction at the New Brunswick Book Awards. Murphy has achieved an artistically ambitious work of prose, the first volume of which garnered her the Mrs. Against the emotional backdrop of these two horrific occurrences, Sarah X. Alfonso Cuarón dramatized the 1971 massacre with haunting beauty in his Oscar winning 2018 film, Roma. The violence of that day, eerily similar to the 1968 event, led to the death of 120 protesters including a fourteen-year-old boy. By June 10, 1971, the day of what has come to been known as the Corpus Christi Massacre or El Halconazo (Hawk Strike), many of those detained or exiled after the Tlatelolco killings were back on the street demanding justice and reform. An investigation determined that secret-service snipers had fired their rifles from rooftops towards the troops, igniting the massacre that would be named for the nearby church of Santiago de Tlatelolco.Īccording to the head of Mexico’s Federal Directorate of Security, 1,345 people were arrested that day. Initially, Mexican authorities said that their troops had been shot at first by protesters, 10,000 university and high-school students gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas to hear anti-government speeches. Students, some of them young Americans like Sarah Xerar Murphy, led the movement for social change by reaching out to labourers and the urban poor, forging democratic alliances, and exposing illegal practices in government, policing and the military. The event was the culmination in that country of a year of political activism aimed at ending war, improving worker safety, eliminating poverty and rooting out corruption in government. Officially 44 people were killed, although the generally accepted death count is between 300 and 400, with more than a thousand injured. On October 2, 1968, soldiers in Mexico City fired live bullets at unarmed civilians who were protesting the summer Olympic Games, which would open there ten days later. Itzel I: A Tlatelolco Awakening and Itzel II: A Three Knives Tale, Sarah Xerar Murphy.
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