By Sunita Nigam

For the 1968 Olympics, held from October 12 to 27, the Mexican state arranged Mexico City into a dazzling visual display. Myriad candy-like colours expanded across the face of the national capital as the Mexican Olympic Committee (MOC) transformed the city into a cohesive visual environment through an extensive Olympic design program. Multicoloured balloons featuring the official Mexico ’68 logo flooded the airport and floated above Olympic venues. Colourful abstract sculptures by international artists lined La Ruta de la Amistad (The Route of Friendship), which connected Olympic venues along the southern periphery of the city. Virtually everywhere the visitor could look, Mexico ’68’s eye-catching graphics were reproduced in bright hues on surfaces of different scales, from the pavement outside Olympic venues to Olympic signage, street furniture, souvenirs, and even the short dresses of the 1,170 edecanes (hostesses), who, along with the colour-coded signage and kiosks, guided visitors between the twenty-five sports venues and other Olympic sites.

At the centre of the design program was the now iconic Mexico ’68 logo created by New York-based industrial designer Lance Wyman. The logo combined the word “Mexico” with the number 68 overlapped with the five Olympic rings, all rendered in a multistroke typeface that radiated outward. In its bold lines, geometric shapes, and vibrant colours, the Mexico ’68 design vocabulary channelled the contemporaneous OpArt movement occurring in New York at the same time as it evoked the colours and patterns of textile traditions of the Huichol (or Wixárika), an Indigenous people living in the Sierra Madre Occidental range in Mexico and the US. Through its aesthetic integration of local heritage and global innovation, the design program produced Mexico City as a spectacle of Mexican modernity. As the Olympic logo and aesthetics vividly communicated, this was “Mexico,” but this was also Mexico in “68.” While creating a message of local specificity, the design program was careful to position Mexico within a global modernity linked to industrial production, a cosmopolitan cultural avant-garde, and modernist design.

The Mexico ’68 design campaign was the first Olympic program to coordinate itself into a unified visual experience—what art historian Luis Castañeda has called a “total design environment.” (1) “Total design” refers to the modernist expansion of design “to touch every possible point in the world,” including “structure, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, doorknobs, light fittings, dinnerware, clothes, and flower arrangements” through the embrace of industrial modes of production. (2)

Mega-events like the Olympics provide exceptional terrains for investigating questions about how urban design negotiates relationships to bodies. For example, whose physical, emotional, and intellectual labour is necessary to produce the urban image designers, planners, and municipalities desire to project? And how are the labour, bodies, and realities of these workers hidden, showcased, or integrated within this urban image? These questions are also relevant to everyday urban contexts beyond exceptional mega-events. For example, in the context of today’s creative city planning paradigm, the bodies of young, racialized, queer, working-class, and creative “types” have been strategically instrumentalized to brand neighbourhoods as “cool,” “hip,” or “up-and-coming.” While unpaid aesthetic labour/capital gets extracted from the bodies of these “types” to raise the economic value of a neighbourhood, only the most wealthy of these “types” can afford to stay in the gentrifying neighbourhoods their bodily presence has been instrumentalized to brand. Understanding how the aesthetic and design logics of urban spaces negotiate the bodies of local populations to attain economic or political goals is crucial for understanding relationships between urban aesthetics, politics, and economics. On the one hand, Mexico ’68’s total design sought to obscure the bodies of many of the city’s majoritarian Indigenous, agrarian, and poor populations out of fear that their physical presence in the city would threaten the performance of modernity that Mexico wanted to showcase at Mexico ’68. On the other hand, the state’s performance of modernity was also powered by some of the very bodies the state wanted to obscure, specifically those of the city’s working-class service workers. What is more, the bodies of the Olympic hostesses (their dress, hair and make-up, speech, and movements), who hailed from the country’s growing middle class, were tightly controlled and ultimately transformed into corporeal extensions of the designed environment. The bodies of Mexico City’s service workers and Olympic hostesses thus served as a kind of “living infrastructure” with important aesthetic and theatrical dimensions without which Mexico’s desired performance of modernity could not be carried out.

The Mexico ’68 design campaign’s negotiations of the bodies of its Indigenous and service populations as well as its Olympic hostesses provides a generative case for examining how urban design integrates/assimilates certain bodies into the urban image, while jettisoning other bodies out.

The isomorphic patterns of the Olympic hostess dress and the urban background blend into one another. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman

The Spotlight on Mexico

Between October 12 and 27, 1968, 14,805 foreign accredited participants and tens of thousands of tourists descended upon Mexico City, joining the city’s nearly seven million residents. Meanwhile, the televisual broadcasting of the Olympics (in colour, for the first time!) vividly documented the city’s live urban environment as a flow of images for over 600 million viewers around the world, an unprecedented number for an Olympic broadcast. While the coverage of the Olympic games was a watershed in terms of viewership, the eyes of the world were fixed on Mexico City long before the Games began. For the first time in the modern Olympic Games, the Mexican Olympic Committee (MOC) revived the ancient Olympic tradition of the Cultural Olympiad, a year-long program of cultural events leading up to, and then running parallel to, the athletic competitions. With the spotlight shining on Mexico City throughout 1968, Mexico’s national capital was under intense pressure to perform as a safe, modern, and culturally exciting destination. Such a performance of place promised to rehabilitate Mexico from a long history of stereotypes that had painted it as a land of lazy, backward people and to secure it a spot within a global imaginary as a country worthy of tourism and foreign investment. (3) That the opening ceremony for the Mexico ’68 Games on October 12 fell on el Día de la Raza (Columbus Day, to most anglophones), historian Eric Zolov points out, was not a coincidence; the Mexico ’68 Olympics were symbolically framed as a rediscovery of the Americas. (4)

The pressure on Mexico City to perform at Mexico ’68 was heightened by Mexico’s status within global power relations. Mexico was the first “developing” country, the first country in Latin America, and the first Spanish-speaking country to host the Olympic Games. Architect Anne-Marie Broudehoux writes about the uneven stakes of hosting mega-events for nations from the East and the South. For these nations, hosting such events “is seen as a test of modernity, a performance indicator, and an occasion to establish themselves as models of organization and responsible management.” (5) A successfully passed test holds out the promise of building these nations’ “credibility as worthy players on the world stage.” (6) Broudehoux’s description of the hosting of mega-events by nations from the East and South as a “test of modernity” suggests that a successfully passed test is achieved through the convincing performance of generic protocols already legitimated within a dominant worldview as indicators of a nation’s modernity. The successful performance of First World modernity was contingent, for example, upon the enactment of scripts of industrialization, urbanization, technological advancement, high standards of living, cultural cosmopolitanism, and liberal democracy. Through the successful enactment of these scripts (what I call “modernity scripts”), cities and nations could be legitimated as modern on the world stage.

Through the eye-catching graphics of their dress, the Olympic hostesses stand out as representations of modern Mexican femininity. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman

Urban Mestizaje: Assimilating and Dissimulating Indigeneity in the City

Crucially, performances of modernity are also performances of race. As critical theorist Homi Bhabha argues, the discourse of First World modernity has symbolically produced both race and the Third World as “time-lagged” relative to a temporally advanced First World. (7) Indeed, First World conceptions of modernity and whiteness were established through the positioning of these categories above and against Indigenous and racialized populations that were categorized as “pre-modern.” First World nations secured their own whiteness relative to what they discursively produced as the racialized hinterlands of the globe. For Third World or racialized nations, performances of First World modernity thus functioned as a kind of racial rattrapage (or catching up) by which certain nations were put in the position of having to catch up with the racially unmarked “developed” world.

Mexico’s performance of modernity at Mexico ’68, which was orchestrated by members of Mexico’s minoritarian middle class (who composed the MOC and the Mexican state), sought to challenge Mexico’s positioning as a racialized hinterland in relation to the so-called developed world. But it did so without challenging the racist logic that structured dominant views about modernity, including the association of racialized, poor, rural, and Indigenous populations with pre-modernity. Indeed, the discourse mobilized by the Mexico ’68 design campaign was in keeping with Mexico’s institutional mestizaje. Mestizaje is a term that refers to the racial mixing of Indigenous and European populations, on the one hand, and to an ideology of this racial and cultural mixing, on the other. This national ideology, which was institutionalized by Mexico’s post-Revolutionary government, explicitly presents a homogeneous view of a shared national culture while implicitly preserving a racial and class hierarchy of national legitimacy. This ideology (still dominant today) celebrates Mexico’s pre-Columbian civilizations, especially the Aztecs (in Nahuatl, the Mēxihcahs), as part of Mexico’s classical past (the post-Revolutionary government aligned Aztec culture with the culture of ancient Greece), while working to assimilate living Indigenous populations into a new, hispanophone, national future. Through a logic by which racial and cultural mixture was figured as a process that could redeem Mexicans from racial characteristics deemed to be inferior, mestizaje promised to vanish many of the physical traits and cultural practices of Indigenous life. (8) Entry into the legitimated national future required that the country’s Indigenous populations leave behind their traditional customs as they adopted legitimated scripts of national belonging through the logic of assimilation. As with the Mexico ’68 logo, mestizaje appropriates aspects of Indigenous culture to secure a sense of national authenticity while also presenting Mexico’s evolution into modernity out of and against a glorious Indigenous past. While the Mexico ’68 design campaign drew on Indigenous aesthetics as a representation of the country’s past, it also distanced its performance of modernity from images that reflected the realities of Mexico’s living and majoritarian Indigenous, poor, and agrarian populations.

If the spectacular cityscape created for the 1968 Olympics seemed, on the surface, to plant Mexico within a global modernity without severing ties with local roots, there were in fact important limits to how much local specificity the Mexican state wanted to showcase at Mexico ’68. It was true that, by 1968, Mexico’s middle class found itself in the afterglow of Mexico’s economic “miracle,” and an expanding and industrializing Mexico City was exhibiting signs of urban development that were legible to a global public as “modern,” including a proliferation of increasingly sexy modernist architecture (see Pedro Ramírez Vázquez’s National Anthropology Museum, Luis Barragán’s Towers of Satellite City, and Mario Pani’s multifamiliares (middle class housing complexes)). At the same time, Mexico City was alive with a swelling population of recent migrants from rural areas motivated by a combination of harsh agrarian conditions and the promise of job opportunities in the city. National realities of poverty and uneven development were reflected in the mass expansion of Mexico City’s informal economy and informal housing system as shantytowns grew out beyond the city limits and appeared in pockets within the city. Because these signs of poor, rural, and racialized life were the kinds of images the Mexican state was trying to present as mere relics of Mexico’s rapidly dissipating pre-modern past, the state did its best to camouflage or otherwise dissimulate these realities within the urban space. (9)

A model of the Mexico '68 Olympic Stadium at the main campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), featuring the radiating line patterns of the Olympic design program

Bodies Becoming Environment: Urban Camouflage and Living Infrastructure

While the inhabitants of the city’s slums were provided with buckets of cheerful paint in the palette of Olympic design campaign to brighten up the façades of their homes and camouflage these structures within the total design environment, the state took measures to remove itinerant vendors from the most showcased parts of the Olympic territory, “predominantly the tourist hotel region of the Zona Rosa, and the southern outskirts of the city near to the main Olympic sporting installations.” (10) But chief among the potentially symbolically threatening elements that could not be removed from Mexico City’s pictorial field were the city’s service workers. After all, the Olympic production required the live labours of service workers—taxi drivers, hospitality workers, hostesses, and other urban maintenance workers—in order to be carried out at all. But how could these service workers— the indispensable stagehands of Mexico’s urban performance of modernity, who belonged largely to the country’s racialized and poorer classes—appear within the urban picture without reading as signs of the country’s premodernity?

The logic of camouflage used to integrate the city’s informal housing into the total design environment of Mexico ’68 was also applied to the bodies of the city’s service workers. The Mexico ’68 design campaign used a process of aesthetic assimilation to transform the bodies of the city’s service workers and, especially, the Olympic hostesses, into extensions and producers of the environment of Mexico ’68. More than guides hired to work within the event space, the bodies of the Olympic hostesses, outfitted in the same radiating line patterns that bloomed over the city’s pavement, were designed as generative extensions of the event space. Instrumentalized as human surfaces and performers of carefully selected scripts, Mexico ’68 hostesses served as essential living infrastructure that supported the performance of modernity throughout the Olympics. In the cityscape of Mexico ’68, in the photographs featured in the official Olympic reports, and in photographs circulated by the international press throughout 1968, the Olympic hostesses figured prominently. In the photographs from the reports and press, the hostesses were frequently pictured in their psychedelic dresses against the isomorphic patterns of the spatial background. Through their uniforms, emblazoned with the same radiating Olympic graphics as the city’s signage and pavement, and through their photogenic presence in the cityscape, the hostesses’ bodies became morphologically continuous with the total design environment. As in French theorist Roger Callois’s description of animal camouflage, here “the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others.” (11) Instrumentalized as visual displays, the hostesses, like the façades of the slum dwellings painted over with bright paint, figured as aesthetic extensions of the modern urban space.

The camouflaging of the hostesses and other service workers of Mexico ’68 was not only a process of visual correspondence between the human body and urban space; it was also carried out by acts of scriptive reenactment. Historians Claire and Keith Brewster have written about how service workers in Mexico City were trained as “actors” in Mexico’s performance of national modernity. (12) Fearing their countrymen’s failure to measure up to appearances and comportments associated with Eurocentric modernity, the Mexican elite, through the MOC, launched a huge media campaign to train “Mexicans who simply could not be removed from sight” in codified comportments that would signify as modern for foreign and elite spectators, or what I call “modernity scripts.” (13) The campaign consisted of a series of comedic shorts featuring the beloved Mexican comedian Cantinflas (who normally portrayed a peasant or someone from the lower classes) and was designed to educate the popular classes in formal expressions of national hospitality. This training included “how to behave on public transport,” generally, and in front of foreigners, specifically. (14) Most importantly, the campaign intended to “correct” perceived flaws of Mexican character, including “prevarication and lack of punctuality.” (15) The city’s taxi drivers and hospitality workers, as reported by The Nevada Daily Mail on March 5, 1968, were also “offered the chance to go to night school to learn English, Mexican history, and courtesy.” (16) This offer was designed to protect Mexico’s modern image from being undermined through encounters with actual Mexicans. (17) The “1,170 young, attractive, and mostly light-skinned multilingual [Olympic] hostesses,” also underwent an intensive, nine-step training program in preparation for the Games, complete with simulative rehearsals of interactions with foreigners. (18) The program included:

1) selection of applicants; 2) language examinations; 3) preliminary training; 4) definitive selection on the basis of performance; 5) designation of group heads and supervisors; 6) training period for administrative personnel; 7) signing of contracts; 8) intensive training program; and 9) a period of simulation during which each group maintained contact with foreign visitors, embassy personnel, and resident foreigners. (19)

The training program, the MOC reports, “consisted of twenty-two conferences and twenty-one special guided tours. Historians and other authorities provided the edecanes with basic information about the country, the capital, the Olympic Games, and the Organizing Committee.” (20) Through this paternalistic modernity training, the Mexican state foisted upon Mexicans literal scripts of embodied behaviour that were to be learned and reenacted before foreign spectators as a performance of modernity.

These scripts of embodied behaviour functioned as a type of camouflage that allowed service workers to blend into the urban space. With their “modernized” appearances and comportments, Mexican service workers became environmental coordinates, used to enhance the urban space without pulling special focus from the “total” urban image. Performing an orientational function, the Mexico ’68 Olympic hostesses also functioned as living extensions of Mexico ’68’s elaborate wayfinding graphic design system. In addition, Zolov argues that the image of the “liberated woman” created by the Mexico ’68 hostesses was intended to distance Mexico from foreign views of the country as a machista society “where middle-class women were routinely denied access to social mobility.” (21) Here, the implication is that the Mexico ’68 hostesses were instrumentalized to enact scripts of female liberation, involving displays of female empowerment, hints of sexual liberation through their somewhat risqué short skirts, and displays of education, multilingualism, and sophistication. The mobility of the hostesses throughout the city was thus activated as a synecdoche for the social mobility of Mexican women at large. It is thus fair to say that, while the Olympic hostesses were meant to blend in with the environment, they were also meant to stand out as examples of Mexico’s apparently modern views on gender. This extra labour of representing modernity by performing a fantasy of gender relations within the nation was not one that other Olympic service workers were burdened with. Other service workers were instead programmed with a series of scripts made to minimize their visibility and the possibility of embarrassing the Mexican elite in its desired performance of modernity. Through their different dramatic and aesthetic inscriptions into the “total” design environment, Mexico City’s hostesses and other service workers were trained to shore up Mexico’s performance of modernity through its modernized urban space.

The labours performed by the Mexico ’68 hostesses functioned as what performance studies theorist Shannon Jackson would call the “maintenance work,” or the often-repetitive labours performed by service workers and domestic labourers (usually women and/or racialized people) that create the “sustaining infrastructure” of human welfare and social life. (22) Through the reenactment of repetitive physical labour, bodies can become systems of environmental support that are in fact not just supportive of the environment, but part of the environment. Through their scripted labours, Mexico City’s Olympic hostesses, and its other, racially marked service workers became part of the sustaining infrastructure of the city and continuous with its aestheticized environment. Their labours, which worked to assimilate their bodies into the total design environment, were an indispensable supportive infrastructure for the image of modernity designed by the MOC.

The Mexico ‘68 logo channels the aesthetics of the Op Art movement

The Mexico ’68 logo painted on a wall in Mexico City. Image reproduced with the permission of Lance Wyman

At Mexico ’68, the state exploited the bodies and performances of its racialized service workers and Olympic hostesses as part of the environmental infrastructure through which a performance of modern statehood could emerge, and through which the Americas could be “rediscovered” as a locus of modernity. In her work on Montreal’s Expo ’67, theatre historian and theorist Erin Hurley has argued that one of the primary roles of the Expo ’67 hostesses was to hold together the environmental tissue through their emotional labour (the “‘management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display,’ which is sold for a wage,”) and mobilization as visual displays. (23) The practice of using the bodies, performances, and emotional labours of Indigenous and poor service workers and women at Mexico ’68 to generate environments through which strictly controlled versions of nationhood could emerge raises questions about the cooptation of the bodies of marginalized people as living infrastructure and urban design in other contexts. How, for example, are certain bodies and their practices co-opted as part of an environmental tissue used to brand neighbourhoods as desirable for living in or for investment? How are the bodies and practices of service workers staged in ways that support certain urban images rather than others? And how are the labours of certain bodies made invisible even as this labour is exploited? These questions suggest that the separation between body and space, person and architecture, human and design is not always clear, and that certain design logics depend on the transformation of bodies into living infrastructure and urban design. If we want to learn more about how architecture discriminates, we must pay attention to the invisible line that separates the bodies that get to use the city and the bodies that are used as the city.

Endnotes

(1) See Luis Castañeda, “Total Design of an Olympic Metropolis,” in Spectacular Mexico, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

(2) Mark Wigley, “Whatever Happened to Total Design,” Harvard Design Magazine, 5 (1998). Web http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/5/whatever-happened-to-total-design

(3) See Zolov’s article “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow’: Mexico and the 1968 Olympics” for his reading of the stereotypical framing of Mexico as a “land of mañana,” as in “I’ll get to it tomorrow.” Eric Zolov, “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow’: Mexico and the 1968 Olympics,” The Americas 61, no. 2 (2004):159–188.

(4) Zolov, 175–6.

(5) Anne-Marie Broudehoux, “Mega-Events, Urban Image Construction, and the Politics of Exclusion,” in Mega-Events and Globalization: Capital and Spectacle in a Changing World Order, eds. Richard Gruneau and John Horne (London, New York: Routledge, 2017), 116.

(6) Ibid.

(7) Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 2004), 339–367.

(8) Post-Revolutionary Mexican philosopher and Secretary of Public Education from 1921 to 1924, José Vasconcelos’s eugenic philosophy of la raza cósmica (the cosmic race) profoundly influenced the consolidation of national mestizaje. Vasconcelos believed that racial mixing could lead to a future, universal, and supreme “cosmic race” if races he viewed as uglier and inferior could be educated so that they might have fewer children and if the civilizing effects of European religion and culture were privileged.

(9) There was also trouble in Mexico’s miraculous middle class paradise. The enormous middle class student movement that galvanized Mexico City in 1968 revealed a tense generational fissure within Mexico and connected the country’s youth to protesting students around the globe. On October 2, 1968, approximately 10,000 university and high school students gathered in the middle of the new, modernist Nonoalco-Tlatelolco housing complex to listen peacefully to speeches. The state opened fire on the crowd, killing and disappearing a number estimated to be over 300 people.

(10) Claire Brewster and Keith Brewster, “Cleaning the Cage: Mexico City’s Preparations for the Olympic Games,” International Journal for the History of Sport 26, no. 6 (May 2009): 806.

(11) Quoted in Laura Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 38. See Levin’s book for her compelling argument about how women and racialized subjects deploy camouflage as a resistive tactic. With Performing Ground, Levin introduces camouflage to the field of performance studies.

(12) Claire Brewster and Keith Brewster, Representing the Nation: Sport and Spectacle in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (London, New York: Routledge, 2016), 95.

(13) Ibid, 97.

(14) Ibid.

(15) Ibid.

(16) “Olympics will help Mexico’s Tourism,” The Nevada Daily Mail, March 5, 1968.

(17) Claire Brewster and Keith Brewster, “Cleaning the Cage,” 806.

(18) Eric Zolov, “The Harmonizing Nation,” in In the Game, ed. Amy Bass (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 206.

(19) The Mexican Olympic Committee, “Official Report, Vol. 2” (1969): 167.

(20) Ibid.

(21) Eric Zolov, “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow,” 205.

(22) Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011), 60–2.

(23) Erin Hurley, National Performance: Representing Québec from Expo ‘67 to Céline Dion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 54.

Bio

Sunita Nigam is adjunct faculty at Bishop’s University. Her research focuses on the relationship between performance and placemaking in North America. Sunita holds a PhD in English from McGill University, where she published on the relationship between urban placemaking and cultural performance forms in Mexico City, New York, and Montreal.