| For many Americans, 1968 is a year marked by political turmoil and social conflict. The 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City is an historical microcosm of an era of highly publicized domestic and international oppression, resistance, and protest. In this study, I focus primarily upon (1) the Black Power salute of African American Olympic medallists Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the rostrum and, to a lesser extent, (2) the Mexican government's massacre of over 300 student protesters a week before the Games came to Mexico City. These events are both historically significant and rhetorically powerful. They illuminate issues of race, class, gender, nationality, and sport by calling attention to the complex processes of remembering and forgetting that constitute public memory. I assert that the construction and constitution of public memory is an ideologically saturated set of discursive, material, and institutional practices that should be interrogated in order to produce critical consumers of rhetorical history. Moreover, inquiry into the ideological structures of society fosters a reflexivity consistent with the goals of critical rhetoric and cultural studies.;I conduct a rhetorical analysis of popular periodical coverage of the 1968 Olympic boycott movement and the politics of protest that so significantly shaped both Mexican and American student demonstrations that year. The analysis reveals themes of Black athletic superiority, progressive individualism, White alienation, alleged racism, and Mexican cultural trauma associated with the Tlatelolco massacre. I also analyze the 1999 Home Box Office documentary, Fists of Freedom: The Story of the '68 Summer Games and discuss the ways in which characterizations of the Black athletes in the film signify on racist stereotypes of the Uncle Tom and Bad Buck. The themes and characterizations, when articulated to emerging cultural values and politics, have serious implications for contemporary controversies about sports, nationalism, masculinity, identity, and social protest. |
