Tlatelolco today

The cloister of the Monastery of Santiago Tlatelolco is the white/red building next to the old church of Santiago (Saint James, patron saint of the conquistadors). It is now a Convent (see the lower photo), but formerly it was the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Santiago, the first college in the Americas, and it was where Bernardino de Sahagún taught.

Nowadays it is enveloped by the city. Nearby are the excavated ruins of a great Aztec pyramid and the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of the Three Cultures) - those three cultures being the pre-Spanish native peoples, the Spanish, and modern Mexican. It’s a reflective spot.

It was here, in the Plaza, on the night of October 2, 1968, that modern México's government ordered the shooting of hundreds of students in the Tlatelolco massacre. Some have said the death toll was in the thousands but newer estimates range from 30 to 300, not counting the hundreds of wounded. Octavio Paz resigned his diplomatic post in protest and it has since become a metaphor for the human rights atrocities committed under successive Mexican regimes in the Sixties and Seventies. The authoritative oral history of the massacre, La noche de Tlatelolco, was compiled by writer Elena Poniatowska and published in 1971.