Strong medicine

I've always suspected that she just might have more than a few critics just a little bit fooled. I argue here that behind that candy-striper appearance of both her visage and her written discourse, Mexican journalist, cronista and novelista Guadalupe Loaeza quite often wields scalpel obsidian blade-sharp words. And she can do so with the precision of a highly trained surgeon, waiting to make the cut exactly when and where it will have most effect.

She belongs to that world whose ills she exposes, and when she exposes wounds to better treat them, she more bravely than any of her contemporaries that I've read, faces the directive, "Physician, heal thyself." In "Edecán 1968" she anesthetizes readers. We start to think that we are reading a simple mockery of the girls chosen to be special cultural delegates to visiting VIPS and athletes participating in the 1968 Olympic Games. The Olympic Games that were destined to show the rest of the world that México was different from Latin America, to show the rest of the world that México had indeed "arrived", could no longer be considered among "Third World" nations...and then 2 octubre en Tlatelolco...and its aftermath, also supressed...

Loaeza's unique treatment of one small segment of the population during this confusing tragic period contains strong medicine. It is a sharp observation of hypocrisy of self and society, briefer perhaps than even Monisiváis' celebrated aphorisms. And the message, encapsulated in a very small and very bitter pill, is certainly very hard to swallow. And she would know, having had to swallow it herself.

Her cronista's first person is a actually quadruple dose of accusatory pronouns:

My clumsy translation follows:

Some of the journalists surely thought the girls' reaction must be a strategy on their part to avoid spreading fear among the tourists. Nevertheless, they'd never imagine that some of the orange-uniformed envoys actually had no idea where Tlatelolco Square was nor what had happened on the second of October. "Ay, but how would you expect us to know?" perhaps many of the ex-orange girls would say to me, "If at that exact Wednesday at exactly 5:00 PM, I was at the seamstress's, picking up my uniform, which fit me terribly. You have no idea, I had to let it out at the sides, raise the hem. And, I had to adjust the collar of the blouse. And do you have any idea where the seamstress lives? Way out in Satelite. Don't you realize? How could you expect me to have even known about the students...Don't you dare judge me unfairly. I bet you whatever you want that you didn't participate in any of that either. That you, too, were one of the orange girls. What, don't you remember?", something like that perhaps, they would have said to me.