• YURI CORTEZ/AFP/Getty Images
  • Elena Poniatowska

Ask an American to name the most tumultuous events of 1968 and we’ll recall the King and Kennedy assassinations and the rioting at the Democratic convention in Chicago. Ask about international upheaval and we’ll add the Soviet invasion of Prague and the student uprising in Paris. Prod us further—what about Mexico City?—and most of us will come up with the moment when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists to protest racism in America as they were awarded Olympic medals.

It turned out Poniatowska was a sort of den mother to young women such as my new friend—rich, cosmopolitan liberals. They talked the talk; she walked. A descendent of an aristocratic Polish family, she’d lived in Mexico since her mother fled Paris to escape World War II, her father staying behind to join the resistance. Elena grew up and became a writer, and in 1968 she’d gone out to the Plaza de las Tres Culturas while the blood was still wet on the stones and begun interviewing survivors. Three years later she published The Night of Tlatelolco, a study of the massacre that for decades was the only alternative to the government’s self-serving narrative. But after the PRI fell from power official files were opened and Poniatowska’s account was confirmed, and in 2000 a special prosecutor charged Echeverria with genocide. (He was acquitted in 2006.)

“Sweet orange / Celestial lime / Tell María / not to lie down. / María, María, / now she laid down, / Death came / and took her away.”

“Naranja dulce,/ limón celeste,/ dile a María / que no se acueste. / María, María / ya se acostó, / vino la muerte / y se la llevó.“

Or this one, which is even more frightening:

” . . . Cuchito, Cuchito / killed his wife / with a little knife / the same size as he. / He tore out her guts / and was selling them. / – ‘For sale: Tripe / of a bad woman!’”

“Cuchito, cuchito / mató a su mujer/ con un cuchillito / del tamaño de él./ Le sacó las tripas/ y las fue a vender./ —¡Mercarán tripitas / de mala mujer!“

Even today feminine guts are being sold. Last April 13 in Ciudad Juárez, two women were killed with several gunshots to the head: one was 15; the other was over 20 and pregnant. The first body was found in a dumpster.

Tortolero compares Poniatowska’s celebrity to Oprah Winfrey’s. “Every college-educated Latino knows who she is,” he told me in a conversation a couple of days later. “I’ve been with her in Chicago so many times. She’s walking down the street and people do double-takes. Elena! Elenita! And she’s talking to people, hugging complete strangers.” But Poniatowska’s stature as an artist and public intellectual sets her above and beyond. “We don’t have anybody like that in the U.S.,” Tortolero went on. “Oprah Winfrey is not Elena Poniatowska. She’s the one who wrote about the murders in Tlatalolco. That was very dangerous to do. It was super-dangerous to speak out against the government at that time. She said, ‘I’m four feet nine in heels and it’d look very bad if they killed me, don’t you think?’

But being thanked by strangers for old kindnesses you can’t remember isn’t the worst thing to happen when you’re beyond the age of 80. She was delighted, and I drove off happy. I’ll write something nice and post the URL on her website, I was thinking. Maybe this time I’ll stick.