Los días y los años by Luis González de Alba: Conditional writing or liberating writing?

Abstract

While books speak to their readers through their content, they also speak from the situations in which they were created. Through these lines I will review the process of writing the book Los días y los años (“The Days and the Years”, 1971), by Luis González de Alba, both from some of the advantages it brought to its author and from certain conditioning factors (political, group and gender) to which it was subject during its creation. This work represented, at the time, a counterweight to the official version that was handled after the events of October 2nd, 1968, through which several generations were able to learn about the student movement from the voice of its leaders. Some writings, especially those that arise in temporary or exceptional situations, such as the one we are dealing with here, are subject to various interests and tensions that shape, or even determine, them. Los días y los años is paradigmatic because besides having been written in prison and having a collective origin, it has a parallel history, written almost 40 years later, which reveals aspects of the author veiled in the first book. From what “place” did González de Alba create his history of Mexican ’68? What advantages did it bring him and what were the conditioning factors that influenced his writing? Based on primary sources such as the book under study and the interviews I conducted with its author, Luis González de Alba, and the representative of the National Strike Council, Raúl Álvarez Garín, and from the new perspectives of the history of books and reading, we try to have an approach not only to the book and the circumstances of its writing, but to those processes of a social, political and cultural nature that marked an era.

Keywords: Literature on the 1968 student movement, prison and writing,