This past Monday, I attended a reading and author talk of the book “A Massacre in Mexico” at the New York Public Library on 42nd St and 5thAvenue at 6:30. After class, I headed on the train uptown and arrived here. The building itself was very grand as I discovered since the building takes up almost 3 blocks. I entered and security checked my bag upon entering and leaving as well.  The room was quite long but not too wide, and there were 2 sections of rows of chairs with an aisle separating them, and a little stage towards the front where the speakers were. The audience of this event consisted mostly of young adults but there were also some older people there as well.

Upon coming to this reading, I did not know anything about what massacre this book was referring to, but I actually learned a lot from this experience. The author of the book is from Mexico, and her name is Anabel Hernandez. She originally wrote this book in Spanish, and the other speaker, John Washington translated her book into English which he told us as he began the event.  Since it is a lengthy book telling a story of an event that occurred going into extreme depth about the underlying details of all aspects of this massacre, the majority of the event was less focused on reading parts of the book itself, and more focused on a discussion of the book. But, because they could not read the whole book, the author gave a quick but detailed summary of the book. Because she is from Mexico and Spanish was her first language, I found her English sometimes hard to understand, and when she said the names of places in Mexico she visited or Spanish names of people she encountered while writing, it sometimes threw me off because her Spanish accent overpowered the words for me since they were already unfamiliar to my ears. John Washington’s role in the event was to read certain parts of the book in which he wanted the author to elaborate on and tell us more about, which he did a wonderful job in bringing many great areas of the book to attention and into greater detail.

From what I was able to understand from attending this event without prior knowledge to the book is that this book is about the Tlatelolco Massacre which happened in October of 1968. The author of the book explained how she wrote it because she was a journalist and wanted to write about how corrupt the Mexican government was and the fact that they have gotten away with things like this massacre. She told us how the Mexican government and military has an extreme amount of power which allows them to get away with murder, including the kidnapping and killing of her own father. Because she had a strong motive to want to expose the Mexican authorities, she decided to find out what exactly happened for the military to to murder 43 innocent students. She told us about her experiences and how no witnesss wanted to speak to her because they were afraid of themselves being killed for telling her anything and how she had to gain the trust of people in order to get information. She told us how many journalists, including big time journalists, would not take on this story because of how fearful they were, but she felt it needed to be addressed.

This event opened my eyes to a massacre that I knew nothing about before, and exposed me to the corruption of the Mexican government that I never knew existed. Anabel Hernandez was extremely passionate in speaking of her experiences and reasoning for writing this book and it has persuaded me to read this book eventually because I would be interested in reading the story in full detail. Hernandez also gave me insight on the craft of writing as a journalist, and the fact that as a journalist, you do not just write, but also travel, interview people, research, and act as a detective in a way to put things together. I also feel that attending a book reading can be very helpful when reading something on a topic you aren’t familiar with, because you are able to ask questions about it during a Q/A session rather than be alone and confused. Additionally, one of the fathers of the 43 students murdered was actually in attendance and he had a translator thank all of us for coming and caring about the cause, which made me feel really happy I was there in a way to support the families of these students. Overall, I had a great experience at my first literary reading and discussion event, and I hope to attend more because I feel they are great ways to learn about things you have never knew about before and open your eyes to what has happened and is still happening in the world.