Twitter as a Mnemonic Medium from an Ecological Perspective: Ayotzinapa and the Memory of Tlatelolco in Mexico

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines how the link between two tragic events in Mexican history—the 2014 attack on students from the Ayotzinapa Teachers’ College and the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre—has been represented and performed on Twitter, pursuing two interlinked objectives. The first goal is to explore the memorialization of the Tlatelolco massacre in relation to the Ayotzinapa case within a corpus of 16,706 tweets, showing how this memorialization has brought about a retemporalization of the history of violent acts committed by the state in Mexico. The second goal is to examine the role of Twitter as a mnemonic medium, considering it from both an ecological media perspective and an interdisciplinary research perspective that explores interconnections between media studies and memory studies.