99% Invisible - 264- Mexico 68

Episode Date: June 28, 2017

The 1968 Olympics took place in Mexico City, Mexico. It was the first games ever hosted in a Latin American country. And for Mexico City, the event was an opportunity to show the world that they were a metropolis as … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The United States leads the Olympics in medal awards and is just about supreme in the Sprint races. On October 16, 1968, American Sprinters Tommy Smith and John Carlos climbed onto the podium at the Mexico City Olympics to accept their medals. Yesterday, they came in first and third in the 200 meter dash. Smith had won gold. Carlos had won bronze. As the national anthem began to play, the men, both African-American, bowed their heads and raised their fists in the black power salute.

That's producer Claire Monde. They kept their fists raised until the last notes of the anthem faded away. The gesture was a statement of black pride and defiance. It's still considered one of the anthem faded away. The gesture was a statement of black pride and defiance. It's still considered one of the most overtly political statements made in the history of the modern Olympic games. But that wasn't the only politically significant moment at the Olympics that year. A Mexican herdler named Enrique de Bas Basilio became the first woman to ever light the Olympic Cauldron.

A Czech gymnast beat out Soviet gymnast for the overall women's title, just two months after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was also the first time a Latin American city, or even a Spanish-speaking country, had hosted the games. It was a big deal to have hundreds of thousands of international travelers come visit Mexico. The Mexican government saw the Olympics as an announcement to the world. Mexico City had arrived as a major international metropolis. So almost everything about the 1968 Olympics felt revolutionary.

Including the design of it, the images and logos associated with the 1968 Olympics were ubiquitous at the time. They were plastered all over the city. This complete design campaign would become one of the most famous in Olympic history, and it would set a whole new standard for games to come. But these government commission designs would also be co-opted by local activists who wanted to reveal the darker political reality in Mexico that was hidden behind the beautiful glossy imagery of the 1968 games. In the decades leading up to the 1968 Olympics, Mexico had gone through a period of major economic growth.

It became known as the Mexican Miracle. The Mexican Miracle typically, you know, historians conventionally speak about it as a period spanning from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. The country had rapidly industrialized, rapidly urbanized, and its capital, Mexico City, had grown into this enormous sprawling metropolis. The city grew faster than it ever had in Mexico's modern history. That's Luis Castaneda. He's the author of Spectacular Mexico, design propaganda in the 1968 Olympics.

Because of its size and layout, Mexico City was a challenging place to host a major international event like the Olympics. Mexico City was sprawling and spreading still at the height of its miracle. I mean, even until the Olympics are literally about to happen, there are all these doubts about whether the Mexican government will be organized enough to undertake the whole aspect of all of that magnitude. The Olympic organizers needed to show that their metropolis was safe, navigable, cohesive, and, you know, exciting.

They wanted to create a visual identity for the Olympics to really sell Mexico City to all these visitors seeing it for the first time. So, they decided to hold an international competition to find a designer who would create a logo and graphic design campaign for the Olympics. They wanted something that looked cosmopolitan and contemporary and distinctly Mexican.

And this is where an unlikely character comes in. I'm Lance Wyman. I'm a designer. I work here in New York. In 1966, Lance Wyman was a 29-year-old graphic designer. When he heard about the competition, he knew that he and his design partner, Peter Murdoch, had to get on the short list of contenders.

This list included design teams from all over the world who would come down to Mexico City for a two week trial run. After their two weeks, each team would present their design for consideration. And we got on the list to go down in November of 1966. And Peter and I had just started out, we didn't have any money, so we only could only afford one- way tickets. They hopped on the plane with their one way tickets and landed in Mexico City. By the way, neither of them had ever visited Mexico before.

They didn't really know anything about the country. If they were going to design a logo to represent Mexico, Wyman and Murdoch would have to learn a lot and fast. They started where most tourists start by visiting museums. It's been a lot of time at the Museum of Anthropology, where they studied artifacts from pre-Columbian Mexico, like the Aztec Sunstone and ancient Mayan murals. I actually was floored by some of the early cultures

because they were doing things in a contemporary way with geometry and with graphics. The bold lines and bright colors and geometric shapes reminded Wyman of the kind of op art that was popular among contemporary artists back in New York. Op art or optical art uses contrast, geometry, and other tricks to give the viewer the impression of movement. And so, informed by both indigenous artifacts

and modern art art, Wyman came up with a logo that rift on the five rings of the Olympic symbol. I realized that the geometry of the five rings could be integrated with the year of the event, 68. He superimposed the digits six and eight over the classic Olympic rings. The circles on the rings radiated out from the circles in the digits 6 and 8 over the classic Olympic rings. The circles on the rings radiated out

from the circles in the digits and it created a hypnotic stripe effect. And from that, I developed the typography to make the word Mexico. It's this very groovy looking typography made of three parallel stripes. Wyman created a logo that he considered both very modern and quintessentially Mexican. The end of the two weeks came and we started making prints

of the Mexico 68 logo type and people from publications and people from the public relations. They wanted copies of it and we were working like crazy making copies and doing all of that. And then Wyman realized that no one actually told him yet if he had the job. So he asked one of the organizers. I said, did we win? He goes, well, I guess so.

Wyman had created a stunning logo and typeface for the competition. But choosing this white guy who had never been to Mexico before was a bit problematic. It's not that unusual for people not born in Mexico for artists and people in culture and the arts to be involved with these kinds of state-sponsored campaigns. It's not entirely unprecedented, but it's still a very unique situation, especially given the fact that this is a very, very significant project. That's author Luis Castaneda again. What is very striking, almost shocking, perhaps,

is that the fact that of course Lance Wyman is very much unproven as a designer, he's very young, he hasn't had much time to do much yet, and yet somehow he's given this very high degree of responsibility as part of the design campaign. Wyman and Murdoch ended up staying in Mexico for two years to work on the campaign. And along with the team of designers, many of them Mexican. They came up with ways to use their typeface, logo, and other designs all over the city. The hypnotic stripes were turned into striped uniforms for the events, workers, and volunteers. The patterns and colors used in the logo ended up on hats, posted stamps, balloons, all sorts of products

to hype the impending games. And these objects range from very small objects, all kinds of memorabilia, things from ash trays and furniture or apparel, all the way to the stadiums. Stadiums across the city were painted with these radiating op-art patterns. Bright colors decorated sidewalks and walls and plazas. And these bright hypnotic designs

didn't just give the Olympic Games a visual coherence. The graphic design language of the Olympics expanded into an entire system that helped visitors navigate the massive metropolis. To do this, Wyman made simple color-coded icons to represent every sporting event. They were not stick figures, but they were focused more on a part of the body or piece of the equipment or a combination of the two.

Gymnastics, for example, was represented by a hand gripping a single suspended ring. Track and field, head its icon, boxing head its icon. So on a ticket, you knew what your ticket was for by the icon only. So if you're visiting from Japan and didn't speak any Spanish, you'd see, say, the soccer icon on a green background, and you'd follow the green signs to the stadium where the soccer would be. And the system wasn't just for sports. Why I'm in the team made universally understandable icons for 19 cultural events happening around the city as well.

We had children's painting, we had folk dancing, we had science programming. By following these cultural icons, visitors could continue to entertain themselves and explore the city after the sporting events were over. The 1968 Olympics had been to create Los Huegos de la Paz, the games of peace. So Wyman designed a little outline of a dove, which shop owners all over the city were given to stick in their windows. Between the logo, the typeface, the colors, the icons, and the doves, Wyman created a visual identity that saturated the whole city. It was everywhere.

It was a total design campaign. Total design campaign, right? The idea of total design, that every single thing, idea, place, object associated with the Olympics, is immediately and powerfully recognizable as part of a whole. And the completeness of the campaign would set a precedent for years to come. I think it's safe to say that, although design and architecture and the arts in general had been very powerfully associated with Olympics before Mexico 68, it's really after Mexico's succeed that it becomes a kind of standard expectation of design campaigns associated with these kinds of events. While Lance Wyman was designing this extensive campaign, he was holed up, swammed with work,

and he really didn't get a chance to go out much. No, so the grindstone really, almost through the whole thing, we were pretty isolated at the Olympic Committee. He didn't see the protest movement growing in the city around him. The movement was led by students who believed the long-ruling institutional revolutionary party catered to wealthy Mexicans rather than the poor, rural, and working class. The country had been experiencing huge economic growth, but millions of people had been left behind. The country had been experiencing huge economic growth, but millions of people had been left behind. The Mexican miracle hadn't reached everyone. The government was talking of the Mexican miracle. Even though in the reality of

those days things were not as happy as they appeared. These are excerpts from interviews with students involved in the protests against Mexico's single party government, courtesy of our friends at Radio Diaries. In the 60s, we were still accounted where the government controlled everything. Presidents were the equivalent of monarchs. I mean, it was forbidden to demonstrate

you could not go and express your dissent. And for the students protesting the government meant protesting against the Olympics themselves, the so-called Games of Peace. Olympics are, I think, maybe by design by definition, always about propaganda on some level or another. And so what the Olympics sought to present as a kind of happy picture of social harmony

and as a kind of very sanitized idea of how modernization happens was of course not the reality of what many of these inhabitants of the city experienced. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets repeatedly throughout 1968. We were urban middle class, low middle class, bunch of job people. It was in a symbolic way the clash of a new Mexico and a non-Mexico. You have a middle class with eyes closed and a group of students saying this was not a democracy

and this is not working. Again and again, police had come out and violently dispersed protesters with clouds of tear gas as the Olympics neared and as international attention turned towards Mexico City. The government was desperate to make the unrest go away. On October 2nd, just 10 days before the games of peace were set to begin, thousands of students gathered at

Lattaloko Square in the northeast of Mexico City to demand the release of people who had been locked up at a previous protest. It was a quiet gathering of people with signs, walking slowly around the plaza. And we'd look back and there was all these infantry troops. They started to advance towards the crowd and at some point we heard some shots. We didn't know where they came from and seconds later how do you say in English? All help broke loose. soldiers opened fire on the protesters. To this day we don't know exactly how many students died in the massacre, but the number is likely in the hundreds. The scene was cleared before there could be an accurate body count.

The blood was washed away. Thousands of protesters were arrested and locked up. The government took great pains to cover their tracks. The amount of students were shot and many of the others were imprisoned for quite some time was covered up. The government claimed that the students had fired first to provoke the military. Evidence has since come to light

that disproves that claim. It's an extremely shocking event for a long time kind of suppressed in Mexican national memory. And in many ways, it is the crux of the crisis that sets the stage for the, in a very, very dramatic sense for the Olympics themselves. The massacre was so horribly devastating

that of course Lance Wyman heard about it. When I heard about it and how severe it was, it was a difficult situation because I felt I was working for the government and I couldn't do anything about it. But he says he really empathized with the students. I wasn't much older than they were, so I had that feeling that I might have felt good

if I just walked away from the whole thing. Wyman felt stuck in the middle. But in a way, he didn't need to choose between the government and the protesters. His designs found a way to serve both sides. Students began imitating Wyman's images and co-opting them. They took a poster he made with a silhouetted image of runners racing and turned it into silhouettes of troops beating people with batons.

They used his signature typography to create anti-government posters and that very simple image of a dove in all the shop windows. Students went around the city spraying a small burst of bright dove in all the shop windows, students went around the city spraying a small burst of bright red paint over the dove's chest, like it had been shot. They were playing with the propaganda of the Olympics and hinting at a darker political reality. And Wyman, he liked it.

He made a design campaign so ubiquitous, so resonant that the resistance could use it too. And I've always been questioned, well, why do you feel good about that? And I guess that's why, because I was in a situation where I was kind of torn. I was very sympathetic as far as what was happening to the students, but I was also very not wanting to see the Olympics be stopped. And they weren't stopped. On October 12, 1968, the games began on schedule, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. 12 October, 1968, declared inaugurated the Olympic Games of Mexico. the Mexico. The 1968 Olympics went on to become one of the most important in the history of the games,

marked not only by athletic achievement, but by open political defiance. Do you think you represented all black athletes in doing this? I can say I represented black America and very proud to be a Black man and also to have won the gold medal. Mexico 68 also set a new precedent for how governments would use design to promote their country's image to the international community for better or for worse. The 68 games also left a permanent mark on Mexico City's infrastructure. Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world. It's the largest metropolitan area in North America. Around 4.4 million people ride on Mexico City's metro system every day, including producer Claire Mullin, who visited a couple months ago. I'm in the metro on the pink line at Quarte-Moc, which has an eagle icon.

Mexico City's metro is incredibly crowded and very extensive, and yet it is often recognized as one of the easiest rail systems to navigate, partly because of its iconography. La Catolica, which is a big ship, it looks like a pirate ship without the pirate symbol. And then we have Merced, where there are six apples and a crate. And those icons are there, thanks in part, to Lance Wyman. The Metro was supposed to make its debut during the Olympics, but excavators kept unearthing ancient architecture in the path of the Olympics, but excavators kept unearthing ancient architecture

in the path of the tracks, and the opening was delayed. But Wyman was still involved in its design, specifically its map. He employed the same visual system he developed for the Olympics to help international visitors navigate the trains. In the Olympics, we relied on the graphics, and I thought, well, why can't a city do that? So Wyman color coded each line and created a unique icon for every single stop? So even if you're visiting from Japan and can't read any Spanish at all, you can say to yourself, I want to take the pink line to the stop of the grasshopper on it. The station that's stopped at Chipotlepec Park,

Chipotlepec means grasshopper Hill in the Nahuatl, the Aliasa Tech language, so I use the Grasshopper. Again, some Mexicans took issue with this young foreigner coming in to design something that would be such a huge part of their city, but eventually, Mexican designers took up the project and made it their own. You know, I designed the first three lines of the Metro and all the, they have 12 lines now and they were designed by Mexican designers and some of these are better than I did in the original line, you know.

After the Olympics, after the Metro, Wyman did some more work for Mexico, like the design for the 1970 World Cup, but he went back to the US. Wyman went on to design more maps, big ones like for the National Zoo and the DC Metro System, although none of them used symbols and icons and colors as completely as in Mexico City. The clear iconography of the Metro System is a reminder of a complicated and sometimes terrible period in Mexico City's history. It's a simple design that invites you to explore the massive and complex metropolis.

It's a design that assures you that, if you get lost, no matter where you're from or what language you speak, you can find your way around and see the city for yourself. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Claire Mullin and Avery Trouffleman. Technical production and mixed by Sheree Fusef with music by Sean Rial and Ok Akumi. Our Senior Producer is Katie Mingle Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the staff includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Delaney Hall, Teran Masa, and me Roman Mars. Thanks to the team at Radio Diaries who provided us with some of the tape from their documentary,

a movement, a massacre, and Mexico's 50 year search for the truth. It tells the story of the student protests in 1968 and uncovers a secret behind the government's bloody crackdown. You can hear that story on the student protests in 1968 and uncovers a secret behind the government's bloody crackdown. You can hear that story on the Radio Diaries podcast right now. Radio Diaries is one of the OG radio topia programs. You should definitely be subscribed if you aren't already. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row. In beautiful,

downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show enjoying discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org, we're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But we have all the old episodes and a bunch of design stories that you can only read with your eyes on our website.

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