Amuleto
by Roberto Bolaño
Locked in a bathroom while history happened.
For you if
you want to understand the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre through someone who survived it by accident
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$16 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
In 1968 the Mexican army occupied the National Autonomous University and Auxilio Lacouture hid in a bathroom for thirteen days. Bolaño tells her story — a Uruguayan woman in Mexico City, mother of all the young poets, witness to the student movement's destruction — in a single long monologue that moves between the past and a future she can already see coming. The most intimate dispatch from inside Mexico's buried trauma. Ninety pages. Unforgettable.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Mexico • Latin America
- Voice
- Written by a Mexican author
- Topics
- 1968 tlatelolco massacre
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Like Water for Chocolate(1992)
dir. Alfonso Arau
Forbidden love, served through food.
In early-1900s Mexico, Tita is forbidden by family tradition from marrying the man she loves, so she pours her longing into the food she cooks — food that carries her emotions, sometimes literally, into everyone who eats it. Adapted from Laura Esquivel's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in making a kitchen the site of rebellion — Tita's cooking becomes the one language her mother can't control or silence. Pedagogical in showing how inherited "duty" polices women's desire generation after generation, and what it costs to break that chain.
Pedro Páramo(2024)
dir. Rodrigo Prieto
A ghost town where the dead won't stop talking.
A man travels to his late mother's hometown to find the father he never knew, only to discover Comala is a ghost town in the most literal sense — populated by the dead, still narrating the tyranny of the cacique who once ruled it. Adapted from Juan Rulfo's novel.
Why it’s here: Punk in blurring the line between the living and the dead until power and guilt outlast the man who held them — Pedro Páramo's tyranny haunts Comala long after his death. Pedagogical in showing how one man's greed can hollow out an entire town's future.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Trauma, time travel, and tinfoil hats.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Ceremony
Leslie Marmon Silko
A Pueblo veteran comes home to the land that can heal him.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
I, Rigoberta Menchú
Rigoberta Menchú
A Maya woman testifies to a genocide in progress.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Know My Name: A Memoir
Chanel Miller
She took her name back from the case.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
El Narco
Ioan Grillo
The drug war by someone who stayed long enough.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
My Mexico
Diana Kennedy
Fifty years of Mexican kitchens before they're gone.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Prayers for the Stolen
Jennifer Clement
Girls raised to disappear before the cartel finds them.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Daughters of Juárez
Teresa Rodríguez
Mothers refusing to let their daughters be statistics.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST