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Printer-Friendly ModeStudent to study 1968 massacre in Mexico
March 1, 2010 —
After students finish their final exams, many may pause their learning for the summer. Korey Force will travel to Mexico to research a massacre from more than 40 years ago.
This Spanish and international studies junior will fly south in May and gather information for her honors thesis about the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City.
Force developed one of five student projects to receive Student Research and Creativity Initiative funding. To achieve that, she said she went through three proposal drafts and received much help from Diane Boehm, director of SVSU’s Writing Center. Force was awarded $2,243 to pay for her trip.
Boehm said that one of Force’s challenges in writing the proposal was convincing the committee that the trip would be safe.
“They are not going to want to fund you if your wellbeing is at risk,” Boehm said.
But Force will stay in Mexico City for only a day and conduct the rest of her research in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she studied abroad in the past.
Force said that even though money was the obvious reward for the process, she is glad that she now has the skill of writing a proposal.
“I think that’s a great feat in itself,” she said.
In Mexico, Force will study two movements that were taking place in Mexico City in 1968. The government was spending large sums of money to renovate the city for the summer Olympics while masses of people were living in poverty.
Students gathered to protest, but the military came in and killed many, with reported casualties that today number between four and more than 3,000. The government denied that the event ever happened and refused to let funeral services be held for the students.
After being turned away, the victims’ mothers held their own ceremonies in protest.
“What I’m talking about,” Force said, “is how two movements that are ideologically different ended up supporting each other in the end.”
She hopes to get firsthand accounts of the movements through letters or past interviews. All of these will be written in Spanish.
“This will be the first time that I will be tackling large works [in the language],” Force said.
She will have to skim and summarize the texts and must learn how to do it quickly and efficiently in Spanish.
When she returns from her trip, she will have the summer to complete her 30- to 40-page thesis. She plans to submit it to academic journals for publication.
For students interested in getting grant money, Force’s advice is “to know exactly what you are going to do and how you are going to do it.” “The best projects,” according to Boehm, “come out of the passions of the students and their unique set of qualifications.”