Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco

Lonely Planet review

Inaugurated in 2007, the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco occupies the former Foreign Relations Secretariat building (the agency has since moved to the Plaza Juárez complex on the Alameda Central). A component of the UNAM, the cultural center contains two interesting permanent exhibits. The Colección Andrés Blaisten, on the first floor, comprises the largest privately owned collection of Mexican 20th-century art.

With over 650 paintings, prints and sculptures by both obscure and famed artists such as Rufino Tamayo, María Izquierdo and Juan Soriano. Downstairs, the Memorial del 68 both chronicles and memorializes the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco. Through film clips, newspaper articles, photos, posters and numerous taped interviews with leading intellectuals (in Spanish), the exhibit evokes the mood of the times and follows the sequence of events leading up to the government-sponsored slaughter of hundreds of student protesters on October 2.