“Nixon Go Home!”: Freedom of Speech and the Challenge of Photography

• In Event: Mediating and Sensing Revolt: Race, Globality, and Left Presumptions

Abstract

On May 7, 1958, then-Vice President of the United States Richard Nixon, arrived in Lima, Peru as part of his “goodwill” tour across Latin America. Despite the supposedly conciliatory intentions of the trip, Nixon’s reception instead cast a light on the growing anti-imperialist sentiment felt across the region, as well as on the increased solidarity across Latin American student movements. His visit to the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, in particular, was met by thousands of student protesters, who prevented his entrance into the university, chanting “Nixon Go Home!”, throwing stones and spitting at him. The publication of a photo essay on the May 19, 1958 issue of LIFE magazine visually and rhetorically curated the encounter for its American readership of more than 22.5 million people. The photographs and text included in the article developed a melodramatic narrative of Nixon’s victimization through the strategic mobilization of rights discourse.

In a two-page spread of the magazine, the Vice-President is shown angrily pointing a finger at the face of a student protestor asking: “Don’t you want the truth?”. Nixon is described in the accompanying text as “a righteously angry man, armed with nothing but a pistol-pointed finger…standing up to a mob of bullies,” and “goaded to wrath by denial of the right to free speech”. This paper explores the contradictions and erasures which result from the framing posed by the LIFE magazine coverage. The account invites a consideration of the implications of a term like “free speech”, so central to U.S. rights discourse, in the context of U.S. empire and points us to the entanglement between these rhetorical conventions and geopolitical hierarchies. The centrality of photographs throughout the article, and for a publication like LIFE more broadly, also undermines the constructed narrative. Drawing from photographic theory emphasizing the indexical potential of the medium, this paper critically examines the images included and attempts to develop an alternative narrative which more faithfully and seriously considers the claims and gestures of dissent performed by Peruvian students. By compiling an alternative archive of videos, photographs and oral accounts from the events to differently contextualize the LIFE photos, I contend with the potential of photography to articulate the conditions of anti-imperialist revolt.

Author

• Maria Paz Almenara, New York University