Mention of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics by Anglophone scholars typically starts and ends in one place: Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos atop the medal stand, receiving their gold and bronze medals, respectively, for the 200-meter footrace. These authors have written extensively on how the protest drew global attention to ongoing racial oppression in the United States as well as to the burgeoning Black Power movement. The demonstration spoke to the frustrations and aspirations of millions of African Americans and countless others engaged in anticolonial struggles the world over. It also yielded one of the most iconic photographs in modern Olympic history. Smith and Carlos made the XIX Olympiad, and the Olympics more generally, sexy for activists and intellectuals alike.1
A handful of scholars writing in English have zoomed out from Smith and Carlos to examine how the 1968 Games shed light on the urban and political history...