English and Spanish-language scholars have generally narrated the state-sponsored massacre of several hundred people at the Plaza of the Three Cultures and the adjacent Nonoalco-Tlatelolco public housing complex in Mexico City on October 2, 1968 as a historical rupture, estranged from its spatiotemporal location due to its grave violence or limited to the finite span of the 1968 student movement, which was its target. However, evocations of Nonoalco-Tlatelolco's modernist architecture figure prominently in the film and literature which emerged in the massacre's aftermath, offering a site-specific mode of interpretation and historical narration. This dissertation investigates the Plaza and Nonoalco-Tlatelolco as built and discursive environment to further the spatial understanding of the massacre and to explain the site-specificity of its representation in Mexican popular culture, which circulates and constitutes the massacre in the present.