Mexico: #YoSoy132 Faces Challenge of Consolidating Itself, say Experts

La Jornada: Laura Poy Solano

Two months after its emergence, the #YoSoy132 student movement faces the challenge of deepening its consolidation while linking with other social organizations, but "without diluting or losing its own mechanisms of social protest," experts say. It is urgent, they emphasized, that they generate internal mechanisms:

"for dealing with the dismissive insults that come from the outside and that are seeking to label [the movement] as violent or radical."

In the case of the People's Front in Defense of the Land of San Salvador Atenco, the Mexican Electrical Workers Union or the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers, they explained, it is about:

"consolidated groups, so [the movement] runs the risk of being absorbed; it must define and maintain the differences in their forms of social protest."

Alfredo Nateras Domínguez, of the Department of Sociology at the Autonomous Metropolitan University and a specialist in youth identities, indicated that for the youth group:

"it is key that they neither lose their nerve nor allow themselves to be diluted by other movements that in the social imagination are closer to radical actions; so far [the movement] has shown that none of its actions are violent, that they are nonpartisan and do not have any [single] leader.

In two months, he added, #YoSoy132:

"has achieved many successes: it opened a discussion about the urgent need to democratize the communications media, changed the mood of the electoral process, obtained a third debate, and its members were included by the Federal Electoral Institute as [electoral] observers. They brought freshness and creativity to the electoral discussion, but what matters is that they managed to establish themselves as subjects and social actors. They disproved the false label that young people are politically and socially apathetic."

Nevertheless, he said, [the movement] still faces challenges, [namely]:

"to consolidate itself as a social movement, to develop greater capacity to respond to attacks, but above all to generate their own mechanisms for facing squarely their enormous ideological diversity so that it may not be a factor that overwhelms it."

José Manuel Valenzuela, sociologist at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte, an expert on youth identities and social movements, warned that the risk of being stigmatized as "radical and violent" is part of the official narrative against social movements that:

"many times is used as a smoke screen to criminalize social protest. We see this in the student protests of 1968 and 1971, when it was said over and over again that they were infiltrated, communists and criminals."

The national context in which #YoSoy132 was born, he said, is a country where fear is internalized, where the dead and missing number in the thousands, and where the current youth condition is precarious in education, employment and the street. Spanish original