“To the Streets”: Public Protest in Mexico’s 1968 Student Movement

This paper examines the protest repertoires and strategies of student participants in the 1968 wave of protests which paralyzed Mexico City on the eve of the Summer Olympic Games.  It argues that one of the most important legacies of “Sixty-Eight” for contentious politics in Mexico, Latin America, and the world was protestors’ use of media and public space as forums for international visibility.  These methods of seizing and diverting media attention included occupation of national monuments and tourist areas such as the Museum of History and Anthropology and the Zócalo, as well as the strategic convening of press conferences and co-optation of national events.  Such behaviors not only spotlighted protestor demands, but also aimed to cloak the movement in a protective layer of international media attention. 

While such protest repertoires have become associated with Latin American transnational contentious politics generally, particularly in the cases of the Mothers of the Disappeared and neo-Zapatistas, a case can be made that Mexico’s Sixty-Eight movement represented a watershed moment in the history and origins of this particular kind of protest ritual.  Drawing on recently declassified archival sources, journalistic accounts, and memoirs, this paper shows that many of the decisions concerning when and where to deploy protests, and how to ensure that demands would be given full media coverage by the international press, stemmed from the realization that the upcoming Olympic Games presented a novel opportunity to attract the attention of foreign journalists, whose presence would minimize the government's willingness to pursue violent reprisals.  While the student leaders were wrong in their gamble, and repression turned into massacre, the moment still stands as one in which protestors began to use co-optation of significant international moments and manufactured media events, such as the Olympics, as means of generating their own public ritual spaces.