Preparing to Rebel: Growing Up in Mexico City, 1940–70

      For Western Europe and the U.S., Norbert Elias, Arthur Marwick and Jeremi Suri explain 1960s rebel youth as products of an era of unprecedented economic prosperity and peace, population growth, consumption, the concentration of a teenage sector in its own spaces, and vociferous democratic ideology in a Cold War setting..Although they never use this concept, they are talking about a modern welfare state based on a Fordist model of industrial production engaged in a mobilization for children’s development. Such states were not limited to the Euro-US metropolis.  Mexico was one of several outside that space.    Drawing upon my book, Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zuñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation(Duke, 2014), I examine the educational/social/cultural processes that formed a freedom-seeking, affective, and contestatory subjectivity in a broad sector of Mexican youth growing up in the capital in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.   I look at family, schooling, radio, cinema, recorded music, sports,  live music, theater, painting, literature, television, and youth’s rapidly multiplying spaces of sociability, discussion, pleasure, and contestation.   The overall process was transnational as were much of the media and other products youth consumed.    If Mexico City Is to be distinguished in this socialization process from the U.S., it is perhaps in Mexico’s more authoritarian, hierarchical, corporatist and patriarchal structures and in a deeply Catholic society, that delighted in sinful pleasures (much more than the Puritanical U.S.)  but was also deeply, often militantly conservative.

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