HETEROGENEITY OF A SOCIAL OUTBURST- THE #YOSOY132 MOVEMENT IN MEXICO

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1 HETEROGENEITY OF A SOCIAL OUTBURST- THE #YOSOY132 MOVEMENT IN MEXICO Raúl Cabrera Amador, Claudia Salazar Villava 1 There has been a substantial transformation in today s community experience. Fraternal solidarity emerges through ephemeral communities, organized without visible leadership, and lacking any hierarchical structure, but based on virtual communication and characterized by a huge potential for both action and creation of meaning. This is the case of the yo soy 132 movement in Mexico. We will briefly narrate its story in order to propose a reflection on the heterogeneity of new social outbursts, which are shared life experiences in a world as defying as this one is. On May 11 th 2012, Enrique Peña Nieto, who was then the presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, by its Spanish initials) attended an event at the Iberoamerican University (UIA, by its Spanish initials), an important private university under the management of The Society of Jesus were only the upper and middle classes can study due to the high cost of their tuition. During this event, several groups of young people appeared on the scene carrying signs and posters with messages alluding to and repudiating the violent repression suffered in a village located in the State of Mexico called Atenco on 2006, when Enrique Peña Nieto was the governor of this province. The young protesters were also questioning the poverty, the violence and the detriment of education during his ruling of the State of Mexico. The candidate, who was being critically questioned by these young people, found himself in the need of abandoning the place through one of the back doors. The information about all this was widely spread through social networks before, during, and after the news reached the media. Some representatives of political parties publicly declared that the young protesters that had confronted Peña did not belong to the Iberamerican University, that they had been paid by other political parties, and that they were trained and manipulated by the leftist candidate López Obrador, so they would cause unrest in the event. Faced with such accusations, on May 14 th, 131 young students of the Iberamerican University uploaded a video on youtube which was rapidly spread through social media. In this video they identified themselves, one by one, by showing their faces, saying their full names, and exhibiting the ID cards and the registration numbers that proved they were students of that university. They also claimed that they did not belong to any political party or movement, and that nobody had induced them to protest in the way they had done it. From this moment on, the actors of the original protest were not only expressing their point of view, but they were considering themselves as personally injured by the politicians who showed such intolerance to criticism and who despised their rejection of the candidate. By then, some national media were already publishing comments on the unexpected criticism of Peña Nieto coming from economically privileged college students. 1 The authors of this paper are professors and researchers of the Metropolitan Autonomous University, Campus Xochimilco, in Mexico. 26

2 The video was rapidly and widely spread, so soon it became a trend topic in both a national and an international scale. Some media showed it on the next day as front page news and an avalanche of comments flooded the newspapers web sites. Between May 15 th and 16 th, the young Ibero students who participated in the video used the social networks to denounce they were being threatened. Their complaint went beyond the social networks and reached some newspapers and some radio stations, thus opening different forums where their right to free speech was reappraised. On May 17 th, the social networks were used to call people to a demonstration march from UIA to Televisa -a monopolist Mexican TV company- that would take place on the next day to protest in defense of their right to information. They declared themselves to be nonpartisan and leaderless. This is the moment when the hashtag #MarchaYoSoy132 first appeared. The calling was a success; it managed to gather around one thousand students from different private universities. They were carrying the ID s that showed them as members of these university communities, as well as posters that read #YoSoy132. They defined their initiative as peaceful and nonpartisan. The media considered the event as unprecedented because this was indeed an unusual demonstration- the participants were mainly students of private universities. After this moment, the expressions of discontent towards Peña Nieto s candidacy, as well as the TV companies involved in promoting his image, would grow exponentially. A manifest was made with this starting line- We are here today, gathered by the shame that affronts us. In this document, the movement s struggle is defined by six points, which are: 1. The democratization and the transformation of the media. 2. A change in the educational, scientific and technologic models. 3. A change in the economic neoliberal model. 4. A change in the national security model. 5. A political transformation towards participatory democracy, with a direct link to social movements. 6. Complete fulfillment of the right to health. The document ends with the following words- We were silence, we were pain, we were oppression. They wanted to take everything away from us and the only thing we lost was fear. We won t be a silenced voice anymore. We come here with our bodies shouting: ENOUGH! Even though, as we have seen, this phenomenon comes from a demonstration of the UIA s students, its constitution as the #YoSoy132 movement is originated with the incorporation of other private and public universities. What started as a demonstration of about a thousand students from private universities soon grew into a movement with tens of thousands of students from all kinds of educational institutions, as well as other supporting social sectors. In order to face a reflection on the heterogeneity of the actors involved in this phenomenon, we must first consider that the definition of the movement as nonpartisan from its initial stage leads to a potential inclusion of different political tendencies among the movement s participants; it also leads to its separation from the political institutes participating in the electoral contestation. Immediately after that, when the public universities joined the movement, the wide political and ideological spectrum was made much more evident. There was also an increase in the gathering of different experiences of collective action and student struggle. 27

3 From being a small group with little or no experience in collective participation in the public sphere, the #YoSoy132 movement became a space for the militant students who already had a long history of political involvement, and others who rescued the memory of old student organizations and movements that preceded #YoSoy132, which included the participation of academics who joined the initiative through the YoSoy132Académico assembly. Other kinds of groups and organizations of young people were involved, some examples of these are those who were not necessarily current active students, or alternative young artists, as well as groups that had once participated in the indignados camping sites that were established at several places in Mexico City. The identification of the participants as students was the general feature in most cases, but as we have seen this was not necessarily so. Besides, there was also the presence of citizens who answered individually or collectively to the movement s callings, but who never belonged or participated in an organized way in any particular group. Socioeconomic status also appeared to be more stratified as the movement grew. Even though at the beginning the movement was made up of upper middle class students, which caused great aw because this social sector had been traditionally inactive in matters of public scene and social protests, the presence of public universities dramatically changed this characteristic, which allowed for a greater diversity in terms of social class or socioeconomic strata. This situation inaugurated a series of practically unprecedented collective actions among public and private universities, whose members gathered their resources, capabilities, and experiences; nevertheless, this does not mean that there were not moments in which the different sectors looked at each other with mistrust due to their social class differences. Age ranges were also modified with the incorporation of graduate students and participating academics some of whom were academics and students at the same time-, although it was always a movement of young people. As their convening power and their legitimacy grew stronger, they began to approach and form alliances with other kinds of organizations, such as unions, community organizations, and NGOs, all of which identified themselves as part of the movement, creating their own local assamblies. Nevertheless, these groups progressively appeared as allies or companions to the movement, not as a part of #YoSoy132 per se. The actions undertaken by these groups have nonhierarchical schemes, and they express the actors different levels of agency 2, as well as the diverse guide lines of their actions. Artistic groups, for example, called for demonstrations on the streets, as well as poor neighborhoods, where they developed artistic activities such as informal courses to paint posters, write and recite poetry, play music, create testimonies and graphic material, and through these actions they promoted the creation of new groups, as well as a vision of culture as a mean of social transformation. We point this out because it s interesting to notice that these demonstrations are not ruled by the organizational methods that are present in other social movements. Rather, they respond to conjuncture moments where the need for profound cultural transformation is felt; these transformations mean that information, participation, listening and the very possibility of collective creation make a different conformation of that which is common possible, a form that is separate from TV models and publicity. The roots of #YoSoy132 come from diverse cultural and political traditions, and it also tend to express a diversity of social classes. Nevertheless, its shared historical belonging demands that we recognize traditions of social struggle and rebellion in the movements undertaken by railway men, physicians, teachers, the students of 1968 and 1971, unions, independent peasant organizations, feminists, LGBTs, environmentalists, zapatists, the gruesome war against drugs victim s families, the people who are defending their lands from the exploitation of transnational mining companies, and other subjects and expressions who show history not as a discipline but as frame of political confrontation. 2 On the concept of agency as capacity for social transformation, see: Ema López, José Enrique, Del sujeto a la agencia (a través de lo político), Athenea Digital, no. 6: 1-24 (Spring, 2004). 28

4 This historical belonging, nonetheless, is produced as a discontinuity, as the rupture and renewal of ways to struggle. Collective action leads to the creation of an evanescent subject. In spite of this, it enables the existence of diverse fields of collective experience and utterance. These fields of common experience clearly show the presence of a semantic dispute which intends to overpower the dominant and oppressive exercise of institutional or media speech placed in the public space as hegemonic referents of social organization. The actions undertaken by the #YoSoy132 movement go beyond a collective action looking to modify the institutional context through the confrontation-negotiation channel or through the exercise of political pressure on decision makers; they are part of a direct confrontation that is not oriented through leadership or through a practical vision of getting a response to their demands. Rather, they tend to show, exceptions granted, a refusal to accept the legitimacy of the institutions that make up a government of any political side. The organization of a parallel debate between the presidential candidates shows this selfdetermining modality which is expressed as an alternative to the debates organized by the political parties under the regulations of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE, by its Spanish initials). The local and the interuniversity assemblies became spaces of experimentation, rather than of pragmatic action organization, which tested different understandings of social organization and community life. The #YoSoy132 movement evidences a direct-action dynamic looking for new political references, apart from institutional and partisan structures. It knits a perspective of the political that is associated to an inclusive project of nation, rather than a representation or an institutional negotiation, which can fight corruption and unequal distribution of wealth. It confronts through action, but it also looks to articulate itself with other social actors and with citizens in general through modes of social strengthening, as well as cultural and community renewal. We are dealing with outbursts whose transcendence is not as shortterm as it may look, because it is placed within a deep transformation due to the apparent exhaustion of the current civilization perspective. In this sense, it draws new horizons from which cultural forms emerge, responding to local spaces of socialization and exchange, capable of producing meaning and ways for collective action and appropriation. The neighborhood, the streets, and public spaces acquire special significance as places for the encounter and defense of that which is common to all. Through them, as it has been shown by the indignados and the occupy movements throughout the world, social ties that are capable of providing meaning to the lives of young people as well as promoting other ways for social organization that define cultural and ethical codes are created. We don t know exactly how far have the experiences that led to the #YoSoy132 movement reached, but we can point out to the fact that this social outburst has defied the pretensions of the ruling elite (made up of different parties) which conducts a procedural democracy 3 and denies the citizens their right to exercise their social and political rights by implementing legalist resources. These young people showed their indignation and led to diverse expressions of social discontent brought by inequality and corruption. The extreme diversity of actions and groups cannot be thought as the sum that integrates into a movement whose borders are more or less defined. Rather, we should consider the possibility that the #YoSoy132 movement does not necessarily sets a youth identity, but an impossible identification, as Ranciére points out 4, that opens up to a wide range of possible expressions and potentialities that are present in a social energy, whose core cannot be reduced to a structured form. Today, the young people who participated in this insurrection are part of a new generation of activists whose shared experience links one another in both affection and solidarity, and who, spread in small 3 On the notion of procedural democracy, see: Castoriadis, Cornelius, La democracia como procedimiento y como régimen, El ascenso de la insignificancia, Frónesis, Cátedra, Madrid, Ranciére understands the idea of impossible identification in the frame of a political subjectivation which assumes, on the first place, the denial of an identity imposed by another, on the second place, a demonstration directed to an adversary even if the latter dismisses the consequences, and finally an identification that works as an impossible utterance Ranciére, Jacques, Política, policía, democracia, LOM, Santiago de Chile,

5 groups, are kept social an politically active as the critical consciousness of a society that has been wounded by the new global totalitarianism. 30