The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle (10 page)

When we arrived, I joined the long lines to register, and signed up as a member of the independent press, though I had no credentials and was not on assignment for anybody. We found a space for our tent crammed in amid hundreds of others on the concrete of the open market in the center of the plaza. It was the height of the rainy season, and almost the entire plaza had been covered with red-and-yellow striped tarpaulins. The convention opened with welcoming speeches. There was a stage backdropped by murals featuring, most prominently, Emiliano Zapata and his burning stare. The master of ceremonies was a woman from a group representing the victims of Atenco; the obviously intelligent, sophisticated, and pretty young woman from #YoSoy132 who gave one of the speeches seemed to come from another planet—but she did come from another planet, University Student from Planet Chilanga—than the handful of
compañeros y compañeras
who welcomed us on behalf of other groups and who mostly recycled the decades-old orthodox rhetoric of the Latin American left. Then we were split up into dozens of separate working groups. It took a while, but a #YoSoy132 student from Ciudad Juárez was elected leader of our group. Three or four others, all students as far as I could tell, were elected to sit with him at the white plastic table facing us. One—the only woman, of course—was charged with the useful task of taking notes, and I’m not sure what the others were supposed to do. The rest of us sat in folding chairs or on the grass, or stood. People were supposed to propose possible measures that students and civic groups and the society at large could take in the coming months to prevent the imposition: among others, strikes, marches on significant dates such as Zapata’s birthday, seizing control of toll booths to allow traffic to flow freely into and out of Mexico City, a proposal to occupy Benito Juárez International Airport, and education squads to ride the Mexico City subways handing out information bulletins. Everyone wanted to talk; the meeting lasted—with a break for the simple lunch served by the convention organizers—into the evening. #YoSoy132 had adopted a sign language that it used at its assemblies to keep people from talking all at once, shouting over each other, or drowning out speakers with cheers or boos. To show agreement or approval, you wiggled your hands in the air, or else you wagged a finger in disapproval, and if a speaker was going on too long, you slid a hand up and down the other forearm as if playing the trombone.

By evening it was raining hard and the floor of our tent city was in danger of flooding. We had to pack up our stuff and carry it inside a building off the plaza, into what seemed to be a warehouse, almost like the sunken cargo hold of a freighter, where we pitched our tents. The space was so tightly packed with tents that wending our way back to the exit was like trying to find the only unobstructed path through a zigzagging maze. We bought bread and a plastic jar of a homemade powdery-gritty
chile
that locals were selling alongside the plaza, and made sandwiches with our sardines. Speakers from the stage continually warned that drugs and alcohol were prohibited. Despite the rain, we slipped off down a side street and into a small sheltered alley to drink
mezcal
. Back at the convention site, there was folkloric dancing onstage. Then the live music began, a few different groups of performers; finally a punk-thrasher band took the stage. The rain was falling even more heavily than earlier, creating a streaming muddy moat around the slightly higher floor of the central plaza. We stood underneath an edge of rain-drummed tarpaulin, water spilling over its edge, as we watched the band and the mosh pit that had formed in the open space before it, filled with hundreds of soaked #YoSoy132 kids, many with their shirts off, frenziedly slam-dancing.

At some point, Marcos, his inhibitions probably a little loosened by the
mezcal,
took me aside and confessed that he was in love with América. He was happy, and wanted someone to confide in, and encouragement. A few years younger than América, he was a really nice kid, handsome, cheerful, intelligent, formerly a math major at the UNAM but now studying history. I guess I’d seen it coming; all afternoon he and América had been puppyishly affectionate with each other. I felt no real jealousy toward Marcos. Mostly I had the familiar widower feeling of being in the way, of being where I didn’t belong. Now the three of us were going to have to share a tiny tent together.

The next morning the convention took up the proposals decided on by all the separate working groups the previous day. Seated at the long table on the stage, essentially running the debate, were veteran members of various leftist groups and organizations; there may have been a #YoSoy132 representative seated up there but, if so, she or he was vastly outnumbered. People defended or criticized the proposals, and many launched into speeches. Campesino leaders waved their machetes in the air, and spoke of the hard, violent lessons of Atenco, Chiapas, Oaxaca, and other places. There was a pause to welcome a late-arriving delegation from Cherán, an indigenous Purepechan mountain town some three hundred miles away in the state of Michoacán, that had been battling illegal loggers protected by a narco cartel and local government authorities. The armed loggers had already consumed some 70 percent of the surrounding mountain forests from which residents of the town used to make their living; for years, Cherán had endured murders, rapes, kidnappings, and extortion at the hands of the loggers and their protectors. But then Cherán had fought back. Declaring themselves autonomous, townspeople expelled the local police and armed themselves with rifles expropriated from the police station. They blocked entrances to the town with bonfires that blazed all night. Cherán’s combative autonomy was inspiring similarly embattled communities throughout Mexico to follow their example. People stood to applaud and shout as the delegates from Cherán marched along the muddy street leading into the plaza and onto the stage, where some gave rousing speeches. The atmosphere of the convention had grown more fervent and militant. One of the most debated proposals that day was a plan to storm Televisa’s headquarters and take over the studios. Students silently wagged their fingers in the air, or wiggled their hands, or stood and raised an arm, waiting for the moderator to let them speak. Nonstudents spoke and shouted out as they pleased. One student argued that it would probably be impossible to occupy Televisa without resorting to some degree of violence, and would certainly be impossible without inviting a violent response, and that this would be a violation of the principles of #YoSoy132’s charter—a declaration which prompted frantic hand wiggling in the audience, as well as taunting shouts. A peasant activist, a sturdy-looking man perhaps in his forties, spoke in support of the plan to occupy Televisa; he cited the example of the indigenous women who several years before had occupied a TV studio in Oaxaca during the often violent protests, sparked by striking teachers, against the government of that state’s especially notorious and repressive PRI governor. “If we die, we die,” the activist shouted at the crowd. “We need to be brave. If Peña Nieto gets in, lots of us are going to die anyway.” That prediction seemed likely enough to come true, but did it include students? Were Mexico City students really going to die anyway? Now the students’ hands were mostly still. You could sense their confusion. Was the student movement too soft? Was it out of step with the long, bloody history of heroic Mexican revolt, in which being prepared to die for your cause was not just a romantic fantasy? But was theirs that kind of revolt? #YoSoy132 students, many originally inspired by arguments such as “Mexico’s real problem is the formalisms employed by the supreme court in the Atenco case,” now had to forge a common agenda with those who spoke a different language, a much older and entrenched one, the language of the organized political left in rural and proletarian Mexico. Those people had been struggling much longer—for their survival; for their lands; for basic human rights, jobs, and unions—and they also had a tradition of not backing down from violence, whether from the military, police, paramilitaries, or even cartel gunmen. Was there any way to form a future “progressive” majority for major political change in Mexico without those two groups—students and elites from the cities, and those from the rest of the country, from often violent and impoverished Mexico—finding a common language? López Obrador, in 2006, had succeeded, though not quite enough, and maybe now his time had passed, and many of the young people, at least, were speaking a new language, or trying to. Maybe the students were somewhat railroaded that day, maybe they gave in to guilt. América, Marcos, and I didn’t stay around to hear the end of the debate—we went back to the city early in the afternoon—but over the next few days newspapers reported on the supposedly radical agenda finally approved at the national convention in Atenco, which the press tended to describe as a #YoSoy132 affair. The final accords had endorsed the plan to seize and occupy Televisa installations on July 27—so much for the element of surprise—as well as another proposal to surround Congress on the day of the inauguration and barricade the streets to prevent Peña Nieto and legislators from entering the building for the ceremony. Within days, #YoSoy132 leaders from various university committees were dissociating themselves from the Atenco agreements. “It’s absolutely false that the resolutions made this weekend . . . are #YoSoy132’s,” a student speaking for the private Anáhuac university chapter, Dante Mondragón, who’d attended the convention, told the press. “Regarding what we’ve set in motion, we need to be reasonable. We’ll fraternize with and support our
compañeros
in the struggle, but from a more reserved perspective.” Others pointed out that #YoSoy132 couldn’t be correctly described as having agreed to any agenda at all until it had been set before the next interuniversity assembly, on July 28, and voted on there.

During part of the summer, well into August, I sat in on the weekly meetings between several #YoSoy132 students and a group of writers and artists they’d invited to collaborate with them in organizing a “popular tribunal,” modeled on the one organized in 1967 in Paris by Sartre and Bertrand Russell to expose U.S. war crimes. Respected jurists, prosecutors, and investigators had already signed on. The students, easygoing and intelligent kids—one afternoon the UNAM architecture student sitting next to me mused out loud, “All three of the established political parties are corrupt, but they all have well-intentioned members”—argued that the tribunal should be a trial of the entire election process, not only of Peña Nieto. The tribunal never came to be—too little time, too many people heading out on late August vacations. But what especially began to dampen the enthusiasm of some members of the group, students and adults alike, was the perception that the popular tribunal was in danger of being usurped by MORENA, the National Regeneration Movement formed by López Obrador and his backers, who were, with good intentions, of course, offering to provide the infrastructure and support desperately needed to organize the event. Some of the adult advisers did believe that the movement should ally itself with MORENA, but others, and all of the students, thought #YoSoy132 should preserve its nonpartisanship.

Once Peña Nieto’s presidency was a fait accompli, it became much harder for the student movement to get tens of thousands of people into the streets. During the summer months, millions of people across Mexico, and especially in Mexico City, had identified with and even felt inspired by #YoSoy132, though for most that signified only opposition to Peña Nieto and the PRI; by autumn, then, for so many, the movement no longer held much meaning. Antonio Attolini, #YoSoy132’s most charismatic figure, and another prominent student leader even accepted jobs as political analysts on Televisa, bringing the student point of view on the news of the day, even on matters such as North Korea’s nuclear belligerence, to the nation via the hated monolith, and seeding public derision of the movement.

More than half a year after the electoral summer ended, #YoSoy132 still exists, on social networks, in the universities, holding meetings and assemblies, putting out communiqués, but also still searching for what its role should be during the long wait until 2018 and the next presidential elections, when most current members will no longer be students. Whether or not #YoSoy132 ever evolves into a permanent and influential student organization like Chile’s, or whether it turns out that the movement was like one of those exotic plants that wait years and years to blossom and then die, it left a legacy. #YoSoy132 brought Mexico’s electoral process, and the manipulative power of its establishment media, under unprecedented scrutiny, and helped propel reforms to the nation’s media laws to the top of the legislative agenda. The political sensibility of the students in #YoSoy132 was shaped as much by life in contemporary Mexico City, I’ll venture to say, as by classroom readings in political philosophy and beery student discussions of the Zapatistas or of the anarcha-feminist followers of the early-twentieth-century Mexico City anarchist writer Ricardo Flores Magon or of any others in the pantheon of Mexican rebels and martyrs. For all its idiosyncrasies and seemingly apocalyptic problems—pollution, crime, the ills of the water supply, traffic, crowding, buildings sinking into the soft unstable earth and so on—the DF is a great twenty-first-century city that in recent years has more or less been governed like one, which isn’t to say perfectly governed by any means, but undoubtedly better governed than any other city or state in Mexico. In a way, all that many of those #YoSoy132 “student radicals” were demanding was for Mexico to be governed more in the way that the DF is. In the summer 2012 elections for
jefe de gobierno
of
the Distrito Federal, the PRD’s candidate, Miguel Ángel Mancera, running to succeed Marcelo Ebrard, was elected with 73 percent of the vote. In Ebrard’s government Mancera had been chief prosecutor (like a district attorney) and could take some credit for a perceived drop in crime. But Mancera’s landslide victory could also be seen as a referendum on how his predecessor, Marcelo Ebrard, had governed over the previous six years, and on the leftist city governments that preceded his. By contrast, in neighboring México State, governed until recently by Peña Nieto, the favorite son won the presidential contest by only 9 percentage points; in the DF’s presidential vote, Peña Nieto received only 27 percent of the vote.