Crises, Rights, and Futurity: Youth in 1980s Mexico City

In Mexico, the 1980s —often referred to as the “Lost Decade”—are mostly remembered for the 1982 Debt Crisis, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and the fraudulent 1988 presidential election. The reaction of citizens to these events and their decision to elect oppositional parties at the local level signaled the weakening of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which lost its grip of the nation to the conservative opposition in 2000, after seventy years of undisputed political leadership and twenty years of economic neoliberal reforms that included privatization, structural adjustments, and the dismantling of the welfare system. How and to what extent did the generation that came of age during the 1980s respond to these economic and political changes? These questions, which are at the center of this dissertation, are particularly relevant in Mexico City, where youth (10-29 years old) made up 43% of the population during this period and composed the bulk of those who responded to the economic, political, and cultural crises that marked the “Lost Decade” with the rise of neoliberalism.

However, Mexico City’s youth were not monolithic. Competing youth expressions were divided by questions of class, gender, and sexuality. These differences shaped their view of the crises, their rights-based activism, and their imagined futures. Drawing from a broad range of archival materials that include newspaper accounts, films, and songs, in conjunction with oral history, I examine four youth groups that were differently affected by neoliberalism in Mexico City: “chavos banda,” or marginalized youth who engaged in gang-like and punk-like subculture and developed a unique style as a form of resistance to their exclusion from the neoliberal project; queer youth (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans), whose response to neoliberal policies coincided with the AIDS crisis and the collapse of the Homosexual Liberation Movement (1978-1984); National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)-affiliated youth, middle-class university and high school students, who organized a massive student protest against the privatization of the UNAM in 1986 and made up a significant base of the left opposition that contributed to the defeat of the PRI; and yuppies and wealthy young people who welcomed and benefited from the neoliberal economic reforms and strengthened the conservative opposition. These innovative cultural expressions of youth and their political movements opened opportunities for leftist and conservative oppositions that ended the historical longevity of the PRI at the start of the 21st century.