After Ayotzinapa: Personal and Self-Construction Impacts of the Mobilization

My investigation focuses on the “post-mobilization” periods. I am particularly interested in those following the student mobilization in support of the Ayotzinapa rural school in Mexico at the end of 2014, in reaction to the forced disappearance of 43 students. In this presentation I would like to focus on the impact that such a mobilization can have on participating students, on a personal and self-construction level.

How the different subjectivation processes experienced by students affect the way they look at politics many years after the main mobilization? Does it have an incidence in the student organization?

The Ayotzinapa mobilization was highly charged emotionally. The encounter with the victims’ families and Ayotzinapa students had a really strong impact on the Mexico City students. This experience will remain present and ease a future mobilization as well as the union with rural organizations. It has also changed their way to see the world, to think of themselves and their relation with others.

As a result, some students involved in the Ayotzinapa mobilization see themselves as “militants”: their personal life is not separate from their political life. It implies also some changes in their personal network: the people they met in the student assembly are now their friends, but not any kind of friend: people with whom they can think about a new world. This new network of friendship turns out to be really important for the student organization during the period fallowing the newsworthy phase of mobilization.

However the subjectivation process is different for every student and it can also lead to some divisions in the organization. For example the repression they lived in their flesh can radicalize some students, or lead others to stay away from those kinds of protest and try to change the world in others ways.