Introduction

Protest camps require and facilitate political education. But political education can also undermine the potential of protest campers to elicit radical change. This chapter examines several protest camps in post-1968 Mexico City to reveal how young protest campers cooperate in political education to the effect of reconfiguring places of activism and cultivating spaces of politics. It shows that protest camps can productively stage encounters between different senses of the world, and that political education can intensify spatial expressions of political antagonism. At the same time, the chapter also shows how political education can sometimes obstruct the reconfiguration of places of activism. Here, political education is a mode of social reproduction that carries with it the tendency toward stability. On the one hand, then, I examine practices of political education through which protest campers prefiguratively embody alternative ways of being that challenge established vocabularies and identities of the place in which they are situated. On the other hand, I show that, as a ‘protest camp pathology’ (Feigenbaum et al, 2013, 229), political education maintains parts of the social–spatial order against which protest campers have ostensibly converged.

These arguments are informed by fieldwork in Mexico City where protest camps have become a highly visible form of youthful agitation. From 2010 to 2014, I worked in central Mexico twice per year, primarily alongside young activists. Many of these young activists identified as student activists, even if they were not enrolled in school. These activists had reason to claim a student activist identity. Alongside the official left (for example, political parties like the ‘centre-left’ PRD), extra-institutional left groups including independent unions, social movements, mutual aid organisations and art collectives, have historically lionised the 1968 student movement as a force of progressive change. Shared reverence for the movement can be traced back to 2 October 1968, when – ten days before Mexico City began hosting the Olympics – forces loyal to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) shot and killed hundreds of activists who had converged in Tlatelolco. Many young activists today look to this massacre – often simply referred to as ‘Tlatelolco’ – as an event that inaugurated an enduring genre of conflict; they use it to identify the repressive essence of the state and the heroic self-sacrifice of the student left arrayed against it.