Youth and politics in Mexico, a public sphere that is disappearing?

Abstract

This document investigates the relationship between the State (in its administrative bureaucratic dimension) and the youth sector of the population in Mexico. As an axis of argument, the gap that exists between the “political offer” coming from the state level (which tends towards homogeneity) and the diverse and heterogeneous demands that characterize large sectors of youth is explored. To do this, we rely above all on some of the results obtained by the National Survey of Political Culture and Citizen Practices, in its most recent edition (2012). Ultimately, throughout this intervention it is argued that the Mexican political field is crossed by at least two processes. On the one hand, a deep disenchantment is visible among the young population with respect to the formally instituted dimension of politics. This contributes to the configuration of an evanescent, precarious public/political sphere: the State tends to lose its instituting capacity and, therefore, little by little it stops addressing young subjects in terms of the production of their subjectivity. On the other hand, the second of the processes does not necessarily indicate that among Mexican youth there is a kind of “naturalization” of apathy, but rather that subjectivity is politicized to the extent that the political is subjective. Therefore, new places emerge in which the political is articulated, which escape the formally instituted dimension and impose the need for new perspectives that allow us to understand the dynamics of the political today. These new places of politics are usually anchored in the plane of everyday life.