The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
APPO demonstration in Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City,2006. Wkikicommons/Maurice Marcellin. Some rights reserved.Mexico has a long uninterrupted history of social protest and mobilization. These mobilizations have however failed to overlap and join forces with other forms of struggle and protest; they have also failed to build up a large social and political movement capable of initiating a veritable transformation of general awareness, let alone of the legal and institutional framework that regulates — in an authoritarian, uneven and inequitable way— the coexistence of the Mexican people.
From 2000 to 2015, in Mexico’s so-called ‘post-transitional’ period, after the National Action Party (pan) defeated the formerly hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri) that had ruled the country for over 70 years, robust social movements emerged, showing skill and inventiveness in their strategies for mobilizing support in their fight for social causes. Despite the groundswell of popular unrest and dissent, these movements locked in a struggle with the de facto powers have failed to move a State apparatus resistant to any deepening in the country’s democratization towards the acknowledgement and exercise of citizens’ political, social, economic, cultural, sexual rights. On more than one occasion this has triggered social protests.
