You Can’t Always Get What You Want”

BEFORE the opening of the first Olympics hosted by a "Third World" country, security forces arrested, injured, and assassinated a still-unknown number of students and supporters who had rallied in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City.The movement had been triggered months earlier by a police assault on a rumble between rival secondary schools, reverberating in clashes at a subsequent march celebrating Cuba's challenge to capitalist imperialism.Imbibing that classic student alchemy of rage and joy, thousands of students then carried the '68 onda ("scene") and demands into markets, schoolyards, buses, and homes, galvanizing hundreds of thousands to protest.Here we offer a rolling retrospective on subsequent ways in which Mexican activists have understood the legacies of '68.Scholars of Mexico '68 and other key '68 sites bemoan the lack of changes in political economy but applaud the sociocultural transformations that expanded participation in multiple realms.To paraphrase the song, "You don't always get revolution, but if you try sometimes, you get . . .environmentalism, feminism, gay liberation, acid rock, etc." Bifurcation offers "no satisfaction," especially when it separates sociocultural from politico-economic change.Our oral histories of Mexican '68ers (sesentayocheros), taken at ten-year intervals, expose a paradox: the satisfaction of expanded polity in fact obscures a foreclosing of revolution.Reading expanded sociopolitical participation through the lens of political economy reveals that at certain conjunctures, this expansion no longer matters-it no longer indexes emancipatory politics.As sesentayocheros tell it, today is one of those "downer" conjunctures: expansion of national belonging comes cheap when politics leave capital unfettered.At a more "happening" conjuncture, just after the twentieth anniversary, we had traveled to Mexico City to conduct oral histories-ourselves then students, too strapped to buy interviewees a coffee, so strapped that we ended up getting taken home by one of those interviewees, who lived, improbably enough, in the former Olympic village.We ended up interviewing over sixty activists, most not leaders but rather the base of this

Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · History · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America · Youth, Politics, and Society