Pancho Peyo T.
Postwar Mexico experienced what was called the Stabilizing Development: the middle class grew, migration to the cities accelerated, and for the first time many families could send their children to university. Out of this came a new generation—idealistic, restless, raising banners of peace, love, equality, and freedom.
The student movement of 1968 was not sudden. It built up through months of clashes with riot police, reaching its breaking point in September. I remember my father sending my older brother to study in Toluca, sensing something terrible was about to unfold. In the Mexico of the so-called “economic miracle,” where the PRI projected an image of unshakable order, that kind of family intuition was an act of clarity.
When the army occupied Mexico’s National University and Polytechnic Institute, it confirmed what many feared. If the home was a refuge, and the university a temple of knowledge, the tanks rolling into both marked the end of innocence.
This is the nature of traumatic memory: we often don’t recall the event itself, but the atmosphere that surrounded it. The cry “we will not forget” was born from that need to shout what the government wanted to bury. Newspapers printed vague, distorted versions, while the truth survived underground, passed from mouth to mouth.
My generation watched the façade of the system collapse. The “Mexican miracle” revealed itself as a fragile pact, upheld by brute force. Trust in government and institutions was broken forever.
Repression was not unique to Mexico. Across the globe, the unrest of 1968 was often silenced. Here, the State banned rock concerts and stigmatized youth culture, while paradoxically opening alternative universities and agencies for women, youth, and Indigenous rights. The 1980s brought new economic “adjustments”—free trade, wage controls, and eventually NAFTA. Three decades later, the paradox is clear: the economy grew, some advanced, but inequality deepened, and drug trafficking flourished under open borders.
Today, a new wave of policies once again shrinks governments at the expense of culture, education, and equality. That is why the memory of October 2 matters. It embodies the voice of a generation that marched against repression and demanded justice, human rights, and education.
It is hard to find, in today’s noisy digital landscape, a new generation ready to defend rights with the same clarity. But I trust that voice, like the echo of ’68, still lives—waiting for its moment to be heard again.
