Space and Networks: Mexico City and #Yosoy132

The first Internet-driven political movement in Mexican history started two years ago in Mexico City. The movement, called #yosoy132, was integrated by university students denouncing the alleged support of media giant Televisa to presidential candidate Enrique Pena Nieto. Mexico City became a platform for the movement, allowing multiple actors to participate across space and time. During the protest, public space became a hybrid realm in which global and local networks coincided. The Internet reconfigured the relation of urbanites to space and to each other, and face-to-face encounters, mediated by social networks, allowed for protestors to cohere in a collective identity. This was an ephemeral moment, however, that latter succumbed to the fragmented life of the megalopolis. In the paper I will show how the events that lead to the massive protest of #yosoy132 in the city center did not take place in a vacuum; they developed in particular areas of the city that are intersected by different local and global threads. Spaces in cities are connected to each other in different ways, the Internet is one: participation in it extends the field of action of a crowd or an individual beyond the limits set up by the built environment. Thus, a crowd that congregates in a secluded space and tweets about it is creating a sense of events unfolding precisely throughout the whole city because of their networked visibility.


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That day in the Universidad Iberoamericana, Enrique Peña Nieta was confronted with an angry crowd that called him a puppet for Televisa. Peña Nieto was not expecting this type of attitude from the students; private universities, like Universidad Iberoamericana, are generally more complacent with the status quo and less prone to massive rallies than public universities.
The scenes of unrest were such a surprise to the students themselves that many of them recorded them through their smart-phones. The videos were immediately posted up on social networks like YouTube, creating an instant buzz that extended beyond the campus grounds.
The next day Televisa acted in a way that was reminiscent of the old role it had with PRI regime. It reported that only a handful of people had protested against the candidate and that they were illegitimate rabble-rousers that had nothing to do with the university. As a response to this belittling statement, the 131 students that participated in the protest organized a video showing their University ID and reiterating their stance vis-à-vis the candidate. This video went viral, and by the end of the 12 of May the #yosoy132 hashtag became a trending topic throughout the twitter platform. The hashtag was as a form of support, implying that the user is the "132nd" protestor. The initial "trigger", the dramatic event that unfolded in the Universidad Iberoamericana was later followed by an avalanche of events that instantly conjured images of other networked social movements--like the ones that developed in Cairo and New York.
Two days after the original event, students organized a march from the university towards the nearby headquarters of Televisa. The march was recorded and tweeted live, and anyone with Internet access could see the images and videos of the students approaching the Televisa building. This experience of watching the action happen in real time allowed onlookers to feel part of an imagined community of protestors. The network, created by the Internet and specifically through social media, linked different parts of the city with each other, regardless of the distance in space. The images even jumped into the Mexican Diaspora where it inspired movements of protest amongst university students worldwide. Nationally, the symbolism of protest created an avalanche of anti-Peña Nieto feelings, particularly amongst university students. In 19th of March there was a spontaneous and massive rally of thousands of people in Reforma, one of the main streets of Mexico City and heading towards the main public space of the city, the Zocalo. have speeds--the quick crowd forms towards an attainable goal that is near (like killing someone) the slow crowd moves towards a larger goal (changes in land zoning, for example).
The #yosoy132 movement started as an open, quick crowd that fed on an emotion, anger against Televisa and Peña Nieto. After the initial massive protest, however, the crowd had to turned into a closed crowd and got fragmented as the goal shifted from immediate anger to the long-term goal of stopping Enrique Peña Nieto from reaching the presidency.
Teasing out the intersection of networks and cities can be problematic: in many cases, the spatial dimensions of cities are lost because of the focus on larger and more virtual conception of a network. In this sense, geographer Jennifer Robinson argues that the focus on territory is essential to think about the city in relation to other networks: 'By paying attention to the city-as a territory, as a platform, or in relation to citywide processes--the diversity of city life and the multiplicity of networks and connection which spat it can come into view" (Robinson,763). This is done by developing a spatial imagination that is multiple and sophisticated, focusing on "networks and clusters; boundaries and globalizing forces: communities of responsibility as well as social fragmentation". (Robinson,763) Given this special dimension of networks we can state that the events that lead to the massive protest of #yosoy132 in the city center did not take place in a vacuum, they developed in   Similarly, Gallo thinks we must think comparatively about megalopolises in order to understand deeper human trends. "In the twenty-first century, Mexico City has undoubtedly more in common (in terms of urban cultures, social problems and planning issues) with other developing cities around the worlds--from Buenos Aires to Karachi-than with the bygone City of Palaces extolled by Humboldt" (Gallo,9). One of the spaces that is comparable to other cities is Santa Fe, a global space of hyper connectivity where one can find an administrative center of media monopolies and the regional headquarters of important bank in a two blocks ratio    The jump of the #yosoy132 movement across spaces challenges our conception of the city as a firmly bounded or easily contained territory. In order to avoid conceiving the city as this steady unit we can look at the mechanisms for integration and roles of cooperation of local actors, interaction and diversity. The focus on the relational aspect is important because technology induces a crisis of boundary, reference and dimension, making it increasingly hard to distinguish between exterior and interior, between here and elsewhere (Auge; Mcquire).
This explains why, from the beginning, the pressure to define the movement was monumental--it was hard to determine its scope and boundaries. Thus, to give its local actions symbolic and geographic frames of reference, the first massive march appeared as images like the ones from other mass protests that took place in Egypt or Occupy Wall Street. These relatively homogenous in its diversity. (Auge, 1995) Thus, coming up with the movement's story became a foundational act, one that established momentary boundaries and roles within the city because it delimited the players and the space where they congregated. According to De Certeau spatial stories are needed to claim space when moving through a city. In this case, the story of the protest in Mexico City mixed with that of the global protestor, claiming, albeit momentarily, the position of the movement vis-àvis History. Thus, the images of the protestor turned mythic in the Barthean sense, in that they came to represent History developing before one's eyes.
In the same way, words like the ¨Mexican Spring" were constantly used to define #yosoy132; these words served as a performative act and anesthetized the phenomenon, poaching global In all of these images, the masses meet in a symbolic public space to express anger and contempt against the established order. Most of the times the spaces where they meet were symbolic of the nation-state. With the global circulation of images through social media, though, these public spaces became integrated into transnational discourses of protest.
Ironically, though, it was this movement towards framing the protest as a global story that reduced its power. As the images of these encounters circulate globally, the space and the multitude becomes entangled within the politics of these global circuits. The space is thus dislodged from national frames of reference and inserted into symbolisms that exceed the nation state in order to become representative of a global situation. But the goal, to destabilize Enrique Pena Nieto, becomes lost amongst the global hype.
Activists in Mexico City have followed the footsteps of protestors in Cairo, New York and Madrid in organizing displays of public unrest that are highly dependant on social media.
Mexico City's unrest, however, did not take place on a global vacuum: there were relations that happened between people from different parts of the cities, different neighborhoods, and which were highly important in the emotional structuring of the movement. The student movement was caused through a Twitter contagion, but it also relied in imaginaries of global unrest to keep organizing itself as a closed crowd.
Mexico City would be seen as a case study to ask questions that could of space and networks that could be applied to similarly globalized megalopolises--like Sao Paolo, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Lagos. As a platform, Mexico City, allowed for the multiple actors of this movement to participate actively, even when the events developed in different spaces. In this sense, the Internet reconfigured the relation that many urbanites had with the space of the city: public space became a hybrid real in which global and local networks together coincided.
Face-to-face encounters allowed for a collective identity to be enacted in a series of important events that happened in Mexico City. Then, the movement disintegrated, leaving behind an ephemeral moment that succumbed to the pressure of a fragmented megalopolis