Emotions and collective action: The Vocacional 7 during the Mexican 68

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the emotional dimension of collective action in the Vocational 7, of Instituto Politécnico Nacional, during the 1968 student movement, in Mexico. The questions that guide this work are: what sociopolitical precedents existed in the Vocacional and how did they lead to a sense of agency that contributed to the collective organization? How this
collective actor was built in this school; What role did feelings play in its constitution, sustaining, and disarticulation? Seventeen in-depth interviews were carried out with former students and activists of the movement of this school, in addition to both bibliographic and hemerographic review. As can be seen, emotions, in a mobilization scenario, are conditioned by the field of confrontation that the actors have with their adversaries, which reveals their relational and dynamic character.