The University of Arizona Press
When Working Class Youth Dreamt in Red
Student Power and the Urban Guerrilla Experience in Mexico's Cold War, 1970–1982
The 1970s in Mexico were turbulent from the start. Insurgent voices converged across cities and rural peripheries. Militant labor, urban popular sectors, and Indigenous collectives erupted in expressions of broad social exhaustion. Rebellion, rooted in the layered betrayals of the postrevolutionary state and the fractures of a deteriorating modernity under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), fermented and boiled over.
At the core of this moment, Mexican youth found their way to political-military organizations, coalescing around shared ecologies of dissent and embedded in broader currents of revolutionary struggle. When Working Class Youth Dreamt in Red reconstructs these insurgent youth cultures and guerrilla imaginaries, reorienting the historiographical lens to center radical working class youth—especially urban students—as protagonists in a wider saga of revolutionary experimentation and political rupture.
At its conceptual core, this book offers a bold new interpretation of a turbulent moment in Mexican history. It shows how class shaped the epistemic horizons through which proletarian youth understood themselves and makes visible their role as central actors at the vanguard of a revolutionary time.
“This is not merely an intellectual history of leftist student movements at the height of Mexico’s Dirty War. What makes Calderón’s work pathbreaking is his ability to straddle the divide between ideology and action—between the urgent pull to fight for change despite very real costs and the safer pull to remain in the world of ideas. He traces what drove young people to carry that struggle out of their barrios and classrooms, transforming those very communities and campuses into spaces of political contestation.”—Gladys L. McCormick, author of The Last Door: A History of Torture in Mexico’s War Against Subversives
“A fresh and vital perspective.”—Margaret M. Power, author of Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism
