Free The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle by Francisco Goldman Page B

phoned threats and reported ominous unknown persons watching their homes. Many of those students, most probably from Mexico’s economic elite, were still adolescents, living with their families in the very sorts of neighborhoods populated by the likes of Peña Nieto, his political and business allies, and Televisa executives.
    In the days after “Black Friday” students took their first steps toward organizing and defining their fledgling movement. Small protest marches tellingly targeted various Televisa offices and studios around the city, as would many of the later mass protests. A coordinating committee was formed. The original core of the movement was in a few private universities—La Ibero, the ITAM, the Mexico City campus of Tec de Monterrey—but students from public universities and other schools began to reach out, seeking ways to become involved. Poor public education students from the DF and México State ventured by metro, buses, and peseros all the way across the city to attend coordinating meetings at La Ibero, whose immaculate landscaped campus looks like a high-tech college in Silicon Valley, with multiple parking garages and only one pedestrian entrance where security guards register the comings and goings of all visitors; SUVs carrying bodyguards pull up in front of that entrance to collect the fashionably dressed students—all girls, the day I was there—who hurry out through the gates to climb into held-open passenger doors.
    Informal meetings were spontaneously organized around the city, often in parks or in Starbucks franchises, where students who ordinarily would never meet each other—“those with and without Internet in their homes, those with and without smartphones,” wrote Osorno, incisively—came face-to-face. Looming over all these discussions was a single question: what degree of involvement could be expected, or should be desired, from the UNAM? With more than 200,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and a third as many more enrolled in its high schools, the UNAM has always assumed the protagonists’ role in Mexican student political activism. The participation of UNAM students would certainly add muscle to the movement, but the great university was known for often recalcitrant and belligerent radical politics, and there was a fear that UNAM students could also seize the movement and make it their own. But the UNAM students who turned up at those first meetings, some of whom would soon hold leadership positions in the movement, turned out to be unaffiliated with their university’s ultra groups, hard-line Communists, Trotskyites, anarchists, and the like. Over the next month those spontaneous meetings evolved into interuniversity assemblies, the first, in fact, held in University City, at the UNAM. Carlos Brito, a master’s degree candidate at an elite research institute, was one of the leaders who presided over that first assembly, and he told Osorno that as he sat on the auditorium stage looking out at the students who had come from all over the country, from every economic class, from every kind of educational institution, he saw that many had tears in their eyes, or were outright crying, and he felt just as moved himself. That assembly session, like all of those that followed, lasted all day and well into the night and often grew chaotic; as might be expected students proposed wildly differing and sometimes incoherent, overlapping, or frivolous agendas. Countless committees and task forces were formed. Web sites, Facebook pages, and twitter accounts speaking for #YoSoy132 or claiming to speak for it soon proliferated.
    What finally emerged from all those student assemblies and plenary sessions, in which professors also participated, was a charter that defined #YoSoy132 as a movement in which each university or school would have autonomy, sending its own elected leaders to future interuniversity assemblies, where decisions would be made. #YoSoy132 was to be nonviolent, and