Space, collective action and identity: the Vocacional 7 of the Instituto Politecnico Nacional during the 1968 student movement

The 1968 student movement was the product of a network of sociopolitical alliances between students from public and private universities in Mexico. In this article I will analyze, from the sociology of social movements and political and cultural geography perspectives, how this collective movement was built in the Vocacional 7, of the National Polytechnic Institute; how the link between collective action, identity and space crystallized; the forms of material, political and symbolic appropriation of the space, as well as what this school represented for some of its former students. For this, eighteen in-depth interviews were applied to alumni of the Vocacional, all of them participants in this social movement. As we will see, space was an important mobilization resource, as well as being a factor that was part of the collective identity.