Social atmospheres of the 1968 student movement in José Agustín's De perfil (1966) and Armablanca (2006)

Abstract

The 1968 student movement constitutes a political and social paradigm that has triggered profound changes in Mexico’s public life. Alongside these transformations, an extraordinary body of novels has emerged, enabling an interpretation of the events that took place in 1968 through the lens of cultural sociology, specifically from Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical perspective. This study focuses on two novels by José Agustín as its primary corpus: De perfil (1966) and Armablanca (2006). These works function as documents for analyzing the social atmospheres in which young people lived before and during the 1968 movement, when countercultural perspectives confronted the conservatism characteristic of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime. At the same time, they reveal the tensions within the Mexican literary field of the period, where competing ideological and aesthetic positions struggled for symbolic power. Pierre Bourdieu and José Agustín provide essential tools for understanding the origins and trajectory of social movements such as the Mexican student movement of 1968 from a theoretical standpoint. Their work situates these events within a social context that must be understood as a dynamic arena in which several key elements converged: narratives, ideologies, position-takings, and forms of socialization.