A lthough we did not meet until 1990, Mary Kay and I were both born as historians of Mexico in the 1968 student movement.Incensed by the police violence unleashed against Vietnam War protesters at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in late August 1968 and inspired by Mexican students braving riot squads and tanks to demand a political dialogue with an authoritarian regime, we were drawn to the struggles of Latin Americans for social justice.Having already changed my major to the History of Latin America, during the summer of 1968, I was studying at the School for Foreign Students at the National University of Mexico, making up the final credits to graduate.So, by chance, I found myself in the eye of the storm and got to see the movement up close and personal (my boyfriend, later husband, briefly was a political prisoner).Mary Kay, having graduated from Cornell, was initiating her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a concentration in Latin American History.She explained, "I read about the Mexican students on the exploding University of Wisconsin campus in the aftermath of the police attack on protestors at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago.I did not know the Mexican students or their concrete demands but I knew they were us."Understanding that student rebellion, what it represented for Mexico, became her lifelong intellectual quest.It led her to become, first, an historian of Mexican education and, then, of revolution and social justice movements; of peasant struggles; of culture, media, and gender
Francie Chassen-López (Wed,) studied this question.