There are marches that make noise, others become historic and some – the less fortunate ones – reveal cracks in the system. Something similar happened on November 15th in Mexico with the so-called Generation Z protest. The official toll: 17,000 participants, a hundred injured and a series of structural failures that highlighted the design of the ban more than the generation it claimed to represent.
The mobilization was called on October 3, but was strengthened after the assassination of the municipal president of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, which occurred a month earlier. Outrage over the insecurity was immediately incorporated into the causes, even as the petition remained ambiguous, proposing a “coup d’état” against President Claudia Sheinbaum, a ban on Palestinian flags, the absence of feminist and LGBT+ movements, as well as a mix of incompatible symbols: flags of One piece“Help Trump” banners on the Angel of Independence, Nazi swastikas, misogynistic slogans, references to “dictatorship” and “narco-government” and the fear of “being Venezuela”, as well as anti-Semitic and Zionist messages. In that din, legitimate calls for justice for Manzo’s murder were obscured by a chaotic narrative that said more about the organizers than the causes.
The mosaic coincided with another trend: media analysis by men exhaustively trying to explain who “Generation Z” was. Voices who have recently defined it as the “glass generation” have tried to define it starting from the nostalgia of a world that no longer exists and the future seemed more linear. But understanding a past generation is looking at the horizon in the rearview mirror: it offers reflections, not windows. Opening windows requires listening, something unusual.
The central question is not what happened during the march, but why it was organized and what it reveals about Generation Z in digital geopolitics. In a scenario where algorithms manage emotions and images circulate faster than ideas, youth has become a strategic signifier that multiple political forces seek to capture.
It’s worth stating the obvious: Generation Z is not homogeneous. We born between 1997 and 2012 live in different realities. At 28 the worries are: home, mobility, security and job stability; At 1pm the political agenda has just begun. Homogenizing 2,000 million young people in the world – 30% of the world population – and 31 million in Mexico, of which 26.5 million can vote, is a methodological and political error.
Hence the six failures highlighted by the mobilization:
First: the generational premise. Assuming that Gen Z is a single block ignores its social, economic, territorial and cultural diversity, and cancels its main characteristic: intersectionality.
Second: the very concept of “generation”. Imported from twentieth-century marketing, transferred to politics, it reduces causes to products and young people to market niches.
Third: the origin. The march did not arise from the streets or from the universities, which have been on strike for months, but from digital strategists – neither young nor Mexican – linked to Javier Milei, Jair Bolsonaro and The right diarynow half present at the White House press conferences. The recipe called for eight million robots that amplified the call with vocabulary foreign to Mexican speech – such as “silver” to refer to money – highlighting its manufacture.
Fourth: geopolitics. Trying to replicate the dynamics of Argentina or the United States – the country from which Donald Trump commented on the rally – ignores that Latin America operates under conditions that cannot be relocated: violence fueled by American guns, expulsive real estate markets and transnational criminal networks.
Fifth: technique. The strategy was based on X, a platform used by only 12% of the population, concentrated in Mexico City. The discourse has acquired a centralized polarization that has made states like Michoacán, land of Manzo and where the first demonstrations were born, invisible. Thus local voices have been relegated behind algorithmic noise.
Sixth: emotional extractivism. Mexico knows territorial, energy and labor extractivism; Today we address the causes. Legitimate collective pain – disappearances, violence, injustice – has become political fuel. The exploitation of Manzo casethe contradictions of a violence-shrouded “anti-violence” march that claimed to be non-partisan with organizers linked to political parties, and the use of the term “youth” for a predominantly adult movement, made this clear.
What is relevant is not the dismantling of the scenario, but what it reveals about the generation that should have been represented. Gen Z enters adulthood without guarantees of social mobility; with noble cities; with structural precariousness; with wars and genocides broadcast in real time – Palestine, Congo, Sudan -; and with a historic decline in fertility because farming has become economically unprofitable.
It is a globalized generation, but crossed by access gaps: they can see the world from a phone, but they cannot afford it. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu underlined, power is not exercised only with force, but with the ability to impose a legitimate vision of the world. Today that dispute occurs in the algorithm.
The global right understands this terrain. But youth is not manufactured: it is lived. And Gen Z – different, critical, uncomfortable – does not adapt to disguises or imported slogans, and its demands, to become reality, deserve to make the elites uncomfortable. For this reason, the second call on November 20, with only a handful of participants and spokespeople distancing themselves, did not fail: it simply revealed its flaws.
Generation Z doesn’t aspire to look young. Aspire to live with dignity.
The question is no longer who intends to represent us, but who is willing – finally – to stop looking in the rearview mirror and open the window.
