The starting point for comparative literature scholar Susana Draper's book, despite its title, is not Mexico in 1968, but the neoliberal present. This slim volume grapples with big questions: What is freedom? What is democracy? How are they achieved? Over four chapters she interrogates the way in which events are remembered—history—not to offer a new narrative that comes to different conclusions or promote alternate protagonists but rather to explore 1968 as a “gesture that not only destabilizes politics and bodies but also institutes different forms of critical language” (xi). The year 1968 was critical, globally and in the history of modern Mexico. Therefore, historical assessments of 1968 might end or even begin by wondering why the new, more democratic world that student protestors imagined did not come to pass, or situating this moment in a longer chronology of political movements, such as the Mexican Revolution or second-wave feminism. Draper sets aside questions of success or failure to probe how the student-led protests in Mexico generated a radical shift in the politics of the everyday.

Draper locates the impact of 1968 and of radical revolutionary movements more generally (including the Zapatistas and Occupy Wall Street, with which Draper was involved) in the way that they transform lived experience, opening even if briefly a window onto radical freedom from both the state and traditional politics. She begins her theoretical reassessment by examining the political philosophy and literary production of José Revueltas (1914–76), who allied himself with the student protestors and was imprisoned. Influenced by late Althusser among others, Revueltas theorized the student movement of ‘68 through a “dialectic of encounter,” that is, as a series of moments in which participants broke with the present to creatively transform the politics of the everyday. Importantly for Draper, Revueltas conceptualized this transformation as taking place outside the teleological logic of liberal developmental thinking or traditional Marxist thought.

The subsequent chapters of the book look closely at practices that allow Draper to elaborate these concepts: the production of clandestine Super 8 cinema in Lecumberri Prison and filmed communiques of radical union organizing, the philosophical thought of Fernanda Navarro, and memoirs produced by female participants in the protests that focus on the experiences of female political prisoners and the lives of the common prisoners they shared space with. She draws on examples from outside more mainstream cultural production about 1968, which has hewn more toward films about the dramatic events at Tlatelolco or accounts written from the perspective of male participants. Using this counter-archive, complemented by the visual archive she and collaborators created (Mention: Mexico's 68: Model for Assembly; Archive of Memories from the Margins), Draper traces how activism expanded the political possibilities of cinema or nurtured a feminist critique of the justice system. In this way, Draper draws our attention not merely to those left out of the narrative but to examples of the way that activism generated “moments of collective emancipation” outside of the language of politics sanctioned by the state (195).

Readers unfamiliar with the chronology and key players involved in the student uprising that was punctuated by the massacre at Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968, and the subsequent imprisonment of political activists, may need to orient themselves by consulting additional sources, but I do not think this is a flaw. Draper does not set out to be a historian, but rather to theorize the political from and through history. The lessons she draws about the power of the micropolitical, shifts in individual consciousness and lived experience vis-à-vis the other (or ethics), and the perception of new temporalities outside those of history—liberal or otherwise—speak not to one event or even one moment in history, but rather to our understanding of what the struggle for new worlds meant, means, and could mean in the future.