Youth night: An insight into the history of young people’s conquest of the night in Mexico

Abstract

This article offers an initial exploration of the process
by which youth have colonized nightlife in Mexico City
between 1940 and 1960. Given the paucity of historical research on youth and nocturnality, I employ several representative scenes from the film Los Caifanes (1967) as the central axis of my argumentation. The selection of these scenes is based on their recreation of age-specific practices, as identified in historical studies that address the subject tangentially. The following analysis focuses on the construction of various youth typologies, moral panics, forms of control, youthful rebellion, and the  transformation of urban nightlife. A social differentiation in nocturnal entertainment forms is observed based on the social class of the youth. The concluding considerations offer a preliminary conclusion: the persistence and adaptation of the sociocultural construction of night to contemporary transformations of urban life.