Guadalajara – REACT

REACT Cities

Guadalajara, Mexico

About Guadalajara

Located in western Mexico, Guadalajara is the country’s second most important city and constitutes the political, economic, demographic, technological, and cultural heart of Jalisco. It is the core of the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area (ZMG), home to more than five million people and characterized by intense mobility and interaction among its different municipalities. Internationally, the city is known for cultural expressions such as mariachi and the region’s tequila tradition, and more recently as one of the host cities of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. This diversity is also expressed through its museums, festivals, cultural spaces, universities, markets, street markets, and independent circuits, which make Guadalajara an important meeting point and space for the circulation of people, ideas, and customs.

However, behind this image of dynamism, innovation, and cultural vitality, Guadalajara is also a city marked by deep territorial and socioeconomic inequalities, difficulties in mobility and access to the city, as well as different forms of violence. These tensions acquire particular complexity in Jalisco, a state affected by the crisis of disappearances, extortion, and the presence of organized crime, including the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG).

Within this intense and contradictory urban life, young people occupy a fundamental place: their presence cuts across the city’s cultural, technological, and social transformations, as well as the different forms of participation, organization, and activism that seek to respond to the problems affecting their surroundings. Thus, Guadalajara can be understood as a territory where institutionalized forms of participation coexist with less visible practices that emerge from neighborhoods, universities, cultural spaces, streets, street markets, digital networks, and everyday life.

Emerging Themes

Guadalajara is a territory of young people. More than 50% of the youth population of Jalisco is concentrated in its metropolitan area, representing approximately 1.3 million young people between the ages of 15 and 29. Although the ZMG is one of the country’s most dynamic metropolitan areas, concentrating employment, education, healthcare, housing, cultural opportunities, and services, a significant proportion of young people live in poverty and face difficulties accessing educational and employment opportunities. This reveals one of the city’s major contradictions: Guadalajara has infrastructure for well-being, but does not necessarily guarantee real access to it for its young population. For example, today’s young people have higher levels of education and yet face more precarious conditions than their parents.

Guadalajara is a territory marked by different forms of violence. Disappearances, gender-based violence, drug trafficking, and recruitment particularly affect younger generations. In Jalisco, 68.8% of missing and unlocated persons are between 15 and 39 years old. Added to this is the problem of recruitment into organized crime, which increasingly reaches younger people. In response to these forms of violence, forms of participation also emerge: families, collectives, and young people who seek, accompany others, build memory, and demand justice. These responses often emerge from the need to confront circumstances that directly affect their lives and territories. Violence, therefore, is not only part of everyday life and of the conditions in which younger generations grow up; it can also become a trigger for organizing, building support networks, and taking collective action.

Guadalajara has become an important cultural, technological, and communication hub that facilitates the circulation of people, knowledge, cultural expressions, and information. It is no coincidence that the city has been known as the “Mexican Silicon Valley,” due to the development and concentration of technology and electronics industries in the region. This dimension is complemented by an intense cultural life: the city hosts the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), considered the largest publishing gathering in the Spanish-speaking world, as well as the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG), one of the leading spaces for the dissemination and promotion of Mexican and Ibero-American cinema.

In contrast, the ZMG has a deep history associated with conservative social values and structures, with a strong presence of Catholicism and a central role as one of the main settings of the Cristero War during the first half of the twentieth century. As a major seedbed of culture, the city is also a territory where conservative traditions, creative industries, technological innovation, and emerging forms of social expression interact and come into tension.

Guadalajara is also a city marked by strong territorial divisions. Calzada Independencia, which crosses the city, continues to function as a symbolic, cultural, and class boundary between a historically more privileged western side and a working-class eastern side with fewer material and technological resources. These differences can be observed through very concrete contrasts: within the same city, neighborhoods known for their vibrant cultural, gastronomic, and nightlife scenes coexist with areas where the conditions of public space and access to basic services—such as water—make everyday life considerably more difficult.

Something similar occurs with mobility: a city associated with innovation and technological development coexists with a public transportation system facing significant challenges, long commuting times, traffic, and costs that shape the way people move through and experience the territory. These inequalities reveal different ways of inhabiting the city, but they also generate demands, forms of resistance, and forms of organization around the right to the city.

Guadalajara constitutes a diverse and constantly contested activist territory. At its most visible scale are the large marches and mobilizations that move through the city, feminist protests, the actions of mothers searching for their disappeared relatives, and spaces that have been appropriated and resignified through social participation, such as the “Glorieta de las y los Desaparecidos” (“Roundabout of the Disappeared”)—officially known as “Glorieta de los Niños Héroes.”

At the same time, public space is also occupied by groups defending conservative and religious agendas, gatherings linked to right-wing and far-right sectors, as well as congresses that promote particular conceptions of masculinity, family, and traditional values.

Alongside these more visible forms, there is also activism on a smaller scale, including cultural projects, community initiatives, and individual, small-scale, or itinerant forms of participation. Urban art, poetry, workshops, street markets, bazaars, cultural spaces, community media, and digital networks also provide opportunities for people to meet, learn, build relationships, finance projects, and sustain different causes.

Individual and multi-cause trajectories also emerge; for example, people who move between feminism, the search for disappeared persons, housing, labor rights, and other causes without necessarily belonging to a single organization. From the macro to the micro level, Guadalajara thus reveals a complex activist ecosystem: from a march occupying the city’s main avenues to an artistic intervention, a self-managed street market, or a person participating through their everyday life. Guadalajara is a city marked by tensions, where young people constantly encounter one another, build connections, contest, and transform the lived territory.