The student social movement #YoSoy132 emerged in the context of the 2012 Mexican presidential elections. It reached national and international influence thanks to its new forms of organizing and creative public actions which were widely disseminated through internet media communications and their public confrontation towards more traditional media. The movement was initiated and led by youth, it started as a reaction towards the ways in which the Mexican state and the duopoly of mass media historically repressed and criminalized youth, social movements, and worked in collaboration to manipulate democratic processes such as the 2012 presidential election. This dissertation is focused on the process political activism, starting with the subjective activists’ descriptions of how they engage for the first time in mobilization, frame their struggles, negotiate collective identity and movement organizing, and manage state repression. All primary data collection took place from the movement’s inception in 2012 and continued through August of 2015, the research in secondary sources continued through the final stages of dissertation writing in 2022. The research design includes primary and secondary sources, media analysis, participant observation, and roughly 30 semi-structured interviews mostly with young activists but also with journalists, academics, and lawyers who were directly involved with this movement. This dissertation’s focus contributes to understandings of political culture in the recent wave of anti-authoritarian social movements that highly rely on internet communications through the experiences of youth in Mexico. Further, this research advances a humanizing perspective of youth studies, presenting youth as agents of change by decentering the institutional or tangible outcomes of mobilization while also presenting youth’s subjective complexities learning the new and unlearning the traditional power dynamics and political culture.