In 2000 only 21% of 18- to 24-year-olds in the region were enrolled in higher education. They also have a greater sense of rights and freedoms, the result of urbanisation, more disposable income, the expansion of higher education and, more recently, exposure to the digital world. Marcela’s generation of Latin Americans are not only more diverse religiously, with the rise of evangelical Protestantism and secularism. Her grandparents’ generation grew up in a hierarchical and more deferential society, where public policies about family, gender and sex were ruled by a monolithic Roman Catholic morality. “Things are changing now, each generation thinks differently,” she said. She would prefer looking at Mexican urban architecture. Standing outside the basilica, Marcela, a young architect from Cusco in Peru, waited for her grandparents and father, who wanted to visit on the first day of their holiday.
