Title: From the Barrio to the Barricades: Grafiteros, Punks, and the Remapping of Urban Space
Abstract: On a Friday afternoon in February of 2011, I sat down with Silvia in the courtyard of the house she and other youth activists had converted into a political and cultural center in downtown Oaxaca City. The youth in her collective met through their participation in a social movement that took grassroots control of the city for six months in 2006. In fact, many met while guarding a network of self-defense barricades that were erected throughout the city to help prevent paramilitaries and the police from targeting key movement installations and neighborhoods. After the federal police brutally retook physical control of the city, youth from the social movement held a series of meetings to discuss how best to keep alive the hope and momentum created during the six months of popular rule. One of the tangible results of these meetings was the creation of a whole network of youth-run collectives and spaces throughout Oaxaca. One of these collectives formed around the creation of a cultural and political center meant to provide the social movement with a central space in downtown Oaxaca City. Five years after the social movement emerged, I asked Silvia how long she planned on participating in the center: However long the project lasts. It's a rented house but we can't just think about material things. Instead, we have to think about what it is that has been achieved.... For example, the barricades are no longer in the streets, but the barricades weren't just the physical space. They are also the deep transformation that they produced, the social relations, the everyday interactions. So these things will be in my heart, whether I am here in the house or in another space, that spirit doesn't die. It's alive. I mean that, truly alive. Even though most of the physical spaces produced by the 2006 social movement no longer existed, Silvia refocuses our attention to the cultural and social importance that those spaces continued to have for those who created them. In doing so, she captures quite eloquently what social movement scholars have difficulty explaining: the impacts that social movements can have on the subjectivities of local actors and on everyday social change. I argue that these less tangible changes can be made visible if we focus on the physical and social constitution of space as a window into the multiple ways that power and counterpower are enacted, contested, and negotiated. It is on these spaces that I will focus in this article. There are many enduring images of the Oaxacan social movement of 2006: scenes of rebellious youth hurling rocks at the police and launching firecrackers using homemade bazookas, or of elderly women marching alongside children, doctors and nurses, youth, teachers from the powerful teachers' union, peasants from the countryside, and working-class urban people. Many also remember images of street art and graffiti covering every last square inch of downtown Oaxaca, or the burnt buses and makeshift barricades. Others remember the brutal police and paramilitary violence that left at least 26 people dead and hundreds arrested and tortured (CCIODH 2008; LASA 2007). However, images are not all that is left from the social movement. Many attribute to the social movement the apparent end of the hegemony of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) over Oaxacan state politics, as represented most visibly by the ascent of an opposition candidate to the governorship in 2010. But that is not the only impact the movement has had on Oaxacan politics. Inspired by Foucault's conceptualization of power, I take into account in my understanding of politics not just the mechanisms and institutions of the state, but also a broader terrain that includes the practices, discourses, and extra-institutional spaces where power is exercised and contested. As such, I argue that the impact of the social movement of 2006 actually permeates a much broader sector of Oaxacan society, to the extent that new political cultures and subjectivities have been radically shaped by the collective experiences from 2006. …
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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