Mexico's urban popular movements

Social Movements 1768-2018, 2020

Guerrero has a history of poverty and repression, but also of resistance, where the students and teachers of Ayotzinapa have been in the forefront. The Ayotzinapa movement draws on the history of the teachers’ colleges, which have existed in the state since the 1920s. These colleges were founded by Minister of Public Education José Vasconcelos, with the goal of educating peasants living in Mexico’s countryside (Padilla 2009). Since their founding, these schools have a socialist and activist orientation and are active in the peasants’ struggles for land distribution. However, they lost much of their funding from the federal government since the switch over to a neoliberal economic model in the 1980s. Protests led by young adults and students in Mexico have gained significant attention in recent years. This chapter looks at the origins of these movements, which were influenced by political corruption and the war on drugs. In particular, the formation of the student-led group #YoSoy132 against presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, and the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students. The students’ kidnapping led to a series of contentious events assigning blame on the federal government. The use of social media helped garner not just awareness, but support beyond Mexico’s borders. Whether or not this qualifies as a social movement under Charles Tilly’s terms shall be determined after a brief analysis of the events.

Abstract This thesis attempts to solve the question of why, despite the efforts of many social activists, there is not a unified social movement in Ciudad Juárez, México. My hypothesis is that social activists who are able to distinguish between a collective project and a personal project are more likely to create a successful social movement than those who tie their public identity with their personal identity. The reason seems to be that individuals who do not make this distinction are not able or willing to create networks beyond their ideologies, as well as beyond their personal direct influence and control, hence limiting the possibility of influence of their social organization in a larger political scene. This limitation seems to have prevented social organizations from creating a unified social movement

2019

The following pages contain an acknowledgment of the social change agents in Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico. The localized knowledge that is created, tested, and recreated, along the working experience of local social movements is the main interest of the present thesis. With the ultimate goal to help understand why is it important we all take accountability for this knowledge. The flexible forms of the local autonomous organizations are challenging the social structures that currently delimit the private and the public, the collective and the individual, the beneficiaries, the participants and the leaders, along with material and subjective production processes. In contrast, these organizations also help to draw new connections amongst the citizens, the City authorities and the City urban space. These organizations are facing the obstacles of social change with hacks; in other words, they are finding ways of reversing the perceived challenges on their advantage. The ultimate hack that I was able to glimpse throughout this research is a network of hacks; local social movements are exchanging their learned skills to push forward each other causes, while local activist are acting as bridges of information and knowledge. Beyond proving the possibility of a molecular revolution (Guattari & Rolnik, 2015), networked social movements in Chihuahua City are making possible to grasp the multiple dimensions of affect in order to be able to decide as a society what should social change look like, the only way to truly talk about social transformation. Given the autonomous impetus and transformative goals of the new social movements in Chihuahua, the analysis of the affective dimension of their dynamics poses an interesting approach. The following may represent yet another account of the exploration of affective politics that Southern urbanism scholars have already recognized in the creative and participatory practices. (Sitas & Pieterse, 2013) KEYWORDS: Social change, Southern urbanism, new social movements, autonomy, urban hacks, networked social movements, affective networks.

In this paper I analyze the popular social movement in Oaxaca, Mexico (APPO; The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) as it evolved since its 2006 beginnings. The key research question is: how did hundreds of autonomous groups with divergent agendas generate collective identities and coalesce around a particular set of issues in a repressive regime? In order to address this question, I first describe the emergence of the Oaxacan movement and then place it in the historical context of Mexican politics. Based on evidence from multiple sources (field observations, in-depth interviews with activists and residents, local newspaper accounts, eye witness blogs, and follow-up electronic conversations with two local scholar-activists), I argue that this movement has features that may be characteristic of 21 st century social movements, particularly in repressive regimes or post-colonial context: (1) the transformation from a popular uprising into a coalition of movements and citizens in conjunction with indigenous communitarian living and governing principles, and (2) collective identity formation based on the use of collective action frames (common origin, oppositional, and "prefigurative") and the use of public space and place-based rituals.

Mexico has a proud tradition of mobilization, yet it has largely failed to ensure that demands are properly met or that the country's politics, institutions and legal system are transformed.

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Since the beginning of the XXI Century, Mexico has become a laboratory of social struggle. The trajectory has followed a galloping pace of multiple struggles, rebellions and protests that look as if they go across the paths of similar movements elsewhere in the world. From the student movements in Chile against privatization; the Indignados in Spain; the Occupy Wall Street and the resistance of teachers in the United States; the Arab Spring in the Middle East; young people for public space in Turkey; struggles of workers in South Korea; and the spread of anarchist communes; all seem to cross nations, cultures and similar experiences. With a highly summarized story I would like to show the way the space of Mexican movements has developed, and introduce some Mexican authors who have witnessed their struggles.

2012

In this paper I analyze the popular social movement in Oaxaca, Mexico (APPO; The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) as it evolved since its 2006 beginnings. The key research question is: how did hundreds of autonomous groups with divergent agendas generate collective identities and coalesce around a particular set of issues in a repressive regime? In order to address this question, I first describe the emergence of the Oaxacan movement and then place it in the historical context of Mexican politics. Based on evidence from multiple sources (field observations, in-depth interviews with activists and residents, local newspaper accounts, eye witness blogs, and follow-up electronic conversations with two local scholar-activists), I argue that this movement has features that may be characteristic of 21 st century social movements, particularly in repressive regimes or post-colonial context: (1) the transformation from a popular uprising into a coalition of movements and citizens i...

The aim of this article is to analyse the movement Yosoy132 in the framework of the Political Opportunities Structure theory (POS; Eisinger 1973, Tarrow 1996). The POS refers to the consistent – although not necessarily permanent or formal – dimensions of the political context that make collective action more or less likely. In this way, the POS emphasises resources that are exterior to the group and which reduce the costs of collective action, discover potential allies and show how the authorities are vulnerable (Martí i Puig 2011). Our main goal is to understand under what conditions #yosoy132 developed its strategy, and which were the weaknesses and limitations faced by the movement to take part in the definition of public affairs, or in other words, what explains its failure to achieve its political goals.