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2010 30: 63Critique of Anthropology Lynn Stephen

Movement of Oaxaca, MexicoKaren Brodkin and the Study of Social Movements : Lessons for the Social

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Karen Brodkin and the Study of

Social Movements

Lessons for the Social Movement of Oaxaca,Mexico

Lynn Stephen

University of Oregon, USA

Abstract ■ This article highlights the intellectual contributions of Karen Brodkinin the analysis of gender and social movements through drawing on some of herkey concepts and ideas, joining them with others, and applying them to thespecific analysis of the pluralistic social movement in Oaxaca which emerged in2006 and continues to this day. The article’s theoretical inquiry centers on twoprimary questions that are followed by specific concepts explored in the analysisof the Oaxaca social movement.

1. How does collective action operate in daily life through interlinked networks?

What are the leadership styles and models that may be unique to women?(center women, interlinked activist networks, meshworks, and the values andties of daily life)

2. How do individual and collective political identities develop, shape the politicsof particular social movements, and participate in performing ideological workthat shifts public political discourses and perceptions? (individual and collec-tive identity development, public political ideologies, and political presence).

Keywords ■ Brodkin ■ gender ■ Oaxaca, Mexico ■ political identity formation ■

social movements

A broad range of scholarship has focused on the ways in which identity politics have either subsumed (Alvarez et al., 1998; Melucci, 1989;Touraine, 1985) or intermingled with other causes or rights struggles(Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley, 2003) and resulted in movements whichcannot be derived from a single interest or identity (Laclau and Mouffe,1985). Other scholars have offered more critical assessments of post-modern approaches to ‘new’ social movements that juxtapose class-focusedmovements with identity-focused movements and emphasize the fact that the fragmented identities which may underlie some social movements aremerely reflections of the flexible accumulation and neoliberalism they exist

in (Harvey, 1989; Vilas, 1993). Many contemporary social movements exist at the intersection of class- and identity-based movements (Hellman,2008), and can be attributed to a mixture of responses, roots and histories

Article

Vol 30(1) 63–89 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X09345428]© The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and permissions:http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav








as described by Marc Edelman (1999) in his analysis of Costa Rican peasant movements. Recent work on the affective and emotional dimensions of anti-corporate activism and other social movements (Collins, 2001; Juris,

2008; Polletta, 2006) suggests the importance of both individual and col-lective emotional energy to building ‘affective solidarity’, which can becrucial to maintaining commitment and participation in social movements( Juris, 2008: 65). Few scholars, however, have engaged in multi-levelintellectual projects to examine how political identities are born in individuals, become shared in specific times, places and historical locations,and sometimes become linked to political ideologies that move into themainstream and compete with dominant ideologies. The work of KarenBrodkin, particularly as reflected in her two books Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center (1988) and Making

Democracy Matter: Identity and Activism in Los Angeles (2007), offers such aroadmap for the study of contemporary labor and social movements.

Within this larger framework, Brodkin’s analytical contributions areparticularly useful for understanding women’s mobilization in and beyondthe workplace, the formation of new political subjectivities and theirrelationship to networked, pluralistic social movements and the develop-ment of alternative public political cultures. Together with concepts suchas Arturo Escobar’s notion of meshworks (2003: 610–11, 2008) – inter-linked networks and the total effect they produce as a system – and Saskia

Sassen’s idea of political presence (2002: 22) – ‘a presence in the broaderpolitical process that escapes the boundaries of the formal polity’ yet ‘signals the possibility of a politics’ – we can assemble a formidable tool-kit for the analysis of pluralistic social movements – a project I undertake herein relation to a significant social movement in southern Mexico.

From June through November of 2006, a pluralistic social movement centered on a democratic teacher’s union, Local 22 of the NationalEducational Workers Union (Sección 22 of the Sindicato Nacional deTrabajadores de la Education, SNTE) and a coalition of more than 300labor, indigenous, student, women’s, human rights, peasant, urban popular,

left and revolutionary organizations known as the Popular Assembly of thePeoples of Oaxaca (Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca, APPO)interrupted the usual functions of the Oaxaca state government for sixmonths and began to construct a parallel police force, constitution and stateassembly structure geared toward a more inclusive and participatory politi-cal vision for the state. Interruption of the state government was achievedthrough mass marches and tactical takeovers of government and mediafacilities. Large-scale organizing began after 14 June 2008, when poorly trained state police attempted to evict thousands of teachers from a sit-intaking place in the historic zócalo (square) at the center of the city. Theeviction failed and evoked widespread sympathy for the teachers, theirfamilies and others who had been the victims of beating and tear-gassing,and provided the political opening for the creation of the APPO.

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Organizing of alternative political goals, structures and processeshappened through dozens of meetings, large assemblies and the election of APPO counselors at regional and state levels who began to meet. Control of

state-owned public media for three weeks by a group of women, and thensubsequent takeovers of commercial radio stations and the production of grassroots videos for the internet produced a blossoming of multi-mediaactivism in the city. About three months into the movement, state repressionramped up significantly and movement activists were detained, disappeared,tortured, killed and imprisoned, while paramilitary caravans of pick-uptrucks loaded with armed gunmen circled the city on a nightly basis to roundup suspicious-looking people. In response, hundreds of barricades wereconstructed throughout the city to impede passage of the paramilitaries.These barricades in turn became the center of a more grassroots and de-centralized part of the movement that operated on a face-to-face basis in thedaily lives of people in specific neighborhoods. The conflict became increas-ingly violent in October of 2006 when several Mexicans and an Americanreporter were all killed on one day. The Mexican federal police force inter- vened in November of 2006, shut down much of the movement, andarrested and imprisoned hundreds of people. The movement has continuedin a weakened state, with internal struggles and continued state repression,but has also registered some notable achievements, such as the institution-alization of a popular alternative to a state-run folk festival known as the

‘Guelaguetza’ and the proliferation of community radio stations, public art and movement artists’ collectives.This article highlights the intellectual contributions of Karen Brodkin

in the analysis of gender and social movements through drawing on someof her key concepts and ideas, joining them with others, and applying themto the specific analysis of the pluralistic social movement in Oaxaca whichemerged in 2006 and continues to this day. I have organized my theoreti-cal inquiry into two primary questions that are followed by specific conceptsthat I will deploy in my analysis of the Oaxaca social movement.

1. How does collective action operate in daily life through interlinkednetworks? What are the leadership styles and models that may beunique to women (center women, interlinked activist networks, meshworks, and the values and ties of daily life)?

2. How do individual and collective political identities develop, shape thepolitics of particular social movements, and participate in performingideological work that shifts public political discourses and perceptions(individual and collective identity development, public politicalideologies and political presence)?

Before going on to develop the analysis implied by these two questions andtheir linked concepts in relation to the Oaxaca social movement, I first offer some background to Karen Brodkin’s broader intellectual develop-ment, and as an anthropologist of social movements.

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Stephen: Karen Brodkin and the Study of Social Movements








Activist anthropologist and the anthropology of activism andsocial movements

I got interested in studying social movements by being an activist. . . . I was livingin a black neighborhood in Detroit for seven or eight years. . . . I was organiz-ing and doing a number of different things. I was working with healthcare

workers and maybe Ford hospital workers who were trying to organize a lot of African-American and white nurses. So I learned a tremendous amount. Eversince then I think it’s important to think about politics informing how we readand understand what is going on. (Karen Brodkin, September 2008)1

Throughout her professional career, Karen Brodkin has woven togetheractivism with her thinking and theorizing in anthropology. While agraduate student at the University of Michigan and part of a women’sconsciousness-raising group, Karen Brodkin (then Sacks) was asked by Robin Morgan to write an anthropological piece on Frederick Engels andgender. The resulting essay, ‘Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property’ (Sacks, 1975), became not only the basisfor Brodkin’s dissertation, but also a pioneering piece of socialist-feminist theory, which, along with work by other feminist scholars such as EleanorLeacock (1978), questioned the near-universal subordination of womenbeing theorized by feminist cultural anthropologists such as MichelleRosaldo (1974) and Sherry Ortner (1974). Brodkin found that although

the existence of private property was important in how women werepositioned vis-a-vis their husbands domestically, whether or not women hadadult status in the larger ‘social’ sphere was the most important determi-nant in what their status was. The article surveyed women’s status in four African societies – Mbuti, Lovedu, Pondo and Gonda – with indexes of women’s status and discrimination against women’s participation in boththe social and domestic realm. Brodkin pointed out that women’s status ina marital relationship can vary independently of their status in largersociety (Sacks, 1975: 214).

In her doctoral dissertation and later in her first book, Sisters and Wives:

The Past and Future of Sexual Equality (1979), Karen Brodkin wrote against the idea that women’s oppression is the result of innate biological differ-ences with men and suggested instead that feminist anthropologistsexplore what the historical, cultural and economic origins of women’soppression might be. Finding the answers could help to provide solutionsfor feminists trying to improve women’s situation in the contemporaryUS through their participation in the women’s movement. Brodkin’sexploration of differences between women was also a pioneering step inbreaking apart the unified concept of ‘woman’ to illustrate how women’sexperiences could vary significantly by class, ethnicity, race, colonialexperience and treatment within different states.

Focusing on transitions from non-class to class societies, Brodkinproposed three types of societies that are each identified with a particular

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mode of production: (a) communal, which encompasses hunter gatherersocieties, (b) corporate kin groups, which encompass a wide range of power relations based on kinship, age, and individual skills and abilities

and are represented through groupings such as lineage corporations andage groups, and (c) class, where power relations are exercised by stateofficials who often expropriate kin corporations. By focusing on both non-state kin-based societies and state societies outside of Europe, Brodkinrefocused the study of women in ‘noncapitalist societies’ and explored‘differences in women’s places in class societies’ (1982: 242–3). Herlarger interest was in suggesting ‘some ways that this Marxist understand-ing of African women’s places can in turn help free our understandingabout women in European history and women in capitalism from sexist blinders’ (1982: 243). While much of feminist scholarship had focusedprimarily on women’s roles as wives, Brodkin’s work suggested that womenhave two primary roles: as both sisters and wives. Both roles are crucial,she maintained, for understanding women’s lives in precapitalistsocieties, as well as the different ways that women’s status shifts incapitalist and state societies.

Sister is a kind of kinship shorthand for a woman member of a community of owners of the means of production; an equal, an adult among adults, a decisionmaker. Wife is shorthand for a woman’s relationship to her spouse . . . and isgenerally one of subordination (1982: 6–7)

Brodkin’s work suggests that in the first two types of societies – communaland corporate – the predominant role that women have is as a sister andthus approaches social equality with men as a social adult. In communalsocieties, both sisters and wives have the same relationship to the means of production as brothers and husbands, although the division of labor may entail differences in tasks. In corporate kin group societies, women’s statuscomes from their role as a sister in a group of kinspeople who own themeans to their livelihood. She suggests that in Africa, as well as perhapselsewhere: ‘the rise of class societies involved the break-up of these kin

corporations by ruling classes, who substituted themselves as private ownersor as a class of hereditary state officials for kin ownership’ (1982: 7). Thussisterhood is lost and women are transformed from sisters and wives to wives‘and to perennial subordinates’ (1982: 7).

Against this general scheme, Brodkin suggests that there is also variation in the rise of class societies and that kin corporations are not always destroyed and may remain important bases for women’s status orprovide other platforms for women’s economic participation. Sisters and Wives (1979) signals Brodkin’s interest in understanding how gender and

kin relations function in working-class politics and the struggles sheexplored in later work. The book is also in conversation with the work of other feminist anthropologists such as Carol Stack (1974) and LouiseLamphere (1987), who explored how kinship functions in relation to

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working-class survival, holding one’s own against poverty, and interacts withgender roles in relation to race and ethnicity in the US.

In 1978 and 1979, Brodkin began doing the fieldwork for Caring by the

Hour (1988). She worked from November 1978 until Feburary 1979 as a volunteer member of the American Federation of State, County, andMunicipal Employees (AFSCME)’s union drive at Duke Medical Center. In1980, and then between May 1982 and October 1984, while on a NationalScience Foundation grant, she carried out continued observations, interviews and historical research on the union drive. The result of this work is:‘a descriptive analysis of how and where political activism is embedded in,and flowers from, everyday interpersonal and social experiences’ (1988: 3).In her analysis, Brodkin came to focus on how the internal structure of women’s work groups and community and family networks were the sustain-ing core for the union movement she studied. ‘The collective leadership of black women’s work-based networks was the organizational strength andsustaining force of the movement’, she wrote (1988: 3). She also focusedon the conditions under which women’s social networks did and did not become active, and the process by which they did so. She found that the‘seeds of activism’ could be found in the stuff of daily work culture and the ways in which women used ‘family-derived values about adulthood, work,and respect to assert and legitimate their positive evaluation of their ownskills and worth in opposition to the hospital’s denigration of them’ (1988:

3). The pace of change in this and other social movements is not sudden,she argued, but is always slowly unfolding. One has to look at the level of daily life at work and at home to understand how change happens. Severalof the basic questions laid out in Caring by the Hour (1988) came to formthe initial core of her framework for the study of social movements. How do networks function in social movements? How do ordinary tasks anddaily-life interactions form part of social movement change? What kinds of values do activists bring to movements that result in collective idiomsof resistance?

This perspective is further developed in Making Democracy Matter:

Identity and Activism in Los Angeles (2007). Brodkin states that the two experi-ences ‘of making democracy and of giving birth to oneself as a social actor’are at the heart of this book (2007: ix). The book is set in Los Angeles inthe mid-1990s, and Brodkin describes a boom in youth organizing, par-ticularly at the high school level that was in response to measures against bilingual education, for trying youth as adults and denying services toundocumented immigrants. Her narrators developed their strongest ties tounions and immigrant worker organizations but also participated in otherforms of activism outside of their ‘paid’ jobs. The interwoven activist networks that emerged went far beyond these two areas of focus to includeenvironmental justice, criminal justice, anti-globalization organizing andmore. Whether unraveling the personal histories of particular people whoare active in social movements or taking seriously the genealogy of how movements relate to one another, the importance of shared social networks

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– personal, residential, religious, cultural and political – becomes very clearin Making Democracy Matter .

A second significant focus of the book is to uncover the process

through which people construct political identities: ‘textured understand-ings of oneself as a person linked to families, neighborhoods, jobs, schools,and particular histories that explain in personally and meaningful ways why and how one must act politically in order to live a meaningful life’ (2007:8). Brodkin is interested in how people create not only selves but also socialmovements from a repertoire of local knowledge, experiences, practicesand beliefs that they share with a wider circle (2007: 9). Brodkin suggeststhat if we can illuminate the process by which personal and collective politi-cal identities are constructed, then we can begin to advance Gramsci’sproject of illustrating how ideological struggle is an ongoing part of thefabric of daily life and can ‘challenge prevailing internal and mainstream views’ and reshape the discourses, categories and assumptions that ‘peoplespontaneously think with’ (2007: 9–10). At a larger level this suggests astrategy for how to change public political discourses and perceptions.

Before going on to discuss some of the most important conceptsdeveloped by Brodkin in relation to the social movement in Oaxaca, I willfirst offer more background on that movement. While Brodkin herself hasnot conducted fieldwork in Oaxaca, I bring her work to bear on my analysisthere to demonstrate the utility the conceptual elements she proposes for

the study of pluralistic social movements.

Background to the Oaxaca social movement of 2006 to the present

Oaxaca has historically been one of the poorest states in Mexico andcontinues to rank first or second to Chiapas in extreme poverty,depending on the year and data source. Home to more than 16 different indigenous ethnic groups, each with a distinctive identity, language andself-identified traditions, Oaxaca often seems to belong to a different

country than the central and northern parts of Mexico because of its strongindigenous cultures and higher level of poverty. Some estimates calculatethe number of people living in extreme poverty (defined as living on lessthan $1.25 per day) as high as 78 percent (Thomas, 2006). About 33percent of its 3.5 million inhabitants are indigenous, according to the 2005population counts of the National Institute for Statistics, Geography, andInformation Technology (INEGI, 2000). The capital city of Oaxaca had anestimated population of 256,270 in 2008. Oaxaca City grew rapidly in the1980s and 1990s due to immigration from the countryside to the city.Mixtec- and Zapotec-speaking populations make up significant portions of the city today.

While it is true that in 2000 Mexico ousted the Revolutionary Insti-tutional Party (PRI) from presidential power after an uninterrupted 70-yearrule, the state of Oaxaca has remained rooted in an authoritarian political

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model in which the PRI – and other parties – use selective and at times widespread repression, manipulation of the justice system and politicalcorruption to perpetuate control. The Mexican constitution provides for

freedom of speech, the protection of women’s rights and racial equality, with specific mention of indigenous peoples, yet these ideologicalprinciples expressed in the letter of the law are juxtaposed to an oftencontradictory reality. The powerful elite of Oaxaca has maintained controlof political and economic processes through a regional culture that speaksthe discourse of equality while often denying the very people whose rightsthe constitution is meant to defend – women, indigenous, poor and othermarginalized peoples – access to the resources, public spaces and legit-imacy that would be necessary to exercise such rights. Yet these samemarginalized groups have continued to gain awareness of their rights dueto exposure to the discourse of organizations like the Mexican NationalHuman Rights Commission, the Oaxaca Human Rights Commission and,most importantly, from their strong social movements and the work of theNGO sector.

The Oaxaca social movement of 2006 was born out of a complex history of prior movements and rights discourses in Oaxaca from the 1970s to thepresent, including indigenous rights, women’s rights and women’s move-ments, human rights, popular media organizing, teacher’s union Local 22,urban popular movements and peasant movements. Each of these subsets

of movements often came to have internal human rights committees inorder to follow up on beatings, disappearances, imprisonment and even themurder of their leadership. In the 1990s, with the militarization of severalregions of Oaxaca, including the Loxicha region, specific human rightsorganizations were founded, as was a Regional Center for Human Rights.Many of the organizations that now participate in the Regional Center forHuman Rights Bartolomé Carraso (BARCO) are supported by the CatholicChurch. Other state groups include the Center for Human Rights Flor y Canto, the Center for Human Rights Siete Principes and the OaxacaNetwork for Human Rights. The Mexican League for the Defense of

Human Rights (LIMEDDH) opened an office in Oaxaca in 1996.In the 1980 and 1990s, a wide range of indigenous, peasant, urban,

student and other organizations had ‘women’s’ committees within them,functioning as internal human rights committees had in the 1980s. In 2003, women’s groups from around the state of Oaxaca, as well as women’scommittees and caucuses within other groups, formed the HuaxyacacCollective. The purpose of the alliance-building network was to pressurecandidates in the 2004 elections (in which Ulises Ruiz was ‘elected’ asgovernor of Oaxaca) to sign the Oaxaca Agenda for Gender Equity, which would have obligated Oaxaca to adhere to the Convention for the Elimin-ation of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women ratified by the MexicanSenate in 2001 (Dalton, forthcoming; Magaña, 2008). The Colectivo

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Huaxyacac also pressured the administration of Ulises Ruiz shortly after hiselection to take action on the alarming number of female murder victimsin the state. In 2006 and beyond the Huaxyacac Collective was an active

member of the APPO.Oaxaca’s state constitution is the most advanced in Mexico with regard

to granting indigenous communities the right to govern by ‘usos y costumbres ’, which loosely translates into the right to local self-rule accord-ing to traditional forms of governance without interference from politicalparties, and respect for local forms of law and justice administration. Whilesuch rights are by no means universally respected, hundreds of com-munities have been electing officials and running local politics for decadesbased on assemblies, and maintain unique forms of local government and justice (see Hernández-Díaz, 2007). These governance and legal systemsrest on a complex set of volunteer civic and religious positions known as‘cargos ’ whose occupants are responsible for everything from running city hall, hearing local criminal cases and meting out punishment, to over-seeing dams and irrigation works, policing, organizing ritual activities forreligious holidays, preventing and putting out forest fires, monitoringschools and health clinics, supervising public construction projects andmuch more. The structure and political culture of indigenous community assemblies, along with the structure and political cultures of social move-ments, have been one important element in how the APPO came to be

structured. The other important element of the APPO is Oaxaca’s powerfulindependent teacher’s union.Since 1983, Local 22 of the SNTE has joined other locals in forming a

dissident federation within the SNTE. This federation is known as the Co-ordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de Educación (National Coordinatorof Education Workers or CNTE). The CNTE was formed in order todemocratize the larger SNTE, to democratize the process of education andto democratize the country, according to CNTE activists Alfredo Chiu Velasquez and Rogelio Vargas Garfias.2 While the CNTE controls about 45percent of the 1.4 million workers in the SNTE nationally, in the state of

Oaxaca CNTE leaders estimate that they have about 60,000 affiliatesgrouped into Local 22. By 2003, there were at least 11 different politicaltendencies within Local 22, all on the left. These ranged from the pro-China socialists in the ‘Democratic Coordinator of the Oaxacan TeachingProfession’, to the ‘Coordinator of the Bases’ linked to the Party of theDemocratic Revolution or PRD (see Vicente Cortés, 2006). Since the 1990s,a Zapatista current has also appeared in Local 22, sympathetic to theZapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas. In the state of Oaxaca indigenous teachers, particularly bilingual indigenous teachers, area significant presence in the CNTE. It is estimated that 60 to 80 percentof the teachers in the CNTE are women. Local 22 on the CNTE has gotteninto yearly confrontations with most state governors of Oaxaca, but is

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usually successful in negotiating their demands after an annual one- to two- week occupation of the zócalo in the center of the city. This pattern changed with Oaxaca governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.

Elected amid widespread charges of electoral fraud in 2004, OaxacaGovernor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz took office with a pledge that there would beno more social protests in the streets and public spaces of Oaxaca. Hemoved the seats of the state senate and the governor’s palace to the sleepy,pottery-producing town of San Bartolo Coyotepec in an attempt to prevent the continual occupations of these public governance spaces by relocatingthem outside of the capital city of Oaxaca. More recently, the state govern-ment has been moved to a fortress called the ‘Administrative City’, in SantaMaría del Tule, another small town, about 10 miles outside of the capital.Ruiz’s removal and reinscribing of state governance spaces, as well as hisbrutal treatment of social protesters and anyone who criticized his govern-ment, set the stage for a prolonged period of conflict, polarization and violence that intensified during the summer and fall of 2006.

During that period, what began as a large group of teachers exercisingtheir right to bargain for higher salaries through the occupation of OaxacaCity’s colonial square, erupted into a widespread social movement afterstate police violently attempted to evict the teachers. On 14 June 2006, thegovernor launched a massive operation against the teachers, with heli-copters strewing tear gas canisters, hundreds of armed police beating back

unarmed teachers, the destruction of the teacher’s radio station known asRadio Plantón and the destruction of the teacher’s personal property. Inaddition, dozens of people were seriously wounded, leaders arrested andthe population in the center of the city was massively affected by thepresence of tear gas. Small children were affected by tear gas, as well asmany other bystanders and neighborhood residents who had nothing to do with the teachers or their occupation of the city center.

The eviction of the teachers was unsuccessful. They regrouped and re-occupied the city center, spreading out to a larger area. The outraged city residents, who had watched the brutal treatment by police of women, men

and small children, began to bring the teachers food, blankets, water andother necessary items. Some businesses, such as restaurants, let them usetheir bathrooms and kitchens, and helped to supply them with food. Morethan 30,000 teachers from around the state continuously occupied a largepart of the city center. Entire extended families reorganized their lives toprovide support to those in the occupation. The teachers from different regions of the state worked out a rotation system whereby one group wouldrest and go back to their families for a week and others would take theirplaces in the occupation. After a week of rest, they would return to the occu-pation and others would take off a week to rest. Four days after theintended ouster of the teachers, a widespread coalition of over 300 organiz-ations formed calling itself the APPO. Many of the key APPO participants were also members of Local 22, who were active in other organizationsoutside of the teacher’s union.

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In July of 2006, the APPO took over many state and some federal build-ings such as the state legislature, Oaxaca state offices for collecting taxes,offices for different kinds of state social services and some offices of the

legal system. Large marches were frequent and the official police forces were seen less and less in the city. The governor was unable to show his facein the capital city. The APPO successfully ran a boycott of a long-runningstate-sponsored folk festival known as the Guelaguetza, which was a majortourist attraction and revenue generator in the city. ‘Guelaguetza’ refers tothe institution of reciprocal exchange in Zapotec, but in the hands of theOaxacan state government it came to refer to a commercialized festival of folkloric dances and gift-showering with a high admission price. Many locals never attended the event because of its prohibitive price tag. The APPO both prevented the official folk festival from happening and, withLocal 22, sponsored a successful free parallel event attended by over 30,000people (see Poole, 2007a). They continued to sponsor this event in 2007,2008, 2009 and successfully competed with the ‘official’ Guelaguetza.

By the end of July of 2006, the social movement had a very solidpresence in the city, with marches happening every other day, nightly ralliesand cultural activities showcasing young musicians writing songs about themovement. A wide range of independent movement video producers soldcheap DVDs highlighting footage of the attempt to oust teachers from thezócalo , interviews with the wounded and ‘extras’ that focused on other social

movements in Mexico, such as the Zapatista EZLN in Chiapas and theconfrontation in May of 2006 in Atenco, where hundreds were arrested or wounded, and some prisoners were sexually assaulted by federal police (seeGibler, 2009: 71–80).

One of the primary arenas of women’s participation in the Oaxacasocial movement consisted of the takeover of the state-owned COR-TV (Corporación Oaxaqueño de Radio y Televisíon/Oaxacan Corporation of Radio and Television) state television and radio stations, and subsequently of commercial radio stations in August of 2006. Women reprogrammedofficial media and projected a new vision of the state of Oaxaca and

who belongs in it. Their programming included radio and television testi-monials documenting the silencing and marginalization of a wide range of social groups, from indigenous women to motorcycle taxi drivers. As thebroadcasts went on, more and more people tuned in. The women held andran the station for 21 days.

During the dawn hours of 21 August 2006, a group of masked men shot out the transmission towers of the occupied radio and TV stations, render-ing them inoperable. As soon as they began to destroy the transmissiontowers, a group of APPO members spread out over the city and began totake over 13 other commercial radio stations. The women who remainedat the occupied COR-TV and radio stations decided to surrender thestation buildings because they were unable to further transmit without thetowers. They turned over the COR-TV and radio installations to federalpolice through a mediated dialogue. The APPO ultimately held on to one

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of the stations, dubbed Radio La Ley, and also took over Radio Universidad,run by students through the Universidad Autónomia Benito Júarez deOaxaca (UABJO). The students were supportive of using Radio Universidad

to support the APPO and the social movement. Through September,October and most of November of 2006, Radio Universidad and Radio LaLey continued with the functions that occupied COR-TV had assumed. They served as forums for a wide range of people to speak, be heard and expresstheir ideas about state government. They were also spaces where new ideasfor how to govern the state democratically and the meaning of citizenship were discussed. Throughout September and October, the movement continued its occupation of public buildings.

In mid September, the APPO grew to have a wider presence in the stateof Oaxaca with the emergence of assemblies in the Mixtec region, in theSierra Norte, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the Triqui and Mixe regionsas well as in Los Angeles and Sacramento, California. In some cases these were symbolic takeovers of city halls that lasted only a few days and in othermonths-long occupations as in the city of Juxtlahuaca, where the APPOattempted to run local markets, coordinate trash collection and take onother city government functions. In November of 2006 the APPO held theirfirst state-wide conference, where elected delegates met together to comeup with a state-wide program. One of the issues involved in the organizationof the conference was the desire to have 50 percent of the delegates present

be women. While some organizations that were participating, such as theOaxacan Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB, FrenteIndígena de Organizacines Binacionales) had been successful in incorpor-ating women into their local and regional assemblies, this was not the casein many sectors of the APPO. Men were a majority of representatives in thefirst and second state-wide assemblies of the APPO in 2006 and 2009. InOaxaca, women who had taken over the radio and television stationsformed their own organization at the end of August, 2006, known as theCoordinadora de Mujeres Oaxaqueñas (COMO). The COMO functionedas part of the APPO, but also took on a set of gendered demands, includ-

ing gender equality for men and women, respect and preservation of indigenous cultures, working against domestic violence, literacy for all women, respect for pregnant women in the workplace, not permitting theirdismissal, land rights for women, dignified housing and healthcare for all women.

Rather than negotiate directly with the social movement, GovernorRuiz Ortiz called repeatedly for the federal government to intervene with armed force. When the federal government did not respond, stateofficials relied on paramilitary groups to try to re-establish order throughrepression. On a nightly basis, beginning in August of 2006, caravans of paramilitaries patrolled the city picking up people they targeted as APPOsympathizers. These actions resulted in a major set of counter-actionsby APPO supporters, who erected hundreds of barricades to keep the

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paramilitaries out. Those who participated in the barricades recall them asdangerous but inspirational spaces. Most were built by people from thesame neighborhood who worked with teachers from different parts of the

state. As described by John Gibler, the night watch around the barricades‘became a place for conversation, reflection, and analysis, for sharingexperiences and desires, for organizing revolt and consciousness-raising without imposition from leaders’ (2009: 164). The organizing that tookplace around the barricades happened largely outside of the formalassembly structure of the APPO and ultimately resulted in the spin-off of autonomous groups, which, along with other currents that were marginal-ized by the APPO, came to challenge those within it who wanted to partici-pate in electoral politics.

After a highly contested presidential election in August of 2006, in which Felipe Calderon was not declared the winner until September of 2006 by the Mexican Supreme Court, the governor of Oaxaca struck apolitical deal at the national level with the National Action Party (PAN, which won the presidency). The deal involved his staying in office inexchange for his party’s political support at the national level. The deal wasbased on the fact that the PAN did not have a large enough majority to passfederal legislation on their own and were forced to make a political alliance with the PRI. On 25 October of 2006, US independent reporter Bradley Will was gunned down with several Mexicans in Oaxaca in one day and the

Bush administration signaled their grave concern about the conflict inOaxaca to the Mexican government. With this push from the US and thepolitical pact confirmed, the federal government finally consented to RuizOrtiz’s request and sent in special counter-insurgency troops known as theFederal Preventative Police (PFP), who are a specially trained force culledfrom the Mexican Army, in October. In late November of 2006, the PFPtook over the city, arrested hundreds and effectively shut down the socialmovement.

During 2006 and since, the response of Governor Ruiz and his adminis-tration to the social movement and Oaxacan citizens who sympathized with

it was to invoke repressive measures, which included the use of para-military forces to intimidate, illegally detain and torture people; forceddisappearances, the arrest of hundreds of protesters as well as bystanders who happened to be in the location of legal protests, manipulation of the justice system to falsely charge people in order to jail them and prevent them from participating in marches and protests, and other forms of illegalintimidation. In the course of six months in 2006 (June–November), at least 23 persons were killed, hundreds of people were arrested andimprisoned, and over 1200 complaints were filed with human rightscommissions – including by students, professors and others from Oaxacauniversities and other institutions of higher learning (e.g. academic centers without students) – alleging torture and harassment at the hands of theauthorities (Amnesty International, 2007; LASA [Latin American Studies

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Association], 2007). Thus not only were political activists targeted in sweepsduring political events and in their homes, but also artists, intellectualsand others.

From 2007 to the present Oaxaca has become increasingly militarized, with five different types of federal and state police forces operating in thecapital city and elsewhere. During the months of May through November, when the movement commemorates significant events such as the 14 June victory over the attempt to evict the teachers, the anniversaries of the deathsof those killed in the march, the takeover of the state media, the popularGuelaguetza in July, and other events, the police and military presenceincreases considerably and in 2007 and 2008 resulted in continued violence,arrests and detentions. The different political tendencies that were heldtogether by the APPO’s unified opposition to Ulises Ruiz Ortiz began tounravel in 2007, resulting in different splits within the APPO. While variousultra-left sectarian tendencies like the Stalinist Popular Revolutionary Front (Frente Popular Revolutionario, FPR) have consistently tried to control the APPO, a variety of primarily youth-led anarchist tendencies such as Oaxacan Voices Constructing Autonomy and Freedom (Voces Oaxaqueños Con-struyendo Autonomía and Libertad, VOCAL) have pushed back and led thestruggle for what they call the autonomy of the APPO. One of the key issuesin the internal life of the APPO has been whether or not to construct alliances with left political parties in order to influence the outcomes of

elections. At the Second State Conference of the APPO in February of2009, some politicians were present in order to encourage an alliance. At the end of the conference, however, the APPO declared that it is ‘politically,organizationally, and ideologically ‘independent of the State and of electoral political parties. No leaders of electoral parties can be leaders ormembers of the APPO’ (APPO 2009). According to the declaration of thesecond state-wide APPO conference, the APPO: ‘defines its main programof struggle as working for a true social transformation and the organizationof the peoples in order to trace a path towards a new anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal project for the country’ (APPO, 2009).

Center women, interlinked activist networks, meshworks, andthe values and ties of daily life

In the 1960s when I was working at Oakland University . . . I got deputized totalk with the campus maids and see if they would join our protest to form achild care center. . . . They supported our demand, but said their kids wereolder. They said, ‘What we would really like is pay parity with janitors. We dothe same work.’ So the two demands were linked. . .. I went to talk to them.There were 15–20 women sitting around and they said, ‘We only have half anhour for lunch, I don’t know if I can do it that day, I need to do my phone calls.’Everyone had a reason. Finally one woman said, ‘Look girls, either we are allgoing to be there or none of us are going to be there. So what do you want todo?’ And they decided they would all be there, after much hemming and

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hawing. I listened to the whole process. And that frankly is where the idea of center women came from. It was a really powerful experience but I didn’t know

what was involved in it until much later. (Karen Brodkin, September 2008)

Observers of social movements are often tempted to identify movement leadership with a charismatic model of leadership, focusing on the publicspokespersons of movements who often are men. Such was the case formany descriptions of the APPO and the Oaxacan teacher’s union (seeOsornio, 2007). For Karen Brodkin, her epiphany recalled above from a1960s organizing experience reappeared as a central concept in heranalysis of leadership and organizing in the Duke Medical Center UnionDrive. There, the idea of ‘center women’ re-emerged to mark those women who were the hubs of the interlinked work and other networks that

sustained the union drive. These center women were not perceived ascharismatic leaders of the union campaign, but were the centralmobilizers. Without them and their networks, there would be little depthor breadth to organizing activity. They were also important figures infostering the development of individual and shared collective identities.

After hospital workers chastised her for setting up a public forum where all the speakers were black and white women, Brodkin realized that the lesson she had learned at Oakland University had come home to roost.The women did not want to be public speakers. In recognizing only oneaspect of leadership – that of the public and solo speakers – Brodkin writes

that she:. . . missed what I think may actually be a more crucial aspect, that of networkcenters: Almost all of the public speakers and confrontational negotiators weremen . . . women were centers and sustainers or workplace networks – center-

women or center persons – as well as the large majority of the union organiz-ing committee. (1988: 120)

Rather than just individuals following a popular orator, Brodkin writes:‘leadership in the union drive involved already existing hospital-basedsocial networks . . . around class and race-conscious or at least job-conscious

values. . . . Centerwomen were key actors in network formation andconsciousness-shaping’ (1988: 121).Center women, Brodkin writes, gain their positions through their

ability to mediate and resolve conflicts by reconciliation, and to provideemotional support and advice – skills they learned in their families, but were able to deploy in organizing. Her conclusions in Caring by the Hour suggest how work and family cultures might mutually reinforce activismrather than work against one another. Working-class kin networks areimportant resources in this process.

The integration of work-based social networks with women’s community-basedkin and friendship networks, and the important part that skills learned infamilies played in forming networks, counters the old contrast of work andfamily, dolicity, and military. Centeromen were particularly important in shapingfamilistic values and understandings into culture of resistance. (1988: 241–15)

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Center women as the hub of interlinked networks is a concept withconsiderable utility in explaining the ways that women emerged as key leaders and conveners in the Oaxaca social movement after their takeover

of publicly owned media. Because only women were permitted to haveauthority and decision-making power within the state-occupied mediastations, the center women role that women had already been playing inthe movement became visible and public, particularly for men in themovement. As explained above, in August of 2006, several hundred womentook over the public television and radio stations of Oaxaca City, Mexico.The action was spontaneously decided while a larger group of women weremarching through the city to demand the ouster of Oaxaca’s governor,Ulises Ruiz, and in support of the APPO, a broad-based social movement. A significant number of the participants were women who were teachersand who had a long history of militancy in Oaxaca’s independent teacher’sunion known as Sección 22 or Local 22. As in the model of organization at Duke Medical Center analyzed by Brodkin, most of the ‘public’ speakers forthe APPO and the teachers’ movement were males. In the takeover of theTV and radio stations, the leadership was female. This came as a surprise tomany male leaders. Within the decision-making process to take over thestation it was one or two ‘center’ women who were pivotal and also emergedas central parts of the network of women and men who ran and supportedthe station while it was on air for three weeks from 1 August to 21 August

2006. Here, Catalina Ruiz describes how women took over the station andhow surprised men in the movement were when they were successful.

We said, ‘This media is ours. It is paid for by money from our taxes. We pay forit every time we buy something. It is supposed to be public, to be ours. So now since it is ours, we are going to keep it and run it.’ The men, the male teachersand others, they were shocked when we took over the station because it wasn’t something they had thought up. A lot of times in our meetings they were alwayssaying, ‘How do we get the official state station to carry our information?’ They never could figure out how to do this. . . . After we did it they supported us. Wegot a ton of calls on the radio from men who stated, ‘Bravo. These valiant

women, these combatative women, did what we couldn’t do.’ We hope that thisis a lesson for the larger movement, for women, and for the media.

I visited the radio station at least four times while the women occupiedit and found that they in fact had developed two or three different kindsof leadership models. There were public spokeswomen like Patricia Jimenez, who was often quoted in the press, but there were other women who ran the internal workings and security operations of the station. Thenthere were women who organized the food and blanket operation that provided meals and warmth for the dozens of people who guarded thestation and the transmission towers at night. And there were women who were on air, who came from all walks of life and spoke of many different experiences, and in several indigenous languages as well as Spanish. The

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interlinked networks of all of these women were crucial to keeping theoccupied stations safe, running, and those within the occupied space, fed,clothed and warm. Their neighbors, extended family members, co-workers,

churches and other forms of affiliations were the webs that sustained thestation – working to some degree like the interlinked networks that Brodkindescribes in the Duke Medical Center union drive and in the youth organ-izing of Los Angeles.

In short, narrators’ social change landscapes look like a network of democraticorganizations tied together by overlapping and changing coalitions and by personal networks of activists. In this mesh, progressive union locals serve asimportant organizational nodes . . . (2007: 279)

This concept resonates with the work of others who have tried to under-

stand the construction of networks in relation to anti-globalization move-ments and other movements which stretch across the world and are linkedthrough the internet as well as through personal networks. Arturo Escobarhas developed a useful concept he borrows from the natural sciences calledmeshworks. Unlike networks, which may be focused from one personoutward, the idea of meshworks is about understanding interlinkednetworks and the total effect they can produce as a system. Escobar writesthat the characteristics of meshworks include the fact that they are self-organizing and grow in unplanned directions; they are made up of diverseelements; they exist in hybridized forms with other hierarchies and meshworks; they accomplish the articulation of heterogeneous elements without imposing uniformity; and they are determined by the degree of con-nectivity that enable them to become self-sustaining (2003: 610–11, see also2008). Escobar states that anti-globalization struggles are best seen as:

. . . horizontal, self-organizing meshworks of heterogeneous sites/strugglesbrought together by diverse interfaces and catalysts, particularly NGOs andpioneering social movements. . . . Meshworks can also be seen as apparatusesfor the production of discourses and practices, that is creating discursive fieldsof action that harbor or capture a number of sites. (2003: 615–16)

The interlinked activist networks which gave birth to the APPO, and which also sustained more specific actions within the wider socialmovement such as women’s occupation of public and private media, alsobecame linked to wider activist networks – in fact some of those same anti-globalization movements that Escobar writes about as a part of meshworks.Indymedia had a strong presence in Oaxaca during 2006 which has only grown since Indymedia reporter Brad Will was gunned down and hismurder remains unsolved in Oaxaca. Over time, and with the development of smaller spin-off organizations and movements of the APPO such as VOCAL, the interlinked activist networks of the Oaxaca social movement have been connected virtually and face to face with other social movementsand activist sites, becoming part of a meshwork (see Magaña, 2008).

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Individual and collective political identity development, public political ideologies and political presence

When people tell you the story of how they got political, it is a story of ‘how Idiscovered what’s wrong, and think of myself as both wronged and having anidea of what should be done instead.’ . . . This is a tremendously empoweringexperience, and it’s very hard to come to that position. . . . It allows some of youto be a story teller, and an agent . . .

When you tell the story of how you came to realize what’s wrong, you’re alsotelling a story of you as a person who can think what’s wrong, think and speak

what should be, and create a community of others who have every reason tofeel as you do – who have been wronged in similar ways and can dream in waysthat you have come to dream. And the networks are really the lines of communi-

cation on which people with different, but parallel experiences, make widerand deeper analyses. (Karen Brodkin, September 2008)

A central dimension of activism that Brodkin explores in Making Democracy Matter (2007) has to do with how political identities develop in individuals,how those individuals seek to provide others with knowledge and confi-dence to analyze the world from their particular social locations, and how groups of people participate in the ideological work of shifting publicpolitical discourses and perceptions. This requires scaling down to revealthe pivotal, emotive moments for individual activists in their own personal

development. It also requires scaling up to look at how collective identitiesmove beyond specific individuals and organizations, and take on an inde-pendent ideological life in relation to other public political discourses andideologies.

In Oaxaca, the redefinition of the state radio and TV station, and thenother stations, as media spaces of the social movement had a profoundimpact on those who were not a part of the APPO, Sección 22, or any of the marches. Radio Cacerola, which became Radio La Ley when it wastaken on 21 August, and later Radio Universidad, which began transmittingagain in September, became the primary conduits of information about the

movement and the source of new ideas for listeners. The broadening of thespectrum of ideas and voices heard on the radio profoundly affected somelisteners who were not involved with the movement. Both in homes and at the barricades, in combination with local discussion, the radio broadcasts were part of the context that ignited individual and collective identity formation. Here is Josefina Reyes, a working-class woman who lives on theedge of poverty by a combination of work cleaning houses, cooking andcaring for children. Her husband is an immigrant worker in Los Angeles who has been away from home for almost four years. Josefina did not participate in any APPO activities. Her testimony reveals how the radiobroadcasts were a part of her awakening and how she then began discussing what she heard with others, developing a common political position with

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her neighbors. She talks of listening to the radio and neighborhooddiscussions:

The other thing that happened with the women taking over the state radiostation and TV, and then the other radio stations, is that lots of people beganto arrive and to go on air. They would talk about what was going on in Oaxaca.

And it wasn’t just people from the city. People started to arrive from the townsand the ranchos from all over the state to say that they too were unhappy withthings. They would go to the station or call in to say that they were in agreement

with the movement, that they supported it . . .

There would be young people who talked about neoliberalism and the peoplestarted to know more things. Before, we never heard about these things and we

were not interested. But people started to know more and more, like about thePlan Puebla-Panama3 and other things that our government was involved in

with other nations. People started to hear more and more from lots of peopleand to know more. They got more and more fed up with our government. Afterthis we started to realize more and more things and to talk about them witheach other.

The type of knowledge production that Josefina describes is often ignoredin models of politics and political ideology. If we follow Brodkin’s modelfor how social movements work, then the creation of political ideology empowers anyone to be a political actor – anyone who can tell a story of how they have been wronged. Then, with others, this person can begin to

develop a shared political ideology as Josefina described above.Brodkin’s model of how social movements produced shared politicalideology follows other political, cultural and feminist theorists (Alvarezet al., 1998; Chatterjee, 2004; Harcourt and Escobar, 2005; Latina Feminist Group, 2001; Rosaldo, 1997; Saldívar-Hull, 2000; Young, 1989) whoadvocate for an understanding of politics, political action and politicalideology that seriously considers the actions, strategies, narratives andideologies (cultural or otherwise) of the poor and disenfranchised, andbroadens the notion of citizenship to include social, cultural and politicalparticipation on multiple scales. I have found in my work in Oaxaca that

the first rights that people seek within a complex set of human, indigenousand women’s rights discourses are ‘the right to speak’ and ‘the right to beheard’ (see Poole, 2007b). The right to speak begins with actually speaking , with thinking of yourself as someone who can speak as Josefina demon-strates above. She is someone I have known well for almost ten years. In2006, I heard her speak for the first time, and talk about injustices toherself, to others, and then conceptualize herself as part of a largercommunity of people of similar speakers. Being heard involves havingaccess to public space and channels of communication, which cut across

different social sectors, cultural worlds and venues. The right to speak andto be heard are precursor rights to other rights. They are foundationalrights. In my research in Oaxaca, the spaces of the occupied radio stations,

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marches, rallies, neighborhood meetings, and hanging out at the barri-cades, provided contexts for many people to begin exercising these funda-mental rights to speak and be heard for the first time. It is important to

note that the two happen simultaneously. If you are only speaking to yourself inside of your own head or alone, then it is like the sounds ofone hand clapping – no one can hear you. You need an audience and aparticular kind of audience to be heard.

In the Oaxaca movement of 2006, the speaking most often took theforms of testimonials, which are a form of oral narrative. The testimonialsare urgent oral accounts of bearing witness to wrongs committed against the speakers. Broadcast on the radio, television, at public demonstrationsand in the street, testimonial rights-claiming in Oaxaca repositionspreviously excluded speakers as active citizens who can speak and be heard.One of the key organizing tasks taken on by the movement was to create venues where people could – in the words of Brodkin – tell the story of how they have come to realize what’s wrong, conceive of themselves of a person who is capable of thinking what is wrong and articulating what should be,and creating a community of others who have been wronged in similar waysand can dream in similar ways of what to do to make things right.

Ruth Guzmán, whose husband Ramiro Aragon was detained, tortured,falsely charged and jailed for 90 days from August to November in 2006,recalled what it was like the first time she spoke in public. Her husband was

still in jail. Her brother and a friend of his, who were detained and tortured with her husband Ramiro, had been freed. On 12 August, when Ruth’sbrother Elionai was released along with his friend Juan Gabriel (bothteachers), they held a press conference. It was the first time Ruth hadspoken about what had happened in public. She had not been an activist before. It was one of her moments of becoming a political actor. I askedher how she remembered feeling in that moment.

The first time I spoke in public was on August 12th. Well, it was something morethan personal at that point. It wasn’t just the aggression against us. That hadalready passed. It was something more. Before that we were angry, but in that interview we gave to La Jornada [national Mexican newspaper], we made UlisesRuiz [the governor] directly responsible for what happened. I said that it washe who had beaten Ramiro, my brother Elio, and Juan Gabriel. I said we wereholding him accountable for anything that happened to my family. My brothertold me that they had taken everything that had our addresses on it. He toldme that they said that they were going to come to the house to rape me andkill my children. They had our addresses. So I accused Ulises Ruiz directly andthat appeared in the press. It was a big picture of the three of us and that washow I really came to start participating in the movement. I had spoken.

Ruth was ‘heard’ not only in the national press but also locally and withinher circle of family and friends. Her speaking, and the fact that ‘she washeard’ by family and friends, resulted in a complete rearrangement of herlife and those around her. She decided to stop working and dedicate herself

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full time to the APPO movement and to getting her husband and othersfrom the movement out of jail.

My mother stopped going to the sit-in of the teachers [she is a teacher] and shetook care of my kids. I started to print pictures of Ramiro, to work with NGOs,to write letters, to make posters, to go to meetings, to go to public forums. . . .I did so many things.

The final aspect of Brodkin’s theorizing of social movements I want todiscuss in relation to the social movement of Oaxaca is the political workthat narratives perform, both in terms of creating new political actors whointerpret the world from their point of view, and in terms of how these‘points of view’ become legitimized as ideologies which can compete withdominant ideas (see Brodkin, 2007: 58). How do counter-narratives cometo occupy a legitimate position as political ideologies?

One of the important processes counter-narratives pass through ontheir way to becoming legitimate political ideologies is what Brodkin calls‘building democratic leadership in chains of teaching and learning’ (2007:140). She compares the young activists she studies to SNCC organizers.‘They sought to provide workers with the knowledge and confidence toanalyze the world from their social locations, and to create opportunitiesfor them to experience themselves as effective actors in making thingschange . . .’ (2007: 140). The analysis that activists create can be legitimized

through temporal and/or structural circumstances that create an openingfor a new political narrative to emerge, and be heard and validated by otherpolitical actors. By studying the forms of knowledge production that activists engage in and the processes by which they become inserted intothe political and cultural mainstream we can understand how publicdiscourses change or are challenged. In California, as documented by Brodkin and others, activists have worked through the electoral system inorganizing in opposition or support for ballot measures as well as in a many other arenas. Even in the electoral arena, they have mobilized those whocannot legally vote as political actors and in the process have broadened

the definition of citizenship. The work of Brodkin in this area makesimportant connections with Saskia Sassen’s discussion about the differencebetween powerlessness and the possibilities of being a political actor, evenif one is lacking in formal political power.

Sassen uses the term ‘presence’ to name this condition. She suggeststhat in the context of the strategic space of the global city, people can‘acquire a presence in the broader political process that escapes theboundaries of the formal polity. Their presence signals the possibility of apolitics’ (2002: 22). The specific context will determine what kind of politics. In Los Angeles, for example, a wide range of nonformal politicalparticipation has emerged from the Mexican immigrant presence, fromfederated hometown associations and transborder organizations that negotiate directly with US and Mexican public officials (see Fox and

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Rivera, 2004), to major participation in unions like UNITE-HERE (seeMilkman, 2005). UNITE-HERE is a union with over 450,000 activemembers that represents workers in apparel and textile manufacturing,

apparel distribution, apparel retail, industrial laundries, hotels, casinos,restaurants, food service and airport concessions. Participation in theseforms of nonparty politics has also led to groups such as UNITE-HEREhaving influence in mayoral races in Los Angeles. Let’s move to Mexico andconsider the notion of ‘presence’ in Oaxaca City.

In Oaxaca City and other smaller cities in the state, long-standingpolitical elites have maintained control of politics and economics througha regional political culture that in practice excludes a majority of people.Throughout the state, and particularly in the capital, there is a critical massor ‘presence’ of poor and working poor people, often indigenous, who havebeen busy generating a rich tapestry of interlinked social movements overthe past three decades. The movements and the actors in them have beentrying out alternative ideologies and political discourses in social movement spaces, largely outside of the mainstream press and sometimes at the center,but usually at the margins of formal political bodies such as the Oaxaca City Council or the state legislature. These alternative ideologies includeindigenous rights to self-governance and self-determined development plans (also articulated by other sectors); the right to elect city and stateofficials who are not affiliated with political parties; the use of long forums

and meetings run by consensus to develop policy; affirmative action policiesin politics for women and indigenous peoples; gay, lesbian and transgenderrights to housing, jobs and public space.

The articulated networks or meshworks of pre-existing movements inOaxaca combined with the opening of new spaces for large numbers of people to experience the rights to speak and be heard. The APPO andSección 22 took physical control of much of the city and the movement controlled significant media spaces such as the public TV and radio andthen other radio stations. In this context, the alternative ideologies of threedecades of movements were able to break out of their boundaries at the

political margins and became mainstreamed for a period of several months. As bus drivers, taxi drivers, citizen drivers, storekeepers and others beganto tune to the movement radio stations – not all for the same reasons –testimonials of those seeking the right to speak and be heard came over theairwaves, as did movement music, lectures and movies. This combined with a critical moment in national politics where the focus was on thepresidential contest and no one focused on Oaxaca. In this temporal space,the movement was able to shift public political ideology and compete withmainstream political discourse, which often focused on supportingOaxaca’s tourist business, the good deeds of the governor and other publicofficials, and the folkloric richness of the state’s indigenous cultures. This was replaced with discussion of the right to decide on who governs; the

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need for healthcare, housing, education and jobs; support for indigenouscultures and languages; and a quest for more democratic models of political participation outside of party politics.

When people recall listening to the radio and talking to one anotherat the barricades and in their neighborhoods, they are describing what Brodkin would likely call a public working-class and resistant politicalsubjectivity. In the process, through creating narratives, listening to others’narratives and then bringing them to the table in a public discussion, they are crafting a shared public political culture. As I have written elsewhere,such political cultures do not necessarily focus on one set of answers, but on an agreed-upon set of questions to ask and debate (see Stephen, 2001). What was so striking about the Oaxaca movement was how this happenedsimultaneously in so many different kinds of spaces in the city and state.The work of testimony and narrative became one of the primary vehiclesfor creating shared and contested identities and political ideologies that began to fundamentally reshape how people thought of themselves ascitizens and what was possible in terms of democratic models of govern-ment and participation. This experience cannot be erased and is related tothe concrete achievements of the social movement which form the basis forfuture organizing.

Conclusion

While the APPO was unable to sustain the mass participation, unity, anddisruption of state government achieved in 2006, this coalition, the Oaxacaindependent teachers’ union Local 22, COMO and the others that workedin the social movement together had some notable achievements:

1. The mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Oaxacans in a powerfuland sustained manner that changed individual lives and resulted in ashared political vision of the right to have rights. This mass mobiliz-

ation was built on interlinked personal, political, work, and neighbor-hood networks that revealed the double and triple militancy of teachersand others who participate in multiple and overlapping organizations.Many of these actors are women.

2. The broadening and proliferation of legitimate public politicaldiscourse through radio, building occupations, the barricades, and thepublic culture of sustained mass marches and demonstrations.

3. The recentering of some parts of the movement leadership to in-corporate women, particularly through women’s roles in controllingthe media and through the formation of COMO. In these parts of themovement women’s leadership styles and models of organizing basedon networks were legitimized.

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4. The legitimation of popular media and community controlled radio.One of the commercial stations taken in 2006 continues to support the APPO and there has been a proliferation of community radio stations

throughout the state.In my analysis of the Oaxaca social movement, I have found the con-

ceptual tool-kit which Karen Brodkin crafted for the anthropology of socialmovements through her work on union organizing and multi-strandedsocial movements to be illuminating. How collective action operates in daily life, how individual and collective political identities and ideologiesdevelop, and how they move into the political mainstream to compete withdominant ideologies is at the core of understanding the complexity of social change and political empowerment of new subjects. While the

Oaxaca social movement of 2006 was unable to sustain its presence in thepolitical mainstream, it remains alive, and continues. Perhaps most import-ant is the continued presence in the city of Oaxaca of thousands of people whose lives were significantly altered by their participation in the socialmovement and who continue to maintain at least part of their shared politi-cal ideology about what kinds of change are necessary in Oaxaca to improvethe lives of the majority.

Notes1 This and subsequent quotes are from an interview the author conducted with

Karen Brodkin in September of 2008.2 I interviewed Alfredo Chui Velásquez in July of 2006 and Rogelio Vargas Garfias

in August of 2008.3 The Plan Puebla-Panama, initiated in 2001, is intended to promote the regional

integration and development of the nine southern states of Mexico with all of Central America and Colombia. It is a multi-billion-dollar plan that is linked toa neoliberal economic model and free trade agreements developed for all thecountries included.

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■ Lynn Stephen is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon, and her research has centered on the intersection of culture and politics. Born in Chicago, Illinois she has a particular interest in the

ways that political identities articulate with ethnicity, gender, class, and nationalismin relation to local, regional, and national histories, cultural politics, and systemsof governance in Latin America. During the past ten years she has added thedimension of migration to her research. In May of 2009, she launched a digitalethnography titled, “Making Rights a Reality: the Oaxaca Social Movement, 2006 –present. Her newest book is titled Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico,

California, and Oregon (2007). Other books include Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas, co-edited with Aida Hernández Castillo and ShannonSpeed (2006); Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca (2005),Zapata Lives!: Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (2002) and Perspectives on Las Américas: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation (2003), co-edited withMatt Gutmann, Felix Matos Rodríguez, and Pat Zavella. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, The Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University and research grants from the National Science Foundation, The Wenner-GrenFoundation for Anthropological Research, and the Inter-American Foundation.Her most recent research focuses on identity formation and the political and civic

participation among Mexican immigrant youth. [email: [email protected]] Website: http://www.mraroaxaca.uoregon.edu/.

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