


































Decolonizing the politics of resistance in Oaxaca, and elsewhere

Review by  Myriam Lamrani

MAURICE RAFAEL MAGAÑA, 2020, Cartographies of Youth Resistance. Hip-

Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico. Oakland, California: University of 

California Press, 206 pp., IBSN 978-0-52034-462-4

Cartographies of Youth Resistance is a rare book, one that takes the reader 

immediately into the thick of the ethnographic action, in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. 

We discover Generation 2006 during its political awakening as the youth participates 

in what some have called the “first insurrection of the twenty-first century” (Osorno 

2007)—a violent confrontation between the people and the authorities in Oaxaca, 

which lasted more than seven months. It is an understatement to say that 2006 was a 

formative period for the youth that took the streets. It did not only change this 

generation, but it also transformed the social fabric of Oaxaca forever. 

A case in point, the present book takes us on an exploration of the dense and 

rhizomatic networks that developed as people took the streets. From representatives of 

indigenous communities and migrants to the youth involved in the punk and hip-hop 

scenes and Street Art/Graffiti movements, we discover an earnest portrayal of 

indigenous identity, with its complex connections to rural communities, migration to 

the US, and the Mexican nation. The book itself is a network of some sort, each 

chapter seamlessly blending into the other, developing each argument in greater 

detail. 

The opening scene, dense in textures, sets the tone of what follows, a thick 

ethnography. Heir of what Chicano poet and anthropologist Renato Rosaldo (1994) 

aptly called “deep hanging out,” Cartographies describes political struggle through 

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the voices of the youth that occupied the zócalo (the city’s main square, a space for 

popular politics, declared a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO) while defending the 

city’s barricades some 15 years ago and that, to this day, remain active political 

actors.1 The level of repression during 2006—of which the reader perceives an eerie 

echo today as protests rage in our pandemic-ridden world—provides the context of 

the coming of age of that youth, as they become revolutionary agents. 

The opening chapter outlines the history of the movement. Setting the coordinates of 

the book, it presents some of the key players of the uprising, such as the Sección 22 

(Local 22), the local branch of the SNTE (National Educational Workers Union), and 

the APPO (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca). It then moves swiftly on 

considering how the use of grassroots radio and online television stations, the 

execution of state functions (e.g. governance, policing, and trash collection), protest 

art, barricades, as well as the occupations of streets and buildings helped foster 

intergenerational networks of political action. These “laboratories of radical 

imagination” provide the backbone of the author’s argument on how the occupation of 

spaces enabled a dialogue between the youth and older members of society, creating 

networks of solidarity while shaping political subjectivities.

Space making materializes as one of the core concerns at the heart of this book as the 

second chapter takes us to the occupation of two collective social and cultural 

“counterspaces” (Lefebvre 1991)—VOCAL and CASOTA—which provided the 

grounds where 2006 political actors reframed indigeneity. Temporality is also a 

crucial dimension of Magaña’s exploration of the new political horizons in the years 

that followed the upheaval. This spatial-temporal conjuncture is theorized here as a 

palimpsest namely, a super-imposition of epochs, movements, ideas/information, and 

objects (3–4) which disproves linear thinking. Through this multidimensional and 

intergenerational approach to horizontal political dissent, we discover the mutually 

constitutive relation between rural movements of resistance and emergent urban 

indigenous and migrant political identities. Anchoring these networks in the idiom 

of comunalidad—indigenous communal life, identity, and epistemology (71)— 

Magaña’s move to decolonizing anarchism and the politics of resistance is a much-

welcomed theoretical intervention. Chapter 3 carries the above conversation by 

linking social movements to transient spaces of direct political action, as they 

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transform to become longer-lasting laboratories of horizontal politics. Returning to 

the cases of VOCAL and CASOTA, this chapter brings into clearer focus the 

importance of spatiality and temporality in challenging established structures of 

power. Moving from the zócalo to the counterspaces—central to the ideas of 

“decolonial anarchism and urban autonomy” (102)—, we realize how such spaces 

fostered and strengthened existing social and political relationships. 

Chapter 4 takes us in the thick of a very rich ethnography illustrating the dialectic of 

space and official structures of power through everyday political action. Through 

three vignettes, we observe the tensions that arise in the organization of mass 

mobilizations in the city center while the concept of “network” that guides this book 

starts to develop more pointedly. Evoking David Graeber’s (2011: 57) work on Direct 

Action Network, the reader grasps that: “One must be able to imagine oneself and 

others as integrated subjects in order to be able to produce beings that are in fact 

endlessly multiple, imagine some sort of coherent, bounded 'society' in order to 

produce that chaotic open-ended network of social relations that actually exists.” That 

is exactly what Magaña shows with great ethnographic sensitivity. Exploring the 

power dynamics playing out in these public spaces, we witness frictions and “spatial 

disruption” but also the solidarities and collective practices at the core of political 

actions through the lenses of the palimpsest and “rebel aesthetics.” As physical 

counterspaces fade into the background, Chapter 5 leads us on the streets of Oaxaca 

with two graffiti crews (AKA Crew and Arte Jaguar) and local anarchist and punk 

movements. Whilst rebel aesthetics take center-stage by visually appropriating 

Oaxaca to disrupt the dominant spatial-political and cultural order (while still 

upholding some aspects of individualism and patriarchy) the mounting militarization 

and state surveillance, which undergird control over public spaces, becomes more 

apparent. Triggering the forced reorganization of autonomous and horizontal politics 

as collectives close their spaces down, the youth’s political future may seem bleak. 

But, as Magaña concludes, the movements—sometimes co-opted by the neoliberal 

market or retreating to rural communities—do not so much disappear as they 

transform to constitute the aesthetics of future radical imagination, and the legacy of 

the 2006 Generation. 

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This book is a crucial addition to the study of political protests and revolutions, for 

researchers working in Oaxaca or Mexico and beyond these geographical borders. 

The author’s clear decolonizing agenda shows him accomplishing the rare feat of 

“walking the talk.” Magaña does so through a thorough engagement with his 

collaborators in the field (one has the sense that they are on equal terms). Skillfully 

interweaving the voices and sovereignty of his interlocutors and their politics of 

indigeneity to a wide scholarship, he builds his theoretical argument on a widely 

decentralized scholarship across the proverbial Western “pond.” 

To anthropologists having conducted fieldwork in Oaxaca, the book is an 

ethnographic treasure-trove. Rich in information, it sheds light on the complexity of 

local politics and social movements. More than anything else, it is the depth of 

Magaña’s analysis, capturing the youth’s interconnected understanding of race, 

politics, and subcultures, that makes this book a must-read for researchers of social 

movements in the Americas, and beyond. Cartographies also has the virtue of 

depicting an unflinching portrayal of the politics of race in Mexico that does not 

essentialize indigeneity for the reader but takes her deep into the intricacies of 

indigenous identity with ethnographic mastery. It is a truly beautifully written book—

yet unromantic— an eye-opener for any researcher of grassroots movements. 

One might be left longing for more sustained development of “decolonial anarchism” 

beyond Mexican borders, or even hope to come across additional lyrics and trivia of 

the Oaxacan punk and (especially) the hip-hop scene. However, Magaña’s sound 

theoretical intervention that illuminates the afterlives of the 2006 social movements 

makes up for these very negligible shortcomings, which may just as well be a caprice 

of a reader nostalgic of the youth and political promises held by the 2006 uprising.

 

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1
� Coined by Renato Rosaldo in 1994, the term “deep hanging out” describes an anthropological 

method and a more involved form of participant-observation, where the anthropologists immerse themselves 
in their field as opposed to conducting short interviews with interlocutors. The term was subsequently used 
by and wrongly attributed to Clifford Geertz (1998).

REFERENCES

Geertz, Clifford. 1998. Deep hanging out. New York Review of Books 45 (16): 69–72.

Graeber, D. 2011. Revolutions in Reverse. Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination. London: Minor 

Compositions. 

Osorno, Diego. 2007. La primera insurrección del siglo XXI. Mexico City: Random House Mondadori.

Rosaldo, Renato. 1994. “Anthropology and ‘the Field’.” Conference held at Stanford University and UC 
Santa Cruz. February, 18-19.

Myriam Lamrani is a multimodal anthropologist whose work focuses on revolutionary politics,
nationalism, intimacy, and images. She conducted her doctoral research (UCL, 2018) on images of
death, devotion, violence, and nationalism in Oaxaca, Mexico as a member of the ERC project:
Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics (CARP – 2014-2019). She is the co-winner
of the J.B. Donne Essay Prize on the Anthropology of Art (2019) and an Honorary Research Fellow
at University College London. As of September 2021, she will work on nationalism through images
of  migration,  comparing Greece and Mexico,  as  a  Marie  Sklodowska Curie  Fellow at  Harvard
University (2021).

© Myriam Lamrani 


