Suchergebnisse

Origins -- Leaving home -- Transforming Southern Brazil -- Family ties -- Gambling on change -- Fighting for rights in Latin America -- The enchantment of activism -- Holding paradox -- Six meetings -- Intimate protest -- Demanding speech and enduring silence -- Moving forward -- When you speak of changes -- Movements in democracy

Since 1989 an indigenous political movement--the Coalition of Workers, Peasants, and Students of the Isthmus (COCEI)--has governed the southern Mexican city of Juchitán. In Decentering the Regime, Jeffrey W. Rubin examines this Zapotec Indian movement and shows how COCEI forged an unprecedented political and cultural path--overcoming oppression in the 1970s to achieve democracy in the 1990s. Rubin traces the history and rise to power of this grassroots movement, and describes a Juchitán that exists in substantial autonomy from the central Mexican government and Mexican nationalism--thereby debunking the notion that a state- and regime-centered approach to power can explain the politics of domination and resistance in Mexico.Employing an interdisciplinary approach, Rubin shows that the Juchitecos' ability to organize and sustain a radical political movement grew out of a century-long history of negotiation of political rule. He argues that factors outside the realm of formal politics--such as ethnicity, language, gender, and religion--play an important part in the dynamics of regional political struggles and relationships of power. While offering a detailed view of the Zapotec community and its interactions, Rubin reconceptualizes democracy by considering the question of how meaningful autonomy, self-government, cultural expression, and material well-being can be forged out of violence and repression.

Women in the Movement of Rural Women Workers (Movimento de Mulheres Trabalhadoras Rurais or MMTR) in southern Brazil envisioned a social movement that represented their interests both as women and as small farmers and agricultural workers, while also allowing for a plurality of voices and strategies. This article describes the feminist and democratic culture of militancy that these women sought, from the 1980s through to the 2000s, and shows how difficult it was to establish and sustain such a culture. These women not only confronted the deep, ongoing difficulties of challenging gendered social relations, but also the pain, shame and silencing that intertwined with gains in voice and equality. They also confronted larger social movements whose leaders understood power differently to the way these women did. For the women described in this article, women's activism requires a deep form of democracy where all voices are heard. Paradoxically, in the context of rural Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil and the panorama of movements that are active there, the rootedness in the everyday lived experience that made the movement relevant to women who advocated for this form of democracy also kept them from taking on powerholders within the movement who chose to ally with larger, more hierarchical movements, sacrificing significant forms of autonomy and voice in the process.

In 1978, just after I graduated from college, I worked at a migrant health clinic in California's San Joaquin Valley and saw what 1960s activism had achieved. Farm workers received health services at government-funded rural health clinics, regardless of citizenship status or ability to pay, and the landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act, achieved through a decade of struggle on the part of the United Farm Workers movement (UFW), promised access to union representation for those who harvested the country's fruits and vegetables. I lived down the road from the UFW headquarters, a mountain retreat center known as La Paz, and the director of the union's new school for organizers hired me to teach English there.

A review essay on a book by Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker Movement (Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

The 30-years that separate Che Guevara from Subcomandante Marcos did little to change the inequality, poverty, illiteracy, & unemployment that plague Latin America. However, some important changes are evident. Student activism has been diminished, opposition popular movements have been strengthened, public consciousness has shifted, & public opinion has evolved. Perhaps the most important lesson to emerge from the events of the last 30 years is the idea that internal democracy, the official recognition of difference, & activism can exist alongside a society's struggle against power. K. Larsen

As a preeminent enduring regime in the world today, Mexico provides a compelling case study regarding the nature and locus of power. Since the 1970s, accounts of politics in postrevolutionary Mexico have assumed that ongoing domination has resulted from centralized, relatively homogeneous power transmitted outward through corporatist mechanisms. The process of transmission replicated the dynamics of the center through a combination of skillful management and efficient coercion. Even now, as researchers are emphasizing the breakdown of corporatism and the complexity and nuance of current Mexican politics, they continue to codify the past according to the terms of the 1970s analysis and view the present through this lens. But while social scientists in the 1970s were right to characterize the postrevolutionary Mexican regime as authoritarian and hegemonic, they were wrong about the nature of hegemony. In constructing a state-centered and center-centered understanding of politics, social scientists then and now have misunderstood the nature of power and domination in Mexico and the reasons for the endurance of the Mexican regime.