Atenco Lives!: Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in MexicoLivia K. Stone (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2019) (original) (raw)

Social Change and Documentary Film in Mexico: Violence, Autonomy, and Cultural Production

2012

The use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media in the Arab Spring, #Occupy Wall Street, and Mexico’s #YoSoy132 student movement have all generated excitement about the new uses of digital technology in organized social movements. This dissertation concerns itself with media and social transformation, but recognizes that even as media content can have a deep impact on society and culture, it is ultimately human beings who create and use technology off screen for our own purposes. This dissertation focuses ethnographically on one social movement, the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (The Peoples’ Front in Defense of Land) of San Salvador Atenco on the outskirts of Mexico City, and their relationships with a range of national and international filmmakers. Through examining the daily practices of producing and distributing social documentary films, I show how people used media as an ethical and political practice to purposefully shape and transform face-to-face human relationships. I argue that filmmaking and distributing was one set of practices through which people attempted to cultivate a collectivist disposition called compañerismo, and through which they could build partial autonomies from the state and corporate capitalism. I argue that the historical shift from ‘resistance’ political practices to ‘autonomy’ practices represents a significant departure for contemporary transnational social movements, and signifies a trend away from a Marxist tradition of organizing and toward greater articulation with anarchist thinking and organizing. The cultivation of compañerismo is part of this shift and is indicative of a partial relocation of objectives away from institutional, legal, and policy changes and toward personal and collective transformations of self. I argue that the intersection between cultural production and self production is a crucial locus for examining how social movements help to bring about elusive social and cultural changes that exist outside the grasp of legal and institutional frameworks. These arguments build from and contribute to three large bodies of anthropological research: a political anthropology interested in social movements, a visual anthropology interested in media production, and a broad theoretical anthropological interest in transformations of self, society, and culture through practice.

From the Zapatistas to Indymedia: Dialectics and Orthodoxy in Contemporary Social Movements

Communication, Culture and Critique, 2012

This article examines shifts in the strategy of contemporary social movements. Using the intersection of the Zapatistas and indymedia, I make two interrelated arguments: First, we have seen a fundamental transformation in the way social movement organizations function, which places communication technology and media practices at the center of resistance. Second, I argue this new logic of resistance that grows out of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation leads to important innovations as well as limits in the operation of contemporary movements.

The Arhuacos, film, and the politics of representing the 'other' in Colombia

2018

This thesis focusses on the contemporary politics of visual representations among the indigenous communities of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. It discusses various methods used to represent the ‘Other’ and reflects on the processes of practicebased research. Centering on the figure of the Arhuaco filmmaker Amado Villafana and the Zhigoneshi and Yokosovi Collectives which he leads, the thesis argues that his initiatives push indigenous filmmaking towards a more widespread inclusion in mainstream cinema, transcending beyond the indigenous context. The Zhigoneshi’s work focusses on the potentiality of intercultural communication, including its challenges and practicalities. In addition, it provides an alternative to non-indigenous representations of the ‘Other’, fighting for the right of self-representation. This thesis is concerned with the wider context of representing the ‘Other’ in Colombia and beyond, forming part of a practice-based research project which includes a coll...

Decolonising Local Knowledge – Arhuaco Filmmaking as a Form of Cultural Opposition

Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas , 2021

Can filmmaking as a form of intercultural communication serve as an apparatus for self-identification and cultural opposition to established North/West knowledge pro- duction hubs? Based on extensive fieldwork in the Sierra Nevada and detailed anal- ysis of the Arhucao films and their production and distribution strategies, this article explores the possibility of utilising film and audio-visual communication as a way to decolonise local knowledge. Following decades of persecutions, hostility, ill-treatment and cultural violence, the work of Zhigoneshi (and, later, Yokosovi) communication col- lectives not only helped to nourish the cultural identity of the indigenous communities of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, but it also turned them into proud ambassadors of indigenous values on the international level. Prolific in their internal and external com- munication practices, they regained agency as full participants of intercultural dialogue, which focuses on the importance of the inclusion, diversity and de-westernisation of local knowledge. While acknowledging its own limitations and the author’s inevitable positionality, this article also reflects on further steps that the European and Western collaborators and institutions need to take to accomplish the vision of decolonisation. It concludes with acknowledging the work of the Arhuaco filmmakers and their allies in providing an invaluable contribution to strengthen this discussion and enable the shift towards a more all-embracing pattern of knowledge production and dissemination based on quality and importance and less so on stereotypical preconceptions and geographical location.

(2012) ‘New Latin American film: Addressing the negative culturescapes and glocalising transnational problem’, Crítica Contemporánea. Revista de Teoría Política, (Montevideo), 2 (November), 119-129. (Invited paper).

Phone: +612 9817 5902 Mobile: +612 411 260 158 Skype: estelamv Abstract This paper will look at the recent filmic representation of contemporary Latin American identities configured by transnational violence. Films such as In the shadow of the raid; Traspatio and La zona will be analysed are clear examples of the role of film in the construction of these emergent identities. Traspatio exposes the victims of foreign investment, transnational narcotraffic and femicide in the USA/Mexican border; In the shadow of the raid explores how labour migration to the US has given rise to new forms of violence, social control and exacerbated insecurity. The film La zona exposes the new form of social control and security: the gated communities or "new castles" where the wealthy can effectively ignore poverty and all social injustices by creating an artificial bubble of their own with a parallel culturescape that operates largely outside the realm of the state's sovereignty. At the beginning of the XXI Century, the transnational world that

From analogue to digital: The Zapatista's struggle against a neoliberal ideology

This is an investigation into the phenomenon of digital activism. Its main focus is a case study on the Zapatista movement’s use of the internet between 1994 and 2015. The aim is to understand how effective the internet was as a tool in the Zapatista’s opposition to the North American Free Trade agreement and the neoliberal policies it prescribed. I will break down the movement into four sections that correspond with the natural processes that social movements commonly go through. Those processes being, a social movement’s initial formation, mobilisation, gaining support and bringing about some kind of impact. This will allow for further investigation into how each of these processes were aided by the Zapatista’s use of the internet. Other social movements would have also experienced these processes of development, previous to the emergence of the internet. Some of those movements were successful and still continue today in their struggle to attain their set out goals. These analogue movements would have come across various obstacles that social movements and groups today are able to avoid due to the wider possibilities that the internet has had to offer. The successes of the Zapatista movement online and offline gives testament to the possibility that using the internet as a tool for activism can produce positive results. At a time when neoliberal policies were being prescribed across Latin America, an economic shift that would heighten interconnectivity with the global economy, an increased scale for mobilisation and networking for the Zapatista rebels was needed to match the gravity of this new neoliberal paradigm. Yet, it is still important to question just how much of the Zapatista movement’s success can be attributed to their use of the internet? Alongside the communications technology revolution in at the time, the Zapatista’s use of the internet as a tool has had a knock on effect, inspiring further movements taking on a similar ideology. But, as more activist groups have started using the internet as a platform to exist and mobilise, so too has the study of social movements become more complicated, further shrouded in anecdotal and observational speculation. This further analysis into the use of the internet as a tool for activism will expand academic research on this new field of study. By using the Zapatistas as a case study, a method of which has been favoured so far in the study of digital activism, we can look deeper at its effects on social movements, as the study is currently limited.