Subjectivity and Social Change In Social Struggles In Mexico

Mexico is a key country to look at and analyze the forms of struggle and the projects of other sorts of life that are being put into practice in the Global South. The experience of Zapatista autonomous communities (since 1994), and the resistances of Atenco and Oaxaca in 2006, the processes of self-defense of villages in Guerrero and Michoacan, and other numerous indigenous struggles, whether rural or urban that are taking place in Mexican territory have been configured as a point of reference for the development of a new social imaginary in both the Latin American continent and other places around the world. In addition, these experiences have contributed to opening a path to a new cycle of mobilizations in Mexico and also in Latin America, mainly led by social subjects that have outweighed the North-centered analyses of collective action and also the traditional conception of social movements.

In this paper, we will present a proposal of analysis regarding social struggles taking place in current Mexico, from below and from the point of view of the leaders. Our starting point is the Latin American literature on social movements and the ethnographic work carried out by the authors in various social protests in the country in the past decade. Among our purposes, we aim to analyze how in these struggles people reinvent and re-codify non-institutional forms of doing politics in relation to collective needs and desires.

With this paper we attempt to contribute to the construction of a dialog between the experiences of struggle in the Global South and the Global North, where the starting point are not the theories far from social subjects nor their geographical location, but instead the everyday political practices of people.