The Illusion of Art? Cultural Activism, Violence, and Symbolic Subversion

Most studies on activism and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Mexico have focused on their capacities for political advocacy, reforming government institutions or changing the rule of law. Further, much of this work has concentrated on understanding how NGOs are able to interconnect and mobilize in socio-political contexts of relative safety and democracy. However, few studies focus on activism in contexts of criminal violence and institutional fragility. Even less research is performed on NGO capacity to build cultural institutions and transform, through art, part of the symbolic network that sustains organized crime’s culture of violence (narco-cultura). This paper focuses on cultural activism in contexts of criminal violence and institutional fragility, and how artistic products emerge from a cultural field that is structurally connected to the criminal field. The objective is to describe cultural activism strategies for resisting criminal and institutional violence, understanding the mechanisms behind artistic production, and explaining how these are able to subvert the meanings behind drug trafficking culture. A case study is included following a qualitative method and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological perspective. The main methodological tools were ethnography, which allowed for the observation of cultural and artistic activist groups (synchronic perspective), and semi-structured interviews, which collected information directly from the actors, from their different positions within the field and the historical coordination of cultural activism (diachronic perspective). The results allow us to understand cultural activism as a series of collective actors immersed in a harsh competition for material and symbolic resources for their field. In the process, although they have been able to access main cultural institutions, they have also reproduced and legitimized structures of domination. Moreover, their proposed cultural products and artistic aesthetics play with and overlap cultural elements of the criminal violence they are trying to subvert.