All posts by Alexandra Lamina Luguana

Insurgent Women’s Empowerment Collective in Oaxaca, Mexico

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By Sari Albornoz

Introduction

“Mujer Nueva” Feminist Collective in Oaxaca. See the main source here

Colectivo Mujer Nueva is a feminist women’s collective in Oaxaca, Mexico that carries out a variety of projects intended to protest existing power structures and build community power. The collective was born out of Oaxaca’s 2006 popular movement, which emerged when the Oaxacan state government rejected teachers’ union-led protests to demand improved working conditions and removed demonstrators occupying Oaxaca city’s central plaza (Poma & Gravante, 2019, p. 240). Thousands of women marched in the streets and a group of women took over and occupied the state-run television station (Poma & Gravante, 2019, p. 241). Afterward, a group of women who participated in the movement formed Colectivo Mujer Nueva (Poma & Gravante, 2019, p. 241). The Colectivo, which now includes about 20 members, facilitates diverse projects ranging from non-violent direct-action protests to a Tianguis Popular Mujer Nueva (Mujer Nueva Community Market) that features healthy foods, traditional medicines, and body care products created by collective members (Jiménez, 2016). The group also organizes capacity-building workshops about domestic violence and a traveling theater that addresses topics such as machismo and abortion (Poma & Gravante, 2019, p. 241-2). The group manages an active Facebook page and creates posters about the Tianguis Popular and other community events.

Analysis

The perspective of visceral geography as described by Sweet and Ortiz Escalante (2014) illuminates how Colectivo Mujer Nueva has been empowering for its members. Visceral geography looks to the scale of the body and its sensory and emotional experiences for insights into the safety of social spaces, as well as “broader political, social, and economic concerns including the structural side of violence and economic inequity” (Sweet, Elizabeth L. & Ortiz Escalante, 2014, p. 1828), including the socially-constructed public-private divide which makes it difficult to combat domestic violence. When the women participated in the Marcha de las Cacerolas (March of the Pans) on August 1st, 2006, they created a shared sensory experience (Sweet, Elizabeth L. & Ortiz Escalante, 2014) by using their bodies to express anger and indignation. They also rejected sequestration into the private sphere by collectively claiming space in the streets of Oaxaca City. In their current work, the organizers of Colectivo Mujer Nueva continue to claim and “repurpose” space for shared sensory experiences, creating safe environments for women to share, process, and release their emotions about their experiences with violence.

From Colectivo Mujer Nueva Facebook page

By claiming “invented” spaces of citizenship, Colectivo Mujer Nueva’s work also constitutes a form of insurgent planning as defined by Miraftab (2009) and Shrestha and Aranya (2015). First, through their integral role in the popular resistance, these organizers resisted the neoliberal policies of the Oaxacan government, occupying the central plaza of Oaxaca City with encampments, spray-painting buildings with demands that the governor resign, and marching through the streets (Garza Zepeda, 2016). Second, the Colectivo women “invented” (Miraftab, 2009) space by asserting their right to participate in public protests as women in a patriarchal society (Poma & Gravante, 2019). A group of women (some of whom went on to form the Colectivo) took over the state-run television station and occupied it for 21 days, creating and broadcasting content in support of the movement’s cause (Jiménez, 2016; Poma & Gravante, 2019).

Miraftab argues that insurgent planning must also be transgressive, counter-hegemonic, and imaginative (Miraftab, 2009). Through their actions, Colectivo Mujer Nueva’s organizers have transgressed boundaries of the public-private/male-female divide and challenged the hegemonies of both patriarchy and neoliberalism. Their current work also demonstrates an imaginative approach and a belief that a better world is possible.

Through their ongoing activism opposing state policies, Colectivo Mujer Nueva’s efforts play an important role in urban planning as described by de Souza, as well. De Sousa argues that social movements “constructively criticiz[e] the state and pu[t] it permanently under pressure—which is always necessary” and therefore “should be seen as a…relevant agent in relation to the conception and implementation of urban planning and management strategies” (2006, p. 328).

Implications

Women grassroots mobilization. See the main source here

The emergence of Colectivo Mujer Nueva from the 2006 popular movement, and its survival more than a decade later, suggests there is a fifth potential outcome of social movements alongside the four posited by Gamson: full response, pre-emption, co-optation, and collapse (1990, cited in Shrestha & Aranya, 2015, p. 439). Another possibility is that a community-based organization (CBO) emerges as a result of the social learning that occurs as part of the social movement (as described by Friedmann, cited in Shrestha & Aranya, 2015, p. 439), and that this CBO achieves sustained impacts over time. With Colectivo Mujer Nueva, women’s experiences of taking meaningful action that allowed for liberation from social boundaries was empowering and emboldened them to take further action.

It is not apparent whether an NGO or any other entity played any role in the development of Colectivo Mujer Nueva. If none did, might its emergence challenge Shrestha and Aranya’s argument for “a need for a strong mediating agent even in the case of insurgent planning practice” (Shrestha & Aranya, 2015, p. 439)? Either way, this case poses questions to critical planners about what role we might be able to play in supporting the emergence and survival of CBOs such as Colectivo Mujer Nueva. Can planners facilitate knowledge-building, healing, and/or empowerment activities that position marginalized social actors to take future, insurgent action through government institutions or NGOs? Perhaps in doing this, planners can act on Ananya Roy’s (2006) call for “doubleness,” where we work within neoliberal state and NGO institutions while also building capacity for insurgent everyday planners to resist such institutions. De Souza might contend that, from the perspective of grassroots organizers, participation in such planner-led efforts would put organizers’ efforts at risk of cooptation by the state, but could also provide organizers access to valuable material and “political-pedagogical” gains (2006, p. 335).

References

Community Development in Organización Barrial Túpac Amaru, Argentina

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By Raksha Vasudevan

Introduction

Organización barrial Tupac Amaru. See the main source here.

This case follows the rise and fall of Organización Barrial Túpac Amaru (hereafter Túpac Amaru) in the province of Jujuy, Argentina. In 1999, Túpac Amaru, led by political activist and indigenous leader Milagro Sala and other indigenous women, queer women, and women of color, emerged as a social movement responding to the neoliberal, inequitable policies of then-President Carlos Menem through overt activist actions such as protests and strikes. Between 2003 and 2015, the organization achieved a period of “consolidation” (Tabbush & Gaona, 2017), taking advantage of left-leaning Presidents Néstor and Cristina Kirchner to implement a variety of community-based housing and development programs. At its peak, the organization also created its own political party and secured multiple seats in the legislature. However, since the election of current President Mauricio Macri and provincial governor Gerardo Morales in 2015, Túpac Amaru has faced threats of the removal of state funding, questions of the organization’s legality and continuing gender-based criminalization.

Analysis

The development of Túpac Amaru took place in three stages in response to a shifting political context (Tabbush & Gaona, 2017). The social movement was founded on the principles of self-organization and right to employment (McGuirk, 2014); following the election of Nestor Kirchner as President and his implementation of the Federal Programs in 2004, federal government funds became available for community work. During this second phase of organizational “consolidation”, Túpac Amaru started growing and organizing its community development work:

Milagro Sala, woman grassroots leader. See the main source here.

“‘We are and we aren’t a revolutionary organization,’ says Milagro. ‘We are not revolutionary in the sense that we don’t carry weapons and we don’t believe in violence. But we are revolutionaries in that we understand that we can change how people think. Through dignified work and a change of consciousness and by guaranteeing health, education and work, people can become better. We don’t want to be in competition with the government. Because it is the state that has the obligation of guaranteeing health, education, and work to the citizens. So the organization works with the state but we focus on the people with the most needs, people who don’t have easy access to a school or a hospital or a house. Túpac Amaru is wherever there is a need.’” (McGuirk, year, p. 59)

Túpac Amaru’s strategies during this phase were based on the philosophy of collective action and followed a cooperative model (McGuirk, 2014). Circumventing the provincial government, the organization initially utilized funds earmarked for housing by the National Emergency Housing Fund to address social welfare, education, employment, and healthcare needs in the province (Tabbush & Gaona, 2017).  By 2015, Túpac Amaru had 70,000 members, provided work for 5,000 individuals in the organization’s five factories, and had over 250 cooperatives, with most of the workers being women (McGuirk, 2014; Tabbush & Gaona, 2017).  Leadership was also primarily queer and indigenous women, not only in the movement-building but also in the execution of the homes, unsettling the public-private binary. Túpac Amaru provided community amenities such and healthcare facilities, as well as structures based on indigenous architecture for religious and other festivities to honor past and present indigeneity despite state cultural erasure and racism.  Swimming pools and water parks allow an alternative futurity to be imagined for the people living in these neighborhoods, and the stamps of Túpac Amaru II and Che Guevara’s faces on homes represent spatial subversions and also provide examples of transformative community building.

In the third and current period in the life of Túpac Amaru, the election of President Macri at the national level and Morales at the provincial level and the arrest of Milagro Sala has, in a sense, necessitated insurgent movement/coalition-building once again. However, this time around, national and international organizations have organized committees around the liberation of Sala, with international organizations such as OAS’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the UN’s working group on arbitrary detention questioning the human rights violations around the extended pre-trial detention of Sala (Bio, 2019). Additionally, artistic interventions and social media campaigns have also brought about national and international recognition, and academics have focused their work on the gendered and racialized dimensions of the extended imprisonment of Sala.

Implications

Women and barrios-based organization. See the main source here.

The case demonstrates the need to learn from the long history of critical political thought and movement building by indigenous communities, and specifically indigenous women. As Perry and Rappaport (2013) note, indigenous peoples have long been simultaneously knowledge producers and political actors with a long history of mobilizing identity-based movements despite oppressive, colonial contexts. By looking at such movements that build on a lived critique of coloniality, planners are able to re-focus on decolonizing methodologies that uncover alternative imaginaries of democracy and citizenship.

Tabbush & Gaona’s (2017) identification of three stages in the history of Túpac Amaru is useful to demonstrate the ways in which the concept of ‘radical planning’ (Friedmann, 1987; Friedmann, 2011) might assume various forms in response to a given political context. Instead of being necessarily anti-state, radical planning re-centers the political actions taken by civil society groups; in this case, Tupac Amaru’s focus on being pro-woman, pro-indigenous, pro-queer, and pro-poor makes Túpac Amaru’s community development work “radical” despite the organization’s direct reliance on federal funds at times. While strategically utilizing “invited spaces” (Miraftab, 2009) to gather government funds for operations, autonomous self- organizing continued under the management of local councils. Today, work through physical and digital “invented spaces” (ibid.) continues. Given that Friedmann’s theorizing of ‘radical planning’ does not extensively deal with the nuances of cultural context, perhaps radical planning needs to look to the ways in which indigenous groups creatively reorient tactics to respond to a long history of oppressive colonial and patriarchal regimes.  For example, in the same vein that Beard (2002) expanded radical planning to include ‘covert planning’ to describe the social transformation in non-liberal, non-democratic societies, perhaps radical planning also needs to leave room for strategic and temporary alignments between indigenous social movements and the state, particularly in unpredictable political contexts.

References