In the Wake of Insurgency: Testimony and the Politics of Memory and Silence in Oaxaca

Abstract

This dissertation is about social movements and the politics of historical memory surrounding popular uprisings and state terror in Oaxaca, Mexico, from roughly the 1970s to the 2010s. Based on approximately thirty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork and historical research conducted between 2008 and 2017 in Oaxaca City, San Agustín Loxicha, and two Oaxacan prisons (Ixcotel and Etla state penitentiaries), this dissertation sheds light on the relationship among experiences of political violence and upheaval, public and personal expressions of memory, and the everyday practices of activists and social movements in Oaxaca. It specifically focuses on two cases of rebellion and repression in Oaxaca—the rural guerrilla insurgency of the Popular Revolutionary Army (Ejército Popular Revolucionario, EPR) in 1996 and the urban uprising of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca, APPO) in 2006. This dissertation offers an ethnographically grounded perspective on political prisoners’ resistance to state terror and corruption, as well as their experiences of torture and silencing through an examination of how ongoing social movements have grappled with the historical origins, outcomes, and legacies of these events. In doing so, it presents prisoners as individuals whose stories of violence, suffering, and disappearance reveal not just the brutal repression they experienced at the hands of the Mexican state for holding opposing/threatening views, but also the urgent need to take steps towards truth and reconciliation. Additionally, such stories also raise critical questions about the ethical relationship between scholars and their subjects, which the dissertation addresses by building on the engaged researcher framework.

I approach the dual themes of historical memory and silence as conceptual bridges through which to trace the connections among these different periods of political upheaval: namely, indigenous political organizing and rural armed conflict between the 1970s and 1990s, the urban uprising of 2006, and the struggles of Zapotec political prisoners, radical urban youths, and truth commission activists in the 2010s. In writing about post-conflict memory and social movements in Oaxaca, my objectives are twofold: first, to participate in and analyze collaborative processes of recovering and reconstructing new histories of resistance and repression; and, second, to trace the ways in which Oaxacans themselves have made sense of these histories and experiences of violence through personal and public constructions of memory, including intimate and public acts of oral testimony. Drawing on anthropological and historical methods, the thesis brings together a range of theoretical approaches, including engaged anthropology, social movement studies, the politics of memory and silence, and self-reflexive ethnography.