Don't Fence Me In: Barricade Sociality and Political Struggles in Mexico and Latvia

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>In 1991, barricades in the streets of Rīga, Latvia, shielded important landmarks from Soviet military units looking to prevent the dissolution of the USSR; in 2006, barricades in the streets of Oaxaca, Mexico, defended members of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca from paramilitary incursions. We employ these two cases to compare the historically specific public socialities and politics formed through spatial and material practices in moments of crisis and in their aftermath. We show how the barricades continue to animate social and political formations and imaginaries, providing a sense of both past solidarity and future possibilities against which the present, including the state of the polity and the life of the people, are assessed. We trace the convergences and differences of political imaginaries of barricade sociality that formed in the barricades’ aftermath and consider what their transformative potential might be. Attentive to the specificity of particular practices and social relations that produce a collective subject, we consider how our case studies might inform broader questions about social collectives like the nation and publics. Though they point in different directions, we argue that the barricades provide an enabling position from which to imagine and organize collective life otherwise. In a moment when much mainstream political activism remains spellbound by the allure of discourses of democracy that promise power to the people, the Mexico and Latvia cases provide examples of social life that exceeded both state-based notions of collectives and what Michael Warner has called “state-based thinking,” even as they were also entangled with state-based frames.</jats:p>

Bordering encounters, sociality and distribution of the ability to live a ‘normal life’

“…In her contribution to the issue, co‐editor Henrietta Moore () calls for a renewed attention to human interaction as a counterweight to network theories, which gloss over differences between network elements; however, many of the recent engagements with sociality go beyond marking out the uniquely human modality of interaction (Enfield and Levinson ) . Such engagements attend to the specificity of practices and processes through which people are connected or disconnected from each other and to the material and/or discursive conditions and effects of these (dis)connections (Allison ; Dzenovska and Arenas ; Feldman ; Long ; Pink ; Yurchak ; Warner ). In many of these interventions, sociality is a crucial formative element not only of persons, as Strathern () would have it, but also of collective subjects.…”

“…In her analysis of community activism, Sarah Pink () has argued that the collective subject of community is not pre‐given, but formed through embedded social relationships, thus emphasising the importance of analysing sociality to understand activism. Dace Dzenovska and Ivan Arenas () have shown how what they call a barricade sociality emerges through the material practices of building barricades and is formative of the populist collective subject of the people in particular historical moments in Mexico and Latvia. Rather than stable entities, all of these subjects – publics, communities and people – are fleeting subject positions much dependent not on the fact that people come together as a collective, but on the ways in which people are simultaneously formed as both individual and collective subjects through concrete practices and emerging socialities.…”

Socialities of solidarity: revisiting the gift taboo in times of crises

“…The emphasis is on the plasticity and malleability of human interaction and its resonances with historically and spatially informed ethical imaginations (Long and Moore 2013: 14). Emergent socialities and their ethical resonances are the subject of ethnographies that seek to explore the production of collective subjects (Dzenovska and Arenas 2012;Lazar 2013;Pink 2008), novel spaces of relationality in times of social precariousness (Allison 2012), vis-à-vis the authoritarian state (Yurchak 2005) or in the setting of virtual social spaces (Long 2012). 5 Sociality turns the ethnographic lens not only to organised political action (in terms of social movements) but also to mundane human encounters, and brings to the fore their political potentialities.…”

Spaces of Resistance, Everyday Activism, and Belonging: Youth Reimagining and Reconfiguring the City in Oaxaca, Mexico

“…As Silvia's account suggests, the raising and guarding of barricades was an integral part of both expanding the grassroots power of the movement, and of providing the physical and social space for new relationships and political cultures to be formed. Dzenovska and Arenas () describe this process, whereby the material practices of producing barricades produces “an affective and visceral togetherness” that informs the formation of collective subjects as “barricade sociality” (2012, 646). Spaces such as the barricades of 2006 provided fertile grounds for youth to experiment with a horizontal political culture that has been honed in subsequent political projects and spaces such as CASOTA and VOCAL (Magaña ).…”