“Since that’s the only way they listen to us”

It’s August 14, 2022. For six days in a row, the front pages of the Mexican press have exhibited photographs of businesses, gas stations, and trucks in flames: highly cinematographic violent acts credited to the narcos that have set fire to five different states of the country in less than a week. These images aren’t new: the ongoing violence triggered by the War on Drugs, initiated by President Felipe Calderón in 2006, has left more than 350,000 deaths and 100,000 disappeared.^[1] But the politics and the aesthetics of such violence and its representation are, as always, ambiguous. While some segments of the press and the opposition use the recent chaos, narcobloqueos (narco-blockages), fires, and killings to undermine the federal security strategy, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador describes the events as criminal propaganda and assures that the security strategy is paying off and that crime is weakened by the actions of the Government—therefore the cartels seek to draw attention and send messages that they are strong.^[2]

Deployed members of the army went from around 50,000 under Calderón, to a maximum of almost 130,000 under his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, and up to more than 150,000 under the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.^[3] Despite the ideological discrepancies and distinct political affiliations of these three presidents—right, center, left, respectively—they seem to share a simplistic but grandiloquent rhetoric of war that has justified this incremental deployment of the army and police. The aims of this militarization of the country—allegedly to combat drug cartels and protect the population—can easily be disputed by both the rise of armed civilian groups or autodefesas since 2013, and by a catalog of brutal actions committed by the same agencies of law and order against vulnerable populations—Ayotzinapa being the paradigmatic case.^[4] Created as a community-based alternative to the nonexistent protection against organized crime by the state, the emergence of autodefensas could be interpreted as a sign of a failed state, or of its weakening. But far from implying the failure of the state, the multiplication of violent actors in Mexico responds to a transformation of the organization and regulation of violence by public authorities. Despite their many times legitimate origins to defend marginalized populations (usually their own), autodefensas aren’t necessarily antagonistic to the authorities, and it is common for them to have the support of local elites—wealthy agro-industrialists, such as avocado growers, important businessmen and merchants, central figures of the local caciquismo.^[5]

The contemporary map of violence in México is complex. The layers of collaboration that exist between violent actors, public and private, legal and illegal, are scandalous, and by far exceed the official drug-related rhetoric. “The cartels are a symbolic device whose main function is to hide the real networks of official power that determined the flow of drug trafficking,” but also the flow of arms and the exploitation of gold, minerals, gas, water, and even avocados, mainly for the consumption of the Global North.^[6] “The political strategy of large-scale community displacement for the appropriation and exploitation of natural resources that, if not for the War on Drugs, would remain unattainable for national and international capital.”^[7] Multinational mining and fracking companies, food-product corporations and breweries, to name a few, violently steal from and displace entire vulnerable communities, mainly Indigenous, enabled by the Mexican government, and, with the help of local cartels and their sicarios, they kill Indigenous environmentalists with impunity. But these obscure alliances of transnational neoliberal/imperialism are usually left out of the official rhetoric and hegemonic representations of violence. The archetypical-almost-mythical figure of the Mexican narco created by the political system, and extensively popularized by the national and international press, academic papers, fiction books, film industry, Netflix, etc.—and contemporary art—strategically or unintentionally simplifies the narrative, in turn legitimizing the state monopoly on violence (and even the interventionist policy of the United States regarding drug control) and facilitating already existing colonial practices of exploitation, oppression, and dispossession.

The work of Mexican artist Teresa Margolles for the 53rd edition of the Venice Biennale, ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? (what else could we talk about?), was a poignant and aggressive representation of the intense violence the country was undergoing in 2009, during the ongoing War on Drugs initiated by President Felipe Calderón. The exhibition’s title alluded to the impossibility for the denial or concealment of this violence; talking about anything else would be trivial.^[8] Margolles used blood obtained from drug-related murders to stain flags and mop the pavilion’s floor, literally immersing an external audience in the blood of the victims. Cards to chop cocaine with images of corpses were distributed to members of the audience, while narcomantas (“narco-messages”) made with gold thread, were also part of the show. The work was highly affective and challenging for the international audience of the Biennale, becoming a powerful and crude exposure of the Mexico’s violent situation. “In those years when we were just beginning to assimilate the insane thresholds of violence, Margolles put the attention where it should be.”^[9] But far from criticizing the government and its combat strategy, the exhibition—financed with public money—consolidated the hegemonic imaginary by blaming drug traffickers for the violence.^[10] Margolles has continued to create pieces about violence, and “has spent years developing aesthetic mechanisms of mourning/protest, which have become increasingly complex.”^[11] By focusing on the care of victims of violent crimes and on their de-criminalization, her work confronts one of the central strategies used by the government to avoid its responsibility for justice: the criminalization of victims.

The first years of the War on Drugs triggered many Mexican artists, like Margolles and myself, to create work grounded in a critical representation of the extreme violence that was being experienced in the country. But in comparison to Margolles’s work, mine exceeded its representational character by morphing into a performance of violence conceived as a collective/collaborative aesthetic tool of resistance against power.

With my work, I investigate the political and poetic possibilities of destruction and violence, with a special interest in effigy-burning traditions, using their precarious aesthetics as deceit, to point out the “fractures” or “fissures” of the official rhetoric of violence and its mediatic representations. An early example is my Paraallegories project, which culminated in a video installation at Casa del Lago (Mexico City, 2015). Paraallegories sought to dismantle events in which violence, protest, dissidence, or repression made the news, using the same materiality of the media as raw material—newspaper turned into papier-mâché—to generate a critique of the official, hegemonic discourse around violence and the criminalization of protest, to highlight the corrupt nature of such narratives, and emphasize the fragility and decline of the political system to which they responded. In this project I was interested, among other things, in pointing out the instability of the discourse generated by the press as an ideological apparatus, where empty signifiers, superficial, manipulative stereotypes, and a lack of analysis abound. Concepts such as “vandalism,” “accident,” “anarchist,” “terrorist attack,” “bombing,” and a long etcetera, seem interchangeable in newspaper articles in which violence performed by organized crime is minimized, while resistance and social protest are criminalized as being violent.

Paraallegories is a series of docufrictions,^[12] meta-constructions that activate a zone of ambiguity where the distinctions between reality and unreality, truth and fiction, are diluted. These anomalies allow the audience to reflect on violence by activating not only their critical thought but also their imagination. In this poetics/politics of combustion,^[13] perplexity, precariousness, and the handmade appeal of ephemeral sculptures and pyrotechnic explosions are ironic gestures, tools that are combined to point out the vulnerability of the driving forces of capitalism. The videos and installation from the Paraallegories project search for a reaction, a sensitivity, an affectation, that aims to incite an intelligible response guided by the critical context provided. An articulation of critical thinking and aesthetic affectation, a violent aesthetic experience that makes visible and delegitimizes the structural, systemic, and ideological violence of the events that are reenacted as well as the rhetoric of its media coverage.

I’ve been developing an emergent poetics of violence, doing PhD research on the aesthetic potential of violence and destruction as an interdisciplinary methodology for the creation of situated performances that use poetic/aesthetic/dramatic violence as a tool for collective memory, epistemic decolonization, and sovereignty. This poetics of violence argues that rituals, community performances and reenactments that use poetic/aesthetic/dramatic violence to generate a carnivalesque-sense-of-the-world and suspend the hegemonic rules of power:^[14]

1. reverses dichotomies such as oppressor/oppressed and victim/perpetrator empowering the oppressed;
2. supports collective memory and communal agency disarticulating the politics of memory;
3. performs epistemic decolonization through a decolonial aestheSis that delinks from Western aesthetics^[15];
4. can contest physical, ideological, and structural violence exerted by the state, its apparatuses and other agencies of power such as organized crime;
5. can exert political action in struggles for justice and sovereignty.

Kurhirani no ambakiti (burning the devil): since that’s the only way they listen to us was co-authored with Arantepacua’s Communal Indigenous Council as a retelling of the criminal attack by the police of Michoacán to the Indigenous community of Arantepacua in 2017, in support of their ongoing fight for justice. Kurhirani no ambakiti Explores the Situated, spatial and performative possibilities of violence and destruction, but also of sound, tactility and affect.

1. According to different sources, including El País. ↑
2. Reina, Elena. “El Gobierno mexicano describe los bloqueos y masacres como una ‘propaganda criminal’ del narco.” El País. August 15, 2022. Avaiable at https://elpais.com/mexico/2022-08-15/el-gobierno-mexicano-describe-los-bloqueos-y-masacres-como-una-propaganda-criminal-del-narco.html (accessed 2022-09-30). ↑
3. Pardo Veiras, José Luis and Arredondo, Íñigo. “Una guerra inventada y 350,000 muertos en México.” Washington Post. June 14, 2021. Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/es/post-opinion/2021/06/14/mexico-guerra-narcotrafico-calderon-homicidios-desaparecidos/ (accessed 20220-09-30). ↑
4. On September 26, 2014, forty-three male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were forcibly abducted and then disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, on their way to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre. They were allegedly taken into custody by local police officers from Iguala and Cocula, with support of state and military forces, and in collusion with organized crime, namely the Guerreros Unidos cartel. Details remain unclear on what happened during and after the roadblock, but the government’s claim (verdad histórica) that the students were killed in a garbage dump because they were mistaken for members of a drug gang, has been debunked by recent investigations. Hypotheses range from an attempt by the government to repress the protests of the Ayotzinapa teachers, to a cover-up by the 27th Infantry Battalion of the Mexican Army of the fact that two of the buses were secretly transporting heroin, without the students’ knowledge. ↑
5. Le Cour Grandmaison, Romain. “Autodefensas: causas del auge de los civiles armados en México.” CIPER/Académico. April 05, 2021. Available at https://www.ciperchile.cl/2021/04/05/autodefensas-causas-del-auge-de-los-civiles-armados-en-mexico/ (accessed 2022-09-30). ↑
6. Zavala, Oswaldo. Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. 2022. ↑
7. Ibid. ↑
8. Dayán, Jacobo. “¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar?” Aristegui noticias. April 21, 2019. Available at https://aristeguinoticias.com/2104/opinion/de-que-otra-cosa-podriamos-hablar-articulo/ (accessed 2022-09-30). ↑
9. Ibid., translation by the author. ↑
10. Zavala, Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. ↑
11. Labastida, Alejandra. “Póker de damas [Ladies’ Poker].” MUAC, 2020. Available at https://muac.unam.mx/exposicion/sala10-teresa-margolles?lang=en (accessed 20220-09-30). Translation by the author. ↑
12. Ruiz, Iván. Docufricción: prácticas artísticas en un México convulso. Mexico City: UNAM. 2017. ↑
13. Ibid. ↑
14. Bajtin, Michael. Problemas de la poética de Dostoievski. Translated by Tatiana Bubnova. Mexico City: Fondo de cultura económica. 1979. ↑
15. Walter Mignolo and Vazquez, Rolando. “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings.” Social Text. July 15, 2013. Available at https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/ (accessed 2022-09-30). ↑

To be played while reading:

Adela Goldbard, Paraallegories, 2013-15, © Adela Goldbard

The harm inflicted by the Michoacán state police to the P’urhépecha community of Arantepacua in central Mexico on April 5, 2017 is irreparable. At 2.45pm, an operation of thousands of police officers—300 according to the media—the entire police force of the state of Michoacán headed to Arantepacua.^[16] The bells resounded—the community’s emergency call. The police did not come to have a dialogue but to generate a confrontation: they entered, shooting tear gas, with a “rhinoceros” (colloquial name for a kind of armored tank) and with dozens of pickups and vans, in addition to three helicopters. The shooting lasted two to three hours; it looked like a war. Four community members were killed, and another nine were detained. Families had to hide from the police, who looted their houses. The comuneros—a Spanish term implying that community members are not only neighbors but share a commitment for the common good—had to defend themselves with sticks and stones, run to the hills, flee. At 5.30pm a military convoy approached Arantepacua from its other entrance road. They were looking for a red truck and only took that one.

The use of road blocks and the holding up of trucks are some of the few strategies left for Arantepacua’s community members—and for many other marginalized communities in the region and in the country— to make themselves heard by the government: it’s the only way they listen to us. That red truck was one of twenty trucks held in Arantepacua to object to the arrest by the police of 38 comuneros who had traveled to Morelia, the state’s capital, the previous day, to negotiate the boundaries of their territory with the neighboring community of Capacuaro, an ancient and ongoing dispute.

Years ago, when Arantepacua supported the Teachers’ Union strike instigated by the biased educational reforms imposed by the federal government, more than thirty vehicles were detained in the town, but no one came to release them.

No operation against drug trafficking has ever been this big.

We know that the government is complicit with organized crime.

We believe that that truck had something illegal: weapons, drugs, organs, bodies.

We will never be able to forget, there are many consequences of psychological trauma.

What was our crime, being Indigenous, being marginal?

Arantepacua has always been a community en pie de lucha, always ready to fight and support social struggles, a pebble in the government’s shoe, since social conscience has always proved an obstacle for power and oppression. The lack of state support and social projects for Indigenous communities has led us to marginalization, and the lack of opportunities and employment in the community have encouraged migration to the United States. One of the greatest concerns for the community, especially for the normalista elementary school teachers, is the loss of the P’urhépecha language due to acculturation processes accelerated by migration. Their constant struggle to defend their ancestral territory, their sovereignty and self-determination based on the practices of their tatakeri grandparents also seeks to strengthen and revitalize the P’urhépecha language and culture within the community and in other communities of the region to become a tool against acculturation and in favor of communality. This fight for the well-being of the community requires opening people’s eyes and an awakening of a social conscience; the fight for justice and the social good is the fight against dispossession, private property, and neoliberalism.

A saga of resistance against oppression that can be traced back to colonial times and that is, more recently, associated with the rejection of the neoliberalist ideal of progress and the exploitation of resources by governments, private investors, and drug cartels, is what allowed a small and marginalized Indigenous community to recover from an extreme act of incommensurable and incomprehensible state sanctioned violence. The damage of the April 5 attack is irreparable, but mourning did not result in silence, as the government expected. Repression fueled rage, which in turn invigorated the demand for sovereignty. On the evening of the day of the attack, the community, although devastated, called on a meeting for the purposes of political reorganization. After the traumatic event, Arantepacua decided to reject and effectively expel political parties and the local police. Community members stayed on guard for several nights, in case the police came back. On April 7, a barricade was built at the entrance of the community and on April 8, at 12.30pm, a community patrol, the kuaricha, was founded. The state of Michoacán officially recognized their decision to adopt self-government in 2018, but Arantepacua still demands that those responsible for the April 5 attack are brought to justice.

The aftermath of these events might be irreparable, but the way this and similar moments in history are narrated and remembered can be either empowering or defeating. Resisting being silenced is as important as resisting repression. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out in Silencing the Past (1995), history is the fruit of power and there has always been an unequal access to the production of historical narratives. I argue that this condition can be challenged by dismantling and subverting the perpetrator/victim, victor/defeated, and oppressor/oppressed dichotomies through reenactment, performance, and the dramatic use of violence and destruction—by adding a decolonial how to Peter Burke’s important question about the politics of memory; who wants whom to remember what and why?^[17] Who gets to narrate and how are both questions about power, since the latter implies questioning imposed modes of memory-making, usually written, that need to be disarticulated in order to break the silences, delinking and reclaiming power.

According to Trouillot “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.”^[18] I argue that a first step to deconstruct the bundle of silences brought on by assault and oppression is to reject “the victim” as a disempowered political figure, since victimization is a strategy of control and oppression, as Daniele Giglioli in his Crítica de la Víctima (Critique of the Victim, 2014) points out. Against victimization, I propose challenging the monopoly on violence—the exclusive use of physical force by the state extended by it to organized crime, transnationals, etc.—by using dramatic violence as decolonial aestheSis. According to Walter Mignolo, decolonial aesthesis, with a capital S for emphasis, “is an option that delivers a radical critique to modern, postmodern, and altermodern aestheTics and, simultaneously, contributes to making visible decolonial subjectivities at the confluence of popular practices of re-existence, artistic installations, theatrical and musical performances, literature and poetry, sculpture and other visual arts.”^[19] In my work I use poetic violence and destruction to make visible, remember, and purge, but also to delink. I argue that when violence is torn away from the dominant and colonizing discourse, its aesthetic, ritual, collective, and affective potential can be unleashed, challenging overpowering dichotomic categorizations that lead to victimization. Dramatic/poetic/aesthetic violence pushes against hegemonic formal means for the production of historical narratives by adding performative layers to the narrations. It allows a shift from recounting to reenacting, from the verbal, to the embodied, thus delinking from Western canonical modes of retelling and remembering.

The main component of Kurhirani no ambakiti is a life-size papier-mâché rhinoceros that functions as a proxy for the “rhinoceros” tank used by the police forces, and allegorically embodies the harm and evil inflicted on the community of Arantepacua. Made by a collective of pyrotechnicians, or coheturis, in Cherán, the first and largest P’urhépecha community to gain political autonomy back in 2011 through an armed movement led by women, the effigy was carried in a procession along the same route of the yearly commemorative procession of the April 5 events. Afterward, the rhinoceros was destroyed with fireworks and burnt in the main plaza of Arantepacua, while local pireris, traditional P’urhépecha musicians, performed pirekuas, traditional songs in P’urhépecha created for the project. For the finale, the coheturis cut off the animal’s head, which was then suspended as a trophy, accompanying the video documentation of the performance that was part of the installation presented at Centro Cultural Clavijero, in Morelia (December 2020—March 2021).

Pyrotechnics were introduced in the sixteenth century by Franciscan priests in what is now Mexico as spectacular and violent components of autos sacramentales, or conversion plays crafted to spiritually conquer the Indigenous peoples and convert them to Catholicism. Fireworks were used as a tool to frighten and punish, as a sensorial representation of hell and suffering. But since then, pyrotechnic effects have been integrated into popular festive traditions in Mexico and other parts of Latin America as a form of catharsis, purge, celebration, and even criticism and protest, which in my view reveals that the violent tools of the oppressor have been subverted and turned into tools for resistance. Anchored in popular culture and in cultural traditions from the margins, from the subaltern, popular effigy-burning rituals such as the Burning of Judas are self-determined, self-organized, and community-funded celebrations in which social roles and rules are challenged to allow new and empowered narratives to emerge. They are subversive carnivals, similar to what Mikhail Bakhtin describes in his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929/1963), celebratory political acts of resistance to what Aníbal Quijano calls the coloniality of power,^[20] through a performative, immersive, cathartic, excessive, destructive, and disobedient decolonial aesthetic experience. These rituals collectively and allegorically eliminate evil, harm, and treason, using violence and destruction as materials to purge but also to make visible and remember.

The aesthetic violence of the burning of the “rhinoceros” in Arantepacua was intended as a form of purging, of catharsis, but above all, it sought to undermine the politics of memory, empower community members, and support the healing of collective trauma. It used dramatic violence to challenge state violence by making visible the excessive use of force by the police. Destruction was used as a memory-building artefact to contest and subvert physical, ideological, and structural violence, and to recover and celebrate situated narratives. The aesthetic and affective potential of violence was employed as a tool for epistemic decolonization and liberation, to delink from the conventional (Western) construction of historical narratives, to carnivalize victimization, against silences, and for a restructuring of the politics of memory, considering that, as Frantz Fanon maintained, “decolonisation is always a violent event.” ^[21]

Archivo Bordado de la Resistencia (embroidered resistance archive) comprises two parts: a sound piece that weaves together narratives generously shared with me through interviews, and twenty-five cross-stitched textiles crafted by female embroiderers from Arantepacua and the neighboring town of Turícuaro. The photographs and video stills used as reference were sourced from Arantepacua’s Indigenous Communal Council’s archive and comunero Auani Pascual, who has consistently documented the community’s and the Teachers’ Union struggles. The interviews conducted with comuneros, normalista teachers, council members, embroiderers, and kuaris (members from the communal security of the town) were assembled chronologically, narrating the events that led to the attack, its aftermath, and its consequences. This cascade of voices formed the contextual basis of the installation presented at Centro Cultural Clavijero by providing intimate, first-hand, unfiltered narratives of the events. Based on the communal archive, the embroideries also develop a chronology that, besides illustrating the oral narrations, adds tactile, sacred, and critical layers to the events represented.

Despite its colonial origins, embroidery has been subverted by many Indigenous communities by becoming a tool with which to conceal and preserve their culture, traditions, identity, and narratives. It has been a device for epistemic decolonization, usually deposited in the hands of women, an “invisible act of cultural preservation of Indigenous epistemologies that often go unnoticed.”^[22] Photographs and still images from videos taken by community members became pixelated tactile images reinterpreted by female embroiderers who, through their labor and affect, transformed them into tools for remembering and resisting, against silence and repression, and into pulsating artefacts of collective memory.

El enjambre (The Swarm) is a sculptural installation comprised of fifty-five scaled police pickup trucks made of wood, crafted by Octavio de la Cruz in the self-governed neighboring community of Pichataro, known, like many towns in the region, for their woodwork. An additional seventeen police cars were made of clay in Ocumicho, another P’urhépecha community, and three helicopters were made of papier-mâché by Baltazar, Domingo, and Ignacio Guerrero, the same brothers who fabricated the rhinoceros in Cherán. Four hundred clay devils (diablitos), dressed/painted with police and military uniforms, were made by Angela Esteban Felipe, also in Ocumicho, in accordance with a traditional craft of recent conception. El enjambre seeks to make visible the disproportionate nature of the attack, and, by turning the culpable soldiers, policemen, and armed civilians into devils, channels Arantepacua’s inhabitants’ perception of the police since the assault.

Finally, the commissioned pirekuas and rap songs add another affective layer to the overall narrative structure of the project.^[23] Mostly in P’urhépecha and created by young community members, they narrate the events of April 5, commemorate the lives of the victims, and praise the strength and fighting spirit of the community. They became intergenerational artifacts for communal memory, where orality and music delink from hierarchical and written memory-making and relink to communal, ritual, and affective production of performative/embodied narratives. The songs were recorded in Radio XEPUR’s studio in Cherán, the most important radio station in P’urhépecha, and then assembled into an album, including the edited version of the interviews, which was recently distributed in Arantepacua during a concert that marked the conclusion of the project.

For the installation at Centro Cultural Clavijero, fragments of all the songs alternated with extracts from the interviews, while the explosions from the pyrotechnics could also be heard in the background. This polyphony of voices, music, and sounds, distributed through the gallery, was a crucial component of the immersive character of the installation. The cathartic impact of a pyrotechnic performance can never be exactly replicated by its documentation. Nonetheless, in this multimedia installation, the video documentation of the procession and burning of the rhinoceros, the layered oral components, the darkened room, the spotlit embroideries, and the sculptural elements—including the dramatically lit head of the rhinoceros hung on the wall as a trophy—were juxtaposed to create an affective experience for the audience that aimed at intensifying the critical and political power of the installation.

Six months after the event in Arantepacua and the opening of the show in Morelia, I created an art-therapy workshop for the female relatives of the victims of the attack in collaboration with psychologist Sonia Contreras, from the neighboring town of Paracho. During five days, the participants explored their emotions associated with the traumatic event, with the loss of their husbands and fathers, with the economic and social repercussions of such loss—including the weight of the community’s gender role expectations—and their desires and goals for the future. Among other activities, graphic narratives of the physical violence and visual symbolic representations of their emotions were created and destroyed, as a form of catharsis. On the last day of the workshop, food cooked in honor of the deceased was shared alongside thoughts and commitments for the participants’ future through narrative patchwork, or arpilleras, created using their relatives’ clothes as a form of memory-making that looks at the past and at the future as closely connected.

In that same visit, the scaled pickup trucks that were part of the installation were brought back to Arantepacua and given to kids in the community so that, in a painting workshop, they could transform them from police to kuaricha cars, representing the transition to self-governance that the community fought for and achieved after the attack. Intergenerational memory-building though making and playing, embodiment and performance.

Kurhirani no ambakiti (burning the devil): since that’s the only way they listen to us is dedicated to the memory of the four victims of the attack: student Luis Gustavo Hernández Cohenete, comunero Francisco Jiménez Alejandre, nurse José Carlos Jiménez Crisóstomo, and comunero Santiago Crisanto Luna.

Menkixi uantakuriakaxi ka noxi meni kuantantojka kuapini juchari ambe

We will always raise our voices in the face of injustice, we will never get tired of defending what is ours

AUTONOMY, SELF-GOVERNMENT AND FREE DETERMINATION

16. All italics in this section are quotes from personal communications with comuneros, teachers, council members, embroiderers, and kuaris (members from the communal security) of Arantepacua, August 2020. Translations by the author. ↑
17. Burke, Peter. Varieties of Cultural History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1997. p. 56. ↑
18. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. 1995. p. 27. ↑
19. Mignolo and Vazquez, “Decolonial AestheSis.” ↑
20. Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies. Vol. 21. Nos. 2–3, March–May 2007. pp. 168–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353 ↑
21. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York, NY: Grove Press. 2004 [1961].p. 27 ↑
22. Steuernagel, Marcos. “Introduction: The ‘Right Not To’: Performing Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization”. In Resistant Strategies. Edited by Marcos Steuernagel and Diana Taylor. Available at https://resistantstrategies.hemi.press/ (accessed 2022-09-2022). ↑
23. Composed and performed by Trio Joskua, Pireris JIMÉNEZ jarhan pakua anapu, Areli Olvera Clemente, and Israel Morales. ↑

To be played while reading:

Adela Goldbard, Towards a Poetics of Violence: Since that’s the only way they listen to us, 2021 © Adela Goldbard