Abstract
This article presents three ethnographic case studies that demonstrate some of the ways that local participants in Oaxaca, Mexico put Marxist and other leftist discourses into practice as they seek to enact social and cultural change. Case study 1 presents a personal retrospective narrative of a local resident who as a university student became involved in battles against the state police following the 2006 teacher’s strike in Oaxaca. Case study 2 explores the presence of Marxist and other leftist references in Oaxacan street art. Case study 3 presents the experiences of a Catholic priest who puts Marxist thought into practice through his social justice work in rural pueblos. These case studies demonstrate how a discursive understanding of culture and psychology can help navigate the conceptual fields of culture and psychology. Each case study comes from ethnographic research conducted in Oaxaca, Mexico in July 2017.
The city of Oaxaca de Juárez is often referred to as the cultural center of Mexico. It is a place where food, music, and art are as abundant and visible as the many public accusations of political and systemic corruption. It is the capital city of a region that possesses many layers of social complexity, which makes it a fascinating place to study the interaction of public discourse, social organization, and psychological functioning. To set the backdrop for the present study, consider the following.
In 1818, a 12-year-old Zapotec orphan walked from his mountain village about 40 miles away into the city of Oaxaca in search of his older sister. The child could neither read nor write and spoke no Spanish, only the native Zapotec language of his region. In a nation dominated by Spanish conquest, this child had few prospects in terms of social advancement. Native peoples at that time were not recognized as Mexican citizens and rarely worked outside of physical labor or domestic service. However, a local Franciscan bookbinder took in the boy and funded his education in exchange for his labor. The child began learning the Spanish language, excelled in school, and eventually earned a degree in law. That child was Benito Juárez, Mexico’s first indigenous president and the eponym of Oaxaca de Juárez. He is famous for implementing important social reforms and fighting for indigenous rights in the Republic of Mexico (Juárez, 2011; Roeder, 1947).
The same year that young Benito Juárez arrived in Oaxaca, a Jewish lawyer by the name of Herschel Mordechai and his wife gave birth to a son in the city of Trier in modern day Germany while navigating a similarly difficult political situation. The city had fallen under French control during the Napoleonic Wars a few decades earlier, but after the Battle of Waterloo, the Christian state of Prussia took the city and enforced a law that prohibited Jews from holding any legal or state position. This meant that Mordechai was no longer permitted to practice law in his hometown and thus provide for his growing family. Faced with a difficult situation, Herschel Mordechai opted for political conversion to Christianity and changed his name to Heinrich Marx. The child born to that couple was Karl Marx (Berlin, 1978). Though Benito Juárez and Karl Marx never met, their voices echoed similar themes about a common form of suffering. Both voices have a visible presence in the city of Oaxaca and provide a lexicon for subjective experiences of social identity, suffering, and mobilization.
Purpose of the study
The topic of social and cultural change has long been an area of focus in ethnographic research. Of particular interest in cultural psychology is the question of how such changes interact with psychological constructs of mental health and well-being. This article employs the premise that language and language practices (i.e. discourse) help mediate the relationship between the two conceptual fields of culture and psychology (Bruner, 1990; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Shweder, 1991) to examine of some of the ways that local participants in Oaxaca, Mexico put Marxist and other leftist discourses into practice as they seek to enact social and cultural change. Three brief case studies will be presented that highlight different ways of using discursive approaches in qualitative research.
The outline of the present article is as follows. First, a brief discussion of the research methods used in this study will be provided followed by the case studies. The case study 1 will introduce the reader to the site of the research through the personal retrospective narrative of a local resident who as a university student became involved in battles with the state police following the 2006 teachers’ strike in Oaxaca. The case study 2 will explore the presence of Marxist and other leftist discourse through a visual analysis of Oaxacan street art. The case study 3 presents the story of a catholic priest who draws explicitly on Marxist discourse in his social justice work in rural pueblos of Oaxaca State.
Methodology
Each of the following case studies comes from a short, one-month, ethnographic pilot study conducted in Oaxaca, Mexico in July 2017. All ethnographic interviews were conducted in Spanish and have been translated into English for stylistic convenience and readability. To maintain the confidentiality of research participants, pseudonyms are used, and any other possible identifying information has been removed or changed. The informants were informed about the purpose of this study and agreed to be audio recorded so that a careful transcription of the narrative could be created.
Rationale for the study draws on the work of Collier, Campero, Perez, and White (2000), who have shown how psychological distress in Chiapas, Mexico emerges, at least in part, from rapid socioeconomic changes that place contradictory demands on working families. Their primary method of investigation is interviews that draw on Arthur Kleinman’s (1988) concept of the illness narratives, which seek to elicit first-hand accounts and emic understandings of suffering. The methodology used in the present study replaces the “illness narrative” with a “vocation narrative” while retaining much of the undergirding psychological and sociocultural theory. By asking informants to tell about their work as well as any conditions that prevent them from working, this study seeks to elicit personal histories that touch on the intersection of politics, economics, social organization, mental health, along with various other conceptual fields. In short, vocation narratives tap into the network of symbol systems that construct the lives and livelihoods of people within a community.
To select informants, I began speaking with people whose work focused on areas of education, social service, and community development. Because there is a plethora of such organizations in the city of Oaxaca, it was not difficult to find people who were happy to share about their work. The selected case studies came from particular informants whose stories seemed to echo similar themes of the political left, though from different social locations. The first and third case studies present personal narratives, frequently drawing on first-person perspectives, to highlight what can reasonably be understood as different instantiations of a broader coherent leftist discourse.
The second case study diverts from the methodology used in the first and third cases by using a visual methodology utilizing photography of street art. The purpose of the second case study is to demonstrate that the discourses highlighted in the selected narratives are more than a coincidental overlapping of terms but rather representations of a collective idiom of distress that exists as an objective part of the visual culture in Oaxaca. The images included in this case study are photographs of art work depicted in public spaces. The images were selected ad hoc over the course of the length of the one-month study as they seemed to resonate with leftist political themes. This case study is not the result of an exhaustive survey of street art throughout the city.
Taken together, these case studies demonstrate how a focus on discourse can keep cultural psychology research grounded in the lived experiences of real people. As the title of the article suggests, the particular discourses studied here are ones that provide a shared vernacular for community members to protest suffering and perceived disorder as well as to intervene in meaningful and tangible ways.
Case study 1: Discourse, social organization, and violence
In 2006, members of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación (a.k.a. the teacher’s syndicate) went on strike, closed their classrooms, and assembled in the Zócalo in the center of the city to demand better salaries, career security, and to leverage their collective power against the government (Arenal, 2007; Denham & C.A.S.A., 2008). What proceeded was a violent conflict between the policía (police) on one hand and a large portion of the population that identified as leftistas (leftists). In conversations with local residents, I heard a range of opinions, but one theme that seemed more or less consistent was that the police are corrupt, but so is the teacher’s syndicate. For example, among the results of their previous victories the syndicate has the right not only to a guaranteed teaching position for life but to also pass that position on to a child as an inheritance.
As one local, Mateo (a pseudonym), told me, “People don’t like the government, but they don’t like the teachers either because when they go on strike it’s the children who have to pay the price by not being able to go to school” (personal communication, July 2017). So when the teachers assembled in the city center people didn’t take sides at first. But all this changed on 14 June 2006 when Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, the governor at the time, ordered 3000 members of the state police to attack the Zócalo by use of violent force, end the protest, and arrest as many demonstrators as possible. Several accounts claim more than a hundred people were hospitalized as a result of the attack. “That was when a lot of people decided to join the fight,” Mateo told me. “I was in university at the time here in the city. My whole family got involved – me, my dad, and my brother. My mom didn’t fight, but she would serve coffee and food to all the people” (personal communication, July 2017). Mateo was involved in six battles in all, including the battle for the university, which the State Police wanted to take because it served as one of the radio broadcasting centers from which organizational information was being communicated to the people, as well as the last and bloodiest battle to retake the Zócalo from the State Police.
As my informant continued it was not the details of the battles that kept me transfixed, though they were indeed fascinating. Instead, it was the salience of the question that brought me to Oaxaca in the first place: How is it that discourse—language-in-use—is connected to culture, social organization, and to the collective and individual psyche? In the case of the teacher’s strike, there are several enactments of discourse: the protest of the teacher’s syndicate, the original silence of the surrounding community, and the intervention of the state police. Each enactment is grounded in a particular script or way of talking about the world and shapes the ways people identify with or in contradistinction to each other. This is evident in the subsequent organization and mobilization of the community.
Further, each of these enactments is in dialogue with other instantiations of discourse that provide a unique local-historical context. For example, unlike the United States, which not only neglected but intentionally suppressed the writings of Karl Marx for decades due in no small part to the highly politicized red scare of the mid-to-late-20th century, there is a visible expression of Marxist thought in many parts of Latin American society. How this plays into the ongoing teacher’s strike and other forms of protest is open to interpretation, but one thing that is clear is that there is a systemic interaction between existing discourses (e.g. Marxism) and social organization (e.g. protests, police activity, and decisions of whether or not to get involved), which in turn shapes and is shaped by the individual and collective psyche.
The value of a personal narrative like Mateo’s is that it reminds the scholar that issues of identity, social organization, and belonging are not always as clear cut as it may seem on the surface. Knowing simply that a discursive action, e.g. public protest, exists within a community does not tell us how members of that community feel toward that action or how identity alignments may have changed over time. As Mateo indicated, before the attack by the state police, he and his family seemed to feel somewhat indifferent given that there was corruption on both sides of the debate. It was not until discourse met with violent action that the teachers’ protest became a symbol of identity along the lines of a public leftist discourse.
Case study 2: Discourse, street art, and visual culture
While case study 1 uses personal narrative as an entry point to understanding the complexities of discourse, culture, and psychology, case study 2 begins at the visual level. This study is an exercise in observing the ways that communities use public spaces to represent collective memory through visual symbols (Awad, 2017; Brown, Brunelle, & Malhotra, 2017; Glaveanu, 2017). This approach is especially fitting for places like Oaxaca that hold artistry in high esteem. As one local told me, “We have a tradition here of listening to musicians, artists, and writers – pretty much anybody who thinks deeply about things – except for politicians” (personal communication, July 2017). That statement is echoed by the presence of multiple talleres artisticos (artist workshops) whose works decorate public spaces in guerrilla fashion (see Figure 1) as well as the less systematic yet meaningful tagging of high literature on city walls (see Figure 2).
Signage for an artist workshop whose English translation reads: “Community Artist Workshop is a capacitation house which offers artistic general education for young people from communities and neighborhoods of the state of Oaxaca.” Source: Photo by author.
A variation of Goethe’s, “If one does not know what went on for the last three thousand years, he or she remains ignorant, merely surviving from day-to-day.” Source: Photo by author.
While there are many productions throughout the city that consist of open-ended imagery and symbolism, a good number convey a deep sense of group identity (see Figure 3). La popular, the name of a local restaurant, has street art-style signage containing symbols representing the empowerment of disenfranchised voices. The name of the restaurant, which can be translated as “belonging to the people” or in other contexts as “the working class,” speaks to a common social struggle and seems to invoke a shared sense of identity by harkening to the city’s history of protest.
Signage for a restaurant which reads: “La popular.” Source: Photo by author.
The next image is a paraphrase of the French historian Jacques Le Goff (1992) from his book History and Memory. In this work, Le Goff discusses how collective memory is a social force that can be used for good or abused with malicious intent. These words clearly strike a chord for some in Oaxaca as illustrated by its inscription on city walls as shown in Figure 4.
“La memoria intenta preserver el pasado solo para que le sea útil al presente. Procuremos que la memoria colectiva sirva para liberación y nunca para el sometimiento.” Memory tries to preserve the past only to make it useful to the present. Let us ensure that collective memory serves to liberate and never to subjugate. Source: Photo by author.
Figures 5 and 6 serve as commentaries on current political controversies such as a number of political reforms and the release of a certain political prisoner. In these images there is an effort to mobilize the populace to protest these perceived violations of human rights by drawing on rich symbolism likely to be recognized by pedestrians. The images speak to the inequalities inherent in different social locations through visceral portrayals of injustice.
Street art. Text reads: “Reformas energética, educativa, financiera, electoral, laboral.” Energy, education, finance, electoral, labor reforms. Source: Photo by author.
Stenciled likeness of Fernando Barcenas Castillo widely considered to be a political prisoner. Wording reads: “F. Barcenas Libertad!!” F. Barcenas Freedom!! Source: Photo by author.
David Harvey is a professor of anthropology and geography at City University of New York as well as a noted Marx scholar. In a carefully produced work on the upper section of a building’s outer wall, a portion from the following passage from Harvey’s (2008) essay “The Right to the City” is reproduced in a strategic location on the upper portion of a building’s wall (see Figure 7). As seen in the image, these words are not scrawled in spray paint but printed with care and attention to visibility by the public eye.
Quote from David Harvey: “El derecho a la ciudad es mucho más que la libertad individual de accede a los recursos urbanos: se trata del derecho a cambiarnos a nosotros mismos, cambiando la ciudad.”—David Harvey. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.—David Harvey. Source: Photo by author.
Another installment (see Figure 8) reads, “El primer paso real hacia la educación tiene que ser el de abolir la servidumbre” (The first real step toward education must be the abolishment of servitude). This passage is a quote from the Peruvian activist José Carlos Mariátegui (2009), who wrote: “Cada día se compruebe más que alfabetizar no es educar. La escuela elemental no redime moral y socialmente al indio. El primer paso real hacia su redención, tiene que ser el de abolir su servidumbre” (p. 142) (Every day proves more that literacy is not education. Elementary school does not provide moral and social repayment to the Indian. The first real step toward reparation must be to abolish servitude).
Graffiti art which reads, “El primer paso real hacia la educación tiene que ser el de abolir la servidumbre.” The first real step toward education must be to abolish servitude. Source: Photo by author.
Drawing on themes captured in the history of Benito Juárez, these words urge public action on important issues of social organization, education, and labor.
Figure 9 shows a spray painted quote widely attributed to Pedro Albizu Campos, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Puerto Rican civil rights activist, which reads in English translation, “When tyranny is law, revolution is order” (Alberty, 1997, p. 234). As seen in the image, this quote forms the bottom border of a wall plastered with various well-worn and half-torn leftist posters. One of those posters displays the communist hammer and sickle with dates advertising a meeting. Once again, we see the move from ideas about identity to a call for action.
Wall with Communist signage. Wording reads: “Cuando la tiranía es ley, la revolución es orden.” When tyranny is law, revolution is order. Source: Photo by author.
While it is common to see anarchist symbols and other graffiti painted onto the doors of churches and other religious buildings, there are several examples that suggest leftist discourse is not conceptualized by locals as inherently contrary to religion. Figure 10 is one such example, which describes Oaxaca as the “land where God and the resistance never die.” This image hints at the ways in which different genres and different rhetoric are integrated with themes of protest and a concern for human rights again through widely recognized graphic and textual references.
Workshop production art which reads: “Oaxaca tierra donde Dios y la resistencia nunca mueren.” Oaxaca land where God and the resistance never die. Source: Photo by author.
While many of the images seen so far evince strong leftist leanings, the last few images draw explicitly on Marxist rhetoric and imagery (see Figure 11). Figure 12 shows a spray painted inscription of the words “Los pueblos no son mercancía, muerte al capital!” (Towns are not merchandise, death to capitalism!). This seems to be a clear reference to Marx’s (1930) Capital: Critique of Political Economy in which he lays out a theoretical explanation for how capitalist societies function by the transformation of raw goods into merchandise by the hands of a disempowered working class. The words in this image demonstrate how discourse can function in social settings to help perpetuate or to protest social conditions by eliciting strong subjective desires for either consistency or change.
Signage showing Marxist imagery. Source: Photo by author.
Street art which reads: “Los pueblos no son mercancía, muerte al capital!” Towns are not merchandise, death to capitalism! Source: Photo by author.
On a similar note, Figure 13 is an image of a group of indigenous people holding an image of the hammer and sickle and a sign referencing Vladimir Lenin, which says in English translation, “The age of imperialism is the age of the proletarian revolutions.” The combination of classic Marxist literature with images of indigenous Mexican peoples sends an unmistakable message. In light of generations of injustice, people are finding a sense of personal and group identity in Marxist discourse.
Street art production which reads: “La epoca del imperialism es la epoca de las revoluciones proletarias.—V. I. Lenin.” The age of imperialism is the age of the proletariat revolutions.—V. I. Lenin. Source: Photo by author.
These images demonstrate that within this community the discourse of complex social theory is far from abstract. Rather, it is part of the objective social structures that people encounter on a daily basis. The images seen here urge individuals toward meaningful social engagement via discourse from the political left. Further, these images signal to us the presence of a collective awareness about a shared history of injustice and the significance of public protest.
It is worth noting that this analysis does not move far beyond the perspective of a casual pedestrian observer. Like most art, the images presented here contain layers of meaning and historical context that could be expounded on far more than has been done here. The scope and purpose of the study, however, is not to provide an exhaustive commentary on each image but rather to demonstrating how ubiquitous leftist discourse is in the local visual culture. The final case study moves beyond the visual to explore some of the ways that this discourse is being put into use in attempts to enact social and cultural change.
Case study 3: Discourse and idioms of distress
Father Gerardo Ortega (a pseudonym) came to Oaxaca in 2001 to continue the work of the late Father Rudolfo Sosa (also a pseudonym) who was assassinated while serving the surrounding rural communities. According to Andrea Noel (2016), “Violence against Catholic clergy is nothing new here. Since 1990, at least 56 religious leaders have been killed in Mexico, including one cardinal.” The cultural context surrounding this violence is complex, and in this particular case it is connected to the presence of Marxist discourse discussed above.
Part of Father Ortega’s ongoing work in the area includes a direct engagement with legal and economic practices in rural pueblos. “In many communities,” he says, “we provide legal support for women because many of the customs and traditions in these towns exclude women from having many opportunities, holding any offices, or even owning land” (personal communication, July 2017). These conditions are exacerbated by the frequent outbreaks of violence due to disputes over land and other resources. “Because of the violence there are a lot of widows in these communities, and because only men are allowed to own land, these women are left completely dispossessed” (personal communication, July 2017). Father Ortega and a team of volunteer lawyers work with town councils in these types of cases to try to help change the traditional customs and practices.
His team is also involved in helping to prevent violence by facilitating dialogue and other peaceful avenues of resolution between warring factions. He continues, “Conflict is inevitable and necessary, sure, but violence does not have to be inevitable. We try to get each side to agree to continue their conflict without entering into violence” (personal communication, July 2017). As his team has begun to speak out against the other types of violence against rural and indigenous communities by government organizations and corporations, counter-accusations have risen claiming that priests are inciting violence between groups for personal interests and economic gain.
In the course of his work Father Ortega has endured his own share of suffering. For example, during our interview he shared the following experience: Men from a certain political party here in Mexico kidnapped me, beat me, and had me detained. That was the first time. After that, I was kidnapped by the state government because they had accused me of killing a government official. It was a terribly difficult time. (Personal communication, July 2017) When I was in seminary, each semester consisted of three months of academic work followed by two months of fieldwork in the rural towns. That’s how every semester went. Three months in class, two in the field. Three months in class, two in the field. Seminaries aren’t like that anymore. They’ve lost interest in social issues like this. But that’s the way we did it. And this was the plan. The first stage was to integrate into the community, learn the language, learn the local customs. Most importantly, we didn’t show up to judge but to learn their values, learn the food, learn the dance, learn the music. The second stage was to analyze the situation. It was tough work, very anthropological and sociologically Marxist. And we would share this analysis with the community. We would say, look we’re seeing this and this and this. And then they would begin to take on an awareness of what was going on. For example, companies would come in to mine trees and they would take advantage of the authorities to get permission. Things like that. (Personal communication, July 2017)
One of the limitations of this case study is that it is relegated to a single, relatively elite perspective. While the experiences of local residents from the pueblos discussed above would provide invaluable data and possibly challenge some of the inferences made here, those voices are noticeably absent. Though this represents a fruitful direction for future studies, it does not invalidate what we can learn from Father Ortega’s story.
Discussion
These case studies have explored different ways that social mobilization can be understood through the lens of discourse. From a cultural psychology perspective, when a discourse is introduced into a community to explain experiences of suffering and injustice, there is a change in the mutual constitution of discourse, culture, and the psyche.
Arthur Kleinman’s (1988) concept of idioms of distress is apropos to this study. Idioms of distress refer to the ways in which suffering subjects communicate “personal and interpersonal problems” in a manner that is “both peculiar to distinctive cultural worlds and constrained by our shared human condition” (p. xiii, 57). From Kleinman’s original medical perspective, when a person is ill, he or she must communicate their distress in a way that is culturally understood. The same principle is true for psychological or social distress. As Mark Nichter (2010) states, “Idioms of distress need to be considered in socio-political contexts and not just be seen in terms of psychological processes intrinsic to individuals. At the level of symbolic protest, they constitute a language for social suffering” (p. 412). In light of the studies above, the correct way (or perhaps a correct way) to communicate suffering and injustice is through protest.
Further, the methodological focus on vocation narratives is a reminder that the discourses presented here reach the core of social cohesion, in the Durkheimian sense, shaping one of the most crucial arrangements of human activity—labor (Durkheim & Halls, 1997). The fact that these narratives were drawn from personal vocation narratives suggests that we are dealing with a discourse that is far from abstract social theory but rather a viable intervention for social ills.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
