Jeffrey W. Rubin

Decentering the regime : ethnicity, radicalism, and democracy in Juchitán, Mexico

Since 1989 an indigenous political movement—the Coalition of Workers, Peasants, and Students of the Isthmus (COCEI)—has governed the southern Mexican city of Juchitan. In Decentering the Regime , Jeffrey W. Rubin examines this Zapotec Indian movement and shows how COCEI forged an unprecedented political and cultural path—overcoming oppression in the 1970s to achieve democracy in the 1990s. Rubin traces the history and rise to power of this grassroots movement, and describes a Juchitan that exists in substantial autonomy from the central Mexican government and Mexican nationalism—thereby debunking the notion that a state- and regime-centered approach to power can explain the politics of domination and resistance in Mexico. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, Rubin shows that the Juchitecos’ ability to organize and sustain a radical political movement grew out of a century-long history of negotiation of political rule. He argues that factors outside the realm of formal politics—such as ethnicity, language, gender, and religion—play an important part in the dynamics of regional political struggles and relationships of power. While offering a detailed view of the Zapotec community and its interactions, Rubin reconceptualizes democracy by considering the question of how meaningful autonomy, self-government, cultural expression, and material well-being can be forged out of violence and repression.

Meanings and mobilizations: A Cultural politics approach to social movements and states

Through examination of the Zapotec movement in Juchitán, Mexico, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Pan-Mayan movements in Guatemala, and the Afro-Reggae Cultural Group in Rio de Janeiro, this article will show that social movements are best analyzed through a combined focus on the circuitous historical pathways of their origins and emergence and on the diverse pieces of representation and meaning out of which they are made. This dual focus, in turn, enables us to understand how political actors form, the places where politics occurs, and the resignifications that lie at the heart of political conflict.

COCEI in Juchitán: Grassroots Radicalism and Regional History

In Juchitan, Mexico, a poor peoples movement has challenged the local and national authorities of the Mexican government, withstood violent repression and military occupation, and succeeded in winning municipal elections and becoming a permanent leftist force in regional politics. This movement, the Coalition of Workers, Peasants, and Students of the Isthmus (COCEI), is one of the strongest and most militant grassroots movements in Mexico, in large part because Zapotec Indians in Juchitan transformed their courtyards and fiestas into fora for intense political discussion, gathered in the streets in massive demonstrations, and, in the course of the past two decades, redefined the activites, meanings and alliancesof therie culture.

Lived Religion and Lived Citizenship in Latin America's Zones of Crisis: Introduction

In this introduction we present the concepts of “lived religion” and “lived citizenship” as tools for understanding the ways in which religious and political meanings and practices are constituted in social movements and locations of poverty and exclusion in Latin America. We first develop the idea of “zones of crisis” as a context in which struggles for rights, recognition, and survival are enacted. We then challenge reified distinctions between the secular and the religious, emphasizing religion’s embodiment and emplacement in daily life and politics. Reviewing the empirical findings of the articles in this special issue, we discuss the multiple imbrications of religion and citizenship with regard to democratic politics, geographies of conflict, and safe spaces, as well as selfhood, identity, and agency. In a postsecular world, interrogating religion, secularity, and politics together enables us better to understand the complex construction of democratic citizenship and the dynamism of Latin America’s multiple modernities.

Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America

The contributors to Beyond Civil Society argue that the conventional distinction between civic and uncivic protest, and between activism in institutions and in the streets, does not accurately describe the complex interactions of forms and locations of activism characteristic of twenty-first-century Latin America. They show that most contemporary political activism in the region relies upon both confrontational collective action and civic participation at different moments. Operating within fluid, dynamic, and heterogeneous fields of contestation, activists have not been contained by governments or conventional political categories, but rather have overflowed their boundaries, opening new democratic spaces or extending existing ones in the process. These essays offer fresh insight into how the politics of activism, participation, and protest are manifest in Latin America today while providing a new conceptual language and an interpretive framework for examining issues that are critical for the future of the region and beyond. Contributors. Sonia E. Alvarez, Kiran Asher, Leonardo Avritzer, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Andrea Cornwall, Graciela DiMarco, Arturo Escobar, Raphael Hoetmer, Benjamin Junge, Luis E. Lander, Agustin Lao-Montes, Margarita Lopez Maya, Jose Antonio Lucero, Graciela Monteagudo, Amalia Pallares, Jeffrey W. Rubin, Ana Claudia Teixeira, Millie Thayer

Can Democracy Challenge Empire in Lula’s Brazil?

history of oppression. Subaltern transnational circuits have the potential of being transformative in a larger sense. In their best expression they are out of necessity both counter-imperial and counter-national, and are based on solidarities of struggle rather than identity in a narrow sense. The political emergence of once-marginal peoples in both North and South is also an ironic consequence of the hegemony of the liberal democratic political system as a global model. The United States, alongside its military and economic strategies of dominance, increasingly defines its grand strategy around democratization as an instrument of global transformation. As a result, it is increasingly bound to respect the results of formal democratic processes, especially elections. Hence, in both Haiti and Venezuela in recent years, Washington has been forced to accept electoral outcomes decided by the counter-hegemonic votes of subordinated classes—outcomes it hardly favored. These developments may not have ended other means of “regime change,” but they do add a considerable burden of illegitimacy to political results produced by other means. In India, though, where independence brought with it full suffrage and free elections, U.S. influence has not been an issue in the same way. National elites, however, have been forced to accept the results of the processes of liberal democracy in a similar fashion. In the four decades it has taken for the political visibility of lower castes and dalits to be consolidated, the nature of the Indian polity has changed radically. As the once-marginalized succeed in pressing their interests in a number of ways, politics is being transformed. The impulse to strengthen the national state as the primary means for resisting neocolonial domination in different parts of the South has a mixed legacy today. Where the state can resist the pressures of imperial demands to some extent—Brazil and India come to mind—some good may yet be done. But as the state in the developing world increasingly bows to international norms, the socially marginal and politically weak become familiar targets of state power and domination. Fortunately, new connections and transnational social networks offer material and conceptual resources for the forging of a new counter-imperial project, one that addresses both empire and state at the same time. In the transnational struggles of South Asia’s dalits and Latin America’s indigenous people, we may well be witnessing a new path to cultural liberation and social transformation. ■ NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS

The state as subject

This essay applies post-structuralist insights to analysis of states by conceptualizing the state as a culturally and historically situated “subject.” Using anthropological and historical research on states and on Mexican politics, it demonstrates that the study of states requires examination of the cultures and internal fragmentation of states, as well as the local and regional trajectories of state actors and agencies. By “seeing and not seeing” the state as a bounded, purposeful actor, we can acknowledge the force and cohesiveness of states, while simultaneously recognizing the mixture of fragments and pieces, with their own histories, out of which states are constituted.