After the Barricades: The Oaxaca Rebellion and the Future of Mexico

In July 2006, a spontaneously developed, broad coalition of civil society groups in the South Mexican State of Oaxaca ousted the state government from its seat after police had brutally broken up a strike by the local teacher’s union. By establishing a popular, participatory alternative government – the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) – these civil society groups managed to maintain control over the city of Oaxaca and assume a number of governmental functions for roughly five months, before being violently repressed by the Mexican military police. After the Barricades is a day-long event that will look back at the rebellion and its implications. A group of top-scholars and commentators on society and politics in Oaxaca and Mexico will analyze and discuss the significance of the uprising on two panels and in a round table debate. In particular, discussion will focus on the situation in Oaxaca two years after the rebellion’s repression, the rebellion’s impact on the rest of the nation, and the possibilities for grassroots-driven social change in contemporary Mexico. The event will be free and open to the public and will be followed by a Fundraising Party.

After the Barricades is being organized by the SFU Latin American Studies Student Union and co-sponsored by the SFU Latin American Studies Program, the UBC Latin American Studies Program, and CIPO-VAN.

Contact: Timo Schaefer, 604-444-0793. Email: tsa3@sfu.ca

When: April 27^th, 2008, 9am to 5:00pm

Where: SFU Harbour Centre, 1700 Labatt Hall

What:

• 9:30-11:30: The 2006 Oaxaca Rebellion and its Aftermath – Panel. Speakers: Lynn Stephen, Raul Gatica, Jeffrey Cohen

• 12:30-2:30: The National Context: Politics and Society in Contemporary Mexico – Panel. Speakers: Fred Rosen, Kristin Norget, Laura Carlsen

• 3:00-5:00: After the Barricades: The Oaxaca Rebellion and the Future of Mexico – Round Table Discussion. Speakers: Lynn Stephen, Raul Gatica, Jeffrey Cohen, Fred Rosen, Kristin Norget, Laura Carlsen

• 7:00: Barricada Cantina – Mexican Music, Food, and Drinks, at La Casa del Artista, 150 East 3rd Ave

Be there at nine for coffee and pastries!

Our guests:

• The work of Lynn Stephen, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon, has centered on the intersection of culture and politics. She has a particular interest in the ways that political identities articulate with race, gender, class, and nationalism in relation to local, regional, and national histories, cultural politics, and systems of governance in the Americas. During the past eight years she has added the dimension of migration to her research, paying particular attention to Mexican migration in Oregon and California. She has conducted research in Oaxaca for the past 25 years. Her latest book is Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico, California, and Oregon published by Duke University Press (2007).

• Jeffrey H. Cohen is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on three areas: migration, development and nutrition. He has worked in Oaxaca, Mexico for many years including a four year project exploring the outcomes of migration for sending-communities in the central valleys of the state. This work was summarized in the ethnography The Culture of Migration in Southern Mexico, published by the University of Texas Press. His articles have been published in the American Anthropologist, Human Organization and International Migration among others. His current work, supported by the National Science Foundation focuses on the impacts of civil unrest on migration in Mexico.

• Raúl Gatica is an indigenous activist, teacher, and writer from Oaxaca who currently lives in Vancouver as a political refugee. His articles on state, society, and social movements in Mexico have appeared in the Mexican daily La Jornada, the Canadian Spanish language weekly El Nuevo Milenio, and other publications. His first book of short stories, Borrowed Characters, is due to be published in Vancouver later this year.

• Fred Rosen is Senior Analyst for the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), and an independent journalist based in New York and Mexico City. Over the past ten years he has covered Mexican political and economic affairs for a variety of Mexican and U.S. publications including El Financiero, NACLA Report on the Americas, and the Mexico edition of the Miami Herald. He is co-editor, with Eric Hershberg, of Latin America after Neoliberalism (The New Press, 2006) and editor of Empire and Dissent: The United States and Latin America (Duke University Press, 2008).

• The work of Kristin Norget, Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, has been concerned with popular religion in relation to processes of social, political, and cultural change in Oaxaca, the topic of her book Days of Death, Days of Life: Ritual in the Popular Culture of Oaxaca (Columbia University Press, 2006). She has also published articles on state-sponsored political violence in Oaxacan indigenous communities and on the role of the progressivist wing of the Catholic Church and social mobilization. Her recent research is on the Catholic pastoral philosophy of indigenous theology in Oaxaca.

• Laura Carlsen lives and works in Mexico City, where she currently directs the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy. She came to Mexico in 1986 to research and do solidarity work with the "September 19th Seamstresses' Union" that formed following the earthquake. Since then, she has worked as a journalist, development consultant and policy analyst. She publishes and speaks frequently on social, economic and political aspects of Mexico and U.S.-Mexico relations and co-edited Confronting Globalization: Economic Integration and Popular Resistance in Mexico, and El Café en Mexico, centroamerica y el caribe. Her most recent writing can be found at www.americaspolicy.org. In February-March of this year she was a delegate of the International Civil Commission on Human Rights to compile testimonies of human rights violations in Oaxaca and Chiapas.