Loving and Living the Zapatista Event: Understanding Affect Inside Youth Mexican Activism

Journal of Youth Studies

ISSN: 1367-6261 (Print) 1469-9680 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjys20

Loving and living the Zapatista event: understanding affect inside youth Mexican activism

Eduardo González Castillo

To cite this article: Eduardo González Castillo (2016): Loving and living the Zapatista event: understanding affect inside youth Mexican activism, Journal of Youth Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2016.1195907

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2016.1195907

Published online: 16 Jun 2016.

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Download by: [Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal] Date: 27 September 2016, At: 16:35 JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2016.1195907

Loving and living the Zapatista event: understanding affect inside youth Mexican activism Eduardo González Castillo Chaire de recherche du Canada sur l’évaluation des actions, publiques à l’égard de jeunes (CRÉVAJ), École nationale d’administration publique-Québec, Montréal, QC, Canada

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This paper will detail youth political engagement in one of the most Received 16 April 2015 important activist organisations that the Mexican city of Puebla (the Accepted 26 May 2016 fourth largest in the country) has known in its recent history. In KEYWORDS particular, the paper will focus on the leadership of two of the Youth activism; affection; leaders of this organisation, who were also lovers. As we will see, collective action; Zapatista the relationship between these two activists proved to be very politics; Mexico important for this organisation, so much so that when the couple broke up, the entire collective collapsed. In this sense, the theoretical challenge I am interested in is the one of inserting the study of the affective dimension of youth political practices in the social and political contexts in which these practices make sense. It is hoped that by studying this case in a rather explorative way, we will gain a better understanding of how youth politics and engagement interact with interpersonal affect.

Introduction This paper will detail youth political engagement in one important activist organisation in the Mexican city of Puebla: the collective Caracol (pseudonym), whose main goal was to diffuse the programmes of the leftist and indigenous Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacio- nal (Zapatista Army for National Liberation)1 in urban space. In particular, the paper will focus on the leadership of two of the leaders of this collective, who were also lovers. As we will see, the relationship between these two activists proved to be very important for this collective, so much so that when the couple broke up, the entire collective collapsed. It is hoped that by studying this case, we will gain a better understanding of how youth politics interact with interpersonal feelings of affection. In this sense, there has been an important proliferation of studies concerning the engagement of youth in collective action in recent years, seemingly as a result of the increased participation of youth in different social movements around the world. However, the question of what place pas- sionate relationships might occupy in youth politics has rarely been explored. Without pre- tending to exhaust the subject, the goal of this paper is to contribute to such an exploration by combining the reﬂections of authors working in ﬁelds of research such as youth studies, affect studies, queer studies and Lacanian social theory.

The paper is primarily based on research conducted in the city of Puebla in 2006 as part of my doctoral studies. The city of Puebla is the capital of the state of Puebla2 and is the fourth largest city in the country, with a metropolitan population of more than 3 million people. It is located at the centre of the national territory, close to Mexico City. Some of the information presented here was also garnered during a subsequent visit to Puebla in 2010 in the context of a different but related study. The goal of my doctoral dissertation was to understand the way that the projects of a variety of young activists interplayed with the dynamics of production and construction of urban space. This research involved the use of methods such as participant observation, the conducti of several interviews (37) and the realisation of a survey (see González Castillo 2009). The content of this paper stems above all from the ethnographic ﬁeldwork and from interviews with the two aforementioned activists. In the ﬁrst section of this paper, I will discuss the recent evolution of studies on youth activism, where I underline the absence of works concerning the place that interpersonal feelings of affection occupy in contemporary youth politics and social engagement. In the second section I present the case study of the two activists and their role in Caracol. My aim in this part of the paper is to offer an ethnographic description of the functioning of this collective and of the participation of the lovers as activists. The paper will end with an effort to understand the cumulative importance that a romantic relationship seems to have had for the existence of the collective.

Youth activism, politics and affect Youth is a social construction, a cultural category developed by different societies to deal (in also very different ways) with the process of socialisation of new generations (Bucholtz 2002). As a consequence of this, in spite of its continuous reference to early age groups, the definition of what a young person is more socially constructed than biologically determined. In this way, inside a given modern society, the determination of the contents of this cultural category is a political process because it involves the hegemonic dominance of a particular ‘view’ of what a young person is over others. Although those considered as young people participate in this process through their everyday practices, they do not do so all the time in a conscious or politically engaged way. This is maybe what Paul Willis had in mind when he wrote: ‘Young people are unconscious foot soldiers in the long front of modernity, involuntary and disoriented conscripts in battles never explained’ (Willis 2003, 390). This being said, it can also be that youth consciously participate in politics and collective action. Doubtlessly, when this political involvement emerges, this process influences the construction of their very subjectivity as youth (see González Castillo 2012). The study of youth engagement in collective political action has gained in importance in the last decade. This evolution seems to be related to the proliferation of movements and actions relying on a significant participation of this segment of the population all around the world. Interestingly, most of these movements appear to go beyond adaptive practices of resistance or accommodation (in the sense of Clarke et al. 1977; Willis 1977)by targeting important social changes (Noguera, Ginwright, and Cammarota 2006). Examples of these types of mobilisation are: the groups of Chicano, Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrant youth fighting for state recognition in the USA (Stauber 2012); the proliferation of student movements in countries such as Chile (Cabalin 2012), Mexico (Rovira 2014) and JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 3

Canada (Ancelovici and Roy-Allard 2012); the participation of youth in different anti-globalisation forums (Rovira 2007; Graeber 2009; Juris 2013) or the multiplication of anarchist and Zapatista collectives working on the creation of alternative spaces and deploying artis- tic strategies inside the capitalist urban space (David 2007; Lagalisse 2010; González Cas- tillo 2012). All of these movements seem to point towards the persistence, in spite of what some postmodernist intellectuals would like to believe, of typical ‘modern’ issues as cata- lysts of youth social, political and cultural practices: the right to public education, fair working conditions and social security (González Castillo 2014). A large number of the scholars interested in these political movements have focused on the prominent role of new media and communication technologies. In this sense, some authors see this use of new communication technologies as an indicator of the arrival of a new generation of social protests: the ‘very-new social movements’ (Juris, Pereira, and Feixa 2012). With this term, these scholars evoke a new era in collective action, marked by the fact that current political movements evolve not only through the known physical (and social) space, but also through the cyber space that pervades our lives. Thus, current youth politics seems to represent an archetypical case of this evolution because young activists constantly turn to these technologies during the deployment of their political actions. The work of Deleuze and Guattari (2002) has been particularly useful for these studies, as their interest in the changing connections, the horizontality and the network-like structuration of social life is particularly suitable for the more flexible and open patterns of evolution in contemporary youth politics (Cerbino and Rodríguez 2005; Rovira 2007, 2014; Prévost 2012). Other studies on contemporary youth political action have focused on the spatial dimension of the practices of young activists (Rioufol 2004; Lukose 2009; Lagalisse 2010; González Castillo and Martin 2015). Lukose (2009), for example, has studied the different implications that the occupation of public spaces by youth has for citizenship and for regional politics in the State of Kerala, in India. In particular, she stresses the importance of youth collective action for the installation of a ‘politic public’ in urban space. This ‘politic public’ refers essentially to the spatialisation of the fight for social justice. With this same logic, Véronique Rioufol, has shown the particular and innovative spatial strategies that characterise the political action of the participants in the world forums. This strategy consists mainly in the production of dispersed spaces of autonomy which are supposed to proliferate with time (Rioufol 2004). From a critical perspective, Lagalisse (2010) has stressed the way in which, in spite of a ‘radical democracy’ narrative, some gender pre- conceptions are present in the private spaces occupied by different anarchist collectives in the city of Montreal. In this scholarly context, the way that affect and love are articulated in contemporary political youth action is a subject whose study remains relatively unexplored. Certainly, in the past, some postmodern scholars studied how emotions can become political in youth practices. For example, the works of Maffesoli (1988) or McRobbie (1996) discuss the importance of proximity and intimacy in political work. However, because these authors tend to disconnect young people from their socio-economic and political contexts (and, thus, from the social stakes) and limit their scope to the personal sphere, the utility of their approaches may be limited for the purpose of this article (see Harris 1992; Griffin 2011). By its side, Mexican academy does have an important tradition in the study of youth practices. Nonetheless, although this tradition has always been concerned by the 4 E. GONZÁLEZ CASTILLO marginal or non-hegemonic character of these practices (in a way highly inspired by the first British cultural studies, see Valenzuela 1988), it has tended to approach separately, on the one hand, their subversive or transgressive contents (Reguillo Cruz 1991; Urteaga 1998; Brito Lemus 2002) and, on the other hand, the insertion of youth in different socio-economic and political contexts (for a review of this two academic tendencies, see Mendoza Enriquez 2010). In this vein, the theoretical challenge I am interested in is the one of reinserting the study of the affective dimension of youth political practices in the social and political contexts in which these practices make sense. In this respect, in spite of their diversity, current works in the field of affect theory point towards the fact that the societal and political implications of affect and emotions surpass importantly the mere personal level (see Seig- worth and Gregg 2010). Ahmed (2004), for example, considers that feelings and emotions do not have a proper object or body, but that they rather exist only as long as they circu- late within and between social groups, as a movement underlining the affinities and differ- ences existing between them. Geopolitics influences this circulation. Thus, Ahmed considers that in post 9-11 Europe and North America, western international politics have nourished the circulation of racialised loves and fears against the other (the immi- grants and the asylum seekers). The way contemporary queer studies approach the relationship between affect/sexuality and economic and political processes could be of some help to approach the social circulation of emotions at an interpersonal level. Stout (2014), for example, has studied the evolution of the social construction of love in post-soviet Cuba in a context of the increase of the sex trade and of deterioration of living conditions. Stout argues that the growth of prostitution among those excluded from the benefits of the socialist state has triggered a sort of public condemnation of relations ‘por interés’ (this is, ‘motiv- ated by status or money’). While this public condemnation deplores the degradation of living conditions for dark skin and homosexual Cubans, it nevertheless tends to associate ‘true love’ to the practices of a white skin heterosexual segment of the population, which is also part of the socialist bureaucratic apparatus. Interestingly, Stout relates all this process to the relative neoliberalisation that the government of this Caribbean society launched after the fall of the communist world. In a different context, How (2013) studied the ideologies and approaches that converge in the fight of some queer activists for sexual rights in post-revolutionary Nicaragua. Howe traces the way these ideologies (gramscian Marxism, Sandinism, liberalism) are related to the evolution of politics in this country, whose governments have rapidly passed from left to right and backwards in the last years. Her work points to the way political approaches about love and sexuality are constantly influenced by these hegemonic struggles. The work of Povinelli has provided an important base for these queer studies. The reflections of this author about love and sexuality are immersed in a research programme focused on understanding the influence that liberalism has had on the evolution of Euro- pean and colonial societies. Povinelli considers that this western ideology rests on the reproduction of a binary construction opposing the idea of the genealogical society (which is seen as coercive, closed and determinant) to the idea of the autological subject (which is conceived as free, rational and independent). According to Povinelli (2006), the main way liberalism deals with cultural diversity and human interactions in western and postcolonial societies consists in locating the different cultures and practices JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 5 inside the binary opposition (western practices being depicted as more autological, while indigenous practices being presented as more genealogical). From this liberal perspective, (heterosexual) love would represent the concretisation of the autological narrative at an intimate level: ‘the “intimate event” holds for those who put some store in it as a liberal mode of self-abstraction and social unity’ (Povinelli 2006, 177). In what follows, I combine the ideas of the authors presented in the last paragraphs with some reflections stemming from the works of lacanian philosophers, Badiou (2003, 2011) and Žižek (2009). For Badiou, true political action (i.e. revolutionary and liberating political action) is above all about the diffusion, by very engaged subjects (‘faithful subjects’), of a universal truth whose validity is beyond the existing social order. For Badiou, this universal Truth can only be unveiled by an atypical event. This (a revolution, for example) is a situation that makes evident the real processes being neglected by the established order. Love and politics are for Badiou two of the main forms that the manifestation of this universal truth can take (the others being art and science). However, it is important to mention that, for Badiou, politics can also exist independently of truth, as in the case of everyday relationships of domination or in the case of what he calls ‘false events’ (such as fascism or bourgeois revolution). Now, it should be noted that the idea of truth is quite complex for this author. In this sense, he considers that universal truths can exist as such only to the extent that they are articulated to the action and practices of the aforementioned ‘faithful subjects’: that is, they are universal and socially constructed at the same time. Thus, for Badiou, although truth is valid everywhere, it cannot exist if dis- connected from human practice. As we will see, these issues concerning praxis and politics can also be addressed in a profitable way with the help of some reflections of Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek about political action. Our insight is that the discussion of this corpus of ideas will help us to strength our reflection on the relationship of love and politics in the case studied.

Spiralling politics The collective Caracol came to be at the beginning of the last century in the context of a reorganisation of social movements in the Puebla region. In this regard, it is important to note that, after a period of important popular mobilisations in the 1960s and 1970s (in which youth played an important role, see Sotelo 2002), a rigid conservative counteroffensive practically swept oppositional organisations from public institutions and spaces in this Mexican region (Castillo Palma 2005). Led by the federal and regional governments and supported by economic powers, this conservative counteroffensive had one of its main targets in the state university (BUAP), which passed from being an educational institution ‘dominated’ by the regional partisans of the socialist and communist parties to being a kind of part of the structure of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional, the centre-right party which governed the region and the country for several decades, since the 1930s until the end of the century. Given the fact that this conservative backlash took place in a context in which neoliberal policies reducing the role of the State started to be gradually implemented in the country, it is not exaggerated to consider it as a constitutive part of this implementation (see Gilly 2006). However, after two decades of neoliberal conservative violence and authoritarian government, new regional popular political organisations started to publicly reappear and 6 E. GONZÁLEZ CASTILLO work in alliance in the late 1990s (González Castillo 2012). This gradual re-emergence of leftist organisations was related to several factors. First, to the local influence of anti-globalisation movements that started to proliferate all around the world at the end of the twentieth century and which counted on the mass participation of young people. It is possible that the most important manifestation of these anti-globalisation movements was the different international social forums, which connected leftist organisations of almost all around the world (see Rioufol 2004; Juris 2013). Furthermore, popular protests against neoliberal policies in countries such as Argentina, Ecuador and Venezuela in the same period could have also increased ties among leftist organisations. Indeed, the difficult living conditions experienced as part of the neoliberal hurricane seem to have triggered, at least in some cases, a sort of political passage à l’act among the youth of the Puebla region (González Castillo 2014). Finally, the silent persistence of political organisations in Puebla and the boost the indigenous Zapatista movement gave them is also an important factor explaining the public re-emergence of political organisations. In fact, in the case of the collective Caracol, it is the growing popularity of the ideas of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation that seems to have invigorated the engagement of its young members in political action (González Castillo 2012). Thus, the collective Caracol appeared as part of the work of diffusion of the Zapatista proclamations in the region of Puebla in 2000–2001. This organisation was the result of the fusion of two different groups (even if, with the passage of time, other groups and activists joined the project). The first of these two groups was composed of some members of five Zapatista brigadas (brigades) which were created in 1999 as part of the Frente zapatista de liberación nacional, the first citizen wing of the EZLN. The other group was composed of members of a collective that published a student magazine in the state public university from 2001 to 2002. The encounter between these two groups introduced Adela and Octavio (pseudonyms), who quickly fell in love and formed a couple whose duration would mark, as we will see, the lifetime of the Caracol. The name of this collective suggested the idea of continuous change and was intended to mean cultural plurality. Adela, aged 24 during my research (in 2006), was the daughter of a university professor and a teacher at the elementary level. Her first participation in collective action took place in a group of people supporting the student strike at the main Mexican public University, the UNAM, in the years 1999–2000. In this sense, in spite of her young age, Adela had been engaged in different political activities in her early years. This political engagement brought her to travel to the south of the country and even abroad (to Cuba, specifically during a World Communist Youth Meeting). Throughout her adolescence, she worked as a freelance artist, as a ballet dancer and as a freelance bookseller. At the age of nineteen, she decided to quit her studies in sociology at the UNAM to join the citizen movement interested in diffusing the Zapatista ideas in the country. In 2000, after having joined the citizen movement, she became connected to the aforementioned Zapatista brigades. Octavio, 26 years old at the moment of my research, was the son of two elementary school teachers. Being a former electronics student, he quit the local public University when, after being strongly reprimanded for being primarily responsible for a demonstration against the privatisation of education, he realised that political activism was not tolerated inside this institution. His departure from the university also involved the end of a student magazine he published with some of his classmates. Octavio then became involved in the organisation of the Zapatista caravan of 2001, the first Zapatista caravan (involving JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 7 indigenous members of this movement from Chiapas) to arrive in the region. It was there that he met Adela. During my doctoral fieldwork in 2006, the Caracol was composed of around 20 active members and was one of the collectives that had advanced the most in the implementation of their cultural projects. For example, the Caracol had created a ‘Café’ (a sort of Cafeteria) that functioned as a small cultural centre (centro cultural) in downtown Puebla. This space was carried out as part of the struggle of this collective to create spaces for discussion and dissemination of the Zapatista proposals. Of course, in order to be a member of the Caracol, it was necessary to show an important commitment to the Zapatista ideas. Indeed, it was during a trip to the Zapatista zone in Chiapas that the founders of this collective decided to invest themselves in the creation of a project supporting the rebel Zapatista communities. Their very first plan was related to the construction of a brick oven in a Zapatista town. The group was also committed to raising money for the purchase of the gasoline required for the production of the bricks. However, after a few weeks, this initial project was completely replaced by another concerning the commercialisation of Zapatista coffee. This second plan eventually resulted in the consolidation of the collective and in the creation, in 2002, of the Café (which was supposed to function as a place for consumption of the Zapatista coffee). This change involved an important challenge for the collective at the spatial level, since it passed, with a sort of spiral motion, from supporting the rural communities in Chiapas to focusing on the diffusion of Zapatista ideas in the poblano urban space:

When the Café was opened in April 12 2002, it was very special. I feel that we learned a lot of

things. Before that we had all had an important political involvement that was rather strong, to varying degrees, but all that consisted only of meeting once a week or going to a demonstration or travelling to Chiapas. But after the opening, we said to ourselves: ‘No kidding! [¡no manches!] now we have to be here every day!’ And suddenly we realised what this all meant, isn’t it? And this has been the story of the Café … (Adela) At the time of my research, the Café had occupied two different spaces, both of them located in the heart of downtown Puebla. After a first year of existence, a conflict with the landlord of the first building forced the supporters of the Café to move. Fortunately for them, this change turned out to be very positive as they found a more spacious and suitable place for their activities. This new locale, the one I knew during my fieldwork, was located in the second floor of an old building situated between the two main public places of the city (El zócalo and El paseo bravo). It was richly decorated with various works of art (paintings, murals, graffiti, stickers) most of which had been developed by the members of the collective. Most of these creations evoked the Zapatista-inspired project and its refusal of authoritarianism and state power. Images of some Zapatista leaders (the Subcomandante Marcos and Emiliano Zapata – on of the leading figures in the Mexican Revolution of 1910) and of the Indigenous peoples in Mexico saturated the walls of the building. The Café was managed by all the members of the collective. With this logic, the process of decision-making, the maintenance of the space and the organisation of activities were the responsibility of all the participants in the project. They usually discussed in assembly about the different problems concerning the space and decided together on the steps to follow in order to find solutions. They collaborated in the project as part of a system of 8 E. GONZÁLEZ CASTILLO rotating volunteers. On the economic front, there was a kind of informal or tacit commitment to support the space among the members of the collective and even among the ‘customers’ of the space, who were usually members of other collectives or artist groups. Thus, during the activities (workshops, conferences, discussions) conducted in the Café, ‘customers’ constantly consumed the products offered by the Cafe with the implicit goal of contributing to the reduction of its debts, which were above all the result of several months of unpaid rent. Thus, if the initial objective of this space was the commercialisation of coffee from Chiapas, with time, this kind of political fair-trade project (which involved also the sale of soft drinks of the Mexican cooperative Pascual Boing as well as homemade cakes and other products of this type) gave slowly place to the one of creating an open space for all the residents of the city to meet and discuss on political issues and to produce and consume alternative culture. It is in this way that the Café slowly become a kind of Centro cultural functioning as a meeting place for different urban collectives and political organisations. These meetings included encounters involving political organisations present in the city (youth collectives, unions, popular movements) as well as workshops conducted by university professors, who offered readings and discussions on their works. Publicised through various means (flyers, mailing lists email, posters), these activities were carried out weekly. To sum up, with this collective, urban Zapatismo was in the process of construction. Visiting the Café was a very inspiring experience. Since no alcohol or cigarettes were sold there, the ambiance was very suitable for people of all different ages. In this sense, although most of its occupants were young people, it was not rare to see elderly people or children playing, reading or watching movies there. Some of these people passed the whole day or even the night in the Café without being disturbed. In addition, the different rooms allowed for many diverse activities at the same time. There could be one group discussing its projects for the next year in the computer room, while another could be playing a board game around a table in the Café and still another could be prac- tising a performance or discussing about the last Zapatista comunicado on the patio or in the stage of the Café. Other people could be watching a movie in a little room prepared for this activity at the same time. This intensity in the use of the space gave the clear impression of being in the presence of a vigorous and successful project. In this regard, Octavio expressed with pride:

I have the desire and the feeling for change and I see that this is the way to make it happen … and above all in a collective way, because you cannot do anything alone! And this is the place where I like to work on that … I mean, getting involved in political organizations is always a difficult thing, sometimes I feel that people and discussions [are complicated]. Anyways, sometimes … I have enjoyed getting involved here: whether publishing of a book or writing an article, or sweeping the floor or composing some lyrics [of huapango music], or when you are discussing … and having fun with your friends, and so on … It is an every-day way of living in fact [ … ] and I enjoy it. As is possible to imagine, the maintenance of the Café required a lot of time as well as a strong personal commitment from Adela and Octavio and from the other members of the collective. Things became harder in 2006, when the Zapatista army lunched La otra campaña, the political campaign where the ELZN tried to reconstitute its links with the Mexican civil society. The active participation of the Caracol in this new Zapatista JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 9 project greatly increased its workload. As a result, the management of the Café became more and more complicated, especially at the financial level. Different resources were mobilised by the members of the collective to face this situation: other than revenues gen- erated by the Café itself, some economic resources were obtained through the families of the activists; others were the result of donations coming from other social organisations of the city; and others were obtained by fund raising activities conducted by the members of the collective. In spite of all these efforts, financial difficulties never disappeared and in 2007, as the debt of the Café increased, the members of the collective decided to move to another locale. The new building would be located slightly out of downtown Puebla and would be shared by the collective with an NGO working in the field of human rights. The move to this new place marked in a certain way the beginning of the end for the collective. There are a few pieces of information that are relevant in understanding the changes that occurred hereafter. First, most of the members of the Caracol had always been very reluctant to work with any organisation that functioned with official or private funding and most of the other NGOs in the city were in this category. We can then ask why the members of the collective accepted to move and share the new place with this NGO. One of the reasons is, certainly, economic necessity. In fact, it seems that the NGO in question engaged in taking on most of the costs related to the occupation of the new building. It is also pertinent to mention that, after the collective moved to this new building, the relation between Adela and Octavio deteriorated and finally ended. This change was in fact due to an unexpected turn: once in the new building, Adela and one of the represen- tatives of the aforementioned ONG started a new sentimental relationship. The Caracol disappeared after the relation between Adela and Octavio changed. It was as if its members had to take a position in this separation and ally with one of the two members of the broken couple. When this happened, some unanticipated conflicts arose among some of the former members of the collective. One dispute concerned, for example, the fact of collaborating with an NGO: Could that be seen as a betrayal of the principles of a Zapatista engagement? Another controversy was about who, among the former members of the collective, had (and who had not) the right to use the original name of the organisation. Now, in spite of these unexpected disputes, the end of the collective did not push its members to abandon political activism. On the contrary, most of them continued their political activities but were dispersed in other organisations or as part of other political projects. In this way, Adela continued to participate actively in the activities of the aforementioned NGO. The last information I had about her was from a press conference in which she and her new companion publicly denounced some acts of intimidation perpetrated in their house by unknown people (likely police agents). Octavio had become involved in a collective promoting the creation of a community radio in a borough located on the outskirts of the city of Puebla. As part of this project, he started to participate in regional and national networks of community media. In fact, I came across him in 2010 in a workshop organised by some supporters of community radio in the region. In the last part of this article, I would like to reflect on what this story tells us about youth political action, engagement and affect. A particular question arises here: How can we understand the fact that a rather vigorous political project became so fragile when facing the love break-up of two of its members? 10 E. GONZÁLEZ CASTILLO

The young Mexican activists as badiouian faithful subjects Certainly, it is important to note the fact that the split between Adela and Octavio was just one of the many sources of tension and pressure that the collective had to endure. In this sense, other than the overload of work related to its participation in La otra campaña,we have to keep in mind both the everyday economic difficulties of the Café and the constant conflicts the members of the collective had with the government of the city. In this sense, police agents were constantly deployed to survey or to impeach the realisation of the activities of the collective in public places. Moreover, according to some activists, under-covered police officials spied from time to time the Café, where at least two raids had been realised before my fieldwork. The quotidian existence of the collective was, in this sense, quit adverse. Now, this being said, and without neglecting the importance of these obstacles, it is still worthy to reflect on the reasons why the incident that seems to have triggered the collapse of the whole project is the very end of a sentimental relationship. I would like to start this reflection by insisting on the very particular role that Adela and Octavio played inside this collective. In this sense, they were not only part of the group that founded the collective, but also those who seemed to invest the most of their energy and resources in the achievement of its goals. In this way, in contrast to other members of this organisation, it was only these two who had intentionally quit their studies to invest 100% of their time in the different projects of the Caracol, and it was because of this that Adela and Octavio eventually became the ‘public faces’ of the organisation. That is, they were present in almost all the activities of the collective and everyone speaking about the collective would automatically refer to one or both of them. In addition, Adela and Octavio never hesitated to turn to their families when an important lack of resources jeopardised the persistence of the project. In this sense, it is possible to say that they acted as what philosopher Badiou (2003) calls ‘political faithful subjects’. That is, they were highly engaged activists who seemed to have found in the Zapatista event the manifestation of a political truth. This can be summarised as the necessity of transforming the dominant order by a political action highly inspired by indigenous principles of justice and communal autonomy. With this same logic, they seem to have trans- formed the task of diffusing this truth into the structuring axis of their subjectivity as youth. In this way, as faithful subjects, Adela and Octavio constituted a dyad which was above all political and which provided an important material and discursive basis for the whole project of the collective. As a ‘badiouian faithful subject’, Adela described what we can consider as her encounter with the Zapatista event in a particularly clear way:

My ﬁrst visit to Chiapas was in 1994. I participated in what was then called the National Demo- cratic Convention (CND), organized by the EZLN in 1994. From then, I started to return there [to Chiapas] because I had many unanswered questions … and I also had several unresolved personal issues, because I felt that … I do not know, for example, there was a situation that affected me a lot: when I went to Chiapas in 1997. I was in a [zapatista] community that got evicted [from their territory] when I was there with other friends. We were like 20 persons of different origins […]. And, in short, the situation was very difﬁcult because the police and the army entered and arrested two of our friends. These friends spent almost two years in jail only because they found themselves in rebel territory. Those were days of war. The war against the insurgency in Chiapas was very hard. That was very impacting JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 11

because when we were there in the communities, the compañeros, the grassroots, told us that some of them had been tortured. They described for us all the persecution they had suffered. That situation of war was very hard, because they had to do guarding at night in order to prevent the paramilitaries from attacking. Then, we lived such an intense experience and felt that people trusted us when they said that in the last ﬁve years no observer had been in the community. And then, once you return home, you feel that they had treated you very well and they had started to talk to you about a lot of things. Then, when I came back [to Puebla], I felt very upset and I really wanted to go back [to Chiapas]. (Adela) The Zapatista political truth that Adela and Octavio started to diffuse from this encounter also referred to the conﬁning role that cultural discrimination and socio-economic domination play in Mexican society and to the necessity of reconstructing this structure regardless of institutional power, ‘from below and through the left’…

We believe that things are going to change regardless of the [elections results]; they are going to change from below. No political party represents hope. It depends on us. This is about no more delegating, isn’t it? If we do not take back what belong to us, nothing will be resolved. We also believe that we have to occupy physical spaces. For example, if we do not have space for housing in the city there will be a lot of homeless people. (Octavio) The diffusion of such a political truth raised more questions than answers … and these were not easy to ﬁnd: How can you motivate youth and people in general to act and to rebel against ‘the system’? How can you construct consistent solidarity networks with the different popular movements of the country? How can you install popular autonomy in the city? (about this last subject, see González Castillo and Martin 2015). As other Zapa- tistas, Adela and Octavio seemed to perceive in the Zapatista movement some clues guiding to the desired answers both in theory and in practice. In this way, they were inve- terate readers of the different declaraciones and manifestos of the Subcomandante Marcos and of the Zapatista army. With this same logic, they saw in the way of life and in the organisation of the Zapatista autonomous communities a model to understand and, at least partially, to apply in order to achieve the desired goals at the local level.

… the kind of struggle that we are having is very local. We have relationships with people from other places, but our work is quite local, it’s so local sometimes that we can focus only on the space [of the Café], right? Then, we have to transcend [this local situation], but without neglecting what we have built. In fact, we have raised the issue of autonomy inside the city: How can we attain autonomy there? That is something quite difficult! (Octavio, 26) Interestingly, neither Octavio nor Adela seemed to conceive their own relationship as a crucial part of this political search. That is, in their public reflections as well as in their public activities, their mutual affection was never discussed as being a central factor for their leftist demarche (even if, in fact, it turned out being it). In my view, they also did not see their relationship in terms of the liberal view described by Povinelli (2006). As we have seen, according to this author, the liberal system approaches love and intimacy in terms of a binary model opposing the autological subject (who besides being free and rational represents the authentic liberal lover) to the genealogical society (which is coercive and conventional). In fact, Octavio and Adela did not seem to frame neither their relationship nor their different activities in terms of, for example, a fight against an alleg- edly coercive society oppressing the individual. On the contrary, their goal was rather to advance hand in hand with the impoverished groups of society towards the overcoming 12 E. GONZÁLEZ CASTILLO of social inequalities and discrimination. Certainly, their views were not completely indif- ferent to some notions stemming from the liberal value system. In this way, their political discourses touched from time to time typical liberal issues such as the question of human rights or that of the independence of civil society from the state. However, as in the case of the Nicaraguan activists studied by How (2013), these liberal influences did not form a unique frame as they were mixed with others related to different ideological approaches (in the sense of political ideologies: Anarchism, Zapatism and Marxism). The reasons for this elusive ideological character of the affective relationship between Adela and Octavio could be studied from a lacanian perspective. As it is well known, one of the most important ideas of Jacques Lacan about love (and about sexual relations) is the statement ‘there is no such a thing as a sexual relationship’ (il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel). Although some scholars have interpreted this phrase as meaning that any sexual relationship is always a kind of masturbatory act (the lover using always the other’s body to satisfy his/her own desires –see Fink 1995), I find a more interesting interpretation to be love can never be completely reduced to the symbolic realm, as, for example, we can do with energy in a symbolic formula expressing the relation (le rapport) between different elements (Choi 2012). As Won Choi has put it: ‘there is no such a thing as a sexual relationship because it can never be written as a “relationship” in a (quasi) mathematical formula in such a way that the necessary working of it is guaranteed’ (Choi 2012, 116). In my view, this lack of guarantee can be seen as related to what Ahmed (2004) characterises as the constant movement of emotions: their endless circulation delimiting collective or individual bodies without never permanently sticking on them. With this logic, it is possible to speculate about the fact that neither Adela nor Octavio was able to perfectly inscribe their own sentimental relationship in their ideological positions because the force and movement of their mutual affection simply escaped from any stable discursive frame. Now, we do know that love is importantly invested with societal attributes. Think, for example, of the issue of the ‘relaciones por interés’ studied by Stout (2014) and referred earlier in this article. Social structures such as class, ethnicity or gender are also important factors in this regard. In this way, according to Pierre Bourdieu, in contemporary societies, love works as a way to favour a sort of class endogamy. That is, it is a way to ensure the preservation (or the improvement) of the places that individuals (and families) occupy in society (Bourdieu 1998, 238). In the case studied, we have hints of the operation of different social mechanisms in various moments of the relationship between our two activists: when, for example, Adela and Octavio met, they were both young activists with very similar social origins and paths of life: both of them had abandoned their studies to get immersed in politics and both of them were also very interested in arts and culture. Thus, the relationship between our two activists was as socially determined as any other. However, in my view, what made their relationship very particular was the fact that they both shared a particular political subjectivity involving a critical view of the social conditions on which their own relationship had grown. That is, as Zapatista faithful subjects, Adela and Octavio followed a political truth that emerged from the interstices of the political order surrounding them. In this sense, by abandoning studies and devoting their lives to their political project, they contested this order and modified their relationship with it. Theirs was in this sense an in-between position concerning, on the one side, the reproduction of the established order and, on the other, its transformation. In my view, JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 13 this situation worked in favour of the different projects of the collective: it gave it access to important economic, material and social resources while keeping in action the political aspirations and the ideals of its members. Adela and Octavio’s mutual affect can be seen in this sense as a circulating emotion giving cohesion and stability to the collective in the context of this kind of split position … and this in such a way that when the relationship between Adela and Octavio ended, the Caracol faded away. Love (among Adela and Octavio, but also among the other members of the collective) was, in this sense, the unifying element which (a) matched the particular trajectories of the two socially in-between subjects and which (b) gave stability to what was a vulnerable project in itself: a collective split between, on the one hand, the economic and political conditions imposed by the capitalist city and, on the other hand, the experience of a revolutionary impetus. But can we consider the relationship between Adela and Octavio a political act in itself? Lacanian philosopher Žižek (2009) writes that, from a materialist perspective (like the one guiding this paper), present choices must always be seen as predetermined by social constraints (the idealist view would, on the contrary, rather speak about the creativity with which the subject creates his own present). Still from a materialist perspective, seen from the future, these same choices must be seen as a variety of possibilities for the arrived future (in opposition to an idealist view, which would always bury the celebrated free individual of the present in the eternal fatality of history). Žižek explains this in this way:

… we should invert the existentialist commonplace according to which, when we are

engaged in the present historical process, we perceive it as full of possibilities and ourselves as agents free to choose among them; while from a retroactive point of view the same process appears as fully determined and necessary, with no opening for alternatives: on the contrary, it is the engaged agents who perceive themselves as caught in a Destiny, merely reacting to it, while, retroactively, from the standpoint of later observation, we can discern alternatives in the past, possibilities of events taking a different path. That is the difference between idealism and materialism: for the idealist, we experience our situation as ‘open’ insofar as we are engaged in it, while the same situation appears ‘closed’ from the standpoint of ﬁnality, that is, from the eternal point of view of the omni- potent and all-knowing God who alone can perceive the world as a closed totality; for the materialist, the ‘openness’ goes all the way down … (Žižek 2009, 79) In the case of Adela and Octavio, social constraints were evident, and they lived their engagement with the Zapatista truth and with their mutual affection in the conditions that the society and the city imposed on them: paying a rent for the space, acting under the surveillance of the police, reproducing some hegemonic spatial models (e.g. when they preferred to occupy buildings located at downtown Puebla – see González Castillo and Martin 2015). Now, retroactively, their mutual affection and the political projects this affection supported can be seen as a political and disruptive force, as a political act becoming more and more political in contemporary Mexico because it reanimated political action in a rather conservative region. It also opened, with the action of other activists, new paths for political action and youth engagement, new spaces in which some ‘foot soldiers’ of modernity seem to have been able to choose their own battles and to actively participate in the construction of their own subjectivity. 14 E. GONZÁLEZ CASTILLO

Conclusion In this paper, I have approached a particular Mexican case of youth activism to explore the way in which affection and politics interact inside youth political action. In this sense, the case studied proved to be very pertinent since it shows in a relatively clear way the determinant importance that affection and love can have for the political practices of young people in a context of adversity. Now, instead of limiting my approach to the intimate sphere of those political practices, I have tried to retrace the links the romantic relationship of the activists of the study can have with social and political processes. I chose to do so because with the increasing visibility of youth political action in Mexico and in other parts of the world, I find it rather difficult to limit the study of this question to the stance that limits the focus to the politics of the personal (see Noguera, Ginwright, and Cammarota 2006). Fortunately, as we have seen, affect theory, queer studies and Lacanian social theory offer us very interesting and useful con- cepts and reflections to advance in this endeavour. In particular, what I have attempted to show here is that the ideas of authors like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek on political action are especially useful to understand the particular social and personal conditions in which youth activism develops. In what concerns the case of the study, that of the collective Caracol, we can say that it represents an archetypical example of the impetus with which political action is expanding among young Mexicans in the current century. Certainly, it can also be seen as an illustration of the different obstacles that this action is doomed to confront in a context of generalised economic and political violence. Despite its failures, the collective Caracol contributed to open a new path for political action in the region of Puebla. In my view, while the strength of this collective stemmed from the engagement of all its members, its permanence was narrowly related to their mutual affection. Love and affection functioned, in this sense, as a force allowing the persistence of a highly challenging project – in particular, the affection of those who, as Adela and Octavio, seem to have made of the political goals of the collective the structuring axis of their subjectivities.

Notes 1. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional publicly appeared in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas in 1994. Led by rural indigenous communities (which are a majority in that Mexican State), this leftist movement declared war against the neoliberal Mexican government with the aim of creating a new socialist and culturally diverse State. A short time after its appear- ance, the Zapatista army changed the military strategy and started to work on the creation of alliances with different social movements of the rest of the country, and even abroad. The different calls of this movement to the paciﬁc mobilisation of civil society have been made under the form of public manifestos or ‘Declaraciones’. For several years, the main spokesman of this popular Army was the Subcomandante Marcos (now called Subcomandante Galeano). 2. Mexico is a federation of states.

Disclosure statement No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author. JOURNAL OF YOUTH STUDIES 15

Funding information This work was supported by the CONACYT (Mexico).

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