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. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 68 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjys20 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. CONTACT Eduardo González Castillo [email protected]; [email protected] © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 E. GONZÁLEZ CASTILLO 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 afore- mentioned 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 deter- mined. 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-globa- lisation 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.

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