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Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Winter 1-1-2012 Social Change and Documentary Film in Mexico: Violence, Autonomy, and Cultural Production Livia Katherine Stone Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Stone, Livia Katherine, "Social Change and Documentary Film in Mexico: Violence, Autonomy, and Cultural Production" (2012). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 1021. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/1021 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of Anthropology Dissertation Examination Committee: Bret Gustafson, Chair Peter Benson Mary Ann Dzuback Rebecca Lester Derek Pardue Ignacio Sánchez Prado Social Change and Documentary Film in Mexico: Violence, Autonomy, and Cultural Production by Livia Katherine Stone A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2012 St. Louis, Missouri TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IV ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION VI CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 6 1.2 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY OF MEDIA 12 1.3 HABITUS, THE CULTIVATION OF SELF, AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION 16 1.4 METHODS 18 1.5 THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS DISSERTATION 22 CHAPTER 2: ATENCO AND ITS RECENT HISTORY 30 2.1 MEANINGS OF ATENCO 30 2.2 THE PLACE 36 2.3 CONTINUING STRUGGLE 39 2.4 POLITICAL IMAGINARY 46 2.5 A HISTORY OF MANY FRENTES 49 2.6 MYSTICAL, RELIGIOUS, AND POLITICAL LENSES 51 2.7 THE FRENTE’S TACTICS 59 2.8 CONCLUSION 69 CHAPTER 3: CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND THE SELF 71 3.1 ETHICAL DISPOSITION AND THE SELF 73 3.2 COMPAS Y PROTAGONISTAS 80 3.3 BETO 91 3.4 SALVADOR DÍAZ 98 3.5 GREG BERGER 103 3.6 COMPETITIVE SELFLESSNESS 108 CHAPTER 4: VIOLENCE AND VISIBILITY 112 4.1 MAKING STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE VISIBLE 114 4.2 MACHETES AND ARMED NONVIOLENCE 123 4.3 REPRESSION 135 4.4 HUMAN RIGHTS DOCUMENTARIES 143 CHAPTER 5: DISTRIBUTION AND ORGANIZATION 151 5.1 MEDIA AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 152 5.2 GIFTING FILMS 158 5.3 SCREENING FILMS 164 5.4 SELLING FILMS 167 5.5 THREE STAGES OF THE FRENTE 174 CHAPTER 6: AUTONOMY 179 6.1 FILMMAKING BEYOND THE COMMUNICATIONS MODEL 180 ii 6.2 LA OTRA CAMPAÑA 188 6.3 ROMPER EL CERCO [BREAKING THE SIEGE] 192 6.4 THREE SIEGES 198 6.5 WE MADE THAT FILM; THERE IS NO FILMMAKER 202 CHAPTER 7: CONCLUSION 209 END NOTES 214 WORKS CITED 217 FILMOGRAPHY 226 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Center for the Study of Ethics and Human Values, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis for funding this dissertation research project. All research is much more collaborative than is usually admitted, and over the course of the last seven years many people have collaborated to produce this document. Bret Gustafson, my advisor and friend, has been my closest collaborator throughout this research. He has stuck with this project through all of its many iterations, and has supported me through all of my incarnations as a graduate student and colleague. Other members of my committee, Mary Ann Dzuback, Rebecca Lester, Derek Pardue, and Ignacio Sánchez Prado, have also followed me through the last seven years and have contributed more to this document from its inception than perhaps they realize. Peter Benson joined only recently, but has been no less influential. Patrick Eisenlohr, a committee member early in my graduate school career, was also incredibly influential in the early years of this project. Glenn Stone, although not a part of the committee, also helped form the structure of this research from its earliest days. My fellow graduate students, friends, and colleagues also played significant collaborative roles in forming this research. Without the deep engagement of Katie Hejtmanek, Lisa Isenhart, Meghan Ference, Anubha Sood, and Sean Gyshen Fennell, this dissertation would not have been possible. Thanks also to my parents, Gary and Katy Hinegardner, and my brother, Jeremy Hinegardner, for supporting me and asking the most difficult questions about this research. My career as an anthropologist began because of you: supporting trips to India and Japan as a child, encouraging me to report what I learned, and helping me to critically analyze the strange customs of the natives around us in rural Missouri. iv This research would also have not been possible without the support of my second family: the Ramos Amézquita family in Mexico City. For more than a decade, Ana Maria, Alejandro, Sandra, and Sergio generously invited me into their homes to stay for extended periods of time. This project began as conversations over your kitchen table, and is deeply indebted your patience, support, and compassion. My deepest collaborator in the writing process was my wife, Abigail Stone, who made the writing of this document more enjoyable and meaningful than I could have imagined. This dissertation was written under her financial, moral, and intellectual support. Abby worked hard on this dissertation, not just proofreading sentences and challenging ideas, but also in keeping together all of the peripheral necessities of life that fell away during key moments of the writing process. It is also because of Abby that the majority of these pages were written in the Djenné- Djenno hotel in Jenné, Mali, a place and time that provided more space, peace, clarity, tea, and lack of internet than most have the privilege of accessing while writing a dissertation. Finally, and most importantly, this dissertation was made in collaboration with filmmakers, distributors, activists, and other friends and allies of the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra. The ideas presented here are more those of Mario Viveros, José Luis Mariño, Salvador Díaz, and the people I call Maria T., Virgilio, and Humberto than they are my own. I often feel that to present them here as my own is an unforgivable act of protagonismo and appropriation. I put my name on this document not to claim it as my own, but to accept responsibility for where it may be lacking. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Social Change and Documentary Film in Mexico: Violence, Autonomy, and Cultural Production by Livia Katherine Stone Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology Washington University in St. Louis, 2012 Professor Bret Gustafson, Chairperson The use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media in the Arab Spring, #Occupy Wall Street, and Mexico’s #YoSoy132 student movement have all generated excitement about the new uses of digital technology in organized social movements. This dissertation concerns itself with media and social transformation, but recognizes that even as media content can have a deep impact on society and culture, it is ultimately human beings who create and use technology off screen for our own purposes. This dissertation focuses ethnographically on one social movement, the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (The Peoples’ Front in Defense of Land) of San Salvador Atenco on the outskirts of Mexico City, and their relationships with a range of national and international filmmakers. Through examining the daily practices of producing and distributing social documentary films, I show how people used media as an ethical and political practice to purposefully shape and transform face-to-face human relationships. I argue that filmmaking and distributing was one set of practices through which people attempted to cultivate a collectivist disposition called compañerismo, and through which they could build partial autonomies from the state and corporate capitalism. I argue that the vi historical shift from ‘resistance’ political practices to ‘autonomy’ practices represents a significant departure for contemporary transnational social movements, and signifies a trend away from a Marxist tradition of organizing and toward greater articulation with anarchist thinking and organizing. The cultivation of compañerismo is part of this shift and is indicative of a partial relocation of objectives away from institutional, legal, and policy changes and toward personal and collective transformations of self. I argue that the intersection between cultural production and self production is a crucial locus for examining how social movements help to bring about elusive social and cultural changes that exist outside the grasp of legal and institutional frameworks. These arguments build from and contribute to three large bodies of anthropological research: a political anthropology interested in social movements, a visual anthropology interested in media production, and a broad theoretical anthropological interest in transformations of self, society, and culture through practice. vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION In 2008 a mutual friend introduced me to Manuel,1 a young man around thirty who sold used LPs, cassette tapes, and VHS cassettes to pedestrian traffic near a busy metro station in downtown Mexico City. In the park across the street were more than a dozen vendors selling handmade bags, indigenous-looking clothing, and leather goods. On the side of the street where Manuel was located, the vendors sold more commercially manufactured goods. Each stall was a metal frame with tarps stretched over the top to provide shelter, and a piece of plywood supported by crossbars on which the vendors placed their goods. The vendor on the busy corner sold pirated commercial DVDs. The man next to him sold plastic alarm clocks. Manuel’s stall was at the other end of the block, wedged between the curb and a stall selling nothing but men’s socks and ties.

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