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Maurice Rafael Magaña, "Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico" (U California Press, 2020)
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An interview with Maurice Rafael Magaña
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Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
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Sneha Anavaripu
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Welcome to the new Books Network.
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Sneha Anavaripu
Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Books in Anthropology, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I am Sneha Anavaripu, the host of this channel. Today I have the absolute pleasure of being in conversation with Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne, author of the fantastic new book Cartographies of Youth, Hip Hop, Punk and Urban Autonomy in Mexico, which is published by University of California Press in 2020. Dr. Maganya is a sociocultural anthropologist and assistant professor of Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona. Thanks so much for taking time out, Maurice. It's such an honor to have you on the podcast today.
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Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
On the contrary, Sneha, thank you so much for the invitation. I'm very excited to be speaking with you today.
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Sneha Anavaripu
Yeah, I'm so glad we could make it work. I'm sure both of our schedules were sort of really busy towards the end of the term or midterms, depending on the kind of academic structure your university is following. So I'm. I'm really excited to kickstart this conversation. And we do have a convention in your books network that we start out with getting to know our guests a little more. So I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, perhaps how you became an anthropologist.
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Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Sure, thank you. Yes, I think like many, many people who come into anthropology, it was certainly a bit of a circuitous route to getting here. You know, myself did not complete high school. You know, I joined the workforce as a teenager, ended up getting my GED and doing some community college here and there. And then once I, you know, decided that roofing houses and working at car washes was not, was not going to be, you know, the best long term career for me, you know, my body was definitely telling me that had a shelf life. So, you know, I decided to go to a four year, four year university with the intention of becoming actually a pilot. But it turns out that, it turns out that that's very expensive. To go to the best aeronautical universities requires quite a bit of money. And so I ended up just enrolling in University of South Florida, which was, you know, the state school closest to where I was living at the time. And I found anthropology through, you know, one of those career sort of guide reference books, you know, where you, you look up sort of what are your, what are your skills, what are your interests and what are some of the careers that, that might align with that. And you know, for me, I've always, I've always loved writing. I've always really been encouraged to, to, to write and to read. And having grown up both, you know, in the United States and Mexico and going back and forth my whole life, I knew that that was something that was really important for me to be able to continue to do, you know, as a professional. And so anthropology sort of, you know, check several of those boxes. And I took, took some anthropology classes at the University of South Florida and they gave me a very skewed view of what the, what the discipline looked like in a positive sense, I suppose. You know, I had quite a, quite a few professors and mentors of color and so it really helped me imagine myself as an anthropologist. And you know, after taking a couple classes, it was something that really spoke to me, resonated with me and, and so I went with it.
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Sneha Anavaripu
You know, I have to say that of all the interviews that I've done until now, this has to have been the, one of the most unique origin stories. And I'm so glad that you shared this. It says a lot about academia that someone like your story is so unique. Right. And yeah, thanks for, for sharing that. I'm also interested in another origin story and that's the one with, that has to do with your book. So how did cartographies of youth resistance originate? How did it unfold?
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Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Sure. So, you know, the book. The book, I think, is the result of a combination of, you know, the influence of my own biography as well as, you know, the networks and institution where I did my graduate studies and a certain amount of luck and of just serendipity in terms of, you know, where. Where the world was at when I. When I began my graduate studies. So I went into graduate school. You know, I started in the fall of 2006, and I went into it thinking, you know, that I was going to research social movements probably in Mexico. I had done some human rights work in Chiapas around the Zapatista movement and the, you know, paramilitarization of. Of. Of the state in response to try to squash the movement. And so I had, you know, I had those. Those interests in mind. My, you know, my. My family history, I think, very much led me in that direction. My. My father was a university student and a part of the 1968 student movement in Mexico City at the UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. And, you know, I very much grew up with stories of 1968 and of the, you know, the possibilities as well as the consequences of. Of rising up against the state and the brutal repression that was unleashed on my father's generation of young people. And so I very much grew up sort of with that in my. The seed was always planted there in terms of thinking about social movements and young people's participation in social movement. You know, often had conversations with my father about, you know, the, you know, the disconnect that he saw between my generation in the United States and how we responded to things like, you know, the first Iraq War and other things that, you know, that. That he imagined would have ignited a massive uprising and a massive sort of response, especially from students and young people. And he didn't necessarily see it. And so, you know, it was always a lot of this sort of. Well, you know, my, you know, in Mexico or my generation, there was kind of the. Both the generational thing, but also the, you know, the different national context and the different national political cultures, you know, was constantly sort of this discussion about these things. And so, you know, I was always interested in and thinking about some of these issues. And so while, you know, I went into my graduate program with the general idea that I wanted to study social movement in Latin America, probably Mexico, and probably the Zapatista movement, since I had some experience already working in some of those communities. Yeah, so I had that experience having worked in chatbots. And that's how I came to find my soon to be advisor. But then in the summer leading up to when I was going to begin the program, the Social Movement emerges in Oaxaca in 2006. And my advisor was in Oaxaca during that time. And so we exchanged, you know, some emails and it became pretty clear that this was a very. A very significant social movement. And, you know, it would just make. It would make a lot of sense for me to shift. Shift my focus there. And so, you know, that's how. That's how I ended up working in Oaxaca and, you know, being. Being interested in the social movement. My master's thesis really focused on the prominent role of the teachers union in that movement, which is sort of the more visible and well known, you know, kind of mobilizing force from that movement. And it was really through the. Through that work that I did with. With the teachers union and looking at the alliances that they made that led me to. To realize that the role of young people in the movement was. Was largely being either written out or in many ways trivialized in the emerging narrative of the social movement. And it was actually a teacher who really encouraged me to think about the prominent role and the important role that you've played in that. In that social movement.
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Sneha Anavaripu
Yeah. You know, on. In. On that note, I really wanted to know more about how you went about doing ethnographic work for this project. And I asked this since I was very intrigued by your proposition early on in the book that social movements don't really have a start or end date. Instead, you write, and so beautifully, that the. The energy that fuels mass mobilizations can be transformed, but not created or destroyed. So how did you go about studying this energy? And how does this approach change the way we think about studying social movements?
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Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Sure. Yeah. So, yeah, thank you for that question. That's really, you know, that's really the main argument in the book. Right. It's really about rethinking the parameters that we use to think about and analyze social movements. And that's one thing that became very clear to me as I was doing this research was that there was all of these competing stories about the movement and not just about who its protagonists were. Right. And who were the, you know, the. The main actors involved in the social movement. But also whether or not in 2007 and 2008 and the years that followed, whether or not the social movement still existed or whether the social movement had already ended. And, you know, there was really this idea that, well, maybe it might be useful here to give a little bit of a summary of the social movement, right? That really, that, again, is the jumping off point for the book. So it was a movement that in the summer of 2006, really started off as a teachers union strike in Oaxaca. This is an annual routine, right, where the teachers go on strike and set up an encampment in the main square in the zocalo of the capital city to sort of pressure the state government to negotiate new, you know, new contracts, new working conditions, new allocation of resources for schools and for students. And so, you know, that was the case again in 2006. But that year, instead of negotiating with the teachers, the governor decided to send in the police to clear the encampment, you know, in the middle of the night, violently, of course. And so that, you know, that immediately backfires. And, you know, thousands of Oaxacans rushed to the city center to help the teachers sort of reclaim the zocalo, reclaim the main square, and, you know, the police return to their barracks and refused to come out, refused to continue to repress the growing movement. And so this growing movement, you know, ends up maintaining, well, taking and maintaining grassroots control of the capital city and several municipalities throughout the state for almost six months. You know, the governor flees the state, takes much of his cabinet with him. Uniformed police officers are nowhere to be found. And, you know, in. In the absence of, you know, these formal institutions of the state, the movement created its own alternative institutions for decision making, for garbage collection, health care, security, all these kinds of things, radio, etc. And so that six months of control ends when the federal government sends federal police into essentially lay siege on the city and take back, take back the city for, you know, to put it under government control. And one of the main demands of the movement was the removal of the governor from office. And so since the governor was not removed from office, he finished out his term, the movement no longer controlled, physically the city because the police had taken it back. The sort of common sense and dominant narrative was that a movement was over once they lost control of the city, that it was a failure because the governor was able to finish out his term. And so then that's really where the intervention of the book comes in. It's sort of really questioning that neat sort of timeline and that neat sort of assessment of what success, what success looks like for a social movement. And so that's really the starting point of the book, because then the rest of the book, right, it's an ethnography of over 10 years of following these different spaces and collectives that Youth who participated in that initial six month experiment with grassroots democracy, direct democracy. What happened to them politically in that subsequent 10 years. And listening to, to those activists, they very much claimed that they were the social movement of 2006 and they were still active. The movement did not disappear, did not stop, had simply entered a different phase. It had transformed. Some folks left the movement, other folks joined, you know, but it was this continual, but it was a movement that was still alive, right, According According to them. So, you know, so, so I really took that seriously and started to think about, okay, how is it that this movement is still alive? What, what does that look like? And, you know, it didn't look like, you know, multiple years of non stop mass mobilizations and sort of these, these more recognizable forms of social movement activism. Those were more sporadic and they were kept alive through everyday, everyday forms of organizing. And so that really required me to pay attention to how the activists really harnessed that energy from 2006 and really created spaces and new forms of politics that allowed them to continue to be politically and socially active in between the moments of more, you know, spectacular social movement action. And so it was a real deep attention to the production of space and how youths were shaping space, transforming space, contesting space, et cetera. So, you know, it's sort of this ethnographic attention to space and also to, to culture. So ways that young people, through punk, through hip hop, through street art, were able to create these communities that were very much politically active, but are not defined solely by a political ideology or a political affiliation, but rather looking at how they're all mutually constituted.
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Sneha Anavaripu
Yeah, thank you for that. That was really, I think it provided a lot of context for the conversations that we will be having on the,
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Sneha Anavaripu
paraphrase, I guess I would say that the book in a way examines how indigenous and migrant youth in Mexico created meaningful channels for political and social participation in the context of what you term neoliberal militarization. Right. And what I found particularly compelling about the book was how you place this investigation in the context of urban social change in Mexico and of the enduring relevance of certain key urban public spaces like the Zocalo, the city center. So could you give us a sense of what neoliberal militarization is and how it's sort of key to understanding urbanization and city space in Mexico and maybe even beyond?
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Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Sure. Thank you. Yes. So neoliberal militarization is sort of what the. The term that I, that I use to try and get at how these various regimes of spatial and social order and control operate in Oaxaca but also elsewhere, right. And so for me, you know, for me in, in the book, I think about the. I think about the protagonists in the book as what I call the 2006 generation. And I call them the 2006 generation, both because, you know, they come of political age during the social movement that emerges in 2006, but also because 2006 marks really the. The escalation of the drug war in Mexico, right. And the escalation of the militarization of Mexican society and the militarization of. Of public space, the. And, you know, the. The repression of dissent, right? And so neoliberal militarization, you know, gets at. The, you know, gets at that way that space became really drastically notarized starting really in, in 2006, but also the sort of, the tension between that militarization of space and the repression of dissent with the fact that the Oaxacan economy relies very heavily on heritage tourism, right? And so that is, you know, you know, that's, that's. That's something that's not unique to Oaxaca or to Mexico, right? We increasingly see, you know, economies going all in on tourism, different kinds of tourism to sustain their economies. And that, that requires a very particular kind of space making and a very particular kind of packaging of places for tourists to come and experience a particular, you know, a particular kind of place. And in the case of Oaxaca, as the, you know, as the term heritage tourism implies, right, it's very much based on this sort of nostalgic, you know, commodification of indigeneity and of the sort of Spanish colonial past and the sort of folk and the folklore of. Of living indigenous people, right? And so it's this sort of spatial and temporal, this. This lodging of the living indigenous peoples that, you know, that live in Oaxaca from their heritage and from, you know, what they can. What they can offer in the tourist imaginary. And so neoliberal militarization is really, is really trying to get at the spatial manifestations of certain characteristic economic aspects of what neoliberalism looks like in Oaxaca and Mexico, coinciding with the drug war. It really, you know, escalates in 2006 and then how that's experienced and contested by what I call the 2006 generation?
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Sneha Anavaripu
Yeah, thank you. And going off on that, in the first chapter, you explore the cultural politics, space making within the 2006 social movement. And in particular, I was very intrigued by your discussion of what a city wide network of barricades did to the urban social fabric in the protests and I guess how they fostered a sense of comradeship and community and how they became. How the barricades were, became laboratories for radical imagination. Right. And I have to add here that I taught parts of this in a class I teach in urban sociology, and students were really taken by how it changed the way they thought about barricades in the city and the function of barricades in the city. Could you tell us a little bit about how and why barricades emerged as counter spaces and the intergenerational connections that they fostered in the. In this context of the social movement?
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Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Great, thank you. And I have to have to add just that, you know, I appreciate you teaching this work and it's always great to hear, you know, how students, how it resonates with students or what aspects sort of resonate with folks, students. So I appreciate it.
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Sneha Anavaripu
They loved it.
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Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Thank you. That's great. So, so, yeah, you know, the barricade, that's a great example, you know, I appreciate the question. That's a great example of what, you know, what this, you know, what these different conversations and conceptualizations actually look like on the ground and in the book. So the network of barricades emerges in the context of that six month grassroots control of the city where I mentioned that uniform police officers were no longer present. But that doesn't mean that policing was no longer present in their place. Paramilitary forces were regularly circulating in caravans throughout the city at night, attacking people who they presume to either be movement participants or even movement sympathizers, but also attacking key movement installations, for example, Community Run or the Social Movement Run radio stations. And so in order to defend against those paramilitary convoys, which people called caravans of death, they would erect every night this vast network of hundreds of barricades throughout the city in more central, heavily trafficked areas, as well as in neighborhoods, roads coming into the city, really a very, very expansive network of barricades. And these really became one of the most, I think, radically Democratic and diverse spaces for the social movement. You know, in, in 2006, there was, there was other more formal spaces like the assembly and, and things like that. But, but here in the barricades, it was really, you know, everyday people either in their neighborhoods or, or they would go to these key installations to, to protect them. And they were, you know, opportunities for folks to really come together in community around their, you know, their rejection of authoritarianism and violence as a way to control dissent. It was their way of protecting each other from violence. It was their way of talking about and thinking through the extraordinary events that they were. That they were living. You know, it was hours and hours and hours of socializing with neighbors that in many cases had rarely exchanged more than a hello previously. Right. And so these became, you know, both a space of constructing an emergent horizontal politics where there are no leaders, or better yet, where everybody is a leader and everybody makes decisions. The erection of these barricades was not something that was handed down from, you know, any sort of leadership or anything like that. These were grassroots decisions. And each, each barricade had its own political culture, had its own, you know, had its own particularities. They, they did not all look the same, they were not all run the same, but they, at the same time were all in conversation and trying to create a coherent strategy of self defense. And so it becomes really one of these sites where we get to see what a radical horizontal politics looks like. And then as I trace, as I trace throughout the book, that experience really radically informs very, very, very much informs the politics that this generation, 2006 generation, develops in the following years. And it also very much alters the political and social landscape of the city because there's all of these new networks and relationships that emerge in those spaces.
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Sneha Anavaripu
Mm, yeah. And you know, what I found very useful about your book is also how seriously you take the value about thinking about generations, but also about youth as a cultural category rather than a purely demographic one. And in the book, you develop this perspective further by showing us how youth and youth in your. In. In your book, they challenge this, the state and the settler colonial paradigm more broadly. And they insist that they're both urban and indigenous. So this insurgent identity, in a sense, is very specific to the 2006 generation. Right. And I absolutely loved your arguments and observations about how this generation of youth mobilize around collective indigenous identities that are tied to political consciousness, social commitments, and family histories. And the book then offers a very fresh take on what it means to transcend the boundaries between urban Rural, new, old, global, local. So could you tell us a little bit about how the politics practiced by the youth you studied could be classified as decolonial or decolonial anarchism? And how does this link to another concept you discuss in the book that is urban autonomy?
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Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Sure, yeah. So these are, you know, very, I think, important sort of political projects that, that I trace in the book. And they very much. They very much overlap, right. Urban autonomy and. And what I call in the book decolonial anarchisms. So the, I think we'll start maybe with urban autonomy, which is sort of, I think, the broader politics that I think encompasses more of the groups that I look at in the book. But this is very much a politics that draws a great deal of inspiration from the very rich history of organizing in Oaxaca specifically, but also throughout Latin America around indigenous autonomy. And so a lot of the youth that I highlight in the book are themselves migrants to the city or the children of migrants to the city from communities that practice a form of indigenous autonomy or have a history of struggle around indigenous autonomy. And so they have that as a very strong and present reference point. They also have, as a very strong reference point the struggle of the Zapatistas, who, again, are, you know, right next door in Chiapas, but who really took the struggle for indigenous autonomy, you know, to another sort of in a different context. They created institutions to practice indigenous autonomy outside of the power of the state. Right. And so in, you know, Zapatista territories, they came up with a way to practice indigenous autonomy that resonated, but also looked different from what indigenous autonomy looked like in the communities where a lot of these youth come from. And so then they sort of their political project becomes, how do we recreate our own form of autonomy from where we are, you know, from where we are situated, which is in an urban space. Right. And so then they're thinking about how, what does urban autonomy mean? What does it look like, how do we practice it, and how do we stay connected to these other struggles for autonomy without, you know, losing sight of the fact that our reality in the city is different, yet still, you know, the fate of non urban communities is still very, very much, very important, right. For their political projects. So it becomes this way to bridge, right, the urban and the rural manifestations of what autonomy might look like, as well as going beyond their. Their own communities. And so that is. That is a politics that. That really transcends many of spaces and many of the collectives that I look at in the book. And then the decolonial anarchisms is, is a more particular politics that emerges, you know, very strongly in the, within the punk movement, which is what they call themselves, El momento punk, which are, you know, the anarcho punk movement in Oaxaca. You know, that's, that's very much, very much defines its politics in terms of anarchism as well as some other collectives that, that identify with the anarchist tradition in Oaxaca found or represented really through like the Magon brothers Magonismo, which is another variant of anarchism. And so they practice these varieties of anarchism, but they actually offer, you know, alternative genealogies for anarchism. Because what they, when it comes down to it, they're, they're like, yes, we're inspired by Magon and we're inspired by, you know, the broader anarcho punk movement, which is a global movement. But really what we're, but really what we're speaking about are ways of governing and ways of organizing that are indigenous to our communities in Oaxaca. Right? And so they, you know, through conversations with leaders in their own communities, they really claim an anarchist politics as being something indigenous to the Americas and not coming primarily from Western thinkers and Western philosophers of anarchy, though they are very also well versed in that philosophy of anarchism. They're saying this informs how we practice our anarchist politics today. But this is not, this is not the origin. Right? We're really focusing on what Zapotec and Oaxacan indigenous intellectuals call comunalidad, which roughly translates to indigenous communal life. And that is a way of governing and a way of, of relating that is based in community, it's based on consensus, it's based on non capitalist forms of exchange, of mutual aid, of reciprocity. And that's the kind of anarchism that they're practicing. And so to sort of give it a name, I call it decolonial anarchism. And so that is part of an urban autonomous politics. But it's a more particular one that not all of the groups share. But the more general sort of umbrella of urban autonomy I think is one that unites various groups. In the book Ryan Reynolds here from
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- [43:07]
Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
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Sneha Anavaripu
yeah, that's. That's really helpful. And I think very concisely, you covered a lot of ground there, so I really appreciate that. And the second half of the book, so to Speak, discusses the role of what you call rebel aesthetics in the collective practices of activists and artists and the ongoing resistance to neoliberal militarization. I found the writing to be really vivid, and I often felt like I was being pulled into the scenes. And, you know, I think it's a mark of excellent ethnographic work. While I think, and I do know that it's quite impossible to capture the ethnographic nuances in an interview like this one, I was still hoping that you could share a couple of instances from your field work to tell our listeners why paying attention to rebel aesthetics matters to understanding how youth politics in Mexico works.
- [44:05]
Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Sure. Thank you. Yeah, so that's. That's, you know, that's another one of the, you know, the concepts that I develop in the book that I think is really important for understanding the politics that youth are presenting to us. And that I think is really important to take seriously. And so when I talk about rebel aesthetics, I'm referring to collective practices through which activists and artists give visual form to their social and political imagination and sensibilities, and which open up space for others to imagine alternatives to the dominant social and spatial order. Right. And so this, you know, encompasses, you know, some of those more traditional social movement actions that disrupt and reconfigure space, such as roadblocks and marches and encampment. But it also, you know, it also includes artistic interventions in space such as, you know, anti government graffiti, you know, murals that depict, you know, perhaps a utopian vision of an alternative way of imagining the city. It includes celebrations in the city streets. So as a way of capturing these different manifestations of how youth activists and artists are really giving form to their politics and to their sensibilities that, you know, that's what I call it rebel aesthetics. And I think that is a, you know, it's. It's an. It's an intervention that I felt was necessary to make because oftentimes some of those, you know, some of those manifestations are. Are. Are trivialized or they're not understood as being part of a larger project or part of a, you know, a longer history of organizing. Right. So where you could just see some of that anti government graffiti and just be like, oh, that's vandalism or that's, you know, that's just one person's, you know, grievance or something of that nature. But really trying to understand the way that that is connected to. To a collective struggle and how it's connected to the more recognizable, you know, manifestations of dissent, such as the encampment and the march and things like that. And so it's really trying to understand how these different ways of intervening in space and trying to create alternatives are connected. And that's really important when it comes to trying to understand the politics, not just of youth, but of really, you know, of any marginalized group who does not have the political capital to be able to pull off, you know, massive actions over time, where it comes at too great of a cost. There's a time for those massive mobilizations, but they're also not sustainable. And so instead of seeing those as the only ways of being active, it's important to also kind of get at the nuance of. Of how these other forms of descent are connected to those. And it's also really important in the context that I described earlier, of neoliberal militarization, where the policing of dissent just makes it really impossible to maintain those more massive actions and mobilizations. And so it really comes from that sort of need to understand how marginalized actors and youth in particular, in this case, disrupt and expose the cracks in what otherwise seems to be a controlled sort of environment or of a city and of a space that's under government control. Right. Or that is a place for tourism and a place for the extraction of heritage for the consumption of others. Right. It's understanding that there's still, beneath the surface, there is a lot happening. Right. And so it's a way of sort of exposing that.
- [49:32]
Sneha Anavaripu
Yeah. And, you know, I really appreciated how in the final chapter, you kind of trace the formation and circulation of two graffiti art, graffiti crews, the city, and the politics of the local punk movement. And you. You also go beyond glorifying, I guess, these political engagements, and you show the kinds of challenges that come up in sustaining these. These engagements. Right. So I would love for you to tell us a little bit about what kinds of challenges, limitations there are and how they shape the trajectories of these activists and artists that you spend time with.
- [50:10]
Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Yeah, thank you for that question. I think that's a really important part of the story. And really, the final chapter, and in the conclusion, I try and sort of see how the different groups that I, you know, that I talk about as being part of this 2006 generation. How. How they fared differently, right? They fared differently in ways that perhaps were. Were predictable, if. If you're familiar with where they were before 2006. And so, you know, in. In your. In your question, you're. You're bringing to, I think, to. To the front here kind of the. The distinct trajectories between the. The punk movement and, you know, what. What we could call post graffiti street artists, right? So street artists in this case, who very much began as graffiteros, as graffiti writers, and continue to be graffiti writers, but have also developed, you know, a very impressive repertoire of art that includes, you know, really elaborate, beautiful murals as well as, you know, installation art and wood carving and all kinds. You know, they're very diverse and skilled group of artists, but they have very distinct trajectories. Anybody who has been to Oaxaca in the last 10 years, 12 years even, would know street art is very visible in the city. You know, it's a tenuous. You know, it's a tenuous relationship again because of the way that the city is marketed for heritage tourism. It's part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. The city center is. And so, you know, there's definitely a complicated response relationship. But. But street art is very much part. You know, has. Has been. Has been incorporated right, into part of what the tourist landscape looks like. People go to Oaxaca, you know, some go for. For the folklore, some go for the radical, revolutionary street art. Some go for both. Some go for the beaches. But the. The point is, I have been sort of incorporated and, you know, there's street art collectives and crews that, you know, have been very savvy in, you know, capitalizing on that. There are some who, you know, are very much part of that dominant economy now. There's others who maybe have one foot in, one foot out, and there's others who reject that, right. And who refuse to be part of that market. But there is sort of a legitimacy and certain institutional recognition of the work that they do, right? And that contrasts, you know, that contrasts quite sharply with the fate of the punk movement, right? The anarcho punk moves. You know, they very much are. You know, they were marginalized, and as I. As I, you know, document in the book, they were marginalized within the broader movement. They did experience a certain liminal elevation of status as a popular security force, right? They were a group who was used to, you know, having an antagonistic relationship with the police. They were used to, you know, being harassed and beaten and arrested by the police just for practicing Their, you know, their subcultural practices. Right. Having music concerts or distributing their zines. And so when the movement emerges, they were at the front lines, and in many cases, they protected teachers and other older folks in the movement by really forming the front line when police and paramilitaries were attacking the movement. And so they were. They were temporarily, you know, recognized and respected for that. But over the years, you know, their refusal to. To play sort of respectability politics, their refusal to tow any kind of. Of party line or of really being incorporated into a system that they, you know, want to see overturned. You know, they. They are very much, again, still marginalized. Right. And so they don't have spaces in the city center like some of the, you know, street art collectives, for example. Right. They're not part of the tourist imaginary. And there's different ways that that tension sort of emerges. In the book, I document some of those moments where that temporary elevation, status elevation, you know, begins to crack. And, you know, it. Some of it is very familiar to, to folks who, you know, who are part of social movements or pay attention to social movements. You know, the ways, the ways that protests are policed not just by law enforcement, but also by members of the movements themselves. What is. What is, you know, an appropriate way to mobilize? What is an appropriate way to protest? You know, is it okay to tag, you know, the storefronts of multinational corporations? Is it okay to break windows? Is it okay to throw rocks, et cetera? Right. So. So those kinds of tensions, you know, play out in. In the book and, and the, The. The consequences that we do see very different trajectories for these different groups.
- [57:46]
Sneha Anavaripu
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a, That's a perfect note to end this really stimulating and interesting conversation on. But before we do so, I do have one last question for you, and it's. I'm sure we would all love to know what, what you're working on currently and what can we hope to read by you in the near future. And I realize that I'm asking this at a time where the world seems to have, well, if not shut down, slowed down. And so I'm curious to know how the pandemic has affected your future research plans and how you've been. What you've been working on.
- [58:24]
Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Yeah. So I think. I think by the time that this podcast is published, I should have an article. An article that's coming out that should be published by then as well that comes from this next project that really looks at hip hop culture production and murals in Los Angeles as a way of sort of understanding a, you know, a multiracial, anti racist sort of politics that black and brown artists and activists are, have been engaging in. That's particular to, to Los Angeles. And so it's really looking at a relational formations of race framework to understand these grassroots theorizations of race and difference and of solidarity. That's going to come out in the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies in the next couple weeks now. And that's connected.
- [59:49]
Sneha Anavaripu
That's awesome. Congratulations.
- [59:52]
Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Thank you, thank you. I'm really excited about that article and that project. And it relates to a larger project that's trying to think about youth culture production in a more transnational space. Thinking about murals, hip hop, also use of social media to think about the ways that racialized youth are really theorizing different politics, different ways of understanding race and difference. And then sort of parallel to that, I also have a couple of chapters in books that will probably be coming out maybe next year so that look a little bit more deeply at this sort of issue of heritage tourism and street art and other kinds of youth politics, that sort of contest, contest the ways that space is made, the way that space is imagined and experienced. And so sort of thinking a little bit more deeply about that intersection of heritage tourism and street art is something that obviously emerges from the book, but that I'm trying to think about more. And one of those is the co author, co authored piece with my colleague Sochir Flores Martial, who's a Zapotec art historian. And so that's also a really exciting piece that I'm working on right now that hopefully will be coming out in the next year or so.
- [61:51]
Sneha Anavaripu
Yeah, I mean, I'm looking forward to reading all of this and more by you. And thanks again for taking time out. I can't emphasize how much I really enjoyed your book and I can't wait to teach more of it and hopefully cite it. And yeah, congratulations on a fantastic book.
- [62:11]
Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Thank you so much. Neha. I really, really enjoyed this conversation with you and you really helped me also think about the work and a little bit of a different perspective. So thank you for that.
- [62:24]
Sneha Anavaripu
That's always great to hear and stay safe and take care.
- [62:28]
Dr. Maurice Rafael Magagne
Thanks, Sam.