Citizenship and the Imperial City

Patricia M. Martin
Departement de geographie, Universite de Montreal, Montreal, Canada;
patricia.martin@umontreal.ca

Historically speaking, Oaxaca may be considered, in the provocative

phrase of Angel Rama (1996), a lettered city. The city was founded
in 1521 as part of the frenzied urbanization that characterized the
foundations of Spanish imperialism in the Americas. The contemporary
historic center of Oaxaca City was built in the now much admired
Spanish colonial grid-like fashion. This ubiquitous colonial landscape,
Rama argued, functioned not only as a material center of administrative
power, but also as the embodied imposition of a potent symbolic
order. Throughout the Spanish American empire, cities functioned
as sites of Eurocentric transculturation (Rama 1996:13). Through
the process of elite education and religious evangelism, Spanish
imperialism produced an urban ideal that remained immanently hostile to
surrounding territories and hinterlands. The symbolic order or cultural
map, represented by the lettered city established an enduring racialized,
cultural, and socio-economic hierarchy of value that continues to
work through many Latin American societies. Within this map the
written wordhence the lettered cityrepresented a certain kind of
education and a certain way of knowing, serving as a gate-keeper
to the power of the city. Even as the written word has had an evershifting institutional base (ecclesiastical; legal; literary; technical),
this form of social communication both legitimized and produced
colonial forms of rule that continued well into the post-independence
era.
As literary critic Jean Franco argues in The Decline and Fall of
the Lettered City (2002), the cultural maps that characterize contemporary Latin American society have profoundly shifted. Excessive
urbanization, the massification of popular culture, the dirty war, modern
authoritarianisms, and contemporary neoliberal development, all have
exploded this peculiar colonial map of cultured production and power.
In this regard, Oaxaca, a city best characterized by the ever-expanding
patchwork of informal and popular neighborhoods, is no exception.
It could be argued, nonetheless, that the specter of the lettered city

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still hangs over Oaxaca. Reflecting this, the popular insurgency that
characterized 2006 was caught between the socio-cultural formations of
the lettered city and its uncertain aftermath.
As individuals attached to the tourist sector will assert, Oaxaca lives
off her image. Indeed, contemporary tourism has reproduced with a
vengeance a nostalgic dream of the orders and cultures represented
by the lettered city. Tourists in Oaxaca readily buy access to fabled
colonial buildings in the heart of the city. The Camino Real hotel is
located in the Santa Catarina Convent that was built in 1576, while just
a few cobble-stoned blocks away, Santo-Domingo, one of the largest
historic Dominican monasteries in Mexico, has been lavishly restored
as a regional museum and ethno-botanical garden. In the colonial
romance of the city, furthermore, the wealthy buy continuous access
to a certain kind of indigenous cultural presencemost notably in food
cultures, artisan production, dance, and musicthereby staking out a
clear cultural and social order that consistently gestures towards forms
of colonial rule. Alongside this urban colonial dream, the continued
absolute negation of, and outright hostility towards, the political, socioeconomic, and cultural realities of the majority of Oaxacas peoples
endure.
In a myriad of ways, the popular movement that erupted in Oaxaca
in the summer of 2006 defied the symbolism and spaces of the lettered
city, suggesting that this colonial matrix still informs political cultures of
protest. Demonstrating intimate knowledge of the contours of Oaxacas
colonial urbanism, the movement progressivelyphysicallyoccupied
key spaces within the heart of the city, gaining de facto control of the
historic center and disrupting the social order of urban space. For a time,
the zocalo became a site that served popular politics. That the state public
teachers union was the catalyst of the popular uprising, placing the issue
of basic public education of Oaxacas rural and indigenous populations
at the heart of the city, marked a radical inversion of the symbolic (and
lived) social order that the lettered city signified historically. And, after
the police repression of 14 June, this popular occupation multiplied;
indigenous groups, students, and popular organizations became central
political protagonists demanding radical forms of political recognition
and inclusion.
The production of urban space works in complex tandem with
the production of social forms of communication, as Rama argues.
Thus, just as the popular insurgency sought to invert the meaning
and contents of the physical city, the movement worked as well
towards the clandestine appropriation of the media in order to
subvert one of the ordering principles of society (Rama 1996:38). This
clandestine appropriation began as early as 2005, when the teachers
union established an unauthorized radio station (Radio Planton) that
operated from the union headquarters downtown. As the movement

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expanded in June and July 2006, the use of the radio was accompanied
by the production of graffiti, political art, and the appropriation of
video technology: remarkable stenciled images appeared on walls
of colonial buildings; and the teachers made life-size papier mache
puppets used during the mega-marchas and later displayed downtown.
Throughout the summer of 2006, furthermore, street vendors in the
zocalo sold a DVD that pieced together video footage of key moments
in the popular movements evolution (the mega-marchas; the police
attack of 14 June; the popular guelaguetza). The same vendors projected
the DVD on TV screens on a daily basis. As events continued to
unfold, more footage would be added to the DVD so that an always
updated recounting of the events, presenting images that became
indelibly etched in peoples minds, was available in the zocalo. As
is well known, the media became an ever-escalating site of conflict
culminating with the intentional destruction of radio transmitters at
the top of el Cerro del Fortn; the destruction of Radio Universidad
(with acid); and the death of Brad Will on 27 October by paramilitary
groups working at the behest of the governor (see Margarita Daltons
contribution).
Thus, the multifaceted production of alternative and clandestine forms
of social communication sustained the popular movements physical
occupation of the city. This entire configuration, which succeeded in
challenging the enduring structures of the lettered city, rested on three
deep ironies. These ironies demonstrate, in turn, the complexities of
Oaxacan (and Mexican) politics in the contemporary era. The first great
irony is that the popular insurgency that characterized the Oaxaca
commune (see Hernandez Navarro 2006) acted upon a certain idea of
the city as polis, as a site through which citizenship could be constructed
and enacted. As is well documented, the movement remained adamantly
pacific in the face of repeated and multiple forms of state repression.
Decisions were made, furthermore, through marathon-length debates.
And though there were clearly social movement leaders, the movement
was undoubtedly based in an expansive form of participatory politics.
However, the de facto response to this demand for inclusion in the
city demonstrated, in turn, that the contemporary romance of the
colonial city is in fact propped by a political system willing to resort
to extrajudicial killings, torture and brutish police repression. A recent
human rights document produced by the International Civil Commission
for the Observation of Human Rights argues that that at least 23 people
have died as a result of the conflict and there are strong indications
that people have been disappeared. The report also documents a large
number of police detentions, characterized by a remarkable range of
illegal practices, as well as indiscriminate violence against the
civilian population of Oaxaca (ICCOHR 2007). Given the incredible
inaction of the federal government in the face of the conflict in

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Oaxaca, this violence was the only tangible political response to the
movement.
The second great irony, of course, is that the political mobilization
and repression in Oaxaca has occurred within the context of official
democratization of Mexico. In Oaxaca, as in Mexico more broadly,
the meaning of democracy is deeply contested. Throughout 2006 an
increasingly hard line pitted a very narrow enactment of electoral
democracy, embodied in officially produced voting results, against enactments of popular democracy, most meaningfully represented through
popular mobilizations in public space. As a result, those institutions,
individuals and interests that sought to fully legitimize the former
worked at the same time to de-legitimize and marginalize the latter.
Thus, though ostensively a local affair, the national struggle over the
meaning of Mexican democracy went right through the heart of
the Oaxacan conflict. Of course, the implications of the struggle
around the meaning and contents of democracy in Mexico is not
simply an issue of definition. As Greg Grandin (2006) has eloquently
argued, they swim in the currents of (post) Cold War geopolitics
and serve as a referendum on the directives of the Washington
Consensus.
The third great irony returns us to the city of Oaxaca and indicates
that the shifting nature of political power in Mexico (with its amalgam
of state violence and official democracy) is intertwined with the
geographical reconfiguration of power. When Ulisis Ruiz, the current
governor of Oaxaca, came to power in December 2004, one of the first
things he did was to commence the geographical reorganization of the
state government (Galvez de Aguinaga 2006). He closed the historic
governors palace that stands on the central square and converted it
into a museum of still undefined purpose. From that time forward, he
has ruled from a municipality that is located half an hour outside of
Oaxaca City. In a similar fashion, the local congress has been moved,
as has the attorney generals office, all into municipalities that lie on the
outskirts of the metropolitan area of Oaxaca City. One of the major
rationales for this new geography of rule was to bring an end to a
pattern of public protest that had become ever more endemic in the
historic center of the city. As many commentators have remarked,
Ulisis has maintained rule, governing from hotels, airports, and the
suburbs. The emergence of a phantom government that has in fact
left the city marks a definitive break with historical forms of rule
established through the lettered city, and signals the emergence of a new
geography of state power in Oaxaca. This move to abandon the city, to
marginalize the zocalo, has clear echoes at the national level, and bodes
an uncertain future for social mobilization and popular democracy in
Mexico.

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References
Franco J (2002) The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press
Galvez de Aguinaga F (2006) Ulisis, el mago que desaperecio los poderes. La Jornada
(online edition) 15 October. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/10/15/010a1pol.php
Accessed 28 January 2007
Grandin G (2006) Calderons inauguration behind closed doors: Midnight in Mexico
Counterpunch (online edition). http://www.counterpunch.org/grandin12012006.html
Accessed 28 January 2007
Hernandez Navarro L (2006) La Comuna de Oaxaca. La Jornada (online edition) 25
July. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/07/25/021a1pol.php Accessed 27 January
2007.
ICCOHR (2007) Preliminary Conclusions and Recommendations Regarding
the Conflict in Oaxaca. http://cciodh.pangea.org/quinta/070120 inf conclusiones
recomendaciones cas.shtml Accessed 27 January 2007
Rama A (1996) The Lettered City. Durham and London: Duke University Press


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