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Atenco Lives! Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico by Livia K. Stone

2022; Wiley; Volume: 66; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tla.2022.0022

1557-203X

Richard Stahler‐Sholk,

Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

Reviewed by: Atenco Lives! Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico by Livia K. Stone Richard Stahler-Sholk Atenco Lives! Filmmaking and Popular Struggle in Mexico. By Livia K. Stone. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2019, p. 212, $39.95. Recent events from Rodney King to George Floyd have heightened awareness of the potential power (and limitations) of video documentation that exposes state repression. At the same time, social movements from Occupy to the Zapatistas herald new forms of grassroots struggle concentrating on transforming society from below rather than changing state structures. Livia K. Stone's Atenco Lives! is an incisive study of activist filmmaking surrounding the 2006 repression against the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (FPDT) in San Salvador Atenco, 20 miles from Mexico City. This is "a book mostly dedicated to arguing for the utility of film production and distribution as a means of social change" (168), although not in the ways we might assume. More than an examination of filmmaking, it is an ethnography of activism and a critical examination of the attendant ethical dilemmas, offering provocative reflections valuable to social movement scholars and activists alike. Atenco has become iconic in the history of popular organizing and state repression in Mexico, alongside the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student protesters in Mexico City, the 1994 Zapatista uprising and militarized response, the violent suppression of the teachers' movement and "Oaxaca Commune" in 2006, and the forced disappearance of 43 students from the rural teachers' college in Ayotzinapa in 2014. Atenco's ejidatarios had organized against an airport project in 2001–02 that threatened to displace them from their communal lands, in one of the first major successes against neoliberalism. When the FPDT mobilized to defend flower vendors from eviction from a public market in 2006, shortly after the Frente had hosted the Zapatistas on their "Other Campaign" across the country, the state responded with massive violence, leaving two dead and hundreds arrested, many tortured or raped by police. As Stone notes, "Atenco is primarily a struggle over who gets to decide the meaning and worth of the complex relationship between people and land" (29), emblematic of the ongoing clash between neoliberalism and autonomous community organizing. Chapter 1 considers the FPDT's symbolic language, focusing on the brandishing of the machete, which the mainstream media portrays as a weapon but which members view as a symbol of their collective defiance that Stone calls "armed nonviolence" (51). Chapter 2 scrutinizes three cases of activist filmmakers representing concentric circles of movement insiders to outside supporters. The camera, like the machete, is wielded as a symbolic weapon, albeit a double-edged sword as police use them for intimidation. Going beyond the Foucauldian concept of surveillance, Stone argues that the camera is multidirectional, as filmmaking involves policing by the state, by activists disciplining the state, and also internally [End Page 362] among activists enforcing community norms of behavior (87–88). When an internationalist filmmaker's carelessness in distributing his DVD about Atenco allowed PRD party opportunists to make multiple copies and circulate them with a partisan logo, he ran afoul of the norm of selflessness. Chapter 3 delves further into movement ethics and its denunciation of egoism and individualism, which one activist leader attributes to "the voracity of the neoliberal system" (94). A key argument of the book is that activists challenge this self-interested individualism (protagonismo) by developing a new collective subjectivity revolving around norms and practices of "selfless interdependence" (compañerismo) in their "prefigurative ethical strategy" of modeling alternative economic and social arrangements (110), highlighting what others call the politics of affect (Freya Schiwy, The Open Invitation: Activist Video, Mexico, and the Politics of Affect, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Thus, the power of activist videomaking is not so much in the product and its dissuasive impact on the state, or even awakening the consciousness of the uninformed, but in the process and space to strengthen movement solidarity. This is an interesting argument for autoconsumo, preaching to the choir (113). Chapter 4 focuses on the best-known Atenco video, "Breaking the Siege: Resistance and Autonomy," a collaboration between Canalseisdejulio and Promedios. Stone distinguishes between the former's resistance politics, seeking to...