Tracing the flows of movement books

At the beginning of May, we had the chance to attend the book launch for the Mexican edition of Magalí Rabasa’s The Book in Movement at La Volcana, a social space in Mexico City founded in 2021 by three independent publishing houses (Bajo Tierra Ediciones, Tinta Limón and Traficantes de Sueños). Bajo Tierra Ediciones is the small editorial Rabasa mentions below; today the project is flourishing thanks to the persistence and political clearheadedness of everyone involved. The Book in Movement has become part of the same flows it describes, a truly remarkable feat. We share an excerpt with you below. -Eds.

Book excerpt • Magalí Rabasa • May 25, 2023 • Leer en castellano

After a series of trips to Bolivia, Perú, Colombia and Brazil during which I was beginning to trace a network of small publishing houses, I returned to Mexico City in 2008 to meet with the editors of a book that had piqued my curiosity. During one of the fundraising parties that was organized in their space in the Portales neighborhood, I met the members of an anti-capitalist youth collective that had just launched a small publishing house.

I was intrigued by the apparent anachronism of the production of print books, not only in the context of such a digitally oriented medium like hip-hop but also in the young activist scene that the publishers are a part of. The collective is made up of young people who, like me, were politicized at the turn of the twenty-first century and cite the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and the broader transnational alterglobalization movement as formative influences. 

Indeed, as Argentine militant theorist Verónica Gago writes, “the Zapatista uprising… frames an entire generation of activists at the planetary scale.” The Zapatistas, like other autonomous movements, make strategic use of the internet and other digital technologies not just as propaganda tools but as fundamental axes of their anticapitalist praxis.

I use the term “autonomous” to refer to movements that, distinct from their leftist revolutionary antecedents, are not defined by any ostensive category, like class, party, or identity. Rather, these popular movements and experiments with autonomous politics are defined by their practices, including self- organization, horizontalism, cooperativism, and mutual aid. 

In this way, the twenty-first century movements, which as many have said are everywhere,  are characterized by their shift away from programmatic and top-down approaches to political organizing and privilege dialogue and communication as their basic modes while working from the everyday to build prefigurative politics.

While there is a significant body of scholarship dedicated to analyzing the new Latin American movements, this North-South attention has replicated the kind of intellectual imperialism that the region’s scholars so poignantly denounce. Gago writes:

And precisely when Latin America was becoming a sort of vanguard scene of insurgency, its conceptual production remained marginalized and was only ever seen as in need of tutelage. As if what happens here in Latin America could not be understood as anything more than the experiential dressing for a bibliographical adaptation that follows the rhythm of “fashions” or dominant theories. 

What she signals here is the failure or, worse yet, refusal of academics to recognize and value the wealth of intellectual production being generated from Latin America. 

This not only perpetuates the dynamics of intellectual imperialism and what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls  “asymmetrical ignorance” that fields like postcolonial, subaltern, and decolonial studies so compellingly critique but also the troubling binary between thought and action. The movements that have brought global attention to Latin America have done so, in large part, because of their tremendously innovative and creative use of media in self- representation.

Medios libres (independent or free media) is the name given to the diverse and decentralized networks of media producers who participate in and accompany the autonomous movements. This phenomenon became most visible, starting in the late 1990s, through the open online platform known as Indymedia, which grew into countless locally coordinated webpages—Indymedia Chiapas, Indymedia Seattle, IndyBay, Indymedia Athens, and so on—that anyone could freely access and contribute to with text, video, photography, or audio. 

The abundance of online media has been crucial for autonomous movements, including Zapatismo, as it has enabled the creation of direct channels of communication with the world. In doing so, the movements also contest the silence and misinformation imposed and perpetuated by the “mainstream” or “commercial” media, often described as a cerco informativo/mediático (media/information siege or barrier). 

Digital and cybernetic technology is what allows communiqués and news to spread rapidly around the planet, as was the case with the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional’s (EZLN) “Declaración de la Selva Lacandona” (Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle) on January 1, 1994. 

But despite the vital place of medios libres in Zapatismo and the alterglobalization movements, there has long been a tension between the efficacy and reach of online media and the importance of face-to- face relations for building political networks desde abajo (from below).

In Toma los medios, sé los medios, haz los medios (Take the media, be the media, make the media), the Centro de Medios Libres in Mexico asserts:

To break with the information siege, the problem is not the machines, but the people who make them work. Communications are made by flesh and bones people, but we live in an era of love of machines that impedes us from communicating with each other. We’ve forgotten the taste of conversations in the park, in the stairs, or on a walk, and we think that this or that machine will make it so we can have efficient communi- cations. What is important is the human aspect, the new social relations and the street networks of communications, but we don’t look there anymore.

The “seduction of machines,” they caution, has created too great an emphasis on the tools of communication, eclipsing the vitality of the social relations that drive and shape them. The shift away from each other and toward machines, as they say, is a tension that must be recognized and interrogated critically. The Book in Movement represents an attempt to work constructively from that tension. 

It is about how an object—the print book—makes and is made of relations. 

Magalí Rabasa. The Book in Movement: Autonomous Politics & the Lettered City Underground. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.