UC Santa Cruz

As we face a global crisis of democracy, this dissertation highlights the importance of visual culture in social justice movements, giving new dimension to the refrain: “This is what democracy looks like!” Visualizing Decolonial Democracy in the Oaxaca Commune analyzes the visual culture of the Oaxaca Commune, a 2006 popular uprising and ensuing social movement in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The Oaxaca Commune was a broad-based social movement aimed at changing the political climate of Oaxaca and addressing long-standing failures of and inequities within its representative democracy. I argue that visual culture projects were the driving force in envisioning, manifesting, and sustaining the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) and its compelling political model. APPO brought together over three hundred social, cultural, and political organizations for an experiment in what I term “decolonial democracy:” participatory democratic politics based in Indigenous communal practices, governance, and forms of resistance to colonialism and its heirs: imperialism, global capitalism, and neoliberalism.

This project is related to global trends in contemporary social movements waging experiments in participatory politics and direct democracy as strategies to combat racial, ethnic, and gendered oppression, austerity, corruption, poverty, and inequality. I signal how my case study fits into these trends while also attending to the specific visual dynamics of social movement culture and the particular geopolitics of Oaxaca. I analyze three visual culture projects initiated in the Oaxaca Commune: graphic art created by youth activists and artists in Oaxaca City art collectives; the People’s Guelaguetza Indigenous folk festival coordinated by APPO, the teachers’ union, and Oaxacan Indigenous communities; and television broadcasts produced by Oaxacan women occupying the state radio and television station. In varying and often overlapping ways, I argue, each visual culture initiative drew from and revised cultural, artistic, and political traditions to galvanize public support for APPO and the political changes it pushed for. The wealth of visual material animating the Oaxaca Commune made it clear that the Oaxacan people were not only protesting the injustices of the current political system, but were also actively prefiguring the kinds of participatory politics they demanded.