Mauser in the Bibioteca Social Reconstruir (BSR) in 1997

From AnthroSource May 20, 2025

ABSTRACT

Autogestión (self-management), has been a popular articulation of radical politics since its emergence in the 1960s. This article examines how Mexico City's anarcho-punk scene transformed autogestión in the 1990s from an anarcho-syndicalist principle into a unique ethical practice detached from industrial material production. It was then popularized and made more mainstream through university rock festivals. As these were Zapatista benefit concerts, autogestión became inadvertently attached to Zapatismo and detached from anarchism and punk. This history is a crucial one for understanding the political development of an entire generation of the political left in Mexico City who were young in the 1990s. This article presents materials and oral histories at the intersections of punk and Zapatismo that are broadly relevant to an understanding of Mexican social movements but are not widely known or accessible. It is essential for understanding how autogestión practice and discourse is deployed in the 21st century.

 

1 Introduction

In the video footage, taken in 1997 by Teresa Carvajal Juárez, a young man, 22 years old, leans casually on a wooden table full of books. A dark cloth holds his short dreadlocks away from his forehead, a septum piercing along the bridge of his nose between his eyes (Figure 1). He speaks in a low, quiet voice. He fails to suppress a grin when he identifies himself as “Mauser” (a “Mauser” is a German-engineered firearm). Carvajal asks how many punk collectives are in and around Mexico City, and Mauser answers that many of the collectives aren't known but are “generating the idea of punk counterculture or even already the idea of autogestión (self-management).” She asks if autogestión is an alternative and he answers,


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Mauser in the Bibioteca Social Reconstruir (BSR) in 1997. Still from video footage taken by Teresa Carvajal Juárez.

Yes. I think that throughout the years, there have been many dogmas. Many ideologies have been seen to not work very well. And I think that anarchism, autogestión, remains standing against all this. I think it is a way of organizing without the need of anyone telling you what to do. I think that it is necessary for us to take control of our own lives and not allow others to decide for us what is up to us to decide. And to generate solidarity and mutual aid in general, beginning with yourself and then with our surroundings in the house, the family, in general. With friends.

 

In this short speech, Mauser demonstrates that for him, the political principle of autogestión is nearly synonymous with anarchism and refers to a non-dogmatic ethical practice beginning with oneself and reaching outward to create non-hierarchical interdependence in every human relationship.

Mauser's sense of autogestión is distinct from the vast majority of the scholarship and activism surrounding the principle throughout the world (Guérin 1970; Dolgoff 1974; Arvon 1980; Vieta 2021; Harbi 2022). The term mostly denotes a workplace that is run nonhierarchically by its workers, without bosses. This article examines how the political principle of autogestión came to have this divergent, more expansive ethical meaning in Mexico City. I argue that it has everything to do with members of Mexico City's anarcho-punk scene, like Mauser, adapting the concept to their unique anti-capitalist and artistic cultural production sensibilities. It was then popularized and detached from anarcho-punk through a hybrid rock music scene that, because of widespread Zapatista benefit concerts, attached the concept to Zapatismo instead in the 1990s.

This specific recent history of transformation is important for several reasons. First, autogestión continues to be popular (see L'Association Augestion –2022; Vega 2019; González Lozada et al. 2020), but scholars and activists sometimes seem to be speaking past one another while using the same vocabulary. An understanding of its multiple uses and how they are connected will aid those attempting to understand the context of 21st century political projects that employ autogestión as an ideological framework and political praxis. Second, the story of autogestión in Mexico City is a crucial one for understanding the political development of an entire generation of the political left in Mexico, whose politics were formed in the late 1990s in the context of punk rock and Zapatismo. This article presents some specific materials and oral histories at the intersections of punk and Zapatismo that are broadly relevant to an understanding of Mexican social movements but are not widely known or accessible. Last, I believe this history to be an enlightening case study for those interested in processes of popularization and the mainstreaming of radical politics in general.

2 1996–2024: Context and Methods

I came to investigate autogestión at the end of the research for my previous book (Stone 2019) about the famous anti-neoliberal movement, el Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (FPDT) of San Salvador, Atenco. Around 2010–2012, I noticed that a large number of the collectives visiting the FPDT from nearby Mexico City were calling themselves autogestivos. I, a North American anthropologist well-versed in 20th-century Marxist literature, understood the term as an anarchist signifier. However, when I spoke with the colectivos autogestivos, people told me they were not anarchist but merely autogestivos, drawing inspiration from the Zapatista indigenous movement and the 1999–2000 student strike of the national university (la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México or UNAM). Having closely followed the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) since the 1990s and being a college student in Mexico during the 1999–2000 strike (and paying attention), I found the claims perplexing. I didn't recall autogestión being a common language of the strike, and an extensive archival search corroborated this memory. Neither can it be found in any of the wealth of documents and speeches emanating from the EZLN for the last 30 years.1 More puzzling still, how could one be autogestivo and not be anarchist?

The present article is part of a much larger project attempting to solve this puzzle. In the piece of research presented here, I concentrate on a crucial moment of transformation for autogestión discourse in the late 1990s. Prior to the 1990s, autogestión as a political principle was closely tied to anarcho-syndicalism (Bookchin 1979; Arvon 1980). By the 2000s, the concept in Mexico City was popularly associated with Zapatismo instead (Green 2018). However, the indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas was not using the language of autogestión to describe themselves, and the transformation was almost entirely confined to the Mexico City area. The much more well-known literature of autogestión, concerned with Argentina's recuperated workplace movement of the early 2000s (Sitrin 2006; Vieta 2021) retains the principle's anarcho-syndicalist sensibility. How and why did the term transform, and why only in the Mexico City area?

Methodologically, this research is what might be called an anthropological history. I am an anthropologist, but as the timeline of my research ages, the project has begun to teeter into history. The research is based on interviews, informal archives of participants (like the video of Mauser cited above), the archives of Mexico City's anarchist library, the Biblioteca Social Reconstruir (BSR), and my nearly 30 years skirting the edges of anti-neoliberal and anti-capitalist social movements in Mexico. I conducted the interviews between 2015 and 2023 with people involved with colectivos autogestivos in Mexico City, its punk scene, and its anarchist networks. We talked a lot about what we were all doing in the 1990s and early 2000s, a topic my fellow Gen Xers were very interested in. The BSR has probably the largest collection of Mexican punk zines in existence (from the 1980s to today). I went through every one of their hundreds of zines, as well as additional training materials, political posters, and pamphlets held in their collections to get a sense of the timeline for punk political discourse. The BSR is not just a repository for this history but takes an active part in creating it. I also used the informal zine collections of participants and the digital collections of Museo Universitario del Chopo.2

It is worth noting, perhaps, that I am not punk. I was not aware when I began this research that it was about punk. I will leave it to others to decide whether I deserve the title of anarchist, but I suspect not. I certainly did not come to this research as an anarchist with any political or ideological agenda. I am merely an anthropologist, a now middle-aged, lefty North American dyke, who has a fairly long history now in Mexico City and who has taken political and professional note of the concept's portability, transformations, and popularizations. I believe that this anthropological history will be useful to others, many of whom I hope may be more punk and more anarchist than I.

3 Autogestión Basics for the Uninitiated

There has been extensive radical literature on the principle of autogestión (Spanish) and autogestion (French) since the 1960s. It is a radical code word, a positioning. “They become a possibility of AUTOGESTIVE participation for students and faculty” a 1983 zine exclaims, “ALL ACADEMIC POWER TO STUDENTS AND TEACHERS! […] VIVA LA AUTOGESTION!” (Acracia No.5, emphasis in original).3 The term is dropped—thrown really—as a radical statement of where the power and force of a movement come from.

The principle is generally translated into English as self-management, as in a factory wherein workers manage themselves without bosses. As others have also pointed out (Vieta 2014; Greene 2016; Green 2018; Tatro 2022), the English translation does a poor job of communicating the term's tone. In 2025, the translation also has the ring of neoliberal subjectivity about it. Vieta suggests conceptualizing autogestión as “self-gestation—to self-create, self-control, and self-provision; in other words, to be self-reliant and self-determining” (Vieta 2014, 783). The Spanish verb gestionar is certainly more active than the English verb manage. It also has the sense of gathering or generating rather than simply controlling (gestionar funds).

Another problem is that the auto does not imply a subject as does the English self.4 It certainly does not imply a singular, individual subject. Auto merely makes the word grammatically reflexive: auto-generating, auto-governance. Green suggests grassroots control as a translation (2018, 354). Many autogestivos in Mexico City told me the best English translation is DIY, a topic I take up below. Nevertheless, when the term emerged in the 1960s, a decision was made to translate the term as “self-management” and so, in the world of keywords, we are stuck with it.

In the larger project, I contest the commonly held belief about where the term comes from, and so I will not repeat the apocryphal history here (Stone 2024). However, it is relevant to note the term was adopted in Spanish from French and was a centerpiece of Algeria's first independent socialist government (1962–1965). It was used among radical networks of activists during the 1968 student movements in France, especially those who had militated in Algeria (e.g., Michaelis Raptis/Michel Pablo, Daniel Guérin). It was also popularized by Situationist International (Knabb 2024), especially Raoul Vanegeim (2012 [1967]), sometimes under his pseudonym Ratgeb (1974) and the scholarship of Henri Lefebvre (2009). In the 1970s, autogestion was adopted as a central principle of some very important French unions, the French Socialist Party (Arvon 1980, 39–45), and a small but enthusiastic number of scholars (Guérin 1970; Dolgoff 1974; Mintz 2013 [1976]; Guillerm 1979; Arvon 1980). In Mexico, it is largely associated with the famous author/activist José Revueltas and his political writings during Mexico's own student upheavals of the late 1960s and 1970s (Revueltas 1978; Draper 2018).

4 1987–1992: Mexico City Punk Becomes Anarcho-Punk

Union activists and scholars seemed to largely tire of the term in the 1980s. An examination of punk fanzines in the late 1980s and 1990s is instructive as to the timeline of when anarcho-punks in Mexico City picked up the term to reinvent it for themselves.

The punk scene in Mexico City was contemporaneous with the punk scenes in London and New York at the end of the 1970s, but primarily among wealthy young people with the funds to purchase their Doc Martens and Sex Pistol LPs abroad (Urteaga Castro-Pozo 1998, Tatro 2022). After reading hundreds of punk zines in different collections, it is clear that punk fanzines began to emerge in the mid-1980s in Mexico City, and when they did, they were almost entirely about the music. They rarely touched on political themes. In the environment of Mexico City, in which all rock scenes were largely underground, these fanzines were a primary source of information about bands and music venues.

The zines started to become more political and overtly anarchist starting in 1987.5 Interviews with bands started asking what they thought about the absence of women in the scene, homosexuality, vegetarianism, or about bands’ politics in general. This timeline is consistent with Poma and Gravante's (2016, 445) assessment that punk in Mexico City emerged in the mid-1980s and Tatro's (2014) assertion that this is when punk in Mexico became more political and working class. Tatro (2022) enumerates that the oral history of the punk scene itself locates its origins as working-class street gangs (chavos banda) of the 1980s.

A 1987 fanzine (Caramelo No.6) is one of the very first that I found to mix its band interviews with political essays and to report on a political march. The march was to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlaltelolco student massacre. The zine laments that the annual march had become too “institutional” and that in the march

various punks and anarchos found each other and around thirty of us with the Ⓐ out front, we organized our own little happy, fresh, lighthearted march. […] This was not taken well by the organizers or by the Marxist-Leninists or the “conscious revolutionaries” who were fuming with dirty looks at the “chaotic, unconscious and reactionary anarchists” or the “lumpen proletariat chavos banda provacateurs” […] They expelled us from their contingent for being rebellious and unorderly!!! […] The important thing is that every day there are more banda that realize the situation that we live in and who think that the alternative is not going to come from any political party, union, or anything but the autogestión libertaria that with time will see results.

 

This passage is a significant historical nexus on a few levels. The account efficiently describes the slippage between youth street gangs (chavos banda, banda, lumpen proletariat) and identification as “punks and anarchos.” Furthermore, it sees autogestión not only as a signifier of being independent from political parties (which was part of autogestión's 1960s meanings) but also as independent from union organizing (which was not). In 1987, punk was becoming working-class, politicized as anarcho-punk, and the principle of autogestión was already in at least some people's vocabulary as part of a punk critique of the established political left.

Caramelo was part of a small group of increasingly political fanzines at the end of the 1980s, appearing in each other's publications through interviews and notices. This group included the collectives Contraviolencia and Colectivo Cambio Radical Fuerza Positiva (CCRFP), members of which went on to make the long-lived zine and collective Brigada Subversiva. All these collectives were also meeting every Saturday at Mexico City's rock market, el Tianguis del Chopo, according to taglines and points of contact referenced in the zines themselves.

Caramelo No. 7 (April/May 1988) carries an interview with the CCRFP, who say that they met in 1987 messing around (cotorreo) in El Chopo and were made up of 30 or 40 people who came together to make zines and organize concerts, but that now they were dedicated to “the spreading of punk culture and ideology” and doing workshops on practical skills and artistic production. The CCRFP zine from June 1988 (No. 3) describes that:

The collective has projects for overcoming economic and personal [obstacles], like putting on workshops about silk screening, carpentry, beauty culture, cabinetry, etc. that we have a disposition for and to demonstrate to ourselves that the collective is for creating and not destroying like the majority of the people think. […] The association has anarchist tendencies because we believe that we are capable of governing ourselves without need for the repression that current governments use.

 

This is a piece of text that describes what would be called 10 years later proyectos autogestivos, but in 1988 was inconsistently using the term. Caramelo and Contraviolencia were using the term autogestión, but the CCRFP wasn't yet and was even only very cautiously beginning to identify as anarcho-punk.

A 1989 issue of Contraviolencia (No. 6) identifies itself politically as Magonista after Ricardo Flores Magón. The editorial essay goes on to articulate what it sees as the three foundations of Magonismo and carries them forward into its own punk proposal.6 These three proposals might be shortened to the principles of (1) collective organization, (2) a nonhierarchical ethic, and (3) the production of alternative/community media. These three aspects of the anarcho-punk ethic articulated in 1989 are quite accurate to the practices and ethic surrounding autogestión at the beginning of the 21st century.

The early 1990s saw an explosion of anarcho-punk zines and a proliferation of the discourse of autogestión. The year 1992 was the 500-year anniversary of Columbus's initial voyage to the Americas and spurred a political response across the rapidly increasing number of zines and their increasingly precise politics that was disgusted by the events celebrating the anniversary rather than condemning or mourning it. I have found very few zines after 1992 that didn't mix its interviews with bands and concert announcements with anarchist political essays.

Part of what was happening between 1987 and 1992 that turned punk into anarcho-punk was the contact between Mexico City's old guard of anarchists, many of whom were Spanish exiles, and the new punk generation. The BSR was an active participant in the politicization of the punk scene. It began as the library of one individual, Ricardo Mestre, who was a militant in the Spanish Civil War. He and other gentlemen Spanish anarchists gathered in that era for a weekly tertulia at the Café La Habana downtown Mexico City. Mestre founded the library across the street from La Habana when he was hospitalized suddenly and realized that his large collection of anarchist materials might be lost to obscurity if he did not do something with them before his death (Mestre 1999, 13).7

Tobi and Martha, two of the subsequent caretakers of the BSR after Mestre's death in 1997, were crucial to translating the early 20th century anarchism of Mestre into something more relevant for Mexico City's anarcho-punks. Martha and Tobi, sometimes called Tobi Hendrix or Tobi Libertario, are not my pseudonyms but the apodos that they are each well-known under. I was able to interview Tobi in 2014 near the beginning of this research.8 When I came to the BSR in 2022 wanting to peruse their fanzines, it was under the tutelage and grace of Martha, who sat with me around the single table in the BSR going through box after box, producing additional materials here and there to show me something, and occasionally instant messaging or calling someone who was part of the scene to answer my questions.

Tobi told me he went to the tertulia to learn about anarchism and found Mestre because of the Sex Pistols song “Anarchy in the U.K.” Various people told me that Mestre was initially very critical of the punks who came to the library because of the state of their clothes and hair, but he was open-minded and generous enough to help them regardless. Through Mestre, Tobi became very well-studied in the classical anarchist texts and well-versed in making fanzines. The BSR has such a large library of fanzines in part because many of them were made in the BSR using their typewriter, and later, their photocopier. Some of the fanzines in the collection are the original pasted-together proofs. The library was a literal space of transference for autogestión from syndicalism to punk long before Mestre's passing.

5 1992–1994: Zines, the BSR, and an Important Pamphlet

Martha told me that she came to the library in about 1992. She was working on a fanzine and was looking for a typewriter to use. Her friend Tobi knew that there was one at the BSR. Martha told me it was at the BSR that she first encountered the idea of autogestión, and it happened immediately. Mestre, she told me, was immersed in issues of anarcho-syndicalism.

Martha planned on leaving the BSR when the fanzine was finished, but during her time there, she and Mestre had gotten to know each other. Mestre, 86 in 1992, had lost enough of his sight that reading was difficult for him. When she tried to say goodbye, Mestre asked her to stay and read the newspaper to him instead. For the next several years, they fell into the custom of her reading to him. While she read, they also discussed the ideas and politics of the material.

She told me that very early, around 1992 or 1993, she and Tobi and some others began distributing a tri-fold pamphlet they produced on the principle of autogestión (Figures 2, 3, 4), published under the collective name of Acción Libertaria with the name and contact information for the BSR on its back. Members of the BSR have distributed this pamphlet ever since. The graphic of the pamphlet is filled with a clipart raven that Martha told me was a symbol of Tobi. They thought the raven looked a lot like Tobi (I think so too), and so they used it as the visual narrator of the pamphlet.


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Front of autogestión pamphlet produced by Acción Libertaria. Author image, copyright free material.

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Inside view of Acción Libertaria's autogestión pamphlet. Author image, copyright free material.

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Complete back view of Acción Libertaria's autogestión pamphlet. Note that the contact information, both email and physical address, are no longer current in 2025. Author image, copyright free material.

There is no more cogent or precise definition of autogestión in its unique Mexico City form than is articulated in this pamphlet, which has been published and distributed continuously for the better part of 30 years now. It has also existed (with a different cartoon raven) on various websites of the BSR throughout the years. I don't think it an exaggeration to suggest that this pamphlet and its specific language have played a key role in Mexico City's unique rearticulation of autogestión as a political principle, converting its anarcho-syndicalist past (that Tobi and Martha were well aware of and is referenced in the text) into a punk sensibility. Several people who I interviewed gave me definitions of autogestión that seem to be lifted directly from the pamphlet. For example, Mauser's words about generating solidarity and mutual aid “beginning in yourself, and then with our surroundings in the house, the family” are almost word-for-word from the pamphlet.

According to the pamphlet, autogestión is the practice of anarchism; a practice that is composed of five principles, each one of which is just as important as the others: direct democracy, direct action, mutual aid, extension (intimate relationships), and formation (study and practice). Furthermore, autogestión as anarchist practice is not pointed outward toward the world as a way to organize people and economies but is first and foremost an ethical practice pointing inward toward oneself and one's intimate relationships. The important organizational aspects of autogestión are the lack of hierarchies and intermediaries. But without coming to these organizational principles with the proper ethical practices, the pamphlet explains, they will not work. It ends by saying that the goal of autogestionary organization is the same as the interpersonal practice of creating it.

In the early 1990s, Tobi, Martha, and others primarily distributed the pamphlet at El Chopo on Saturdays, something that Kelley Tatro writes about as still going strong during her fieldwork with Mexico City's punk scene 20 years later (2022, 6). As designed, El Chopo has been a major distributor of information and media among networks of countercultural music scenes in Mexico City since 1980 (Ríos Manzano 2005; Paredes Pacho and Blanc 2010). For 30 years, the BSR pamphlet, anarchist zines, and a variety of media produced by Mexico City's anarcho-punks have been placed in the hands of its more mainstream (but still alternative or countercultural) rockers there. The pamphlet says nothing about punk.

6 1990s: Autogestión and Punk Production

Many of the qualitative differences in meaning of the term autogestión in Mexico City, when compared to its anarcho-syndicalist meanings elsewhere, can be explained by it being filtered through the political lens of Mexico City's anarcho-punk scene and the context of punk production. Autogestive factories produce products that look very much like commodities. In some cases, they simply are commodities that are sold on a capitalist market. The autogestive intervention is simply a change in the hierarchical structure within the factory walls.

In contrast, punk is anti-industrial and anti-capitalist. It is against commercial music and against the large multinational music labels. Part of punk production is recording and distributing one's own albums. In her book on rock and youth cultures in Mexico, Urteaga Castro-Pozo (1998) uses the term autogestión entirely in the context of punk production and distribution networks. Speaking in general of independent rock music in Mexico, she mentions, almost as an aside, that:

The end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties produced the financing of a group of independent alternatives to recording and distribution […]. Under the label “independent”, are found consciously underground positions, anti-commercial, and autogestivos (like punk collectives that produce their own compilations of group “demos”—cassettes that they sell or trade… (1998, 131)

 

For Urteaga in 1998, autogestión meant almost exclusively punk bands financing and producing their own music, often on demo tapes that they would record, copy, and distribute themselves.

Many people told me that a better translation of autogestión into English was DIY (Do It Yourself), a concept that also emerges from punk. Poma and Gravante (2016) speak of the two together, arguing that “the practice of autogestión and DIY permeate every social and political aspect” of what it means to be anarcho-punk in Mexico (2016, 458). Similarly, Shane Greene argues that the 1991 Peruvian Text X he examines “positions DIY as the very core of anarchist praxis” (2016, 171).

DIY as a mode of production poses some challenges to an anarcho-syndicalist sense of production. This is not necessarily ideological, but practical. A factory producing physical widgets can be anarcho-syndicalist, but industrial production of music is necessarily tied to multinational capitalist corporations. According to the common anarcho-punk logic of “selling-out,” a punk band signed to a large, multinational record label is not a punk band at all, but a money-making operation for global corporate capitalism. A DIY punk album, recorded in a basement straight to cassette tape and distributed through hand-made copies, is not supporting global corporate capitalism. The auditory and physical punk aesthetic requires and encourages, on principle, alternative and non-commercial, even anti-capitalist, means of production and distribution.

Furthermore, in a five-person group in which each person does something different (drums, guitar, vocal, etc.), ensuring that there are no “bosses” is not as clear a process as in a factory. A theme of my interviews with members of colectivos autogestivos was how challenging autogestión is to practice because of the very complicated interpersonal factors. One participant told me, “Autogestión also has to, from my point of view, be understood as the daily effort to work with other people […] It is complicated to work with others who are equal to you, who are just as neurotic, who are just as angry or loud.” An autogestive artistic pursuit, in contrast to an industrial production line, is more of an interpersonal struggle among people and a struggle within the individual not to dominate others. In this context, the strict definition of autogestión as an organization of material production without bosses loosens significantly. It becomes much more ethically expansive, beginning in the self and working outwards.

Kelley Tatro has written about the place of autogestión in the punk scene specifically in Mexico City (2014, 2018, 2022). Tatro defines it for herself as “a kind of self-development that ideally fosters autonomy among people who wish to rely less on governmental institutions and more on themselves and their family and friendship networks” (2018, 243). Tatro argues that autogestión and DIY are integral to punk music sound and “that the harsh, distorted, and loud musical sound of punk and the intensity of its performances are equally important parts of promoting autogestión” (2018, 244). For Tatro, even the physical exertions of how punk vocalists over-extend their voices through screaming and full-body performances are part of an alternative ethic of work and value in a context of economic precarity among Mexico City's working-class youth. Autogestión is a means of bettering oneself through an anarcho-punk ethic of autonomy and DIY (Tatro 2014, 447–448).

In this sense, punk autogestión can be seen as a much more radical intervention than anarcho-syndicalist autogestión. It seeks not to reform the workplace but to obviate it. It attempts the destruction of all hierarchy (interpersonal as well as class hierarchy), all capitalism, and all commodities.

7 1994–1999: Zapatismo and Punk

This is where the transformation of autogestión was in 1994 when the EZLN exploded into international prominence. Tobi told me that on January 1, 1994, when the EZLN took over San Cristobal de las Casas, there were marches every day in the city, and all the anarchist and punk collectives went to support the EZLN. He told me that “from there we invited all of the punk collectives and anarchists and we formed one called the Union Libertaria Autogestiva” (ULA) to investigate what was going on with the Zapatistas. This collective sent several representatives to Chiapas for the first Zapatista meeting with a statement of support.

“But obviously,” Tobi told me, “We made a distinction.” It is important to note that it was not inevitable for punk and Zapatismo to align with one another, and in several important ways, they didn't. There is a robust body of scholarship on the EZLN that is beyond the scope of this article (Stephen 2002; Hayden 2002; Speed 2008; Khasnabish 2008). However, it does not take an in-depth analysis or my nearly 30 years of following various incarnations of Zapatismo to note some differences in the forms of struggle between the EZLN and Mexico City punks that could have been insurmountable.

The distinctions that Tobi was primarily concerned with (and that other self-identified anarchists, punk or otherwise, brought up in interviews) had to do with the military nature of the EZLN that is in significant tension with many forms of anarchism, and certainly with anarcho-punk. First, portions of the ULA, including Tobi, were pacifists and didn't support violence of any kind. Pacifists and insurrectionalists coming together is already a substantial hurdle. However, that was also a difference that Mexico City anarcho-punks were familiar with even among themselves.

Second are the issues of hierarchy and conformity. Tobi described to me that as anarchist and punk collectives, they of course did not support any hierarchical or authoritarian social organization. The EZLN of the 1990s was certainly more democratic than most armies. They had a practice of voting on large decisions, for example (Stephen 2002). Their Revolutionary Law of Women was groundbreaking.9 However, the EZLN was still an army. It had a hierarchical rank system, soldiers who were expected to follow the orders of their superior officers, and certain military standards for comportment.

What Khasnabish (2008) has called the “resonance” of Zapatismo outside of Chiapas questions conventions and is revolutionary in nearly every way. However, within the collective autonomy of the EZLN and its associated indigenous communities, there are a lot of signifiers of social conformity. Drugs and alcohol are strictly forbidden. People wear almost identical clothing and speak softly. There is a high level of gender conformity and gendered division of labor for those not in the EZLN itself. There are a lot of outward signifiers in the Zapatista indigenous communities and army of the kind of “traditional” way of life that Mexico City punks were attempting to throw off. The punk scene is very far from a queer feminist utopia and also has its own systems of social and political conformity (including ethical processes of autogestión). However, its outward signifiers—tattoos, facial piercings, drugs, alcohol, gender non-conformity, queerness, being loud, and discordant—are in significant tension with rural indigenous ones. It was far from inevitable that the rural indigenous campesino farmer with an assault rifle and the pierced mohawked rawker from the city would have any interpersonal respect for each other.

Additionally, the central symbol of the EZLN, Emiliano Zapata, was a revolutionary leader who is a symbol of Mexican patriotism and nationalism. In naming themselves Zapatistas, they are making a claim to the Mexican state that they are closer to the heart of Mexico as a nation than the current government. As the Zapatista hymn says, “Our country cries out [patria grita] and needs all of the force of the Zapatistas […] Let's live for our country [patria] or die for liberty.”10 They partially owe their success to widespread approval by mainstream publics throughout the world who vouch for their virtuous struggle against the irrational violence of the Mexican state. For their own protection, indigenous Zapatistas needed to be seen as more sympathetic and reasonable than the state (Stephen 2002; Speed 2008). Punk has no such affinity for irreproachability. It is based in a culture of irreverent opposition to structures and norms: smearing shit and menstrual blood in the face of the state and laughing about it.

These are significant ideological and tactical hurdles to get over and took work. Mutual respect and cooperation could have been shattered quite easily if one of their shared points of political practice weren't a purposeful dedication to tolerance and working with others. A primary Zapatista slogan is “a world in which many worlds fit,” a concept very well aligned with an idea of anarchist federations. There was a lot of room for punks to support Zapatista autonomy and for indigenous Zapatistas to accept that support, even though they disagreed on forms of struggle. The ULA even drew up an extensive document on their recommendations for how the EZLN might imagine a more just Mexican society (Renegados No. 2, 1995).

8 1995–1999: Rock Festivals

By 1995, autogestión was still anarchist but had been adapted to a uniquely anarcho-punk sensibility, and the EZLN had broad support throughout the political left in Mexico City. From here, the story of the detachment of autogestión from punk and its popularization among more mainstream young people as Zapatista has everything to do with music.

It is a defining characteristic of the rock scene in Mexico that large rock concerts of any kind were almost completely banned from 1971 until sometime in the early 1980s (Anaya González 1999; Paredes Pacho and Blanc 2010; Green 2016). The repression of concerts slowly lessened into the 1990s, but the right to have music-festival-like events at all, even without an explicit political message, was still quite new and not without incident. An open-air festival in 1995 organized by the government of one of Mexico City's neighborhoods ended in scenes of violence in which police injured and arrested hundreds of attendees. Immediately afterward, the larger government of the Mexico City urban area banned all open-air concerts.

There was a swift reaction to prevent a return to the blanket bans of the 1970s and 1980s. The reaction came from UNAM students, who immediately began to organize massive open-air rock concerts on its campuses in opposition to the ban. Paredes Pacho and Blanc describe how this reaction, from its inception, positioned itself “as a protest against the prohibitive measures against rock as well as for peace in Chiapas” (2010, 455, emphasis added). In these concerts, protest against government repression and violence in Chiapas mixed with protest against government repression and violence in Mexico City. Support for the right of the Zapatista communities to exist mixed with the right for Mexico City's youth to have rock music festivals.

The indigenous Zapatista communities were also a financial beneficiary of the concerts. The students who organized the initial concerts were those of the Consejo Estudiantil Universitario (CEU). The CEU shared leadership with the Caravana Ricardo Pozas that was delivering humanitarian aid and resources to Zapatista communities at the time.

In a collectively written chapter about the origins of their collective, los Jovenes en Resistencia Alternativa (JRA), a collective that throughout the early 2000s gave workshops on autogestión, wrote that

The generation of the massive rock festivals opened an organizational space for youth and students, pushed forward processes of autogestión, [and] questioned the urban social space in Mexico City and in the university. In the nineties said spaces were closed to rock and later, at least until 2001, they created a public cultural sphere that was neither private, nor of the state. For the number of festivals and participants, and their clear politico-cultural claims, made them a phenomenon that is unprecedented in other parts of Mexico and possibly in Latin America. Rock as a disruptive movement grew from an independent cultural sphere, and from organizational autogestión that would provoke a real dispute for the social production of urban space (Navarro Trujillo 2016, 103 my translation).

 

In other words, these concerts became an important site of development for a generation of young people living through the 1990s in Mexico City and beyond (see Figure 5). I argue that they were also the context that brought the anarcho-punk language of autogestión into the realm of more mainstream audiences.


Details are in the caption following the image

Poster announcing the music and art festival XochiStock put on by the members of the strike committee of UNAM's Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (ENAP) in the context of the 1999 student strike. Poster created by Sublevarte Colectivo. Author photo.

Conejo (an apodo, but one he is well-known under), a man from an autogestive art collective called Sublevarte, told me in 2018 that these concerts were crucial to his political formation. “For ten pesos,” he told me, “you were going to have a lineup with almost twenty bands […] in areas accessible to la banda, that lasted twelve, fifteen hours.” They were affordable and accessible concerts of some major, popular Mexican rock bands (Café Tacuba, Santa Sabina, Maldita Vecindad, Panteón Rococó, La Castañeda, La Cuca) that were demonstrating support for Zapatismo and trying to educate their audiences as part of their performances (Anaya González 1999). Between acts, someone would come on stage to talk about the plight of the Zapatista communities and collect money to send to Chiapas.

The question of why these concerts weren't violently repressed is an open one. They certainly could have been, and there was a feeling at the time that they would be. Green cites one musician calling the lack of violent repression a miracle (2016, 4). I will only comment by way of explanation that the autonomy of the national university system was taken very seriously. The federal riot police would eventually break this autonomy in 2000 to repress a student strike, but this seal had yet to be broken. There was also perhaps a sense that the concerts were more wholesome because of their association with students (good kids) and this prestigious university system. Perhaps there were just so many children of the country's elite intelligentsia involved, both on and off stage, that the state knew it would face significant barriers from its own political elite and prying international eyes if it were to crack down on them. Regardless of the reasons, the university concerts were not officially repressed.11

The bands playing in these concerts were “alternative” or “indie,” but in comparison to the anarcho-punk scene, they would have been considered fresa or mainstream (Tatro 2022, 103–104). Many of these bands had, or would have in the future, large and lucrative recording contracts with multinational music corporations. Paredes Pacho argues that his band Maldita Vecindad was one of the first Mexican rock bands to go on a European tour (Paredes Pacho and Blanc 2010, 456). Santa Sabina already had a recording deal with the Mexican branch of a large multinational that they later dropped to become independent. They remained very big though and in 1997 even did an MTV Unplugged concert recorded live in Miami (González Villegas 2018, 461–463).

These bands’ mode of production for these specific university benefit concerts, however, followed more punk production practices. A 1998 zine-style publication put out by La Bola, a collective made up of musicians and artists including Rita Guerrero (the lead singer of Santa Sabina), declared, “we propose generating spaces of expression and participation that are autogestive and inclusive; independent of any partisan influence” (La Bola 1998, 6). This was on the heels of a 1996 effort of the EZLN to inspire those outside of Chiapas to organize in their own communities and networks.12 Anaya depicts La Bola as the name of the collective of “former CEU students rockers and artists” (1999, 33) who organized the definitive series of mass concerts at the university campuses from 1997 until 1999. There were relationships in La Bola with UNAMeros por la Paz, the FZLN (what was then the civil organization supporting the EZLN), and other organizations interested in independent music and Zapatista politics. This inaugural (and possibly only?) issue of the zine of La Bola demonstrates how the language of autogestión was being taken up by more mainstream bands. It was not a slogan, not a central organizing principle, but it was there in the background as a concept that was already dissociated from the punk scene and anarchism and becoming more associated with indie music and Zapatista autonomy in 1998. In his history of Mexican rock, González says it was these bands (not more punk ones, not anarchist thinkers, not the CEU) that “planted the seed of autogestión that many of us practiced after the new millennium” (2020, 28).

Autogestión, for these concerts, referred to the fact that they were organized by the bands themselves outside of their normal commercial activities. It was a partial and contingent ethical practice borrowed from punk for the purposes of the benefit concerts. Bands continued to do other commercial concerts and recordings.

However, nearly everyone involved with these concerts had overlapping political participation in student activism, an alternative rock scene, and Zapatista support networks. Many of them came from working-class high schools where punk had a pervasive influence. Furthermore, they had exposure to Tobi and Martha's autogestión pamphlet as well as the multitude of fanzines that mixed anarcho-punk political essays with music commentary. They had been to the documentary screenings of Mauser's collective. All these influences came together in the Zapatista concerts as urban young people at the end of the 1990s were beginning to think about how they could apply the example of Zapatismo to their own, more urban, environment. The punk autogestión of the Zapatista benefit concerts as a mode of non-capitalist production became inexorably connected to an urban Zapatista form of political organizing detached from anarcho-punk.

Green (2018) demonstrates that by the 2010s, Mexico City's independent musicians were using the term autogestión as a mode of music production that they associated with cultural roots and the indigenous tradition of the Zapatistas to be autonomous and self-governing. By the 2010s, they were articulating autogestive production as a manifestation of their Zapatista practice without connecting it to anarchism or anarcho-punk at all.

9 Conclusions

The very important UNAM strike of 1999–2000 impacted an entire generation of young people in Mexico City who were becoming involved in social movements, sometimes for the first time, and their thinking about how best to organize. The strike took the Zapatista rock festival politics, intensified it to life-or-death stakes, and spread it out across the hundreds of thousands of Mexico City college and high school students. The history I have so far outlined that transformed autogestión from a syndicalist principle to an urban Zapatista one, merely set the stage for further popularization of the new, more punk conception of autogestión.

Urban organizing surrounding the 2005–2006 wave of Zapatismo called La Otra Campaña played a further role in popularizing autogestión and attaching it to Zapatismo. At one point in 2007, there was a vote among member organizations, and autogestión was the most popular principle (followed by “anti-patriarchal”) members suggested officially adopting.13 From 2013 to 2019, there was an annual Autogestival in Mexico City that participants told me grouped it with the indigenous practices of tequio (collective work) and trueque (free exchange of materials and knowledge) and extended it to such wide-ranging concepts as autogestión of the body, emotional autogestión, and interspecies autogestión.

In little more than 20 years, autogestión in Mexico City had diverged from anarcho-syndicalism in its meaning and become attached to indigenous autonomy, even a sense of music production having fallen away in its new (unauthorized) association with Zapatismo. In hindsight, the connection between autogestión and Zapatismo is easily naturalized, but this was an unanticipated consequence of a very specific series of convergences that occurred in the particular context of Mexico City. Rather than naturalizing the connection, it is crucial to recognize the unique contribution of punk ethical and political practice, as well as the specific contributions of anarcho-punks like Tobi and Martha, to both a tradition of anarchist thought and more mainstream leftist politics.

Endnotes

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