Against the Grain of the State: The Assembly-based Memory for Resistance in Oaxaca

Abstract

In the context of Oaxacan struggle and resistance, opposing the State means redressing a litany of grievances stemming from the dispossession of land and territory. This article argues that assemblies and resistance movements redefined antagonistic relationships between the people, the party, and the State, based on acts of betrayal by the political class. The collective memory of social struggle in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region, in Oaxaca, illuminates collective experiences within a context of political delegitimization of leaders and caudillos aligned with an orthodox conception embodied in the figure of the revolutionary subject. In this sense, assembly-based resistance rejects the forms of the State and the party. The methodology used in this article derives from collaborative action research developed as part of a doctoral dissertation, which involved participation in the Assembly of Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus in Defense of Land and Territory  and the Puente Madera assembly. This collaborative experience is interwoven with the conceptualization of collective memory from a counter-narrative perspective, as established in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, of 2002. The memory of struggle prefigures a tool for reclaiming a past that is updated in the present, addressing injustices stemming from the dispossession of land. In the concluding remarks, we state that collective memory of struggle contributes to revealing an emancipatory past-present, affirmed in the assembly-based resistance that blurs those deterministic notions about the end of history.