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  • We Are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements by Lynn Stephen
  • Luis van Isschot
We Are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements. By Lynn Stephen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. 366 pages. Paperback, $25.95.

Lynn Stephen's latest book about social movements in Oaxaca, Mexico, is an original and important contribution to the field of oral history. We Are the Face of Oaxaca is empirically grounded and methodologically innovative. The author [End Page 165] offers deep insight into how ordinary citizens in Mexico have contested decades of political corruption while opening new democratic opportunities within local communities.

In 2006 a nonviolent uprising in Oaxaca involving thousands of people from more than three hundred civil society groupings took over the streets and airwaves of one of Mexico's most popular tourist destinations. The election in 2010 of Governor Gabino Cué Monteagudo, which ended the Institutional Revolutionary Party's (PRI) eighty years of dominance, stands as the clearest political success of the movement organized in the name of the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (APPO). As Stephen points out, some of the protest leaders eventually joined forces with the new governor. In Mexico and across Latin America, citizens' movements such as APPO have helped propel new progressive leaders to historic breakthroughs. Stephen's book, however, goes well beyond the rise of a new-left politics.

One of the great values of Stephen's research is the presentation of her oral histories. With decades of experience working in Oaxaca and with Oaxacan migrants in the United States, the author is able to draw upon richly detailed interviews, many of which are quoted at length. Some of the interviews are life stories, although most focus on the events of 2006 very specifically. Many of the most compelling interviews reflect on the narrators' experiences sharing personal stories at assemblies, at the protest barricades, and on the radio. A website on which Stephen has posted subtitled video recordings, as well as photos, maps, artwork, and written summaries of the main issues raised by her research, complement the book.

In this vividly documented study, Stephen explores the broader social and cultural impact of large-scale collective protest. Through nine chapters she carefully considers the role that oral testimony played in the expansion of social and political participation during the 2006 uprising. Stephen argues persuasively that testimonio is a tool not only for engaging wider publics, but also for local movement-building itself. Protestors' public sharing of testimony became a means of "broadening historical truth by opening up the range of who can legitimately speak and be heard, and ultimately, who participates in the construction of shared social memory" (11).

Stephen's focus is mainly local. While the use of new social media and consensus decision-making distinguished the 2006 Oaxacan uprising in much the same way that it did in the Occupy and Los Indignados movements, these practices emerged out of indigenous histories of organizing. The movement in Oaxaca, while clearly influenced by the flow of ideas and technologies of resistance from other parts of Mexico and beyond, nonetheless remained mainly concerned with reshaping the connections between and among local residents and between these participants and the government. Accordingly, Stephen spends [End Page 166] relatively little time analyzing how global economic forces have impacted Oaxaca.

Following an introductory section in which she engages current scholarly debates on the relationship between testimony and social activism, Stephen spends two chapters describing the complex derivation, development, and structure of the movement that took over Oaxaca for six months in 2006. While APPO grew to comprise more than three hundred organizations, the protests were initially sparked when police opened fire on a strike by teachers. Teachers in Oaxaca are central to social and political processes, as they have been elsewhere in Mexico since the post-Revolutionary reconstruction period of the 1920s. As Stephen argues, teachers unions were one of the only social groups with a stable presence in the city and countryside, among poor mestizos and indigenous people alike, with a membership that reflects this diversity. While the occupation of the main square in Oaxaca's capital became the focus of...

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