Political Cultures of Social Movements

What is most visible from afar are the mass mobilizations in the streets, the protests documented in the mainstream media, the cries of “No!” that echo throughout the Americas: no more police brutality, no more gender violence, no more exploitation of workers, no more dispossession, no more displacement. The “No!” is the expression of the “anti” in popular politics. What is less visible, but far more transformative and enduring, are the movements to generate, create, invent, and construct other ways of being, living, and doing in the world. This is the “Yes!” uttered less audibly by the heterogeneous subject implicitly affirmed not in the “anti” but in the “auto”: autonomía, autogestión, autodeterminación [autonomy, autogestion, self-determination]. The position of the “auto” is not reactive, but proactive; not passive, but dynamic; not programmatic, but prefigurative. To be sure, this creative “Yes!” is not new—after all it is the call with which Frantz Fanon concluded The Wretched of the Earth in 1961: “we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.” ¹ Yet, while the ideas are not new, ² their recent enactment through the articulated practices of new political cultures across Latin America is—and that is the focus of this chapter.