Beyond Resistance: Raising Utopias from the Dead in Mexico City and Oaxaca

Abstract

This essay offers a critique of the theories of everyday forms of resistance, and a new analysis of the term agency as used in the previous two decades in scholarly writing, for instance, with regard to social movements. Agency often stands in contrast to culpability and as such has been a useful concept in challenging determinist thinking, giving the dispossessed a fuller voice in deciding their own fates, victories, and tragedies. Generally, however, agency has referred to the politically progressive efforts of los de abajo only when they are able to break free of what are often held to be preexisting structural and systemic constraints. How one understands failures or situations when the poor dare not even attempt to break out are subjects analysts have been more reluctant to address. At the least, agency has been absent as a concept when the issue of compliance arises, if it is entertained at all. For whatever reason, then, agency is used to capture aspects of defiance but has been less useful in helping us conceptualize compliance.