Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico was published by University of California Press in 2020 and was awarded the Anthony Leeds Prize by the Critical Urban Anthropology Association in 2021.
Based on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico, Dr. Magaña’s book, Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico, considers how urban and migrant youth in Oaxaca embrace subcultures from hip-hop to punk and adopt creative organizing practices to create meaningful channels of participation in local social and political life. In the process, young people remake urban space and construct new identities in ways that directly challenge elite visions of their city and essentialist notions of what it means to be indigenous in the contemporary era. Cartographies of Youth Resistance provides a window into how we might better understand social movement impact, temporality and spatiality.
“Revealing the aesthetics, horizontal organizational strategies, and epistemologies behind one of the twenty-first century’s most creative social movements, Magaña vividly paints urban Indigenous and migrant youth as creators of new models of politics and culture that are crucial for our time.”
—Lynn Stephen, Philip H. Knight Chair and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of Oregon and author of We are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements
“This is a beautifully written book that analyzes the life and transformation of one social movement: youth activists in Oaxaca, Mexico who cohered into a movement after the 2006 civil uprising in that city. An important contribution to the literature on social movements, indigeneity, art, urban politics, and neoliberalism.”
—Nancy Postero, author of The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia
The Justice for Janitors union conducted strikes that reverberated across the country, achieved path-breaking victories that transformed the way labor organizes, and moved political campaigns that won victories for millions of immigrant and low-wage workers across the country and shifted political power in California to the left. This book traces Mike Garcia’s roots from a Mexican American, working-class family and captures his visionary leadership that transformed his union and the US labor movement.
Maurice R. Magaña, PhD 