Visualizing Decolonial Democracy: The Women’s Media Takeover in Oaxaca, Mexico

In the summer of 2006, during a popular uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico, a group of Oaxacan women peacefully occupied the state television station (CORTV) and transformed it into TV by and for the people in just twenty-one days. They were part of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), a coalition of over 300 social and political organizations aiming to create a political space inclusive of the state’s historically minoritized populations – peasants, women, and Indigenous peoples. Engaging with the amateur and fugitive aesthetics of the women’s self-produced media, this paper examines the ways in which the broadcasts escaped uptake into state logics of power to prefigure APPO as a model of what I propose to call decolonial democracy; that is, a participatory democracy based in Indigenous communal lifeways and forms of resistance to colonialism and its heirs. I argue that through the recuperation of the previously foreclosed space of public television, the women developed forums for political deliberation and debate that re-articulated and reframed issues of gender, class, and Indigeneity in APPO’s social movement. They drew from communitarian feminism, developed by Indigenous (Aymara) Bolivian feminists, waging a decolonial feminist critique of APPO’s proposed democratic model to ensure that it would not reify the gender inequities troubling communal autonomous governance in Oaxaca’s Indigenous pueblos. The occupied CORTV broadcasts visualized the popular assembly as a dynamic work-in-progress and in turn helped to manifest it by inviting broad public participation and support to realize APPO’s democracy “to come.”