We Are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements

From Europe and Asia to Africa and the Middle East and across the Americas, grassroots social movements have gained the attention of scholars. As the latest addition to her distinguished body of scholarship, anthropologist Lynn Stephen focuses on the predominantly indigenous southern Mexican state of Oaxaca to figure out the relationship “among oral testimony, rights claiming, and identity formation in contemporary social movements” (p. 2). By doing so, she hopes to “provide a crucial window on the continuing importance of culture in politics and on the ways social movements organize and engage with states” (p. 2). The author is particularly interested in the movement's reliance on oral testimony as a form of self-affirmation and as a medium for communicating with the public to grow the movement. She argues that the act of producing and hearing oral testimony is crucial to the shaping of people's sense of their dignity and of...