“Venimos a hablar de lo imposible por que de lo posible ya se ha dicho demasiado”
“We came to speak of the impossible because too much has already been said of the possible.”
ZAPATISTAS
About
Photo: Susy Chávez Herrera, 2021.
Dr. Maurice R. Magaña is an urban anthropologist and ethnic studies scholar who studies social movements and migration. His work focuses on understanding how everyday people collectively envision and enact more just, liberatory horizons. He has worked extensively with activists and artists in the United States and Mexico and collaborated with applied research teams working with the labor movement in Honduras, South Africa, and Costa Rica.
Dr. Magaña is an Associate Professor of Mexican American studies, a faculty member in the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Graduate Interdisciplinary Program, and an affiliate faculty in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. His first book, Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico, UC Press, won the Anthony Leeds Prize by the Critical Urban Anthropology Association in 2021.
Before joining the faculty at the University of Arizona, Maurice was the Institute of American Cultures Visiting Researcher in Chicano Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. Magaña’s research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Ford Foundation and the Tokyo Foundation. His work has been published in scholarly journals like American Anthropologist, Ethnic & Racial Studies, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, American Studies, Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Anthropology, Social Justice, City & Society, and Political & Legal Anthropology Review, among others. His work has also appeared in the edited volumes, Critical Handbook on Indigenous Development, Comunidades Virtuales, Handbook of Youth Activism, and Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical Action from Below.
Maurice R. Magaña has served on the board of the Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists, the American Anthropological Association’s Working Group on Racialized Police Brutality and Extrajudicial Violence, the board of the Society for the Anthropology of North America and the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Dr. Magaña received his Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Oregon in 2013.
Books
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.
Writing
Books
Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico. University of California Press. Fall 2020.
Mike Garcia and the Justice for Janitors Movement. Kent Wong, David Huerta, Victor Narro, Hugo Romero, and Maurice Rafael Magaña. UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. Summer 2020.
Edited Volumes
Dreams Deported: Immigrant Youth and Families Resist Deportations. Contributing Editor with Kent Wong and Nancy Guarneros. Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. 2015.
Refereed Journal Articles
“Multimodal Archives of Transborder Belonging: Murals, Social Media, and Racialized Geographies in Los Angeles.” American Anthropologist. Vol. 124 (4), 2022.
“Rebel Aesthetics: Street Art, Urban Space, and Militarization in Heritage Mexico.” Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture. Vol. 4 (4), 2022.
“The Politics of Black and Brown Solidarities: Race, Space, and Hip-Hop Cultural Production in Los Angeles.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. Vol. 5 (5), 2022.
Spaces of Resistance, Everyday Activism and Belonging: Youth Reimagining and Reconfiguring the City in Oaxaca, Mexico, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Vol. 22 (2), 2017.
From the Barrio to the Barricades: Grafiteros, Punks and the Remapping of Urban Space. Special double issue, “Mexican and Special double issue, “Mexican and Chicanx Social Movements,” Social Justice: Vol. 42 (3/4), 2016.
Analyzing the Meshwork as an Emerging Social Movement Formation: An Ethnographic Account of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). Journal of Contemporary Anthropology: Vol. 1 (1), 2010.
Refereed Book Chapters
Magaña, Maurice R. and Xóchitl Flores-Marcial “Giving Form to Indigenous Futures Through Monumental Architecture, Art, and Technology.” In Indigenous Futures: a Critical Handbook on Indigenous Development. Nancy Postero, Irma Alicia Velasquez Nimatuj, Katharina Rickshtul, and John Andrew McNeish, and (eds). Routledge. 2023.
Building Horizontal Political Cultures: Youth Activism and the Legacy of the Oaxacan Social Movement of 2006. In Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical Action from Below. Richard Stahler-Sholk, Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker (eds.). Latin American Perspectives in the Classroom Series. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2014.
Editor-Reviewed Essays (Invited)
“The Ungovernability of Anarchist and Liberationist Political Imaginations” featured in the virtual issue Ethnographic Encounters with Destituent Power and Alternative Futures. Political and Legal Anthropology Review (POLAR). March 31, 2022.
“Anthony Leeds Prize for Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico.” City & Society. Vol. 34 (1), 2022.
“Giving Form to Black and Brown: The Art of Political Solidarity.” Published in Dialogues: Blog of the American Studies Journal. October 1, 2021.
“Educational Reform and Repression in Mexico.” Publish in blog for the journal
Social Justice. Published June 22, 2016.
Peer-Edited Book Chapters
Latin American Immigration in Rural Oregon, Co-Authored with Lynn Stephen and Marcela Mendoza. In Understanding the Immigrant Experience in Oregon: Research, Analysis, and Recommendations from University of Oregon Scholars, Robert Bussel (ed.), pp 45-55. Eugene: Labor Education Research Center of the University of Oregon, 2008.
Book Reviews
Review of The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilization and the Aquatic Space. By Ulrich Oslender (Duke University Press, 2016). In Anthropological Quarterly (Vol. 90 (2), 2017.
Review of Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, race, and spatial entitlement in Los Angeles. By Gaye Theresa Johnson (University of California Press, 2013). In American Studies 53(4), 2014.
Other Writing
“Archiving Transborder Communities Through Murals and Social Media.” Invited blog post for Youth Circulations: Tracing the Real and Imagined Circulations of Global Youth. October 19, 2020.
“How to Sustain a Mass Movement? Lessons from Urban Indigenous Youth Collectives and “Decolonial Anarchism” in Mexico.” Invited blog post for the University of California Press Blog: Where Bright Minds Share Bold Ideas. October 12, 2020.
Magaña, Maurice R., and Michelle Téllez
“A Climate of Hate: How Border Militarization Is Getting Deadlier.” Article
published in Truthout. March 27, 2017
Téllez, Michelle, and Maurice R Magaña
“Border (In)Securities in the Era of 45.” Invited blog post for Australian Outlook of
the Australian Institute of International Affairs. Published March 1,2017.
“Seeing Race and Citizenship in the U.S. Through Ava DuVernay’s 13th.” Invited blog post for the #Black Lives Matter Syllabus Project. Published March 1, 2017.
Téllez, Michelle, and Maurice R Magaña
“The U.S-Mexico Borderlands.” Invited blog post for Australian Outlook of the
Australian Institute of International Affairs. Published December 7, 2016.
“Engaged Anthropology- Maurice Rafael Magaña.” Invited blog post for the Wenner-Gren Foundation Blog. Published October 25, 2016.
Maurice R. Magaña, PhD 