Geology & Geography Faculty Work
Title
Politics Squeezed through a Police State: Policing and Vinculación in Post-1968 Mexico City
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2015
Publication Title
Political Geography
Volume Number
47
DOI
10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.01.003
Abstract
Contemporary political geographers accommodate everyday practice in accounts of state power but arguably tend to retain a bias towards sites easily identified with the state. This bias complements a frequent conflation of policing and the state in recent scholarship on the post-political. This article challenges these assumptions by showing how rituals of anti-stateness may themselves paradoxically give to the senses a partitioned world of state domination and non-state resistance that delimits political possibility. I specifically examine activist participation in such policing through analysis of student-left commemorations of 1968 in Mexico City. My analysis of such activism also reveals tension in processes that consolidate a partitioned state/non-state world. I show that, through vinculación, some activists establish unaccounted-for solidarities that exceed the categories through which state power has in the past been exercised, reconfiguring relations between people whose place vis-à-vis the state would otherwise be predictable. I therefore reveal ongoing interplay between processes of politics and policing, not a “post-political condition” that would demand, as politics, the negation of any social-spatial order.
ISSN
0962-6298
First Page
1
Last Page
10
Recommended Citation
Crane, Nicholas, "Politics Squeezed through a Police State: Policing and Vinculación in Post-1968 Mexico City" (2015). Geology & Geography Faculty Work. 2.
https://digitalcommons.owu.edu/geol_geog_pubs/2
Link Out URL
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.01.003