She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Without Masters: Autogestión, Anarchist Ethics, and Mexico City Punk, with the following results:
Page 99 of Without Masters: Autogestión, Anarchist Ethics, and Mexico City Punk does provide an interesting insight into the book as a whole. It describes a pivotal moment in the recent history of the concept of autogestión (often translated as self-management, or non-hierarchical organization) that the book describes.Learn more about Without Masters at the Duke University Press website.
From page 99:The early 1990s saw a proliferation of both anarcho-punk zines and autogestión discourse. The year 1992 was the five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus's initial (Spain funded) voyage to the Americas, and it spurred a political response across the rapidly increasing number of zines and their increasingly articulate politics that were disgusted by the official events celebrating the anniversary rather than condemning it. While Contraviolencia and Carmelo were early innovators of anarcho-punk zines, after 1992, it would have been difficult to find a punk zine that didn't mix its interviews with bands and concerts announcements with anarchist political essays.The page goes on to describe that part of the politicization of the punk scene was happening because punks were increasingly hanging out and making their zines at Mexico City’s anarchist library, founded by a man named Ricardo Mestre, who was an exile from the Spanish Civil War earlier in the century. They were becoming acquainted with classical anarchist texts there, but also the library was becoming a social center for producing anarcho-punk publications, including a wealth of zines that formed the basis of this part of the book.
Without Masters overall uses the recent history of autogestión as a window through which to explore some large issues at the intersections of activism and scholarship, including how academics can appropriate activist ideas and how activists can deploy academic ideas. It is a fascinating story of cultural change through time. Although I believe the story of autogestión is a thrilling one in its own right, I think even readers not particularly interested in anarchism, punk, or even Mexico, will find it a compelling story of cultural and political movement through many of the major political moments of the twentieth century: African independence movements of the early 1960s when autogestión emerged, the countercultural and student movements of the late 1960s and 1970s where it was used as a slogan, punk in the 1970s and 1980s when it transformed meanings, Zapatismo and the anti-neoliberal movements of the 1990s that popularized the term and attached it to indigenous organizing, and the turn towards ideas of the local and sustainable in the 2000s where it became a foundational principle for small collectives.
--Marshal Zeringue
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