Street art

So many of you may know that I'm a little obsessed with street art here (and in fact the grad student I met Sunday told me about another anthropologist here who's doing research on the stencil art collective here). One of the more difficult things (for a webbed-in person like me) that I've noticed about life here is that rather than announcing things on-line (and there is definitely some of that), people put up these big silk-screened posters on walls. There's also a ton of stencil and graffiti art... which I want to meet this guy and learn more about if/how it's connected to other sorts of social politics.

There's one wall close to my apt that is covered and I find these two elements very interesting, although not particularly new.



Associating women's reproductive potentials with both colonialist and liberation movements has a long history... and managing women's reproduction has been a key component in Mexico's self-modernization, largely through encouraging (indigenous) women to have more planned and fewer children through biomedicine. And, there are articles about women in Chiapas actively refusing to enter public health institutions for fear that they will have IUDs implanted without consent. So it might make sense to see social movements responding to state practices with pronatalist art like this... but I haven't seen or heard any feminist or health activists doing so..... so, I'm not sure how to read these kinds of public art in terms of actual politics.

And here are some more pieces of street art I've found around my adventures.....