Forging Mixtec Identity in the Mexican Metropolis: Race, Indigenismo and Mixtec Migrant Associations in Mexico City, 1940−70

This article presents a social history of the Coalición de los Pueblos Mixtecos Oaxaqueños (Coalition of Mixtec Oaxacan Communities, CPMO), a grouping of mutual-aid associations formed by Indigenous migrants in Mexico City during the middle of the twentieth century. It draws on the coalition's archives to demonstrate how years of migration to Mexico City eroded traditional inter-village conflicts and created the conditions for a broader ethnic identity among Mixtec migrants in the capital. In addition, the coalition's collaboration with the federal government's Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenous Institute, INI) challenges common depictions of Indigeneity and modernisation as being inherently antagonistic with one another. The coalition's collaboration with the INI led its members to more consciously and visibly identify with their Indigenous roots; they had to become more Indigenous in order to become more modern.

Everyday speculation in the remaking of peri-urban livelihoods and landscapes

Peri-urbanization is transforming the urban-rural interface of metropolitan areas across the global south. Large-scale planned developments and infrastructure projects result in the widespread displacement of residents and the disappearance of agricultural fields, vegetable plots, and small enterprises. Through multi-year fieldwork in eastern peri-urban Jakarta, we shift the optic from the large players driving these transformations—developers, land brokers, and investors—to examine how residents of peri-urban settlements (kampungs) respond to unexpected developments and manage the uncertainties associated with market-induced displacement. We conceptualize their practices as everyday speculation, extending speculation beyond its financial meaning to include social and cultural aspects. Both displacees in relocation kampungs and holdouts in kampungs subject to displacement make the most of emergent spatiotemporal rent gaps to devise ways to improve their livelihoods and accumulate wealth, but they also attempt to realize their social and cultural aspirations of reproducing kampung ways of life characterized by dense social networks and commoning practices such as mutual aid. Speculation reinforces pre-existing economic inequalities among kampung residents but is not obliterating social and cultural values that contest the norms of neoliberal global urbanism. Scaling up from everyday speculation by individual households, we identify three paths of kampung transformation that are concatenating across a shape-shifting speculative kampung landscape that coexists in a complex and synergistic relationship with the planned developments. Understanding residents’ everyday actions is thus important to grasping the full scope of peri-urbanization.

Application of Smart Healthcare in LTCI, Outpatient Mutual-Aid Guarantee Mechanism, and Sustainability of Medical Insurance Fund for Urban Employees

With the aggravation of population aging and the increase of life expectancy, long-term care insurance (LTCI) system has been established to meet the medical and long-term care needs of the increasing elderly population. In China, LTCI system is currently not a stand-alone insurance, but it is attached to the national basic medical insurance fund for urban employees (MIUE). As a result, the expenditure of LTCI is a part of the expenditure of the MIUE, which has an impact on the sustainability of the MIUE. By modeling the income and expenditure of MIUE, especially including the expenditure of LTCI, this study optimized an LTCI system with a higher individual out-of-pocket payment ratio of LTCI and implementation of the outpatient mutual-aid guarantee mechanism (OMAGM), which could improve the sustainability of the MIUE. The study also reveals the following: (i) solely increasing individual out-of-pocket payment ratio of LTCI to 20%–50% can only postpone the deficit on Social Pooling Accounts (SPAs) by 1 or 2 years, and the effect is very limited. (ii) Besides a higher individual out-of-pocket payment ratio, further implementation of a partial OMAGM from 2022 will postpone the deficit on SPAs by 7–9 years, and the implementation of a complete OMAGM from 2022 will postpone the deficit by 14–18 years. Accordingly, China should implement OMAGM as soon as possible to enhance the solvency of MIUE fund, and, in the long run, an independent LTCI scheme should be established to ensure the stability and sustainability of the LTCI fund and the MIUE fund.

Shame

Reliance on mutual aid is a distinctive characteristic of human biology. Consequently, a central adaptive problem for our ancestors was the potential or actual spread of reputationally damaging information about the self – information that would decrease the inclination of other group members to render assistance. The emotion of shame appears to be the solution engineered by natural selection to defend against this threat. The existing evidence suggests that shame is a neurocomputational program that orchestrates various elements of the cognitive architecture in the service of (i) deterring the individual from making choices wherein the personal benefits are exceeded by the prospective costs of being devalued by others, (ii) preventing negative information about the self from reaching others, and (iii) minimizing the adverse effects of social devaluation when it occurs. The flow of costs (e.g., punishment) and benefits (e.g., income, aid during times of hardship) in human societies is regulated to an important extent by this interlinked psychology of social evaluation and shame (as well as other social emotions). For example, the intensity of shame that laypeople express at the prospect of committing each of various offenses closely matches the intensity of the actual offense-specific punishments called for by criminal laws, including modern laws and ancient laws that are millennia old. Because shame, like pain, causes personal suffering and sometimes leads to hostile behavior, shame has been termed a “maladaptive” and “ugly” emotion. However, an evolutionary psychological analysis suggests that the shame system is elegantly designed to deter injurious choices and make the best of a bad situation.

Carceral and Colonial Memory During Pandemic Times in the Philippines

#CommunityPantryPH is a mutual aid movement that began in the Philippines in April 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The movement is founded on the slogan ‘give what you can afford, take what you need.’ Instead of the movement receiving an overwhelming welcome, especially within conditions of food scarcity and health insecurity during the long-lasting pandemic, the Duterte government attacked volunteers with ‘red-tagging’ tactics—the malicious calling out of individuals as communists, which may result in harm both online and in real life to those red-tagged. The public response also circulated myths about the supposed indolence of Filipinos receiving aid and how the volunteers are fanning a culture of dependence among the poor. In this article, I introduce the concepts of ‘carceral memory’ and ‘colonial memory’ in understanding colonially inherited punitive, civilising, and self-deprecatory logics that have become embedded in postcolonial disciplinary regimes, and which suppress dissent and shape popular attitude and consciousness in the Global South.

The Role of Public Art in Solar Commons Institution-Building: Community Voices from an Essential Partnership among Artists, Community Solar Researchers, and Activists

In this urgent decade when American democracy faces the challenge of decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid and assuring that the economic benefits of our energy transition are equitably shared, many solar energy researchers and activists are searching for new ways to partner with the civic sector. Instead of treating energy users as passive customers, experts understand the importance of engaging community as active decision-makers, beneficiaries, and communicators for a just energy transition. Distributed solar technology offers more democratic potential than small savings on individuals’ electric bills. Energy experts working on the Solar CommonsÔ community solar model at the University of Minnesota are piloting demonstration projects with community partners in Arizona and Minnesota. These solar commons aggregate savings through power purchase agreements that create 25-year peer-governed revenue streams to support mutual aid and reparative justice work in neighborhoods. This article describes a Solar Commons research project in Arizona, with a conversation among the public artists who partnered with the legal research team to co-create communication and peer governance tools that will allow DIY Solar Commons to iterate throughout the US as a new institution in our civic sector. Images of the Solar Commons public art demonstrate how the artists helped expand the vision of solar energy from the iconic individual solar panel to a technology embedded in community justice and in a complex human-more-than-human environment.