Mobilizing Self as a Social Actor to Disrupt the Common Place

In her day-to-day, Vaga De Franx seeks out information about current social justice struggles, questioning moments and operations of oppression. During our first interview in early spring of 2012, she talked to me about her approach to understanding history and current events, seeking out multiple perspectives in the media and using mainstream media against itself:

VDF: Democracy Now! I think is a big one and a lot of activists know about it. It is it’s own independent news media. And I think that what a lot of activists do is – well, have very little faith in mainstream media. We use media. Like, if we are on the Internet, we see an article and we almost use it to prove our point of what the media wants us to think, what the media wants us to believe, and why they want us to believe that.

Here she uses mainstream media in ways that force a meta-critique of its underlying messages.

She engaged in the same critique as she discussed her thoughts about the New York Times. She recognized that despite the level of professionalism and expertise in the paper, there were problems with what they reported, how they reported, what they leave out and how one is expected to perceive their articles. She used the example of their reporting on illegal weapons trade in Mexico and how it shaped messages to United States citizens about Mexicans as the sole, violent perpetrators of the “War on Drugs.” Here she offered alternative ways of understanding the material conditions surrounding US-Mexico relations, a topic that was very personal to her as an activist. This topic of borders was one I wished to explore further, but she interrupted her own critique of mainstream media to discuss another important information medium in her learning: books.

VDF: Your question before was where do you get your information from, and I think books. Because even in the university, a lot of my fellow student organizers, you know – the class structure is there and you have to go to class. But in terms of really learning, I don’t think any of us look at a textbook and think, “This is what I’m learning.” It’s more like, independent books and who is publishing these? What press is publishing these?

Which is something that I never worried about until now. I need to see who is feeding me this information. So when you see that it is this publishing company who has also

published Howard Zinn, then I know I can rely on this information and I’m pretty sure that I want to read this perspective. A lot of things happen to be around Marx, and analyzing Marx, and you know – you don’t have to read Kapital (laughing) to think Marx is right. That is another thing, in our generation, people reading Marx and you know, they say, “I’m not a communist, not a socialist.” But there are smaller books and they give you a better perspective. You know, feminist issues. The Communion is a great book on patriarchy and the way that relationships work.

Her discussion of independent books and publishers raised questions about the purveyors of media, illustrating the knowledge and skills she has in the present to seek out perspectives that will add complexity to her learning. She asked questions about textual intentions and the positions of writers, readers, and distributors. Implicit in her referencing of Howard Zinn is the acknowledgment of his work as a progressive scholar and a “people’s historian” whose legacy is connected to publishing alternate ways of seeing, telling and constructing history. I knew what she meant, too. I have a series of presses whose reputations precede them in my quest for inventive writing around cultural theory and activism: Semiotext(e), the AK Press, PM Press, Haymarket and Seven Stories immediately come to mind.

She took this discussion into the issues she organizes around the most: educational equality, immigrant rights, Stop and Frisk and other forms of “racist police brutality.” She also went into an extended aside about environmentalism and the internal struggles of meta-cognitive activisms and activists in making small moves toward sustainability. I asked her how she thought people should learn the history they don’t know or don’t understand in a quest for informed social justice actions to happen:

VDF: Peer education. Study groups. Being able to, sometimes when I read a book, I get influenced by the writer and I - sometimes even asking the most critical questions, you sometimes can’t analyze a book objectively and compare it to other people’s ideas or just reality, you know. So, being able to read within a study group and talk about it, it helps so much. It doesn’t allow you to just get caught up in that writer’s work. It really, like – talking about feminist theory with men has been the most informative thing I have ever been through. Because, as a woman, I am reading the book and I’m just like yes, yes, yes, that’s exactly what I go through. And the feminist writer will give me an analysis of why men suck. And why this and why that. And then it’s just like, men suck, men suck. And then I talk to a man who is my friend and I’m like, well - you don’t suck.

(laughs) But you have these ideals too. So, being able to talk about that. That’s the best way. That’s really the only way, to me.

This emphasis on dialogue is a topic that emerges time and again in conversation with the participants. Vaga De Franx highlights how essential it is to share in making sense of ideas and frameworks, to include disparate voices in order to gain a more just and measured perspective.