Community weaving across Latin American peripheries: A listening infrastructure in Oaxaca

Abstract

In July 2021, residents of Vicente Guerrero, a settlement built around the largest landfill in Oaxaca, commemorated the waste-pickers’ 40th anniversary with an urban art festival. This event was organised by Santa Cecilia Music School, a community-led cultural infrastructure that has shaped the social and material landscape of Vicente Guerrero since 2011. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted around this festival and throughout 2023, I propose studying cultural initiatives like Santa Cecilia as listening infrastructures to discern their ability to ‘centre’ peripheral communities through the opportunities they create for self-, collective and social listening, which, respectively, promote self-growth, spark community projects and display peripheries as creative places. I argue that the combined effect of these forms of listening – what Vicente Guerrero residents call community weaving– helps overcome material and social stigma conditioning life on the periphery. By examining these listening mechanisms, this analysis aims to enrich debates about the fundamental role of cultural infrastructure in the making of (Latin American) cities and their peripheries.