Mutual Aid: Trueque, Cooperación, And Skill Swapping

Seed: Cooperate!

Clearly, my fellow organizers for the Femstival—a three-day festival organized by local women with ties to the punk scene to celebrate International Women's Day on March 8—were not very comfortable with delegating tasks. But I hated to find myself at loose ends while others were still working. Finally, we agreed that I would gather cooperacion voluntaria (donations) from the audience at a nighttime show of music. Standing with an old coffee can pierced by a coin slot at the top, I found myself at the entrance to the event, wheedling and cajoling the mostly male audience to give up even a peso in support.

One guy looked over my shoulder at the women setting up instruments on the makeshift stage and, in a whiny, disappointed tone, asked if it would be all “chicas” performing that night.

“Yes,” I said, locking my eyes on his, daring him to contradict me. “Isn't that fantastic?” I ignored the fact that there were men scheduled to perform as well—sadly, there weren't nearly enough all-female bands to fill our roster. I shook the little bit of change I had accumulated in the can, which made a bright, resonant noise totally out of proportion to how few coins were actually inside.

A bit sheepishly, he agreed as he dropped a few centavos in my jar.

When life is a hustle and securing everyday necessities a regular challenge, it pays to be generous with what you have. Sharing of all kinds is key to sociability in Mexico City's punk scene for that pragmatic reason, as well as for more high-minded principles derived from anarchist ideals. Mutual aid is an autogestive principle that governs several exchanges, as many participants engage in the task of ensuring their own wants and needs, in part by seeing to the wants and needs of others. The roots of practicing mutual aid are, like many other key activities in the scene, multiple. In the earliest days of the Chopo market, for example, middle-class regulars privileged the practice of trueque, trading precious cultural items that were hard to find in Mexico at the time, such as recordings of free jazz, rock, and other cosmopolitan musical styles not significantly produced by the national music industry. In this way, people could pursue expensive, hard-to-find cultural experiences without having to repeatedly lay out large sums of money for the privilege. Abraham Ríos Manzano (1999, 24) has noted the importance of the practice in his history of the Chopo market, before its removal to the street outside the Chopo museum, which hastened the arrival of more economically marginalized patrons from the metropolitan zones, including punk fans.

In the late 1980s, as the market became better established and more regulated, its leaders increasingly failed to provide a space for this type of exchange to occur, but persistent criticism from marketgoers eventually brought back the practice. During my fieldwork periods, people who wanted to swap items knew to go to the very back of the market, to an open space right next to the Espacio Anarcopunk. There, a shifting number of people milled about with a box of records, a handful of cassettes, a D.V.D, or whatever it was that they were looking to upgrade for someone else's cast-off treasures. The practice was important to punk-scene participants as well. I witnessed people engaging in trueque within the Espacio Anarcopunk itself, despite its puestos with items for sale, people sometimes bartering goods for services instead of goods for goods—by parting with a book or a T-shirt, the owner might have his hair neatly done in rastas (dreadlocks).

In addition to trueque, a few other time-honored practices are meant to alleviate financial obstacles to punk-scene sociability. I witnessed many, many instances in which people banded together to hacer la vaca, pooling money for anything from a caguama from the corner store to admission to a punk show. For most of my friends, it didn't matter that I was a privileged North American when it came time to buy the beers.

Few people—though not literally zero—ever hinted, much less demanded, that I should pay the party tab, but rather wanted to see my own contributions to a group total. A little handmade change purse I'd bought in a street market broke, the zipper worn out from so much use when giving a few pesos here, a few pesos there. I would save up change over the course of the week, my pockets, too, weighted with coins before starting a weekend's worth of activities.

The practice of pooling money for admission to tocadas has become controversial at punk shows, however, particularly when there has been some layout on the sound equipment or on venue rental. Though there are a few organizers with ties to professional venues, and thus pricey punk shows featuring internationally known performers at those locations, many shows are organized through D.I.Y friendship networks, the burden of costs shared by a small group of people who'd ideally like to have them reimbursed. These bands typically perform for nothing, or for free refreshments, but there are often incidental expenses to get them to the shows, housed, and fed, especially if they are not locals. All show organizers complain that there is plenty of money for beer, so why can't people pay what they're asked at the door?

Meanwhile, people at shows protest even the most minimal prices of twenty or thirty pesos for admission, which can be the lower range for more informally organized events. Given that the minimum daily wage in Mexico City hovered around fifty-five pesos per day during my early fieldwork period—for the minority of people who had salaried work at all—the idea that people who want to attend a show might not be able to hand over a chunk of that figure never seemed far-fetched to me. And perhaps, even with the grumbling, most people feel the same. Despite controversy, the practice of pooling money continues in a number of small ways and is still unquestioningly accepted at some punk shows. Of course, refusing the practice can also spur a portazo.

Another tradition related to the concept of mutual aid is the practice of asking for cooperación voluntaria rather than setting strict prices for items like fanzines or for entrance to events. In this way, fanzine creators attempt to recoup the costs of printing their product while ostensibly keeping it affordable for everyone. People certainly abused the practice on occasion, refusing to give at all. The Femstival was one of those occasions. Set at the Auditorio Che Guevara on the campus of the Ciudad Universitaria (UNAM), the events attracted both people who did and didn't typically hang out in the punk scene.

But for the most part, scene participants operate according to unwritten rules about what things are worth, and perhaps what they could get away with offering for any particular item. Habitually stingy people were ridiculed to their faces at times, and certainly behind their backs.

A related, more widespread and less open practice that flourishes in the punk scene, as well as in tianguis broadly, is the sliding scale approach to pricing, according to the presumed social positioning of a buyer. Prices at ordinary street markets for someone like me were often far higher than they would be for people not so clearly marked as economically privileged. If I gathered for some activity with punk-scene friends, preparing to cook a meal together perhaps, they tended not to send me out to buy things for that very reason. We wouldn't necessarily get our collective money's worth if I took charge. On the other hand, it was a great compliment when anyone would offer me precio banda, the price that they would offer to other members of la banda, not because they believed I couldn't afford something, but because they wanted to make me feel like I was banda for one fleeting moment of camaraderie at least.

Finally, my favorite among the various mutual aid practices in the punk scene is an emphasis on skill swapping, sharing one's learning with others, often in the form of talleres (informal workshops). Here, I could participate easily. Skill swapping can happen as sharing favors, such as various occasions on which I was asked to do some Spanish to English translation or vice versa. Or it can be the exchange of informal teaching services, such as the time when I traded a violin lesson for a primer on how to operate a sewing machine.

Though shared tastes guide the selection of skills that scene participants might wish to offer or encounter as learners, the breadth of knowledge that may be shared is vast. From bike maintenance to computer hacks to vegan cookery, punk-scene participants develop expertise not only for their own use and enjoyment but also for the edification of their friends. While formal higher education draws controversy because of its inaccessibility for many, and the ways that it fails to create better job prospects for even more, informal autogestive education is a tradition within the punk scene in which most people participate freely and gladly.

Additionally, punk-scene participants use institutions like the Biblioteca Social Reconstruir to offer workshops to people in nearby communities, a practice that bleeds into outreach as well. During my visit in August 2017, library regulars were brainstorming activities for the local community as the new school year neared, planning how they could support families in the area and simultaneously attract them to the anarchist library's network.

In my experience, the Femstival 2010 was the event where skill swapping was on clearest display, providing numerous talleres over the course of its three-day existence. The event in itself was inspired by the examples of Ladyfest and clitfest, two series of D.I.Y women's festivals with strong punk participation, held in various global locations starting in the year 2000. The local take on this practice was organized by a loose collective of women friends, many who were fixtures in the local punk scene, though also including a significant number of women who were not.

Workshops featured activities ranging from self-defense training to making one's own herbal remedies and washable sanitary napkins. At Femstival 2010, there were also discussions, performances, an art exhibition, crafts sales, and the raffle of a menstrual cup, an eco-friendly object not easy to find in Mexico in those days. The workshops primarily brought women together to teach and learn with one another.

But as with fanzine production, the purpose was to entertain as the event educated, providing fun and informative events for men as well as women. Children and pets were also welcome, though parental discretion was to be advised. Many events incorporated frank discussions about sexuality, and imagery of the female body was prominently displayed. At the entrance to the auditorium proper, women bunched pink tissue paper to create a vaginal womb-door, prompting numerous delighted attendees to perform full-body jokes, snapping pictures.

There was an open call for women who wanted to set up a booth, stage a performance, or offer a workshop. They proposed their ideas and we did our best to provide them with space and materials for following through. This was a messy, ad hoc process, but it mostly worked. An impressive diversity of women participated, often recruited through collective members' friendship networks, and by no means all linked to the local punk scene.

A few friends of friends even came in from other parts of the country to lend a hand, including a female tattoo artist who provided her services during the event. While the festival was a huge amount of work, particularly for the two women who became the project's de facto leaders (more on this later), the rewards were great enough that ultimately a second Femstival was planned for 2011, again providing numerous chances for mutual aid, as well as outreach and autogestión more broadly, since the festival drew participants from beyond the punk scene.

FIGURE 4.6. The reinauguration of the Biblioteca Social Reconstruir in 2015. Photo by Iván Torres.

Figure 4.6 summary: A black and white photograph shows a group of people in a room filled with bookshelves and stacks of papers. Some individuals are seated at a table reading documents, while others stand nearby, including one woman reading a book and another person standing next to tall piles of archives.

Seed: Friendship and Feminism

Saturday afternoon, the second day of the 2010 Femstival, an unfortunate bit of drama occurred. On the auditorium stage, a performance had barely begun before the crowd became uproarious. From outside of the auditorium, where I was stationed to sell raffle tickets, I heard a confusing blend of angry shouts and wolf whistles.

The performers referred to themselves as a body-positive cabaret group, but they were said by those present to have performed a striptease. Many men in the audience were loudly supportive. But from what I was told later, a handful of the festival organizers were enraged at this affront to their feminist beliefs and rushed the stage, yelling in their fury, attempting to physically remove the act. While other women tried to plead for calm and tolerance, the scene erupted in chaos.

The incident ignited tensions that had been sizzling beneath the surface between various women organizers. There had been whisperings that the feminism represented by the event was not radical enough. Some were annoyed by other events included in the festival, such as the performance of a pair of women who claimed to represent Hindu women's culture and who were described to me as gyrating in sparkly, gauzy, midriff-exposing saris.

The problem was that would-be performers weren't vetted before the event. The cabaret act, like most other groups, simply had a member who was friendly with one of our central organizers and she had vouched for them, having seen a very different performance that they had done some time before. Many of the groups and individuals that participated in the event were bound to Las Cirujanas—"The Surgeons," as the collective was known—by friendship ties, and it was taken as a given that we would all be more or less on the same page when it came to our feminism.