Gómez Cruz, E. & San Cornelio, G. (2018).

Imagening discontent: Political images and

civic protest. In Marco Bohr & Basia Sliwinska. The Evolution of the Image: Political Action
and the Digital Self. London: Routledge.

Please cite original

Imagening discontent: Political images and civic protest.

Edgar Gómez Cruz, RMIT, Australia

Gemma San Cornelio, UOC, Spain

Intro: #VibraMexico, the anti-image Rally

On February 12th of 2017, barely 20 days after Donald Trump’s Inauguration as
President of the United States, Mexican civil society and intellectuals organised a
“National Civic Rally demanding respect to Mexico” with rallies in different cities
(organisers claimed 40 thousand in 22 cities). During Trump’s campaign Mexico was
one of the main targets of Trump’s populist and hateful comments, he called Mexicans
that migrated to the US “bad hombres”1, “drug dealers”, “criminals” and “rapists”2 and
one of his main campaign promises was to build a wall on the border between the two
countries. His combative and confrontational tone did not change after he became
President and the march was a response to these constant accusations and attacks.
Organised by a variety of citizens and organisations, the call was to participate in a
“nonpartisan, pacifist and respectful protest” under the title of #VibraMexico (Mexico
pulsating). The rally was aimed at redefining/reclaiming the power to define who
Mexicans are, to reclaim the right of Mexicans to present their own image in response
to an imposed image from a foreign powerful person.
This text analyses photos posted on Instagram about the rally in order to demonstrate
how the use of images3, digital platforms and practices could form a social imaginary
with political implications. This protest provides an example of how images and
imagination are entangled and mobilized in an emergent form of civic participation and
it aligns with a growing academic interest in the relationship between images and
imagination, particularly the political implications of this relationship4.
Doerr and Teune suggest that “images produced by social movements are part of the
struggle over meaning.”5. In the case of the #VibraMexico rally, it is precisely the
contestation over a meaning that constitutes the core of the protest. Through the rally,
participants collectively displayed an “imagined community” (presenting ideas of unity
and goodwill while expressing discontent towards these discourses) against Trump’s
imposition of meaning on Mexicans (as “rapists and drug dealers” as “bad hombres”,
etc.). We use the concept of images in a broad sense, comprising photographs,
illustrations, cartoons, etc. We also acknowledge the multiplicity and complexity of

1
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/oct/20/donald-trump-bad-hombres-us-presidential-
debate-las-vegas-video
2
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37230916
3
We use images in a twofold way, as visible images (photos, texts, banners, cartoons) but also as “mental
images”, as imagined projections.
4
See for example Bottici, Chiara. Imaginal politics: images beyond imagination and the imaginary.
Columbia University Press, 2014.; Azoulay, Ariella. Civil Imagination: a political ontology of
photography. Verso Books, 2015.; Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World: An Introduction to Images,
from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More. Vol. 8. Basic Books, 2016.
5
Doerr, Nicole, and Simon Teune. "The Imagery of Power Facing the Power of Imagery: Toward a
Visual Analysis of Social Movements." In The Establishment Responds, (Palgrave Macmillan US, 2012),
46.
communication ecologies used in protests6, but we focus our analysis on these different
images shared on social media. These images, portrayed in the analysed data are indeed
part of a larger entanglement of different elements (the street, the walk, the banners,
social media, traditional media, historical icons, etc.). In this sense, we suggest that the
#VibraMexico rally is particular because it was, as we call it, an imagened protest—
though it incorporated people’s actual presence, marching in the street, it was shaped
in important ways through images and widely photographed and shared in social media.
While photographing in rallies seems to be the norm nowadays, we highlight the central
role of images in the creation of a shared imaginary. By remediating, appropriating and
remixing images for different purposes (mocking, complaining, responding, etc.), we
present the rally as a case study of how a shared imaginary sets in motion using images.

Method and protest images

The methodology used in this chapter was developed by the funded project Selfiestories
and Personal Data7 (12/2014-6/2017) led by San Cornelio and with Gómez Cruz as
one of the researchers. The goal of the two-year project was to analyse selfies as
personal and collective narratives using Instagram as the main field site. Using the same
methodology, the particular case study presented in this chapter is centered on the social
media study of the #VibraMexico rally. Our approach is as a non-image-centric visual
study. While we focus on images, we understand them as communicative objects that
circulate and generate social interactions and consequently are context-dependant while
holding multiple meanings.
We have designed a mixed methodology that combines analysis of a large corpus of
data (photos, hashtags, comments) with a qualitative approach. More specifically, our
methodology was built in three phases: image content analysis, platform analysis (in
this case Instagram), and a practice-theory approach, focusing on users’ perceptions,
discourses and doings8 especially those photography-related9.
Our observation of the march started before the physical event took place — following
the media coverage, discussions on social media—, continued during the time of the
rally — reading and making notes of tweets and images in real time—, and finally, we
analysed the material generated after the event, both on Instagram and on twitter —
comments, reactions, etc. —. Gómez-Cruz, as a Mexican himself, felt emotionally
attached to this event. John Postill developed the idea of “remote ethnography”10 to
account for the ways ethnographic work could indeed be completed from afar. Inspired

6
Treré, Emiliano, and Alice Mattoni. "Media ecologies and protest movements: Main perspectives and
key lessons." Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 3 (2016): 290-306.
7
Project funded by BBVA Foundation, aiming to experiment with a mixed methodology approach
combining big data with an ethnographic orientation. www.selfiestories.net
8
Cruz, Edgar, and Elisenda Ardèvol. "Ethnography and the field in media (ted) studies: A practice theory
approach." Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 9, no. 3 (2013).
9
Gómez Cruz, Edgar, and Elisenda Ardèvol. "Some ethnographic notes on a Flickr group."
Photographies 6, no. 1 (2013): 35-44.
10
Postill, John. Remote Ethnography. Studying Culture from Afar. In Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst,
Anne Galloway and Genevieve Bell (Eds.). The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography. London:
Routledge. 61-69. 2017.
by this idea, Gómez Cruz followed the protest since its inception, and “participated”
remotely by posting, retweeting and commenting on social media about the protest. In
this sense, a rally, with its fixed timespan and with the shared use of a hashtag presented
a rich object to study “intensities”. Postill and Pink11 use the concept of intensities to
describe a shift in ethnographic work, from studying territories or communities to focus
on “relations between things and processes” 12 Studying intensities presents new
opportunities to understand the way the rally was not bounded (only) to the physical
marching of people nor to specific identities.
In order to obtain the data, a data scraper was developed by a programmer in the context
of the project selfiestories. Since our main focus is Instagram, the official API
(Application Programming Interface) was used to gather data using different methods
of communication between various software components. As a result, we got a piece of
software that allows the extraction and storage of information in a server, automating
specific queries, related both to hashtags and users on Instagram. In this case, the
application captured information during the period of 12/02/2017 and 14/02/2017,
forming an archive of “visual protest material”13 comprised of a total of 800 posts to be
analysed. According to our query, the scraper returned a raw data file (in json14 format)
containing the following information besides the images; hashtags, captions and
comments, date and time of uploading, users, and like count, amongst others. This file
was later converted into a spreadsheet and analysed with NVivo, a software for
Computer Assisted/Aided Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS). Finally, we contacted
ten of the most active users detected in the dataset in order to do online interviews and
ethnographically informed observations of their practices on social media. This method
allowed us to approach the rally from multiple perspectives and layers; from a
comprehensive overview of the type of images shared to the most important depictions
in those images and the possible impact they had. Moreover, these two analyses,
contextualised by the richness of interviews and ethnographic interpretation locate
quantitative data among broader and deeper narratives regarding photographing and
sharing practices.

Social discontent, civic imagination and creative imagery

Our analysis showed that more than 40% of the collected images posted during the rally
depicted banners or crowds, suggesting the display of the rally and people participating
as a reinforcement of rally’s success. Simultaneously, these photos display images

11
Postill, John, and Sarah Pink. "Social media ethnography: The digital researcher in a messy web."
Media International Australia 145, no. 1 (2012): 123-134.
12
Postill and Pink, "Social media ethnography: The digital researcher in a messy web.", 124.
13
Philipps, Axel. "Visual protest material as empirical data." Visual communication 11, no. 1 (2012): 3-
21.
14
A JSON file is a file that stores simple data structures and objects. It contains data in a standard data
interchange format which is lightweight, text-based, and human-readable. JSON files were originally
based on a subset of JavaScript, but is considered a language-independent format, being supported by
many different programming APIs.
within them, on banners and signs, and these embedded images represent the message
of the protest. In combination, our interpretation of this 40% of images is that the overall
statement of the rally’s social media posting was: “we are all here together and this is
what we think”. As one female Instagram user claimed in a comment: “I think the image
we were looking for was achieved and will reach overseas, thousands of Mexicans
demanding respect”. These photographs present an image of unity and cohesion that
becomes effective precisely because of the collective gathering of individual messages.
In this sense, the presence of some public figures such as Enrique Graue the Vice-
Chancellor of the National University, the biggest university in Latin America, and
Denise Dresser, one of the most important independent news journalists, helped to
boost representation of the protest on social media. As one of the male interviewees
mentioned: “I photographed them [the vice-chancellor and the journalist] because they
are ‘famous’ and because they were going to create a bigger impact when I publish
them on my social networks”.
This rally provides a good example of the contemporary shift from social movements
presenting specific political demands to a norm in which protesters seek systemic
change or show general discontent rather than seeking specific outcomes in the rally.
Several examples of these “discontent rallies” were indeed against Trump such as the
women’s march or the academic’s march opposing him but there are many other
examples such as the first stage of the 15M in Spain or the rally in Paris after the Charlie
Hebdo’s terrorist attack. These manifestations of discontent present an alternative
“vision” to the existent one. Because they are imagened visions in opposition to an
imposed one, irony, sarcasm, and mocking are a central element in the rallies. While
these elements have always been an important element of protests15 in this particular
one they were central. The combination of images and texts changed some of Trump’s
motifs by playing with them, remediating them and contesting them. For example, a
man carried a sign that said: “bad hombre” with an arrow pointing down at him while
he carried it above his head (but with the addition in smaller font of the words: “son”,
“brother”, “uncle” in Spanish). Following Jordan’s definition of “semiotic terrorism”
as part of a culture jamming16 where the “power of an effective moment is based on
using the same language as that being criticized”17. Some other banners said: "Build
bridges not walls", "Simpsons yes, Trump no", "México is the new black", “No hate,
no racism, no walls”, “time to make America Latina great again”, all of them in English.
Protesters presented an informed subversion of many of Trump’s discursive elements
regarding Mexico and Mexicans. Written on cardboard, T-Shirts, faces, and hats, these
messages turned into a public satire of Trump’s populist claims. In the same way, other
images (re)mixed different iconic elements to re-signify them (for example one poster
used the same design of the “Hope” poster created by Shepard Fairey for Obama’s 2008

15
Cuninghame, Patrick Gun. "“A Laughter That Will Bury You All”: Irony as Protest and Language as
Struggle in the Italian 1977 Movement." International Review of Social History 52, no. S15 (2007): 153-
168.
16
Dery, M. (1993)
17
Jordan, Tim. Activism!: direct action, hacktivism and the future of society. (Reaktion books, 2002),
104.
campaign, using Trump’s face with the addition of a Hitler-like moustache and overlaid
by the word “Twitler” instead of “Hope”. Trump’s face was portrayed in masks, piñatas,
posters etc. in a cartoonesque style, clearly signalling the personification of a discourse.
While Trump’s discourses portrayed Mexicans in a certain way, all these discursive
elements were contested using the person of Trump himself as the focus of the protest.
But this discontent also targeted the Mexican president for his perceived lack of
strength in his opposition to Trump. There were several images portraying President
Peña Nieto as a puppet or as a lackey. A popular sentiment mocked the distinctive
hairstyle of both Trump and Peña Nieto Presidents, with one banner reading: “let’s get
rid of toupees”. Several posters reproduced political cartoons, especially those
published in the national newspaper La Jornada, famous for its political cartoonists that
are among the best in the country and that portrays Trump quite often in their cartoon
section.
In Mexico there is a long history of political iconography (political cartoons18, prints,
murals), which has been fundamental in the creation of national imaginaries19, from the
Mexican Revolution to the 1968 Students’ movement. This historical heritage of protest
iconography in relation to a Mexican self-awareness is activated nowadays through
political cartoons but also with memes and tweets 20 . Therefore, this political
iconography has been increasingly present in the latest social movements that have an
important social media component21.
Two iconic elements are also widely present and both are good examples of the
important relationship between images and imagination: the first is the Mexican
national flag. Historically, the national flag has been an element of unity and cohesion,
respected and venerated by Mexicans. It is commonly used in national celebrations,
sport events, popular media and it is a distinctive element of pride and cohesion in a
country that is very diverse and full of inequalities. The presence of the flag, and its
colours works to underwrite the visual homogeneity and therefore creates a cohesion in
the imaginary. The second iconic element, widely present in the rally imagery is the
Monument to Independence (better known as “The Angel”). Established in 1917 to
mark the centenary of the independence in one of the main avenues in Mexico City.
The “Angel” is a golden sculpture of angel on top of a 36 meters high victory column.
At the base of the column there are four bronze sculptures that symbolise: law, war,
justice and peace. The place is a common gathering site for victories of all sorts
(especially sports) and it is also the icon of Mexico City. The rally passed by the
monument and along with the flag it was one of the most photographed icons,

18
Alba, Victor. "The Mexican Revolution and the cartoon." Comparative Studies in Society and History
9, no. 02 (1967): 121-136.
19
See for example the Special Issue of Third Text on “Art and Revolution in Mexico”
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ctte20/28/3
20
See for example https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/31/donald-trump-mexico-memes-
cartoons-pena-nieto
21
Treré, Emiliano. "Reclaiming, proclaiming, and maintaining collective identity in the# YoSoy132
movement in Mexico: an examination of digital frontstage and backstage activism through social media
and instant messaging platforms." Information, Communication & Society 18, no. 8 (2015): 901-915.
expanding its presence in connection to the protest and transferring its meaning into the
rally’s topic. The Angel is a symbol of freedom and independence and it belongs to the
imaginary of all Mexicans and that’s what, implicitly, the rally was trying to aim. In
this sense, there is a relationship between the offline protest design that also contributes
to the way online imagery is constructed and shared.

An increasingly important corpus of work discusses the role of visual elements in social
movements, public protests and political activism. Current literature focus overall on
social movement identities and visual branding of social movements. A prominent
contribution to the field is Mattoni and Doer’s 22 work on the imaginary of the
precarious in Italy through the case of the Euro Mayday Parade (EMP) protest
campaign. They found that the main objective of the activists was subverting existing
popular culture traditions by creating new icons. On the other hand, the work of
Cozen23 is focused on the images produced by artist activists against climate change.
From an arts perspective, Tzortzis Rallis coined the expression ‘Agitational Visual
Language’24 as an attempt to examine geopolitical characteristics, as well as common
visual elements in social movements arising in Greece and other parts of the world in
recent years. This Agitational Visual language could also be observed in Mexican case
studies such as the Zapatists’ websites25. According to this body of work, patterns and
visual elements within these images, provide an shared interpretation in terms of their
iconic power.
Following this literature, other scholars focus on precisely how images are used
politically in protests with different configurations than those organised by traditional
social movements. Jeffrey Juris, in his work about #occupy 26 proposes that some
current protests introduce a “logic of aggregation,” “which involves the assembling of
masses of individuals from diverse backgrounds within physical spaces” 27
distinguishing it from a more structured and networked logic, traditional in social
movements. In the same direction, Fatima Aziz, in her analysis of the #azadimarch in
Pakistan uses Engin Isin’s concept of “acts of citizenship” to explain how, by taking
and sharing images of protests in social media, a banal activity is transformed into a
citizen act, “an active performance of political identity.”28 This seems aligned with
Nunes’ suggestion that one gains a kind of political agency: “not by making an overt
rights claim, then, but by situating oneself, in a highly personal way – situating one’s
selfie – as a node of circulation within a movement that expresses itself equally through

22
Mattoni, Alice, and Nicole Doerr. "Images within the precarity movement in Italy." Feminist Review
87, no. 1 (2007): 130-135.
23
Cozen, Brian. "Mobilizing artists: Green patriot posters, visual metaphors, and climate change
activism." Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 7, no. 2 (2013): 297-314
24
http://glossary.mg-lj.si/common-histories/documents/agitational-visual-language.pdf
25
Escalona Urenda, Sandra. "A cultural analysis of the visual signs in the Zapatistas websites." (2012).
26
Juris, Jeffrey S. "Reflections on# Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging
logics of aggregation." American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (2012): 259-279.
27
Juris, "Reflections on# Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of
aggregation.", 260.
28
Aziz, Fatima. "Performing Citizenship: Freedom March Selfies by Pakistani Instagrammers." In Selfie
Citizenship (Springer International Publishing, 2017), 27.
actions and imagery”29 . Aligned with these approaches, we suggest that, due to the
particular nature of the #VibraMexico rally (a civic protest without specific demands
and open to any form of participation but not politically-driven as many protests),
images and image-making practices created a network of digital visuality that had two
main outcomes. First, it produced the conditions for the protest to reach more people
than those present in the rally itself and second this imagery extended both the
temporality and the reach of the physical protest in social media. These two outcomes
combined created an echo-chamber, an imagined image of a common idea (that
Mexicans are united and reject Trump’s portrayal of them) shared collectively. Mattoni
& Teune 30 in their meta-analysis of studies about visual components and political
protests affirm that social movements are “essentially visual phenomena”. While
acknowledging the important role of icons and images in every rally, political or social,
we want to suggest that the case of the #VibraMexico rally seems to be different. We
are not suggesting a new form of political movement nor a necessarily new form of
protest, but we do argue that networked images, along with practices and platforms,
create the conditions for a non-political multitudinous but individually-experienced
gathering to be discursively constructed in political terms by imagining it through
images without a shared identity of people as a movement. This is not a self-represented
social movement but an imagened rally of different individuals that oppose an
ideological representation that they feel as personal. We will develop this idea further
at the end of this section.

The hashtag: aggregating individualities, imagining collectivities

After an initial image classification (using an image management software), focusing
on what the image depicted, we extended the analysis to identify the most common
hashtags and phrases used in captions (besides the main #VibraMexico) by using tag
cloud visualizations. We found that hashtags related to geographic locations were
predominant (#MexicoCity, #Mexico) along with those related to the rally’s aim
(#mexicounited, #unity, #family, originally in Spanish). We analysed hashtags
ethnographically (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015) as a key element of the discursive and
connective nature of the rally. They were also useful to identify the more active users
and the most liked photos during the time of the capture. We contacted ten users in
order to do online interviews and ethnographically informed observations of their
practices in social media. We analysed all these different sets of data to understand how
people felt about the rally, why they participated and how they perceived its failure or
success.

29
Nunes, Mark. "Selfies, Self-Witnessing and the ‘Out-of-Place’Digital Citizen." In Selfie Citizenship,
(Springer International Publishing, 2017), 114.
30
Mattoni, Alice, and Simon Teune. "Visions of Protest. A Media-Historic Perspective on Images in
Social Movements." Sociology Compass 8, no. 6 (2014): 876-887.
According to Rambukkana (2015), hashtags mediate discursive assemblages with
multiple possibilities that depend on the different actants involved. By naming the rally
“Mexico pulsating” the organisers were not making the rally a clear political demand
but creating an open invitation to gather under a common umbrella of discontent, but
at the same time a call to participate in the depiction of Mexicans as an active society.
The combination of words in the chosen name was closer to other titles used in sport
events, national celebrations or popular media. What seems relevant is that the
organisation included the hashtag sign as part of the rally’s name since its inception; it
seems clear that they wanted social media to be an active element accompanying the
physical rally and create online resonance from a physical gathering. In this sense, and
following Rambukkana31, the hashtag was a “pathway to an open and non-predefined
set of communicative encounters and architectures”32.
The hashtag functioned as a connector that gave a sense of continuity and collective
cohesion to a series of images that are individual. But while hashtags can give a sense
of cohesion and commonality, they also work against a shared goal by enhancing the
social component and dissolving the political elements into individual goals. For
example, one Instagram user posted several selfies using the hashtag of the rally along
with others such as “follow”, “gaymexico”, “gym” and many others. Similarly, a radio
station Instagram account used the hashtag when posting images and news content that
in some cases had nothing to do with the rally. Examples like these not only distorted
our analysis of the sample, but also highlighted an apparently unusual overlapping of
aims, interests, and connections beside the use of the official hashtag. This finding is
consistent with other studies such as the work of Giannoulakis and Tsapatsoulis33. In
their analysis of a corpus of 1,000 Instagram images they found that an important
portion of hashtags had nothing to do with what the image depicts 34 . The use of
apparently non-related concepts through hashtags can be interpreted, in this case, as a
form of reaching a wider audience to photos and personal accounts. While connecting
to a collective event through the official hashtag, every other hashtag opens a new
possible connection with different publics. As one informant mentioned about the use
of several different hashtags: “I do it to get more followers…the hashtags link my
photos to a wider exchange network”. An extreme example of this was another user
that posted a bikini shot at the beach and, along with the hashtag from the rally she used
others such as “traveling”, “passion”, “heart”, etc. This user was aware of the rally
taking place and she used the fixed temporality of the hashtag to get more visits to her
account. There are multiple possible interpretations to this, the hashtag adds layers of
connection, bringing multiple networks together and multiplying the contextual
meaning of the posted images. But while hashtags can be used for personal interests,

31
Rambukkana, Nathan. Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks. Peter Lang
Publishing, 2015.
32
Rambukkana, Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks, 4.
33
Giannoulakis, Stamatios, and Nicolas Tsapatsoulis. "Evaluating the descriptive power of Instagram
hashtags." Journal of Innovation in Digital Ecosystems 3, no. 2 (2016): 114-129
34
Giannoulakis and Tsapatsoulis, "Evaluating the descriptive power of Instagram hashtags.", 127.
according to Aziz (2015), in her analysis of a Pakistani rally, images that use the hashtag
indirectly support and acknowledge the importance of the rally.
After visualizing all the verbal content that is present in the picture caption, including
hashtags, comments and mentions, three different types of contents mainly emerge.
Firstly, after the official hashtag, the most frequent words are related to Mexico and its
different cities and locations (#cdmx, #mexicounido, #mexicocity, #noalmuro),
secondly, we identified the kind of hashtags more commonly used in Instagram to get
more followers and likes (#like4like, #followme, #spam4spam), and finally, a third
group of hashtags related to gender collectives (#gaymexico, #gaymadrid, #gaymodel).
The first set of hashtags is logically used since they are related to the topic of the rally,
showing pride for Mexico and making it visible. The second group reveals a strategic
use of the images trying to get likes and reach as many followers as possible. For the
last concurrence of hashtags there could be two probable explanations; one particular
user posted several dozen pictures (mostly selfies) using the rally hashtag along with a
number related to gay communities. One possible explanation is that he was taking
advantage of the temporality and visibility of the rally for personal purposes. A more
optimistic interpretation could be that, since the rally was organized against Trump’s
statements against Mexicans, the user tried to connect specific agendas fighting sexism
and homophobia as part of a broader set of discourses contesting Trump’s ideas.
Nevertheless, looking in depth into this possible connection, it is important to consider
at this point that most of these tags were used by only a small number of users –that
were very active in posting- so the hashtags related to gay collectives are probably
overrepresented. In this regard, if we look at the big picture we see a message of a
cohesive and unitary discourses showing and verbalising the projected feeling of a
whole country but in very personal ways and for a myriad of reasons.
Finally, there is another important element regarding the use of the official hashtag in
the rally. Not only was the hashtag part of the official name of the rally but the hashtag
symbol was also used, as a visual signifier, in many prints held in the protest. This
signals the multiple dimensions and entanglements between the online and the offline
elements of the prostest, something interesting to further theorise.

Some concluding remarks

The media coverage of the #VibraMexico rally was scarce and the coverage gave the
impression that the rally was not especially successful35: participation was low, there
was another parallel rally at the same time in Mexico City (allegedly in support of the
Mexican president), the messages were diverted from the rally’s theme to a criticism to
the Mexican President and Trump didn’t even tweet a response to it! But it became a
good example of the possibilities for social discontent to be politically constructed in
the future.

35
See for example https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/10/the-walls-within-mexico-struggles-
for-unity-against-trump
Devrim Gürsel, in her analysis36 of the images of the Unity Rally (Marché Republicaine)
in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo’s terrorist attacks in 2015 points out that: “How events
and publics are visualized matters not only because we live in an image-saturated world
but because determining what can be visually represented, managing zones of visibility
and invisibility, has become a key means of exercising power” 37 In this sense,
photographs that depict the mass of attendants to the event, are important in
demonstrating that the call had a numerous response even while traditional or mass
media did not cover the event as it happened.

The rally was similar to other protests for unity, such as the mentioned in Paris in 2015
or the 15M in Spain. Although it did lack a clear political agenda based on ideologies,
groups or movements, it seems to be a good example of an emerging form or protest
that follow the “logic of aggregation” suggested by Jeffrey Juris38. Participants in this
rally didn’t share a “collective identity” but they are more an enactment of an “imagined
community”39. Anderson, in his influential book proposes to define a Nation as an
imagined political community, “imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”40.
Precisely the idea of the protest is to offer a shared idea of a united front against an
imposed (and foreign and alienated) “subject construction”. This rally was an “anti-
image” protest because it was a reaction to a series of discourses that disparaged
Mexican identity, a reaction from an “imagined image” in Trump’s discourses. At the
same time but it was a shared display of a series of visual tropes that anyone from
Mexico could be related to: freedom, independence, the national flag, unity, etc.

There have been other social movements that were organized based on the opposition
to a specific (and usually uneven or unfair) situation. That’s the case for example of the
15M movement in Spain, a movement characterised by plurality that sometimes even
contradicts itself41 or the #Ferguson protest42 . Nevertheless, it is important to notice
that some of the usual participants in political rallies did not join #VibraMexico and
that signals a different (and less politicised) event. Some of the people we interviewed
mentioned that it was surprising for them that participants in the rally were from the
Mexican upper-class, a group that doesn’t participate in protests very often. In this
sense, the rally was less politically constructed than many others. Therefore, it would
probably be a mistake to call participation in the rally activism in the traditional sense
of an ideology-based form of protest in order to change something. It was more a

36
Gürsel, Zeynep Devrim. "Visualizing publics: digital crowd shots and the 2015 unity rally in Paris."
Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (2017): S135-S148.
37
Gürsel, "Visualizing publics: digital crowd shots and the 2015 unity rally in Paris.", 135.
38
Juris, Jeffrey S. "Reflections on# Occupy Everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging
logics of aggregation." American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (2012): 259-279.
39
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism.
Verso Books, 2006.
40
Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, 6.
41
Monterde, Arnau, Antonio Calleja-López, Miguel Aguilera, Xabier E. Barandiaran, and John Postill.
"Multitudinous identities: a qualitative and network analysis of the 15M collective identity." Information,
Communication & Society 18, no. 8 (2015): 930-950.
42
Bonilla, Yarimar, and Jonathan Rosa. "# Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial
politics of social media in the United States." American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2015): 4-17.
synergy of individual participation triggered by social media affordances and the
current political climate. But, at the same time, it can’t simply be disregarded as banal
or apolitical. This rally could be seen as a good example of what Mirzoeff calls “Visual
Activism”43 where images are at the centre and vehicles of social discontent. The civic-
based nature of this protest signals the entanglement between the online and the offline
marked by images as a common denominator, not only as a practice during the rally but
also as an online performance of participation. In that sense, images become powerful
translators between different forms of mediations (political, social, technological). As
Gerbaudo points out: “it is precisely because of the high level of individualization of
our society as reflected in the personalized nature of social media communication that
the construction of collective identity becomes so important and urgent”44. In this sense,
the imagined entanglement created by an assemblage of images, social media activity,
participation in the rally and the resulting imagined unity, opens new ways to think
about civic participation and political discourses that need to be further explored.

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