Participatory public culture and youth citizenship in the digital age: the Medellín model

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PARTICIPATORY PUBLIC CULTURE AND YOUTH CITIZENSHIP IN THE
DIGITAL AGE: THE MEDELLÍN MODEL

By
Melissa Brough

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

May 2014

Copyright 2014 Melissa Brough
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AKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation has benefited from the generous, and often tireless, support of
many—first and foremost, my family. My husband, Chris, read every word of every
chapter at least once. He helped me refine my thinking and writing, and urged me on at
every step; I am so grateful for his partnership and the many ways that it has enabled me
to reach new heights. I gave birth to our daughter, Josephine, in the middle of the writing
process, and she had to share a great deal of my attention in her first year of life. She
helped me get an early start to my days and filled my writing breaks with immense joy.
My mother, Jan, helped us through the challenges of this period, coming to the rescue in
some particularly trying moments. Both of my parents have been a constant source of
strength and nurturing, for which I am forever grateful.
I am truly indebted to my exceptional committee. Sarah Banet-Weiser (co-chair)
has profoundly influenced my thinking and writing, and modeled the kind of teacher and
mentor I aspire to be. I am likewise grateful to Manuel Castells (co-chair) for his
encouragement from the very beginning of my time at the Annenberg School, for his
enthusiastic support of my research in Latin America, and for the many ways he has
helped strengthen my analytical capacity. Henry Jenkins inspired much of this work and
offered thoughtful and generous feedback throughout. He has continually supported my
efforts to marry theory and practice. Josh Kun helped me develop some of my earliest
thinking on this topic, and was the first to suggest that I do my research in Medellín. He
encouraged me to be creative in forging my own direction as a scholar. And without
Clemencia Rodríguez, this project never would have happened; the experience of
accompanying her to visit several Colombian community media projects in 2009
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prompted me to return to Colombia to carry out this research, and she supported my
Fulbright application that made it possible. She has always been generous with her time,
contacts, translation assistance, and insightful feedback.
Early in this intellectual journey I met a number of people in Colombia who
greatly influenced the path that I took. Melba Quijano made Colombia my home, was a
co-conspirator in my research process, and kept me laughing along the way. Camilo
Pérez was my first friend in Medellín—how fortunate! He gave me my first in-depth look
at the dynamics shaping Medellín, hosted me in the early stages of my research, and
connected me with many of the people who became central to this study. His unique and
beautiful way of seeing the world continues to inspire my work. I am likewise grateful to
all of his colleagues in the audiovisual collective Pasolini en Medellín (especially Ana
María Guzmán, Sandra Benítez, Duvan Londoño, Diego Gómez, Leo Cataño, and Andrés
García) who provided an intellectual and creative home away from home. Ángela Garcés
Montoya (Universidad de Medellín), Jair Vega (Universidad del Norte), and Monica
Pérez (formerly of the Universidad de Antioquia) all helped me find my intellectual
footing in Colombia and pushed my thinking. And I was very fortunate to have Eddy
Lorena Cuartas Graciano as a research assistant at various stages of this project.
I am grateful to everyone who granted me an interview or otherwise contributed
to this study. In particular I would like to thank: Jose David Medina Holguin, Yesid
Henao Salazar, Rafael Augusto Restrepo Agudelo, Daniel Acevedo Gómez, Jose
Arellano, Ángela Panesso and the Subsecretaría de Metrojuventud, Victor Daniel Vélez
Vélez and the office of Planeación Local y Presupuesto Participativo in the Secretaría de
Cultura Ciudadana, Sergio Fajardo, Alonso Salzar, Jorge Melguizo, Nectalí Cano, Jairo
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Foronda Cano, Adriana Zafra Kiasúa, Clara Inés Restrepo Mesa, Santiago Leyva Botero
at the Universidad EAFIT, Gladys Acosta at the Universidad de Medellín, the Educación
en Ambientes Virtuales research group at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Alex
Correa Velez and Lina Mejía of Platohedro, Orlando Lujan Villegas and the Instituto
Popular de Capacitación (IPC), Libardo Andrés Agudelo, Diego Andrés Río Arango,
Jeison Alexander Castaño Hernandez, Alexandra Castrillón Laverde, Daniel Felipe
Quiceno, Jhon Jaime Sánchez, Jhon Freddy Asprilla, Ingrid Joana Bonilla Jaramillo,
Natalia García, Álvaro Ramirez, Gabriel Jaime Vanegas Montoya, Diego Fernando
Gómez, Henry Barros, Ana María Cardona, Kelly Múnera and the other members of
Hiperbarrio, Jorge Blandón, Juan Guillermo, Miguel Ángel Bedoya, Mauricio Cadavid
Restrepo, Gerard Martin, Juan Pablo Ortega, Yan Camilo Vergara Gallo, Andrés
Montoya, Rafael Aubad, Germán Franco Díez, Delio Aparicio, Paula Marcela Moreno
Zapata, Juan Carlos Flechas, Rafael Obregón, Orley Duran, Amparo Cadavid, the
Emisora Comunitaria San Vicente Stereo, Jesús Martín Barbero, and—especially—past
and current members of La Red de Hip Hop La Elite, Son Batá, and Ciudad Comuna.
I am also grateful to my friends and colleagues who read earlier versions of these
chapters and offered their invaluable feedback. In addition to my committee, this
includes: Camilo Pérez, Zhan Li, Sonya Fierst, Gerard Martin, Charlotte Lapsansky,
Daniela Gerson, Chris Marshall, and Pilar Riaño. I would also like to thank Doe Mayer
for many stimulating conversations about participation, and Edelmira Gracián for her
tireless assistance.
This dissertation benefitted greatly from the generous support of the following
institutions: the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the Graduate
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School at the University of Southern California, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, the
Universidad de Antioquia, the Stark Foundation, and the Annenberg Program on Online
Communities.
Ultimately, I am most indebted to the youth who participated in this study; they
taught me, motivated me, humbled me, and humored me. I experienced both profound
inspiration and great sadness working in Medellín. During or since my time there, several
youth—including one of my interviewees—have been killed in the dynamics of armed
violence that I describe in the following chapters. I dedicate this dissertation to their
memory, and to the youth of the future, including my daughter.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii
LIST OF FIGURES viii
ABSTRACT ix
INTRODUCTION 1
Background 4
Why Medellín, Colombia? 5
Overview of Chapters 7
CHAPTER 1: Participation and Youth Engagement in the Digital Age: Framing the
Study of Participatory Public Culture 11
The Proliferation of Participation 14
Why Youth Participation Matters 18
Reconceptualizing Civic Engagement and (Youth) Citizenship in the Digital Age 27
The Normative Functions of Citizenship and Participation 33
Theories of Participation 37
Participatory Public Culture: Thinking Across Communication, Culture, and Politics 52
Methodology 54
Conclusion 67
CHAPTER 2: Medellín in Context: Youth, Violence, and the Promise of Participation 69
Medellín: A City of Contrasts 71
Violence and the Fracturing of Public Life 75
Narcotrafficking and Its Youth Protagonists 77
Violence and the State After Escobar 86
Compromiso Ciudadano 93
Youth as Agents of Nonviolent Change and Collective Action 97
Conclusion: Medellín as a Site for the Study of Participatory Public Culture 101
CHAPTER 3: Political Participation and Governmentality: Participatory Budgeting and
Youth Engagement in Medellín 102
The Turn Toward Participatory Democracy in Colombia 104
Participation and Governmentality 111
Participatory Budgeting as a Form of Participatory Democracy in Medellín 116
Conclusion: The Role of Political Participation in Participatory Public Culture 150
CHAPTER 4: Participatory Cultures and Youth Citizenship: Comuna 13, the Territory of
Artists 153
The Significance of Culture to Participation 155
Tactics and Strategies of Participation 158
Comuna 13: Contested Territory, Conflicted Citizenship 162
Red de Hip Hop La Elite (The Elite Hip Hop Network) 165
Son Batá: Youth Citizenship Contested 175
Cultural Tactics of Participation 182
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Navigating Institutional Strategies of Participation: Youth Tactics in the Participatory
Budgeting Process 207
The Role of Communication and New Media Technologies, by Way of a Brief Example 216
Challenges of and to Participation 222
Conclusion: The Role of Culture in Participatory Public Culture 224
CHAPTER 5: Communication, Digital Citizenship, and Participation 229
Communication and Society 233
Communication and Voice as Participation: Horizontality, Dialogue, Openness, and Autonomy 235
New Media, New Opportunities for Participatory Communication? 242
Ciudad Comuna 244
Medellín Digital 261
Digital Citizenship and Digital Literacies 275
The Limits of (Digital) Participation and Voice 284
Conclusion: The Role of Communication in Participatory Public Culture 291
CHAPTER 6: The Medellín Model of Participatory Public Culture: Toward a New
Analytical Approach 295
Summary and Synthesis of Findings 295
The Medellín Model of Participatory Public Culture 308
Medellín: A More Participatory Public Culture? 321
CONCLUSION 327
Transmitiendo Desde Los Angeles 337
BIBLIOGRAPHY 342
APPENDIX A: Partial List of Collectives, Organizations, and Government Departments
Interviewed and/or Observed; Partial List of Events Observed 376
APPENDIX B: Organizational Structure of the Red de Hip Hop La Elite 378
APPENDIX C: Survey of Revolución Sin Muertos Festival Attendees 382
Part 1: Survey Guide 382
Part 2: Summary Report Submitted to La Red de Hip Hop La Elite and the Asociación
Cristiana de Jóvenes-YMCA 384

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1. Participación. Graffiti, Medellín, Colombia. 14
Figure 2.1. View of Medellín from the Metrocable Line K. 72
Figure 2.2. Map of Medellín by neighborhood and socioeconomic strata (0-6), 2006. 73

Figure 2.3. Annual Homicide Rate in Medellín, 1987–2012.

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Figure 3.1. Participatory budgeting (PB) annual allocations and number of
initiatives/projects funded, 2005-2013. 123

Figure 3.2. Citizen participation in Asambleas Barriales y Veredales by age group,
2006-2012. 125

Figure 3.3. Citizen participation in Asambleas Barriales y Veredales by gender,
2006-2012. 125

Figure 3.4. Delegate Participation in PB by Age Group, 2004-2007 and 2010-2012. 126

Figure 4.1. Map of the comunas of Medellín. 163
Figure 4.2. Composition of La Elite network by age in 2010. 170

Figure 4.3. Mural near Son Batá’s cultural center, Comuna 13, Medellín. 176

Figure 4.4. Breakdancing performance, Revolución Sin Muertos Hip Hop Festival,
2011. 191

Figure 4.5. Graffiti artist tags an overturned couch during a march against the violence
in Comuna 13. 193

Figure 4.6. Screen shot of a Facebook dialogue, Medellín, March 2011. 219
Figure 5.1. Four dimensions for analysis of participation through communication. 242
Figure 5.2. Cover of Visión 8, December, 2011. 248
Figure 5.3. “Un nuevo mapa para la comuna” (“A new map for the comuna”). 253

Figure 6.1. The Medellín model for the analysis of participatory public culture. 309

Figure 6.2. Example of analytical model applied to cases examined in this study. 311
Figure A.1. Organizational structure of La Elite in 2011. 376
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ABSTRACT

A growing body of research suggests that we are witnessing new forms of youth
civic engagement and public participation, invigorated by digital technologies, practices
and cultures. In communication studies, “participation” has primarily been theorized in
the separate, and so far largely disconnected, subfields of participatory communication
and participatory culture. Few scholars have bridged these fields, and while both take
civic and political engagement as a central concern, both have fallen short of theorizing
how participation in public life traverses the areas of communication, culture, and
politics. This study investigates participation across these three areas to develop a model
for analyzing participatory public culture and youth engagement in the digital era.

The
model is based on the findings of several case studies in Medellín, Colombia, developed
through a multi-level, ethnographic approach. The findings suggest that participatory
public cultures are cultivated through both institutional strategies and grassroots tactics
for participation. The study also finds that efforts to use digital communication
technologies to enhance youth engagement are less technologically deterministic and
more effective when they are linked to dialogical communicative practices; to cultures
that promote the expression of citizen voices; and to political or other structures that
connect the expression of voice to influence over decisions that affect participants’
material reality. The resulting analytical model prompts analysis of the relationship
between institutional and grassroots modes of participation, and critical consideration of
the kinds of participation being enacted or offered, whether structural or content-related.
It proposes several analytical dimensions relevant to the construction of participatory
public culture, including reducing barriers to participation; creating spaces and cultures of
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participation; developing capacities to participate; and linking voice to influence. The
study historicizes contemporary discourses of participation, and engages scholarship from
the United States, Latin America, and Europe in digital media studies, cultural studies,
and communication, political, and sociological theory.
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INTRODUCTION

On the afternoon of January 29, 2011, I found myself sitting on the corner of a
couch in the Parque Biblioteca San Javier (San Javier Park Library). The renowned
library, one of five such world-class structures each located in poor neighborhoods in
Medellín, had become a recreational and educational meeting space for local youth; they
filled the computer labs and appropriated the outdoor patio for breakdancing. The wall of
windows in front of me looked out at the heart of Comuna 13—a part of the city made
notorious in the media for its history of violence and ongoing gang activity, and a place I
might not have visited a decade ago. Just down the hill was the end of the metro B line
and the beginning of the San Javier Metrocable, one of the three famous gondola systems
in Medellín that climb through the uppermost reaches of the city’s shantytowns.
Together, the library and the gondolas stood out against the backdrop of ramshackle brick
housing. Heavily branded with the insignia of the Mayor's Office, they were dramatic
signs of the local government’s efforts to both make its presence more visible and
transform the city.
Next to me on the couch sat the hip hop artist and activist known as “JEIHHCO”
(a stage name combining his first name, Jeison, with hip hop and Colombia), age 25, and
the graffiti artist known as “El Perro” (“The Dog”), age 21.
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JEIHHCO was wearing
classic hip hop attire: wide pants, a baggy t-shirt, a large, stiff baseball cap. El Perro
carried a backpack of aerosol paint cans and other art supplies. JEIHHCO and El Perro
were members of one of Colombia’s most active and widely recognized youth-run hip
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With the exception of public political figures, such as the two mayors whom I interviewed, I anonymize
my interviewees throughout this study. I specifically asked JEIHHCO and El Perro their permission to use
their stage names in the recounting of this meeting.
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hop networks, the Red de Hip Hop La Elite (La Elite Hip Hop Network, known as “La
Elite”). They both joined the network as teenagers and had since devoted the majority of
their time each week to organizing the network and developing their skills as both hip
hop artists and activists for peace. In their own way, they had become as iconic of
Comuna 13 as the famous park library and Metrocable; they were known by many across
the city and beyond for their promotion of nonviolence and youth empowerment through
the arts of hip hop.
This was my first meeting with them, and as we concluded our conversation about
hip hop activism in Comuna 13, JEIHHCO did something that I had started to experience
as a curious pattern: He offered me the cell phone numbers of senior officials in the
municipal government. What I found surprising was that, rather than the researchers,
NGO staff, or other professionals I spoke to, it was most often my youth interviewees
who offered to put me in contact with the local government
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—challenging my
assumption of traditional relations of power. As JEIHHCO explained,
If I want to speak with the Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana [Ministry of Civic
Culture] or Metrojuventud [the municipal department of youth programs], I can
call them, they’ll pick up their cell phone. This doesn’t happen in Bogotá, or
almost anywhere else for that matter. . . . [H]ere, there’s an administration that is
close to [grassroots projects] but furthermore, La Elite pulls a lot of weight in this
city, in the political realm. And this means that our spaces, our process, and our
voice are more often heard.

This is true. During my fieldwork in Medellín in 2010–2011, I witnessed, for
example, how the killing of a young hip hop artist prompted a conversation between hip
hop activists and government officials via the online social networking site Facebook,
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An important exception is Gerard Martin, former director of the Colombia Program at Georgetown
University's Center for Latin American Studies, to whom I am indebted for putting me in contact with
former mayors Sergio Fajardo and Alonso Salazar.
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which resulted in government support for a memorial march and concert that materialized
only a few days later. I found all of this surprising in a city where youth from places like
Comuna 13 had been heavily stigmatized since the height of narcotrafficking violence in
the 1980s and early 1990s. In my fieldwork, I learned that such relationships between
youth organizers and the municipal government were not necessarily an exception (even
though La Elite has had a particularly strong relationship with certain branches of the
government), but rather, a product of the city’s public and political culture at the time.
The following chapters explore, among other things, how it is that young hip hop
artists from one of the poorest, most violent areas of a highly segregated city came to
hold sway as both political and cultural change agents, and what this can tell us about
contemporary discourses and practices of youth participation in public life. This is a
multilevel study of the (re)construction of public culture in Medellín through discourses
and practices of participation, with particular focus on both the role of youth and the
ways in which digital communication technologies may be bolstering participation. The
study analyzes how youth participation through communicative, cultural, and political
practices becomes a contested resource for various actors, institutions, and networks. It
bridges scholarship on participatory culture, communication, and politics from both the
global North and South (mainly the United States and Latin America). It ultimately
develops an analytical framework for better understanding youth participation and social
change in the digital age, which I call the Medellín model of participatory public culture.

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Background
I first became familiar with the concept of participatory communication as a
youth media producer. I started studying the topic after interning with the Chiapas Media
Project, an organization that supported indigenous communities in southern Mexico to
produce their own video documentaries. At the time (2000), participatory media was
understood by activists and some development communication scholars/practitioners as a
counter-hegemonic practice aimed at reconfiguring power relations by giving
marginalized voices control over media production processes. As video technology
became more accessible in the 1980s, and as digital video began its rise in the 1990s,
“participatory video” gained popularity among activists and community-based
development practitioners, while, at the same time, participatory communication was
increasingly being institutionalized by international development agencies like the World
Bank.
In late 2006, I began to notice a shift; the terms “participatory media” and
“participatory video” became part of mainstream discourse as social media capabilities
such as user-generated video platforms (e.g., YouTube) helped to catalyze major shifts in
the media landscape, most often for commercial ends. “Participatory video” was now
being used to describe how marketers could engage consumers in interactive marketing—
in other words, harnessing consumers’ free labor for the production of brand content (see
Chapter 1). In the United States, the term participatory media is now used in contexts
ranging from citizen journalism to corporate marketing strategies, and it carries with it an
unprecedented degree of cultural and economic capital. Indeed, the trope of
“participation” itself has been widely commodified (Andrejevic, 2007; Fuchs, 2011),
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diluting some—but certainly not all—of its utility as a framework for shifting relations of
power in and through communication and media practices.
This project was inspired in part by a desire to rethink participatory
communication in relation to both these changes and recent scholarship on uses and
cultures of new/digital media (including participatory culture), and in the process, to
advance current thinking about youth engagement in the digital age. “Participatory Public
Culture and Youth Citizenship in the Digital Age: The Medellín Model” is a culmination
of my experiences as both a practitioner and scholar. Its central purpose is to develop a
theoretically robust framework for analyzing the ways in which discourses and practices
of participation across the interrelated spheres of culture, communication, and politics
may produce participatory public culture—and to consider how this can be used to better
support youth civic/political engagement in the contemporary context.

Why Medellín, Colombia?
Colombia has been a nexus of participatory communication since the middle of
the 20th century. Colombian practitioners and scholars (e.g., Orlando Fals Borda, Pilar
Riaño, Clemencia Rodríguez, and Jesús Martín Barbero, among others) have contributed
significantly to international debates about people’s/citizen participation through
communication media and other forms, and have developed a diverse range of
participatory practices using both old and new media technologies to promote civic
engagement and social justice (see Gumucio Dagron, 2001; Riaño, 1994; Rodríguez,
2011).
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Since the 1990s, some Colombian cities have also implemented practices of
youth-inclusive participatory democracy. One such example is Medellín, where youth
participation in public life is seen as a central resource for stabilizing and developing the
city. Narcotrafficking and the longer history of armed violence in and around Medellín
have severely constrained the participation of many youth and other citizens in the public
sphere. The crisis that made Medellín notorious on the global stage in the late 1980s and
early 1990s for having the world’s highest homicide rates also created a political opening
for new actors independent of traditional party politics to enter into local government—
an opportunity that was seized by Sergio Fajardo and the Compromiso Ciudadano party.
This unprecedented alliance of academics, business people, community organizers, and
others brought an administration into power that emphasized citizen participation as one
of its central agendas. The crisis also positioned youth to become recognized as key
agents of change in the city’s development, spawning a vibrant ecology of youth
organizing.
Medellín has since become internationally recognized for its innovative initiatives
aimed at renewing civil society and promoting participation in public life. During the two
Compromiso Ciudadano administrations (2004–2011), participation was at once
conceived by the municipal government as a discursive and practical tool for the
integration, stabilization, and development of the city, and harnessed as a resource for
resistant practices by grassroots groups. As a result, discourses and practices of
participation proliferated from both institutional and non-institutional actors;
“participation” became a central episteme in the (re)construction of public life. Medellín
has been further recognized as a leading digital hub of Latin America, with major
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government commitments to bridging the digital divide and promoting digital literacy
and e-governance.
Medellín is thus an exceptional case in some ways, one in which the renewal of
public life (and youth protagonism within it) is understood to be an urgent necessity, a
way to resist or transform the widespread violence that has plagued the city. Yet gang
violence, poverty, and the disillusionment of youth with traditional political institutions
are conditions faced by many cities in the United States and worldwide, to which the
Medellín experience can speak. Several global discourses about youth/citizen
engagement, digital and participatory culture(s), democratization, and social change
converge in Medellín. This makes it a key site for developing an analytical framework for
understanding manifestations of participatory public culture in the digital age. With this
in mind, and with the support of a Fulbright Student Grant, I carried out the following
research over the course of ten months in Medellín between 2010 and 2011.

Overview of Chapters
Chapter 1 contextualizes and historicizes the study, and reviews why youth
engagement is seen as important and also changing. It considers what “participation” has
meant in different contexts, particularly in Colombia; and how the discourse of
participation has become expedient internationally, in the sense that it has become a
resource for gaining legitimacy and power by both state and grassroots actors. The
chapter argues for analyzing participation at—and as—the intersections of politics,
culture, and communication. Chapter 2 describes the Medellín context, its history of
violence, and the construction of certain youth subjectivities as either murderers or agents
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of positive social change. It also discusses the significance of youth collectives as
presenting alternatives to gang membership. Chapter 3 considers political participation,
broadly conceived, and analyzes participatory budgeting both as a form of participatory
democracy, and as a state strategy to involve youth in public life and governance.
Participatory budgeting provides a case through which to investigate institutional
structures for participation and how these may catalyze public discussion of what
constitutes participation, while also serving as a form of governmentality. Chapter 4
focuses on culture, analyzing case studies of youth-driven participatory cultures in
Medellin (including a hip hop collective and an Afro-Colombian cultural group) and how
they resignify cultural codes and reterritorialize public space through participatory
practices. It analyzes the relationships that exist among these youth groups, state actors,
and institutionalized forms of participation like the participatory budgeting process.
Chapter 5 analyzes two case studies of “digital citizenship” and how this contested notion
is constructed in relation to the concept of youth participation. It theorizes the
relationship between participation and communication, and the potential capacities that
new media bring to this. The two case studies, one a top-down, municipal e-government
and digital literacy initiative, and the other a bottom-up, youth-led community media
group active in local development, are analyzed along four dimensions of participatory
communication: horizontality, dialogue, openness, and autonomy. Scholarship on new
media literacies also informs the analysis. The distinct ideologies, practices, networks,
and even software choices of these distinct initiatives result in different conceptions of
digital inclusion, citizenship, and participation—all of which have fundamental
implications for how we analyze participatory public culture.
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Across all of the case studies, the following key themes are considered: how the
areas of participatory culture, politics, and communication are interrelated; how
participation is construed as a resource by various actors through particular discourses
and practices; how digital culture is or is not changing these; the institutionalization of
participation; and its exclusions. Chapter 6 draws on the findings of the previous chapters
to articulate a framework for analyzing participatory public culture and youth
engagement in the digital age, and then it considers how this framework may be
applicable beyond the Colombian context.
Many argue that we are witnessing the emergence of new modes of participation
in public life, particularly among youth. Looking at participatory forms of culture,
communication, and politics in the Colombian context offers the opportunity not only to
historicize, but also to raise analytical questions about the ideologies, discourses,
practices, and material outcomes implicated in contemporary notions of participation
through a cross-cultural perspective.
The study bridges scholarship from Latin America, the United States, and Europe.
Cultural theory, recent media studies scholarship on digital and participatory culture,
Latin American participatory communication scholarship, and political
science/sociological theories of participatory democracy and civic engagement all inform
the analysis. To develop an analytical framework that may not simply advance theory-
building, but also inform future strategies for enhancing public participation, this research
investigates the links between cultural, communicative, and political participation in
relation to youth empowerment, integrating elements of each field to propose a new
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definition of—and model for thinking about—what constitutes participatory public
culture.
It is my hope, then, that this research not only advances critical scholarly debates
about youth participation, but is also, as my Colombian friends might say, propositivo
(proactive, proposing action). I believe that participation can be transformative and lead
to greater social justice; it is my hope that this study helps to recuperate the contemporary
utility of the concept toward these ends.
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CHAPTER 1: Participation and Youth Engagement in the Digital Age: Framing the
Study of Participatory Public Culture

It’s the context that determines not only the content and practices of democracy,
citizenship, and political culture, but also the theme of participation. . . . The discourse of
participation has been capable of adapting itself like a chameleon to this new situation.
– Mario Giraldo, Universidad de Antioquia, July, 2011

The turn of this century also marked something of a turn in the way many of us
think about youth engagement. While some analysts—perhaps most famously Robert
Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000)—have lamented a decline in political awareness, news
consumption, and membership in traditional civic organizations, others have begun to
celebrate the rise of new modes of youth participation. The widespread use of terms like
“Facebook Revolution” to describe the waves of protest in the Middle East known as the
Arab Spring (Allagui & Kuebler, 2011) is illustrative of the global fascination with
whether, and how, more participatory forms of communication enable more participatory
politics and public cultures—and how youth may be at the forefront of shaping these.
Specifically, the development of Internet-based social media (or what some call
“participatory media,”
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e.g., Bull et al., 2008; Ciszek, 2013; Rheingold, 2008;
Zuckerman, 2013) in the first decade of the 21st century prompted a new wave of
research on emergent forms of political and civic engagement invigorated by new media
technologies, practices, and cultures. Now, a sizeable and growing body of research in
the United States and internationally focuses on how youth participation in public life can
be enhanced through the use of online platforms. The interactive, networked, and
dialogical forms of communication enabled by these online tools far exceed the potential
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For reasons elaborated below, I find this use of the term “participatory media” to be technocentric and
ahistorical.
!
!
12!
12!
of older forms, such as television, to support the engagement of people of all ages—
especially youth—in public discourse and action (Livingstone, 2009).
Participation is not new to the field of communication, but the term has
proliferated both within and well outside of the discipline particularly in the last decade
(Carpentier, 2011). Participation has most often been studied in proverbial silos, either
focusing on political participation (e.g., in political science), civic participation (e.g., in
sociology, political science, urban studies, or development studies), cultural participation
(e.g., in art history or media studies), or communicational participation (e.g., in digital
media studies, development communication, or communication for social change). Yet in
many cases, actual youth engagement traverses these porous boundaries. And particularly
in today’s digitally networked societies, the increasing interconnectedness of these areas
requires us to think across them to better understand youth participation in contemporary
public life.
In this chapter, I argue that the study of participation in public life has been
constrained not only by a relative lack of discussion across scholarly fields,
4
but also by
geographic and language barriers—especially between the global North and South. In
contrast to the proliferation of discourses on participatory cultures, new media, and civic
engagement in the global North since the advent of social media and Web 2.0,
5
there is a
long history of participatory communication scholarship and practice in the global South,
best documented in the development literature. Colombia, in particular, has been a nexus
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
Carpentier (2011) is a useful exception. Another is the Youth and Participatory Politics Research
Network, an inter-disciplinary network of researchers funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital
Media and Learning initiative (see http://ypp.dmlcentral.net/).
5
“Web 2.0” is commonly used synonymously with social media to refer to online social networking sites
and platforms for sharing user-generated content. Jenkins (2010) points out, however, that the term was
originally developed to describe the business model for commercial websites that capitalize on user-
generated content.
!
!
13!
13!
of such work for decades, a place where extensive participatory practices using both old
and new technologies are understood to have played key roles in promoting individual
and community empowerment, civic engagement, and social change (Coryat, 2008;
Gumucio Dagron, 2001; Rodríguez, 2011). Some analysts have called Colombia “la zona
del mundo más prolífica en comunicación ciudadana” (“the most prolific area in the
world in terms of citizen communication,” Ortega et al., 2005).
6
To date, however, little
dialogue has occurred between web-based participatory culture(s) in the United States
and those that have been practiced for decades (on and offline) in Colombia and other
parts of the global South. In this study, I take a cross-cultural or “border crossing”
(Giroux, 2005) approach, engaging scholarship on participatory culture, communication,
and politics from Colombia, the United States, and elsewhere to develop a model for
analyzing youth participation in public life in the digital age. Putting such an array of
literatures into conversation is a challenging and extensive task. I do not pretend to cover
each exhaustively, but instead, I offer a selection of key insights that help to frame the
development of the analytical model.
I focus the discussions in this chapter on the following topics: the proliferation of
discourses of participation in the contemporary moment; why youth participation matters;
how participatory culture and communication have been theorized to date as they relate
to political/civic engagement,
7
drawing primarily from the development communication
and media studies literatures; and theories of (youth) citizenship and participation in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Throughout this study, unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
7
Throughout much of this study, the categories of civic and political engagement are combined for
purposes of the analysis (e.g., by “participation in public life,” I am referring to both forms of engagement).
I concur with Youniss et al. that “there is not a definite demarcation between the political and civil realms.
Rather there is a continuum” (2002, p. 126). These authors note that, particularly in contexts where youth
have limited channels for formal participation in politics, expressions of civic engagement may need to be
understood as forms of political behavior.
!
!
14!
14!
public life. Across all of these topics, I consider some select insights that the Colombian
context and scholarship have to offer these debates. I argue for thinking across the areas
of communication, culture, and politics, as well as for greater definitional clarity,
proposing the concept of participatory public culture to accomplish this. I also discuss
both the central questions that drive this study and the methods used to investigate them.

Figure 1.1. Participación. Graffiti, Medellín, Colombia.

The Proliferation of Participation
Participatory Video Ads: Encouraging Engagement and Participation:
The new Participatory Video Ad is a user-initiated video advertisement with all of
the YouTube community features enabled. Consumers can rate, share, comment,
embed, and favorite advertising content that they find interesting, informative and
entertaining. Rather than interrupt a consumer’s experience, we have created a
model which encourages engagement and participation. . . . With this, the
!
!
15!
15!
community and marketer can now participate in the advertising experience in a
mutually beneficial way.
–Press Release, YouTube (2006)
8

As one of YouTube’s first advertising initiatives exemplifies, “participation” and
“engagement” became buzzwords far beyond the realms of civics and politics with the
arrival of Web 2.0. However, “participation” first became a global buzzword in the 1960s
and 1970s, serving as a central organizing concept for social movements in Latin
American and elsewhere—from pro-democracy movements to struggles by ethnic
minorities for greater inclusion and equal rights; to workers’ rights; to alternative and
community media, to such theater and art movements as Dadaism and Situationism, the
community arts movement, and other counter-cultural movements (Bishop, 2006;
Brough, forthcoming; Carpentier, 2011).
9
In these cases, “participation” was wielded as a
challenge to existing, vertical relations of power. The term became central to critiques of
top-down development initiatives, spawning a sub-field of participatory development
communication. The discourse of participation was subsequently appropriated by some
governments (including Colombia’s; see Chapter 3), as well as by international finance
and development institutions like the World Bank (see below).
The term had a resurgence in popularity across a number of fields in the 2000s
(see Carpentier, 2011), fueled in large part by the technical capacities and social
imaginaries of Web 2.0. The potential for anyone with an Internet connection (and the
skills) to produce and circulate their own media through user-generated content and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8
YouTube is the largest online user-generated video sharing platform, with over 160 million unique
viewers (comScore, 2013). As of this writing, Participatory Video Ads are now called “Homepage Video
Ads”; see YouTube, Advertising Best Practices and Use Cases, retrieved August, 2013, from
http://www.youtube.com/t/ads_best_practices.
9
“Participation” was also part of the utopian imaginaries of early visionaries and devotees of computer and
digital culture, who were influenced by some of the counter-cultural movements of this period (Delwiche,
2013; Jenkins, forthcoming; Turner, 2006).
!
!
16!
16!
social networking platforms sparked the imagination not only of individuals, but also of
media corporations interested in capitalizing on these new capacities through initiatives
like “participatory” advertising and marketing, as the YouTube press release illustrates.
In the United States, participatory media is now used to refer to a range of practices and
products, from citizen journalism and tweeting to corporate efforts to engage consumers
in marketing content. For example, Rheingold (2008) describes participatory media as
consisting of Web 2.0 phenomena, such as blogs, wikis, digital storytelling, virtual
communities, and other forms of social media that have the characteristics of being
many-to-many, involve the active participation of many people, and enable relatively
low-cost coordination of activities. This definition situates participatory media as a
distinctly new phenomenon that is heavily determined by digital communication
technology.
Yet for decades prior to the emergence of these technologies, alternative,
community, and citizens’ media (Rodríguez, 2001) have used the concept of participatory
media production to highlight their democratic, grassroots approaches to production as
distinct from—and outside of—commercial mass media markets (Downing, 2000).
Before Web 2.0, participatory media typically referred to horizontal practices of media
production characterized by dialogic communication, participants’ control over decision-
making in the production process, and the sharing of power with non-hegemonic groups.
Clearly, YouTube’s (2006) notion of enabling users to participate by rating, sharing, or
commenting on a given advertisement is a very different notion of participatory media.
Some scholars and practitioners of community, alternative, or citizens’ media lament that
the term’s significance as a tool for social change has been blunted by its mainstreaming
!
!
17!
17!
by commercial interests, diluting its usefulness as a framework for shifting relations of
power in and through communication and media practices (Andrejevic, 2007; Fuchs,
2011).
10

There are several reasons why the episteme of participation may be particularly
resonant across many contexts in the contemporary moment, including:
• widespread disillusionment with traditional politics and government
institutions, even in representative democracies, and especially among
youth (Youniss et al., 2002; Zuckerman, 2013);
• concern over declining political news consumption and electoral
participation among young people globally, fueling efforts to increase
youth participation;
• the international dominance of neoliberal ideology and the resulting
reduction of public services and institutions in much of the global North
and South, disproportionately disenfranchising the poor;
• since the 1980s, the slow turn from top-down approaches to development
to somewhat more inclusive ones in response to criticism (see below);
• most recently, the development of social media and surrounding practices
of networked, user-driven production and consumption of media content;
and
• the spectacular use of these in social and political movements worldwide.

Participation has become, borrowing from George Yúdice, an expedient
discourse. Yúdice (2003) theorizes that, in the increasingly globalized and neoliberal
world, the episteme of “culture” has shifted toward a concept of culture-as-resource, in
which cultural difference is contained, commodified, and managed by states,
transnational commercial interests, or nonprofits. He argues that culture has become an
expedient tool for organizing certain relations of power, markets, and international
resource flows. In other words, invoking “culture” has become a useful way of justifying
and legitimating particular markets and relations of power, and of managing difference.
For example, Yúdice analyzes the way in which the Mexican state found it expedient to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
This concern was expressed in panel discussions at the OurMedia Network 7 Conference in Accra,
Ghana (author’s personal notes, August, 2008).
!
!
18!
18!
adopt a discourse of national cultural identity based, in part, upon indigenous cultural
identity and difference in order to legitimize state power (and to attempt to placate
indigenous rights movements), while at the same time being largely responsible for the
continued marginalization of its indigenous peoples. Separately, indigenous communities
of the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico found ways to use their indigenous
cultures as resources for mobilization, while also rejecting the state’s discourse of
cultural difference.
This is a useful heuristic to apply to the burgeoning discourse of participation,
because it prompts us to ask how the concept is being utilized as a resource across a
range of contexts, and also because it suggests a broader frame of analysis than has
typically been applied to participatory culture to date. Following Virginia R. Domínguez,
Yúdice asks us to consider “what is being accomplished socially, politically, discursively
when the concept of culture is invoked to describe, analyze, argue, justify and theorize”
(Domínguez, 1992, quoted in Yúdice 2003, p. 215). In this analysis, I reconfigure
Yúdice’s notion to consider how “participation” has (again) become an expedient
episteme, though not necessarily with a negative connotation; that is, how participation
has become a discursive and practical resource for a variety of actors, both hegemonic
and resistant, who aim to engage youth. This compels us to think about the cultures,
practices, discourses, infrastructures, and powers that increasingly structure the
contemporary relationship between youth, society, and social change.

Why Youth Participation Matters
The political culture of adults is to stigmatize us: that we dress strangely, that we’re
rappers, that we wear baggy pants, that the punks have Mohawks. But in reality there is
!
!
19!
19!
something that we want to express through how we dress, and we want to participate
politically.
– Male youth, Medellín, July 2011

“Youth” is a socially constructed, culturally specific, and fluid category. It is
typically used to refer to young people between the stages of childhood and adulthood,
often correlated to a range of ages between 14 and 30. The age range depends on the
socioeconomic, political, and cultural context. The United Nations’ definition refers to
people between the ages of 15 and 24, though some member states include persons up to
the age of 40 (Kassimir & Flanagan, 2010).
11

Youth is a social imaginary vested with cultural, economic, social, and political
meanings that differ across societies and change over time. In the United States, these
imaginaries have ranged from youth as vulnerable, corruptible, and delinquent to hip and
cool; from a group that should be sheltered from society to a central market demographic;
and from a threat to political stability to the hope for the future of nations (Gilbert, 1986;
Frank, 1997; Light, in review; Youniss et al., 2002). Jennifer Light describes how youth
in the United States in the early 20th century were first constructed as a “separate
sphere,” one that required sheltering. Within this context, youth participation (namely
that of white, upper- and middle-class youth) was seen as something to be controlled by
adults, and ideally confined to supervised training for future citizenship in adulthood
(e.g., mock government activities in educational settings; Light, in review). By the
middle to late 20th century, the concepts of youth culture and youth movements (e.g., the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
As Kassimir and Flanagan explain, this is because “conditions of educational and work life in the
developing world mean that many young adults are not prepared to support themselves by the age of
majority. Consequently, in many nations youth are officially designated in national youth policy as persons
between the ages of 15 and 35 or even 40” (2010, p. 95).
!
!
20!
20!
counter-culture movements of the 1960s) had become widely embraced as a source of
collective identity for groups of young people. The 20th century also saw the
establishment of the study of youth in the social sciences, as it became an increasingly
reified category of social, cultural, political, and economic concern.
In Medellín, a particularly dominant social imaginary of youth is that which
emerged with the rise of narcotrafficking and the accompanying increase in gang
violence, which figures youth—particularly poor, male, often but not exclusively black or
mestizo youth—as violent thugs or delinquentes (see Chapter 2). A sizable and growing
body of research by Colombian scholars has challenged this by focusing on how youth
are acting as protagonists in bringing about nonviolent social and cultural change in
Medellín and elsewhere in Colombia (Buchelly, 2005; Corrales Acosta, 2008; Fierst,
2013a; Garcés Montoya, 2010; Gaviria Mejía, Patiño Torres, Cardona Pabón, & Manco
López, 1995; Herrera, Acevado, Pinilla, & Díaz, 2005; Hurtado Galeano, 2010; Martín
Barbero, 2008; Medina Holguín & García Guzmán, 2008; Restrepo, 2010; Uribe Neira et
al., 2009; Vega, Pérez, & Gaviria, 2010; Vega Casanova & Escalante Orozco, 2013).
In Colombian law (specifically, Law 375 of 1997), “youth” refers to people
between the ages of 14 and 26, although culturally it is sometimes used to refer to a
broader age range. In Medellín, I found that youth are frequently described as young
people between the ages of 14 and 29, though this is sometimes split into the two
categories of youth and young adult. Over the course of my research, I met a number of
people over the age of 26 who still identify as youth and associate themselves with youth
movements. And while the voting age is 18 in Colombia, youth 14 and older can directly
participate and vote in Medellín’s participatory budgeting process, through which
!
!
21!
21!
communities decide how to allocate a percentage of the city’s annual budget (see Chapter
3).
La juventud (youth) is a category of great significance in Colombian public policy
aimed at stabilizing the country, which has been wracked by decades of armed violence
and dramatic socioeconomic disparities (see Chapter 2). Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the role
youth have played in some of Medellín’s armed violence, as well as in its social and
political movements, and how this has impacted discourses of participation at both the
local and national levels. In Chapter 2, I illustrate how some youth in Medellín became
reified as gang members and hit men in the era of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel, while
others were seen as potential agents of positive social change. There are thus both
positive and negative imaginaries associated with Medellín’s youth that have had
significant implications for public policy and participation in public life.
In the sociological and political science literatures, the importance of youth
participation in public life has been understood in a number of ways. One such way stems
from democratic theory; a healthy democracy requires, at the very least, the electoral
participation of those citizens who are currently or are soon to be of legal voting age
(Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996; Galston, 2001; Sherrod, Flanagan, & Youniss, 2002). In a
Tocquevillian vein, Putnam argued that civic engagement increases social capital, which
leads to a “more efficient” society (2000, p. 21), and that “when community bonds
slacken . . . our economy, our democracy, and even our health and happiness” are
negatively impacted (ibid., p. 28).
12

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12
See also Kassimir & Flanagan, 2010, for a similar argument on an international scale.
!
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22!
22!
Others see youth engagement as a form of a nation’s human capital (Kassimir &
Flanagan, 2010), or a way to strengthen the stability of the state. As I show in Chapter 3,
this assumption underlies some of the strategies of the municipal government of Medellín
in its efforts to counter armed violence linked to narcotrafficking. Writing about youth in
contexts of violence worldwide, Youniss et al. argue that youth “can inflame adult
conflicts and their cohort is likely to carry hostile feelings into adulthood, which can then
perpetuate political conflict for decades. Just as youth can be part of the problem,
however, they also can be key to the solution” (2002, p. 134). In the same vein, Light
offers historical examples of civic engagement activities for youth, designed by adults, to
mitigate gang membership and insure “law and order in the local community” in various
parts of the United States (in review, pp. 6, 11). As Light’s work implies, youth civic
engagement has always been a contested terrain in which adults have attempted to exert
control over youth behavior.
13

From a more youth-centric perspective, youth participation may also be conceived
as a basic human right (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2006; Middaugh, 2012). The United
Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights designated Human Rights
Day 2012 to honor “inclusion and the right to participate in public life,” arguing that
“[f]ulfillment of the right to participate in public life is fundamental to the functioning of
a democratic society and an effective human rights protection system. Inclusion of ALL
in decision-making processes is an essential precondition to the achievement of both”
(United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2012; emphasis in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13
Light points out that the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which lowered the legal voting age to
18, was motivated in part by adults “hopeful that extending voting rights might suppress the increasingly
militant participatory style that youth activists in this period had assumed” (in review, p. 15).
!
!
23!
23!
original). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights do not distinguish youth from adult, but are stated to apply to
“every citizen without exception.”
14

Several scholars have pointed out that civic/political engagement can enhance
political and socioeconomic equality (e.g., Levine & Youniss, 2009; Kahne & Middaugh,
2008). Without their direct participation in public life, the particular interests, priorities,
and needs of youth are unlikely to be well represented (Middaugh, 2012). Young
people’s lives are often greatly impacted by public policy, but their ability to influence it
is relatively limited (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2006). This is an even greater concern for
youth from marginalized groups. There is a growing body of evidence in the United
States showing large disparities in civic and political engagement among youth across
such factors as race or ethnicity and socioeconomic status (Middaugh, 2012), and some
researchers have identified a “civic opportunity gap” in U.S. high school educational
experiences (Kahne & Middaugh, 2008; it is also likely that there is a higher opportunity
cost for youth with limited resources, who need to dedicate more time to paid
employment opportunities, rather than unpaid civic/political engagement activities).
These serve as reminders that “youth” must not be reified as a homogenous group with a
consistent set of public concerns and equal opportunities to address them.
This gap in opportunities for engagement could further perpetuate existing
inequalities and weaken democratic systems. Youth participation in organizations and
community service during adolescence has been found to predict adult political
behaviors, including voting and membership in voluntary associations (Verba,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
14
See the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (retrieved July 10, 2013, from
http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx).
!
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24!
Schlozman, & Brady, 1995; Youniss, McLellan, & Yates, 1997). If so, disengaged youth
should be a societal concern for several reasons. On the national level, higher numbers of
disengaged youth tend to correlate with dysfunctional, less representative government
(Sherrod, Glanagan & Youniss, 2002; Youniss, McLellan, & Yates, 1997). On the
community level, communities with higher rates of engagement are more likely to be
better at problem-solving and self-governing, both within and outside of local
government institutions (Levine, 2008). Finally, at the individual level, “There is a strong
correlation between adolescents’ civic engagement and successful [personal]
development” (ibid., p. 125). Youths’ civic engagement may not only help to socialize
them “into the civitas” and cultivate collective identity (Youniss et al., 2002, p. 133; see
also Shah, Thorson, Wells, Lee, & McLeod, forthcoming), but also facilitate their civic
and political development, sense of self-efficacy, and leadership skills (Coleman &
Hendry, 1999, in Livingstone, 2009; Middaugh, 2012). In Medellín as elsewhere, it
appears that young people engaged in community groups, protests, or other aspects of
public life often become future leaders of non-governmental and governmental
organizations (see Youniss et al., 2002, p. 132).
When we consider that there is a disproportionate population growth of this age
demographic globally (the so-called “youth bulge”
15
; Kassimir & Flanagan, 2010), low
rates of youth engagement raise concerns across all of these levels, and also on an
international scale. So while the justifications vary, the significance of youth participation
in public life is a topic of global concern and one that has gained renewed attention in late
modernity, given the rapid changes in forms of social organization brought about by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
15
As of 2010, there were approximately 1.8 billion young people between ages 10 and 24 globally, 90% of
whom live in the developing world (UNFPA, n.d.).
!
!
25!
25!
globalization and the rise of digitally networked communication technologies, as I
elaborate below.
According to several scholars, the end of the 20th century saw a rise in apathy and
a decline in civic and political engagement of youth in the United States compared to
previous generations (e.g., Delli Carpini, 2000; Putnam, 2000). This perspective tends to
be based on traditional measures of participation, such as electoral voting rates,
membership in traditional civic organizations, and consumption and knowledge of
political news. With some exceptions, data along these measures largely supports the
narrative of decline in youth engagement in public life (Delli Carpini, 2000; Lopez et al.,
2006, in Livingstone, 2009; Middaugh, 2012; Pew, 2007; Wattenburg, 2008; see also
Levine, 2008). Reviewing data at the turn of this century, Delli Carpini (2000) concluded
that, compared with older Americans or younger Americans from earlier eras, youth were
less interested in politics and public affairs, less likely to read or watch the news, less
likely to vote (with the exception of the 2008 U.S. presidential election), and less likely to
participate in community organizations that take a public stand on at least one policy
issue. More recently, Wattenburg argued that “Today’s young adults are the least
politically knowledgeable generation ever in the history of survey research” (2008, p. 5).
Further, rates of youth membership in organizations that address public issues are low
(Middaugh, 2012).
In the Medellín context, survey data shows that civic participation measured as
membership in formal organizations is also low (Restrepo, 2009). Colombian researchers
have found skepticism of traditional political and government institutions among youth,
as well as widespread disenchantment with Colombia’s political culture (e.g., clientelism,
!
!
26!
26!
dependency, and the use of violence or the threat of it; Herrera et al., 2005). Similar
trends have been identified globally (Loader, 2007).
[T]he general picture that emerges is one of apathy toward traditional politics, but
interest in a range of nonmainstream forms of civil involvement that can become
mobilized. Apathy toward formal politics may be partly explained by the large-
scale and global political order, in which decisions that affect people are often
made in distant places through obscure processes. (Youniss et al., 2002, p. 128)

While we can speak of some general similarities in the trends in youth
(dis)engagement in the global North and South, there are also crucial differences, often
determined by the power dynamics shaping the contexts of these youths’ lives. For
example, Kassimir and Flanagan note that “[s]ocial exclusion—in the form of poverty,
inequality, limited opportunities for social mobility, and various types of
discrimination—is the norm for the vast majority of young people in the developing
world” (2010, p. 94; regrettably, this is also experienced by some youth in the global
North). Youniss et al. highlight another difference, postulating that, in the global South,
“disenfranchisement is undoubtedly felt by young people in developing countries with
regard to the leadership of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and
the large multinational corporations that have major influence on their lives” (2002, p.
128–129). Whether or not the majority of youth are aware of the details, these influences
are unquestionably shaping their lives and the opportunities available to them. The
Medellín researcher Jorge Arturo Bernal observed that multinational corporations and
international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank “influence in a direct and active
manner the economic, trade, and social policies of our country and cities,” affecting the
material realities and the political cultures faced by their youth (2005, p. 112).
!
!
27!
27!
Indeed, contemporary global dynamics are changing the landscape of youth
engagement. Increasing global connectivity; processes of deinstitutionalization of
traditional social and cultural institutions (Beck, 2000; Bennett, 1998; Loader, 2007); the
normalization of brand culture (Banet-Weiser, 2012); and increasingly fragmented, niche
media markets and patterns of news consumption in many parts of the world have all
resulted in “different conceptions of membership, identification, and commitment”
(Bennett, 2008, p. 13; see also Buckingham, 2008; Castells, 1997; Giddens, 1991). The
resulting shifts in processes of social and political identity formation in recent decades
help to explain the observed decline in traditional forms of political and civic
participation among many youth (Levine in Bennett, 2008; Putnam, 2000; Youniss et al.,
2002), and require a rethinking of the concept of civic engagement.
To varying degrees, these factors have also impacted public life in Colombia (see
Chapter 2), where youths’ trust in government and public institutions is relatively low
(Torney-Purta & Amadeo, 2004; Torney-Purta, Barber, & Richardson, 2004). In addition,
the context of armed violence has both dramatically limited the opportunities for
civic/political engagement of many youth and changed their relationship to government
institutions, as I explore in Chapter 2. It has also fomented youth organizing largely
through non-institutional means (especially cultural), as I investigate in Chapter 4.

Reconceptualizing Civic Engagement and (Youth) Citizenship in the Digital Age
Today’s youth access, process, and share information differently and enact
“everyday political encounters” in ways that traditional understandings of what
constitutes political and civic engagement may miss (Bennett, Freelon, & Wells, 2010, p.
!
!
28!
28!
395; see also Brough & Shresthova, 2012; Cohen & Kahne, 2012). For example, young
people in the United States participate in public life through activities such as consumer
politics and commodity activism at rates comparable to or higher than those in older age
brackets (Zukin, Keeter, Adolina, Jenkins, & Delli Carpini, 2006).
16

Researchers who focus on the new media environment and the forms of
participation it facilitates have increasingly called for a broader and less institutionally
framed understanding of civic engagement than traditional definitions allow.
17
They
argue that younger generations are civically engaged in new and different forms, related
less to government or civic institutions, and more to personal interests, social networks,
social entrepreneurship, and cultural or commodity activism—often enacted through
informal, non-institutionalized, non-hierarchical networks (Bennett, 2008; Brough &
Shresthova, 2012; Burgess, Foth, & Klaebe, 2006; Ito, 2010; Jenkins, 2006a; Jenkins et
al. 2006; Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2013; Kassimir & Flanagan, 2010; Levine, 2008;
Livingstone, 2009; Loader, 2007; Middaugh, 2012; Pettingill, 2007; Zuckerman, 2013,
Zukin et al., 2006).
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
16
Further, the millennial generation showed high rates of volunteerism compared to that of the Baby
Boomers when they were young, although these rates appear to have declined since peaking in 2005
(Middaugh, 2012).
17
As Ellen Middaugh relates, “civic and political engagement frequently is [sic] described as commitment
to a community beyond oneself and one’s family (neighborhood, city, nation) and participation in activities
to maintain or change the institutions that regulate these communities (government or civic organizations)”
(2012, p. 8, emphases mine). This is an institutionally framed conception of civic engagement. Middaugh
notes, however, that “[t[he policies and institutions that emerge to solve a set of problems in one era may be
ill suited to or insufficient for another” (ibid.). From a political communication perspective, Michael Delli
Carpini defined civic engagement as the combination of civic awareness (defined as “Cognitive [e.g.,
knowledge], attitudinal [e.g., interest] and affective [e.g., concern] involvement in civil society”) and civic
participation (defined as “Individual and collective actions designed to address public issues through the
institutions of civil society”; emphases mine, retrieved June 3, 2010, from
http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/michael_delli_carpinis_definitions_key_terms/). This is also an
institutionally-framed definition.
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29!
29!
Peter Levine’s definition of civic engagement is therefore useful, as it includes
political activism, deliberation, problem-solving, and “the production of culture, at least
insofar as cultural expression shapes norms and priorities” (2008, p. 121).
18
This is
because shaping norms and priorities, which occurs in the terrain of culture, is a
fundamental part of defining community or collective identity, and therefore, of public
life and governance—whether online or offline. This point is particularly relevant to the
study of youth participation, since youth collective identity and action are often expressed
through cultural forms, rather than through traditional political or institutional modes. To
avoid a definition so broad that it dilutes its analytical utility, however, I specify a focus
on the production of public culture; that is, the discourses and practices that give meaning
to civic and political life (see further discussion of public culture below).
A benefit of this broader definition is that it allows space for researchers to
identify modes of engagement that are based on actual youth practices (including shifting
forms of group membership over generations and across distinct groups of youth), rather
than “grafting” a historical model onto them (Pettingill, 2007, p. 18). Further, a broad
definition is especially important “in light of evidence that young people—and perhaps
young people of color, in particular—are drawn to community-based forms of
participation more than to participation in traditional civic and political life” (Kahne, Lee,
& Feezell, 2013).
19

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18
Note that political participation is subsumed within the broader category of civic engagement here.
19
Elsewhere, I have written about the merits of understanding politics as not only electoral, but also
contentious and everyday forms of political and civic activity (Brough & Shresthova, 2012).
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30!
30!
In the rapidly growing literature on youth participation in the new media
ecology,
20
the “disengaged paradigm” has thus been increasingly challenged by scholars
articulating an “engaged youth paradigm,”
21
which emphasizes the new ways in which
youth engage in identity formation, peer networking, commodity activism, and other non-
traditional modes of public participation (Bennett, 2008, p. 2).
22
When the Internet is
viewed as a digital public sphere (or spheres), many forms of online activities—such as
blogging and online activism—may represent modes of public participation and civic
engagement (Cohen & Kahne, 2012; Ito, 2010; James et al., 2009; Jenkins et al., 2006;
Levine, 2008; see also Bennett, 2008). Particularly as media platforms have converged
with wireless communication technologies, the Internet has come to offer a combination
of qualities and capacities unparalleled by previous communication systems: It boasts
interactivity; searchability; speed of connectivity; the possibility of global reach;
relatively unlimited capacity (for some); and a non-linear, horizontally networked,
flexible, and relatively open architecture. These characteristics have the potential to help
amplify youth perspectives and create new spaces for youth expression, debate, and
engagement that disrupt traditional power dynamics (Middaugh, 2012). The Internet can
potentially be “a domain in which adolescents are not stigmatized by their age or
specifically blocked from participation because of status” (Youniss et al. 2002, p. 138).
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
20
Ito’s collection defines “new media” as “a media ecology where more traditional media such as books,
television and radio are intersecting with digital media, specifically interactive media and media for social
communication” (2010, p. 10).
21
Many of these scholars are part of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Digital Media and Learning (DML)
research network, in which I have periodically participated.
22
Dahlgren and Olsson associate these paradigms with different disciplinary approaches; political
communication traditions tend to focus on traditional politics and thus see a decline in participation,
whereas media studies and other culturally-oriented scholars observing online cultures see online
participation as a significant element of “new” or “sub-” politics that represent larger changes in democratic
practices in the contemporary context (2008, p. 495, citing Beck, 1998).
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Ito “identified that there is an expanded palette of opportunity for kids to participate in
different kinds of publics because of the growth of the networked variety” (2010, p. 13).
Understanding contemporary youth participation in public life therefore requires us to
look at their online behavior; this is increasingly the case worldwide, as examples like the
Arab Spring illustrate (Castells, 2012).
The traditional media landscape of Colombia is largely privatized, concentrated,
and elite-driven, so the Internet can be a particularly important platform for political
movements and other forms of participation in public life (Neumayer & Raffl, 2008;
Rojas & Puig-i-Abril, 2009). As of 2011, approximately 55% of Colombians used the
Internet (Internet World Stats, 2011). Slightly earlier data showed that the highest rates of
Internet usage were among 12–24 year olds; between 63% and 72% of young people in
this age range were online in 2008 (DANE, 2008a). Approximately 16.8 million, or 37%
of all Colombians, were on Facebook (Internet World Stats, 2011), ranking it in the top
13 countries of registered users (Neumayer & Raffl, 2008). While the digital sphere
remains inaccessible to many Colombians, to the best of my knowledge, all of the youth
who participated in this study (most of whom were from the lower socioeconomic strata
in Medellín), used the Internet regularly or semi-regularly. Facebook was often the most
reliable—or even the only way—for me to contact them. They used the platform socially
(e.g., to communicate with friends, family, and acquaintances), politically (e.g., to
mobilize protests, communicate with certain government officials, or simply express a
position on an issue), and entrepreneurially (e.g., to sell products or promote their work).
Political engagement on social networking sites is increasingly common among
18–24 year olds. A 2012 survey of Internet users in the United States found major growth
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32!
in political activity on social networking sites between 2008 and 2012 (Smith, 2013).
What’s more, youth in this age range are more likely to engage in political behaviors on
social networking sites than in any other venue (ibid.). Yet research to date provides
mixed, inconclusive, and rapidly changing evidence of the relationship between online
and offline engagement. The Internet clearly facilitates the engagement of youth who are
already civically/politically active (and sociodemographic differences matter here), but
the extent to which it has been shown to lead to new engagement is varied and
inconclusive (Dahlgren & Olsson, 2008; Delli Carpini, 2000; Livingstone, 2009;
Livingstone, Couldry, & Markham, 2007; Loader, 2007; Pettingill, 2007). In many parts
of the world, this may be changing, as new media tools and technologies are poised to
become “the primary mechanism for bringing attention to issues of public concern,
accessing information about civic and political issues, and connecting to and mobilizing
constituencies” (Middaugh, 2012).
Further, the ways in which market forces are helping to shape these online public
spheres—including increasingly personalized media, data mining, and one-to-one
marketing—may work against the otherwise unprecedented potentials for civic
engagement and collective action (Montgomery, 2008; see also Andrejevic, 2007).
Rebekah Willett (2008) and others therefore argue that youth engagement must be
considered within the contemporary political economic context of neoliberalism, which is
generally associated with privatization, rather than the expansion of the public sphere.
23

She asks “how the agency offered to young people is structured by neoliberal discourses,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
Neoliberalism is a political economic ideology characterized by laissez-faire economics, free trade
dogmatism, privatized social services, and reduced public services. For an in-depth discussion of
neoliberalism, see Harvey (2005).
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33!
33!
for example, those of ‘individualization’ and ‘responsibilization,’” which privilege
consumer citizenship over other forms of citizenship (ibid., p. 51; see also Banet-Weiser,
2012, and Couldry, 2010). Certainly, discourses of participation are imbricated in the
underlying conceptions of citizenship that inform them.

The Normative Functions of Citizenship and Participation
The narrative of youth disengagement is based on 20th-century liberal and civic
republican conceptions of citizenship, in which the citizen should feel an obligation to
participate in institutions of governance (what Bennett [2008] calls the dutiful citizen
model), and should do so by making informed choices through independent decision-
making (what Schudson [1998] calls the informed citizen model). These models
predominated in the context of a mass media landscape, while the new media landscape
is prompting analysts to consider “alternative citizenship models” (Kligler-Vilenchik &
Thorson, in review). Bennett (2008) articulates one such emergent model of citizenship,
the actualizing citizen: one who is driven less by a sense of duty or government
obligation than by personal and expressive interests, as part of the production of self-
identity. The actualizing citizen, according to Bennett, favors less structured, more
networked forms of action (such as commodity
24
and transnational activism), often
sustained by online social networks or other information technologies. Bennett does not
see these models as mutually exclusive, but rather, as ideal types that help to describe
changing trends in understandings and expressions of (youth) citizenship (Bennett,
Freelon, & Wells, 2010).
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24
Examples of commodity activism include “buy-cotts” or other product-driven campaigns.
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Chantal Mouffe’s (1992a, 1992b) work on radical democracy offers another
alternative vision of citizenship, one that sees it as being constructed through ongoing
articulation and contestation. Challenging normative conceptualizations of the citizen as a
unified subject, Mouffe sees citizenship as a fluid, contested “articulation of an ensemble
of subject positions, corresponding to the multiplicity of social relations” (1992b, p. 376).
Through such alternative understandings of citizenship, young people’s contemporary
modes of socializing and participating in public life may be observed for the ways in
which they connect to civic and political activities (Kligler-Vilenchik & Thorson, in
review).
However, as Mouffe’s definition intimates, the concept of citizenship is
imbricated in racialized and stratified social and political systems; its most common
function in contemporary society is to delineate who has access to certain rights and
resources, and who does not. The concept of citizenship is typically wielded in a
profoundly normative manner (Levine in Bennett, 2008).
25
It can function as a mode of
governmentality
26
(e.g., “driving the integration of [certain] individuals with the State”
[Bernal, 2005, p. 69; see also Loader, 2007]), and exclusion (e.g., from exercising rights
like voting, working, and accessing certain public services; Carpentier, 2011; Schudson,
1998).
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
25
Nancy Fraser made a similar argument about the normative assumptions of the Habermasian notion of
the public sphere; not only did Habermas idealize the liberal public sphere and fail to recognize other
“nonliberal, non-bourgeois” or “subaltern counterpublics,” but much subsequent scholarship rested on “a
class- and gender-biased notion of publicity, one which accepts at face value the bourgeois public’s claim
to be the public” (Fraser, 1992, pp. 115, 116). Importantly, such critiques serve to de-naturalize
universalizing or normative conceptualizations of citizenship and participation in public life.
26
Foucault introduced the analytic of governmentality in the 1970s as a way to critically analyze how
power operates in modern society through rationalities and discourses of responsibility and individual
governance. Governmentality, according to Foucault, can be “understood in the broad sense of techniques
and procedures for directing human behavior” (1997, p. 82). See Chapter 3 for further discussion.
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Yet it has also served counter-hegemonic or resistant agendas. La ciudadanía
(citizenship) became a strategic term in the political vocabulary of Latin American social
movements struggling for greater democratization during the late 1970s and 1980s, with
an emphasis on the cultural dimension of citizenship and struggles for equality, expressed
through concerns about subjectivities, identities, and recognition of difference (Dagnino,
2007). Citizenship was also conceived through discourses of human rights during this
time (Bernal, 2005), understood as “citizens being active social subjects, defining their
rights, and struggling for these rights to be recognized” (Dagnino, 2007, in Cornwall,
2011, p. 418). This conception of citizenship was meant to promote participation and
serve as a parameter for all social relations, not just the relationship between the
individual and the state. María Teresa Uribe (2001) thus argues that, despite efforts since
the country’s independence to instill a liberal doctrine of individual rights, a more
communitarian understanding of citizenship has predominated in Colombia, fueled in
part by its history of popular social movements.
Dagnino (2007) traces the ways in which the concept of citizenship in Latin
America subsequently became a contested one, appropriated by elites and the state from
the 1990s onwards. This has resulted in a “perverse confluence” of the participatory and
the neoliberal projects, which “share several core notions, such as citizenship,
participation and civil society, albeit used with very different meanings” (Dagnino 2007,
in Cornwall, 2011, p. 419). Dagnino concludes that,
The contested definitions of citizenship are the principal axis of political struggles
in Latin America today, a reflection of the confrontation between a
democratizing, participatory project to extend the meaning of citizenship and the
neoliberal offensive to curtail any such possibility. (ibid., pp. 418–419)

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36!
In this analysis, the neoliberal conception of citizenship is based on individual rights and
market freedom. Citizenship is expressed through consumption and production in “free”
engagement with the marketplace, while the role of the state as a guarantor of rights and
protector of the public good is minimized. This is in tension with popular movements in
Latin America that have historically placed greater emphasis on collectivism (see Chapter
2).
Youth citizenship is also understood in numerous ways, depending on the context
and ideological perspective; it is often understood and enacted through culture (Kassimir
& Flanagan 2010). Sherrod, Flanagan, and Youniss advocate a broad definition of youth
citizenship, such that “a key aspect of [youth] citizenship includes the ability to move
beyond one’s individual self-interest and to be committed to the well-being of some
larger group of which one is a member” (2002, p. 265). Youth citizenship can be
conceived passively, where youth are understood as future citizens in training (an
ideological standpoint that illustrates how the notion of citizenship can function as a form
of governmentality; see Chapter 3), or as something that is enacted as youth struggle to
attain wellbeing, recognition, and power (Kassimir & Flanagan 2010). I take the latter
perspective throughout this study, based on my own experiences studying and working
with youth in Medellín and elsewhere.
Given these concerns, throughout the following chapters I revisit the following
questions: What is at stake in the conceptual emphases of terms like “citizenship” and
“participation” when they are invoked to describe contemporary forms of youth
engagement? In other words, what cultural and political work is being performed through
these concepts? And what forms of youth citizenship are constructed through discourses
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37!
37!
and practices of participation? These questions are based on a Foucauldian understanding
that discourse and power are mutually constitutive, and that social knowledge is produced
through language and social practices (Foucault, 1980). Discourses and practices of
participation produce particular forms of citizenship, knowledge, and power relations. As
Nico Carpentier puts it, “the definition of participation is one of the many societal fields
where political struggle is waged between the minimalist and the maximalist variations of
democracy. . . . The signification of participation thus becomes part of a ‘politics of
definition’” (2011, p. 127). These “politics of definition” were partly what motivated this
study, as I found myself both excited and frustrated by the proliferation of
“participation.”

Theories of Participation
In communication studies, participation has primarily been theorized in two
separate, and so far largely disconnected, subfields: that of participatory communication,
studied primarily by development communication scholars interested in challenging top-
down approaches to development in the global South; and that of participatory culture,
advanced by media studies scholars, primarily in the global North, who understand
audiences as participating actively in media processes, rather than as passive consumers.

Participatory Culture and/as Participatory Politics
In media studies, Henry Jenkins began applying the concept of participatory
culture to his studies of fan cultures in the early 1990s (Jenkins, 1992) to analyze cultural
communities that actively consume popular culture through appropriating, transforming,
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and recirculating media content. Participatory culture in this sense can encompass
resistant practices, although it doesn’t always (see Brough & Shresthova, 2012). Jenkins
and others have studied how popular culture content is appropriated and remixed for
political and counter-hegemonic meaning-making, especially among youth (Jenkins
2006a, 2006b; see also Transformative Works and Cultures, volume 10, 2012).
While he began studying participatory culture among media fan cultures in the
1970s and 1980s,
27
Jenkins argues that participatory cultures have proliferated across a
wide variety of subcultures and communities of practice because of the intersection of
new media technologies, do-it-yourself (DIY) subcultures, and “economic trends
favoring the horizontally integrated media conglomerates [that] encourage the flow of
images, ideas, and narratives across multiple media channels and demand more active
modes of spectatorship” (2006b, p. 136).
With his colleagues Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robison, and
Margaret Weigel, Jenkins further developed the concept in relation to learning in the
digital media era, defining a participatory culture as one:
1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the
most experienced is passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another
(at the least they care what other people think about what they have
created). (Jenkins et al., 2006, p. 7)

Further, “Not every member must contribute, but all must believe they are free to
contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued”
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27
Jenkins and others have pointed to important historical examples of participatory culture (see Brough,
forthcoming; Delwiche & Henderson, 2012; Jenkins, Ford & Green, 2013), however, the concept is most
often evoked as a characteristic of the digital age.
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(ibid., p. 7).
There is a growing body of work on the relationship between participatory
cultures and contemporary forms of youth civic and political engagement (e.g.,
Bennett, Freelon & Wells, 2010; Brough & Shresthova, 2012; Cohen et al., 2012;
Jenkins, 2006a).
28
Ethan Zuckerman sees a shift toward “participatory civics”
(2012, 2013). Joseph Kahne and others argue that participatory cultures may
create new pathways to political activity, and that the new media landscape has
“expanded the options and lowered the barriers of several forms of participatory
activities . . . transforming the relationships between the political, social and
cultural realms” (Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2013, p. 8). Cohen and Kahne call
this trend participatory politics, a term that became popular with student and
other social movements in the 1960s, but which they re-conceptualize for the
digital age to mean “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and
groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern . . . not
guided by deference to elites or formal institutions” (2012, p. vi).
29
They conceive
of participatory politics as including both online and offline activities, such as the
circulation of information, dialoguing and feedback, production of information
and media content, and mobilization; through these kinds of activities, individuals
may exert political agency by “talking back” to political leaders and helping to
shape public agendas (Cohen et al., 2012, p. 4).
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28
Much of this emerging literature stems from scholarly work supported by the MacArthur Digital Media
and Learning Initiative. See http://www.macfound.org/programs/learning/, retrieved July 15, 2013.
29
In a chapter of the Routledge Handbook of Participatory Cultures, Aaron Delwiche reviews the New
Left’s interest in cultivating participatory political cultures in the 1960s and 1970s. Theorists of
participatory politics have frequently drawn on the work of Hannah Arendt and John Dewey, among others.
See also Barber (1984).
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Modern politics have always contained forms of participatory political
action (e.g., protests, boycotts, letters to the editor in newspapers, etc.). What is
new is the ease with which these may be carried out due to global, digital
networks that, in many but not all parts of the world, have relatively low barriers
to access; this facilitates (but does not determine) new civic/political expressions,
alliances, and configurations of networks. However, while Cohen et al. are
focused primarily on technologically-enhanced participatory politics, my interest
in participatory politics is broader (see Chapter 3). I try to understand the
synergy
30
between forms of participation and the contemporary cultural, political,
and communicative landscapes (including the digital), and to tease out how and
why this synergy is generative of new discourses and practices of citizenship.

Critiques of Participatory Culture
Critiques of the concept of participatory culture have been elaborated in scholarly
work from several disciplines, particularly around the question of how power is
theorized. Summarized briefly here, they include whether scholarly and mainstream
discourses of participatory culture help to obfuscate:
1) the relatively limited range of active participants in the digital mediascape
(though this is ever-changing), who are typically white with middle- to upper-
class socioeconomic status, and the fact that the vast majority of audiences or
users do not produce their own media (Bird, 2011);

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30
While I acknowledge that the term “synergy” has become a corporate buzzword, particularly in the
marketing language of technology companies, I am not making any intentional reference to this by using it
here and throughout this study. I simply use the term to describe dynamics in which the interaction of
different entities may produce additional or greater effects than those produced individually.
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2) the socioeconomic, educational, technological, and other barriers to
participation (Kelty, 2013, Seiter, 2008)—what Jenkins et al. (2006) call the
participation gap;

3) superficial uses of the term “participatory” in relation to online spaces. For
example, Nico Carpentier argues that community and alternative media have
remained “more successful in organizing more deepened forms of participation in
the media” than many of the new media platforms that are frequently described as
participatory (2011, p. 520; see also Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013);

4) the “free labor” of participants on user-generated content and social networking
platforms, and the extent to which their production of content and data is
exploited by commercial interests (Andrejevic, 2007; Ouellette & Wilson, 2011;
Terranova, 2000); and, more broadly,

5) the relations of power embedded in networks, platforms, and practices of
participation (Andrejevic, 2007; Fuchs, 2011; Kelty, 2013).

The vast majority of the literature on participatory culture makes an implicit
normative assumption that participatory cultures are inherently positive for
society, although it is possible that some forms of participatory culture may have
negative consequences.
31

Christopher Kelty’s recent work on participation and power in online platforms
suggests one approach to addressing some of the limitations in the existing literature on
participatory culture. Kelty advocates questioning the ownership and decision-making
structures in spaces of participatory culture, as well as “thinking concretely about the
practices, tools, ideologies and technologies that make them up . . . the structures of
participation, the processes of governance and inclusion, the infrastructure of software,
protocols and networks, as well as the rhetoric and expectations of individuals” (2013, p.
29). He argues that, too often, the agency to participate in social media platforms is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31
Youniss et al. (2002) make a similar point about youth civic engagement, arguing that not all patterns of
civic and political involvement should be equally lauded; e.g., xenophonic or other hateful behavior,
militancy, or violence.
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collapsed with the agency to participate in governing. Indeed, a shortcoming in some of
the literature on participatory culture is that content-related participation and structural
participation are at times conflated; yet these are different spheres of decision-making
and entail different degrees of power-sharing (Carpentier, 2011). Structural participation
includes participation in the management and policies that shape participative spaces.
New media may enable, but certainly do not guarantee, both (ibid.; see also Jenkins &
Carpentier, 2013). As the following chapters illustrate, both content-related and structural
participation may play a meaningful role in youth engagement in public life and in social
change more broadly. Yet distinguishing between the two is crucial to maintaining the
analytical utility of participation and its related terms. I return to these challenges of
definitional and analytical clarity below.

Participatory Communication
Since the 1970s, participatory communication has been a buzz phrase in the fields
of development and communication for social change, influenced by the New World
Information and Communication Order debates, as well as by the critical pedagogy of
Latin American and other scholars and practitioners (including Orlando Fals Borda and
Jesús Martin-Barbero in Colombia; Huesca, 2002; Servaes & Malikhao, 2005).
Participatory communication spread in Latin America—and in Colombia in particular—
in the context of growing socioeconomic disparities, globalization, crises of legitimacy of
the state, militarization, corruption, and widespread perceptions of the failure of
representative democracy.
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Paulo Freire characterized participation as being “an exercise in voice, in having
voice, in involvement, in decision making at certain levels of power . . . a right of
citizenship” (Freire, 1999, p. 88). Heavily shaped by Freire’s work, participatory
communication is understood as a dialogic, transformative process of collective
communication starting at the grassroots to solve societal problems (Freire, 2003;
Mefalopulos, 2003; Servaes, 1996). It is distinct from traditional development
communication because of its collective, rather than individual, focus, as well as its
emphasis on horizontal over vertical communication, and on consciousness-raising over
persuasion (Gumucio Dagron, 2001). Prior to the 1970s, development communication
had been based on one-way, diffusion- or transmission-of-information models, in which
information (e.g., health information) was transmitted in order to reach pre-determined
aims for modernization, determined primarily by U.S. and European institutions. Latin
American critics argued that this model was “based on an ideological framework” from
the Western social sciences “that contradicts the reality of this region” (Beltrán, 1975, in
Huesca, 2002). Huesca calls this “the Latin American challenge” to top-down approaches
to development and communication (2002, p. 180). These scholars contributed to and
were influenced by dependency theory, which held that power struggles between the so-
called First and Second Worlds were being waged in the Third World, and that Western
blueprints for “modernization” merely perpetuated the impoverishment and dependency
of nations in the global South on exploitative relations with the global North. Further, the
emphasis on individual-level effects in the development communication sector
obfuscated the structural issues at the heart of the region’s underdevelopment.
Scholarship and media practices emerged that pushed back against positivist scientific
!
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44!
44!
paradigms that were seen as too instrumental, hegemonic, and even neocolonial. Instead,
they emphasized a more politicized, social constructivist understanding of the role of
communication in empowering communities (Huesca, 2002).
Participatory communication was thus initially understood to be a counter-
hegemonic practice aimed at reconfiguring power relations by giving marginalized voices
control over decision-making and communication processes; in this way, participatory
communication is thought to support a more equitable, just society (Bordenave, 1994;
Huesca, 2002; Servaes, 1996). In Latin America, Paulo Freire (2003), Orlando Fals
Borda (1982), Augusto Boal (1979), and others theorized participatory pedagogy,
communication, theater, and research as challenges to vertical structures of meaning-
making and power relations.
The field of participatory communication has developed relatively independently
of any particular technology, although a great deal of work has involved radio, video, and
theater. Given the contexts of relative poverty—and digital divides—in which such
practices have often taken place, the field has been slow to adapt theory and practice to
the digitally networked mediascape.
“Participatory video” is one example of participatory communication, which
stands in marked contrast to the “participatory video ads” envisioned by YouTube.
Participatory video is an approach used by community organizations, social justice
advocates, and development agencies, among others, to involve communities or groups in
conceptualizing, producing, and sharing their own media. The broad goal of participatory
video is typically to include marginalized groups in decision-making and problem-
!
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45!
solving through grassroots video production (Rodríguez, 2001). One of the arguments for
participatory video is that,
It can serve as a powerful force for people to see themselves in relation to
community and become conscientized about personal and community needs. It
brings about a critical awareness that forms the foundation for creativity and
communication. Thus it has the potential to bring about personal, social, political
and cultural change. (White, 2003, p. 64)

For example, a recent case study from a women’s participatory video project in
Zimbabwe describes how a local leader was transformed by seeing himself as others saw
him, through interviews and documentation in the videos. Hearing what his community
expected from his leadership, he subsequently became more responsive to their concerns
(Matewa, 2010; see also Riaño-Alcalá, 1994; Rodríguez, 2001).

Critiques of Participatory Communication
Development practitioners and organizations have adapted and institutionalized
participatory communication into a variety of practices using media and other cultural
forms.
32
As the episteme of participation was repurposed from a counter-hegemonic
practice to an institutionalized one (e.g., in the form of participatory rural appraisals; see
Francis in Cooke & Kothari, 2001), its earlier political valence was lost (Cooke &
Kothari, 2001; Cornwall, 2003, 2008, 2011; Dagnino, 2007; Gumucio Dagron, 2009;
Hickey & Mohan, 2001; Huesca, 2002; Leal, 2007). Cooke and Kothari (2001) famously
called this the “tyranny” of participation, arguing that discourses and practices of
participatory development had been co-opted and become a systemic and “unjustified
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32
Mohanty (2011) and others have traced the institutionalization of participation in the development
context back to the late colonial era, illustrating the long relationship between participation and
governmentality; this topic is explored in greater detail in Chapter 3.
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exercise of power” by development institutions primarily from the global North acting in
the global South. Leal (2007), for example, examines how participation has been used by
institutions like the World Bank to dispel critiques of their neoliberal agenda; in other
words, participation became an expedient discourse for such institutions. Jenkins
acknowledges a similar trend with participatory culture, which at times “has become an
empty signifier often used in very superficial ways by all kinds of groups that want to
entice our participation but do not want to give up any real control” (Jenkins &
Carpentier, 2013, p. 2).
While “participatory development has often failed to engage with issues of power
and politics and has become a technical approach to development that, in various ways,
depoliticizes what should be an explicitly political process,” Hickey and Mohan maintain
that the trope of participation can be redeemed, and that “understanding the ways in
which participation relates to existing power structures and political systems provides the
basis for moving towards a more transformatory approach to development; one which is
rooted in the exercise of a broadly defined citizenship” (2001, pp. 4, 5). They conclude
that discourses and practices of participation can be empowering to marginalized groups
if practiced outside of the institutional development agenda, along with critical analysis
of the structural inequalities in which they are embedded (Hickey & Mohan, 2001; see
also Guijt, Arevalo, & Saladores, 1998; Leal, 2007).
Critiques of participatory communication most often stem from such debates
about the “authenticity” of participation in the face of its institutionalization by
international development agencies and financial institutions, and about the extent to
which power is truly shared (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Cornwall, 2011; Gumucio Dagron,
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2009; Hickey & Mohan, 2001; Huesca, 2002). However, purist approaches to
participatory communication have also been criticized for romanticizing marginality,
homogenizing notions of community, being too localist in focus, being inefficient, and
insisting on time-consuming participatory approaches when these may not be appropriate
(Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Gumucio Dagron, 2009; Heeks, 1999; Hickey & Mohan, 2001;
Huesca, 2002; Tufte & Mefalopulos, 2009).
The broader point here is that participation is an episteme that can be wielded in
many ways; it can challenge hegemonic power and promote greater equality, but it “may
also be the means through which existing power relations are entrenched and reproduced”
(White, 1996, in Cornwall, 2011, p. 68). This tension is further explored throughout this
study, particularly in Chapter 3.
In sum, very few scholars have bridged the fields of participatory communication
and participatory culture.
33
The long history of participatory communication outside of
the United States—and in Colombia, in particular—has not been substantively engaged in
the participatory culture literature, and vice versa. Much of the scholarship on
participation in the new mediascape in the global North (the United States in particular)
does not sufficiently account for relations of power embedded in social, economic,
political, and technological structures, and should be rethought in juxtaposition with
participatory communication theories and practices from the global South. Participatory
communication as developed in the global South (especially in Colombia and other parts
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33
One exception is Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s (2006) chapter “From ‘reading’ to ‘New’
Literacies”, in which the historical influence of Latin American theorist and educator Paulo Freire is
articulated in relation to the radical education movement of the late 1960s, including how this movement
influenced progressive thinking on literacy and education in the digital age in the United States. Also
relevant to this discussion is Antonio López’s (2008) article on digital media and Native American
education, published by the MacArthur Foundation. Henry Jenkins and Nico Carpentier have also begun to
bridge these literatures (e.g., Carpentier, 2011; Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013).
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of Latin America) often emphasizes relations of power and structural inequalities—
though this has been diluted in its mainstreaming—but needs to better account for digital-
era shifts in the communication and media landscape. Further, it pays little attention to
individual and community engagement with popular culture and the ways in which it can
be repurposed for social change goals. Both fields lack in multilevel analyses that
consider dynamics of power and participation across micro, meso, and macro levels. And
the links between cultural, communicative, and political participation in the digital era
remain under-theorized in both literatures. This study takes micro-, meso-, and macro-
level power dynamics into account and offers an actionable analytical model for studying
and practicing participatory public culture in the digital age.

Participation in What?: Defining Participation
Part of the challenge of theorizing participation is to distinguish participation in
what (Cornwall, 2008; Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013). This is both analytically necessary
and problematic. It is necessary for obvious reasons of clarity and specificity. It is
problematic because articulating participation in what may, in many cases, force a
narrower conception of the kinds of participation being enacted than might be the case in
participants’ lived experiences. For example, some participants in a hip hop group may
view their participation as primarily cultural, while others may view it as primarily
political or communicative, and still others as all three.
In many cases, researchers have focused more explicitly on defining how
participation is enacted, or how participatory activities can be distinguished from non-
participatory ones. In A Voice for the Excluded: Popular Participation in Development –
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Utopia or Necessity? (1994), a central text in the study of participation in developing
contexts (Cornwall, 2011),
34
participation was defined generally as “the organized efforts
to increase control over resources and regulative institutions in given social situations, on
the part of groups and movements hitherto excluded from such control” (cited in Stiefel
and Wolfe, 1994, p. 5). Pateman (1970) similarly understood “control” as related to
participation, conceiving of ideal participation as all actors having equal power in a
decision-making process.
Applied to participatory communication, such a definition suggests that non-
hegemonic groups have some degree of control or decision-making power over the means
of production of messages, as well as their circulation and regulation. Applied to
participatory culture in Jenkins’ sense, this definition of participation would imply that
non-hegemonic consumers/users have some control over the means of production and
platforms that structure their experience of cultural engagement. According to such a
definition, platforms like YouTube could not be considered “participatory,” in that users
lack control over many of its resources and its “regulative institution” (the company and
Google, its owners). However, YouTube may, in some instances, provide a platform for
“participation through media . . . in other areas of decisions making” and change “how
people can enter public spaces and use media to enter into societal (or more localized)
debates, dialogues, and deliberations” (Jenkins & Carpentier, p. 10). In other words, the
relatively low barriers to self-expression and the possibility (though by no means
guarantee) of access to public audiences seen in social media platforms like YouTube
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34
This 1994 publication was the culmination of a United Nations Research Institute for Social
Development research program on popular participation that began in the late 1970s and spanned several
years and contexts.
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may still support some forms of participation in public life while restricting others (e.g.,
in the decision-making over how YouTube is structured and managed). In Chapters 4 and
5, I explore this tension by looking at how different youth participatory cultures engage
with proprietary social platforms like Facebook and YouTube. While maintaining clear
distinctions about the kinds and degrees of participation being analyzed is crucial, I argue
that both content-related and structural participation—including participation in and
through media—have a place in the participatory public culture project.
To maintain definitional clarity, a number of scholars and practitioners
historically have proposed analyzing different levels or “ladders” of participation,
ranging from participation as “manipulation” to full “citizen control” (Arnstein, 1969; see
also Cornwall, 2008). Each step on the ladder represents a greater degree of participant
control over decision-making and resources that affect their wellbeing. Cornwall’s (2003)
spectrum model ranges from “functional participation,” in which participants are
positioned as “beneficiaries” and treated as “objects” to “secure compliance, [and/or]
lend legitimacy,” to “transformative participation,” in which participants are positioned
as “citizens” and treated as “agents” of change (Cornwall, 2003, p. 1327). These
constructs have been used to distinguish “deep” from “narrow” participation (Farrington
& Bebbington, 1993), “transformative” from “nominal” participation (White, 1996), or
“authentic” from “pseudo” participation (Carpentier, 2011). Another way to think about it
is along a spectrum of “participatory intensities” between minimalist and maximalist
versions of participation (Carpentier, 2011; Carpentier in Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013).
These models are useful for identifying relations of power in broad strokes
through a simple schematic, and for making certain definitional distinctions between
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what “counts” as participatory and what does not. However, such models are relatively
linear, one-dimensional, and overly normative—reducing the scope of vision of the ways
participation can be enacted and contested. They offer little in the way of conceptual
tools for multilevel analysis. Further, they do not account for the interconnectedness of
culture, communication, and politics, which I argue (and illustrate in the following
chapters) is necessary for understanding participation in contemporary public life.
I am not alone in calling for a new, more nuanced analytical model for analysis of
participation (see Carpentier, 2011; Cornwall, 2008; Fish, Murillo, Nguyen, Panofsky, &
Kelty, 2011; Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013; Zuckerman, 2013). Kelty (2013) and his
colleagues (Fish et al., 2011) propose a naturalistic approach to observing emergent
forms of participation in the digital sphere, rather than grafting existing conceptions onto
them. However, their primary focus on online forms of participation limits its
applicability to the broader, less technologically centered consideration of participatory
public culture. Both Jenkins and Carpentier (2013) call for more micro-level analysis
(e.g., of decision-making processes among social or cultural groups, approaches to
education, etc.) of “how specific participatory practices are characterized by specific
power balances and struggles at different levels, moments, and locations. Participatory
practices are surprisingly complex and hardly ever straight forward” (Carpentier in
Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013, p. 3). I could not agree more. This study and the model
developed in it are an effort to embrace this complexity and draw richer, more nuanced
(yet still actionable) understandings from cases of participatory culture, communication,
and politics.

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Participatory Public Culture: Thinking Across Communication, Culture, and
Politics
Communication, culture, and politics are all implicated in participation in public
life, and in the construction of (youth) citizenship. In this study, I therefore dedicate a
chapter to each of these areas and consider the relationships between them. In the
process, I develop a framework for theorizing participatory public culture, which I define
as being characterized by relatively
35
horizontal decision-making that is based in
practices of dialogic communication with low barriers to participation, through which
issues of public consequence are negotiated. A participatory public culture is one that
values the voices and participation of non-hegemonic groups. This definition is informed
by the literatures reviewed here, but grounded in the following analysis of participation in
public life in Medellín. The qualities that make a participatory public culture
“participatory” are explicit in my definition, and further elaborated in Chapters 3, 4, and
5. I use the term “public” to refer to both civic and political practices and discourses. Of
course, what constitutes an issue of public consequence is debatable, particularly in late
modern consumer societies in which the public/private binary has proven highly
problematic as an analytic; the debate over this binary is not my focus here.
36
Public
culture is produced through the discourses and practices that give meaning to social,
civic, and political life; or, more generally, “the signs, symbols, languages and codes”
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35
I use the term “relatively” here to acknowledge that having truly “equal” relations of power in decision-
making processes is impossible, and that, in some cases, participatory cultures have included—and
benefitted from—a combination of both vertical and horizontal decision-making (see Kelty, 2013; Jenkins
& Carpentier, 2013).
36
See Berlant (1997), especially the introduction. Given the lengthy history of debate over the term
“public,” here I use Cayton’s summary of widely held understandings of “public” as “issues, problems, or
topics that are discussable in nonpersonal terms, and not only within the lifeworlds of individual subjects
involved in them” (2008, p. 20). Cayton (ibid.) also provides a useful history of the debate surrounding the
public/private binary, and of the concept of public culture from a variety of schools of thought.
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(Cayton, 2008, p. 4) used in “negotiating shared meaning among a diverse group of
individuals” (Shaffer, 2008, p. xi). This study considers how public culture is constituted
through communication, culture, and politics (broadly defined). Public culture is not a
unified, bounded sphere; it is porous and contentious. It is a terrain of struggle over
meaning (and power) amongst multiple, diverse publics.
37
It should be clear, then, that
while I use the word “culture” in the sense of cultural production (the sense most often
used when the term participatory culture is invoked) at points throughout this study, here
I am using it in the second sense described by Raymond Williams (1958/2011), culture as
“ordinary”; the “common meanings” that shape a society.
I suggest the term participatory public culture in an effort to recuperate some of
the analytical utility of participation by specifying participation in what (public life,
understood through the interrelated dimensions of culture, communication, and politics),
and how (e.g., through relatively horizontal decision-making, dialogical communication,
and other modes of participation investigated in the following chapters). By considering
the following questions, I illustrate how the concept can inform the study of youth
engagement in the digital age:
• What is the relationship between discourses and practices of participation, and
youth engagement in Medellín, Colombia? What forms of youth citizenship are
constructed through these discourses and practices, and to what ends? How does
participation function as a resource in this context?
• Are these discourses and practices cultivating a more participatory public culture?
If so, what kinds of infrastructures are supporting it?
• Is digital communication bolstering participatory public culture in Medellín, and
if so, how? What are the limitations of this?
• What are the broader implications of this case for understanding the
relationship(s) between youth participation and social change in the digital age?
How can recent U.S. new media scholarship inform the Colombian context, and
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This understanding of public culture is informed by the work of Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault,
Nancy Fraser, Raymond Williams, and Chantal Mouffe, among others.
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reciprocally, how can Latin American understandings of participatory
communication inform U.S. new media scholarship?

Broader conclusions will be drawn about the value of my participatory public culture
framework for theorizing youth engagement in the contemporary context. To avoid being
confined by a technocentric approach, this framework will not take digital culture as its
sole premise, but will identify the kinds of participation that recent shifts in the
mediascape can support. The aim is to develop an analytical approach will advance our
ability to theorize—and perhaps better support—youth engagement today.

Methodology
I first visited Medellín in July of 2009 while attending an OURMedia conference
on alternative/community/citizens’ media. After the conference, I was fortunate to
accompany Clemencia Rodríguez and other scholars and practitioners to visit a number
of community media projects across Colombia.
38
I was struck by the array of approaches
to citizen participation through community media, and I was inspired by the central role
that youth played in many of them. I wanted to learn more and felt that the Colombian
context had much more to contribute (in addition to what it already had) to global
conversations about youth participation in public life in the contemporary moment. With
the help of my Colombian friends and my colleagues at the University of Southern
California, I returned to the country in 2010, supported by a Fulbright grant. After
considering a number of possible research sites, I settled on Medellín for reasons
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Many of these are richly analyzed in Rodríguez’s 2011 book, Citizens’ Media Against Armed Conflict:
Disrupting Violence in Colombia.
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elaborated in the Introduction and in Chapter 2. To carry out this research, I spent most of
the year between August 2010 and August 2011 in Medellín, as well as several weeks in
Bogotá, Colombia’s capital.
The majority of scholarship on participatory communication and participatory
cultures consists of case studies, many of which take an ethnographic approach. While
this study does both of these, it is also multi-site and multi-method, and it takes more of
an ecological perspective than is typically the case.
39
By this, I mean that I studied
discourses and practices of youth participation across multiple levels of society—from
the grassroots to the city government, while also taking national and international
contexts into account—and how these were interrelated. This included both online and
offline discourses and practices. The ecological approach helped me to think about
participatory culture as a resource that is constituted and operated upon by a system of
actors, institutions, and networks. I considered how knowledge and power were produced
through relationships between individuals, groups, communities, and institutions, from
micro to macro levels.
I wanted this study to be cross-cultural in an attempt to prompt greater dialogue
between bodies of knowledge from distinct contexts (primarily Colombia and the United
States). In particular, I wanted to encourage the influence of knowledge produced outside
of the global North on dominant discourses of participation. The term “cross-cultural,”
however, runs the risk of reifying “cultures” as bounded, identifiable systems of meaning,
rather than understanding them as spaces of contention, difference, and continual
reimagination (Rosaldo, 1993), and of obfuscating the privileged position I am in to be
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39
My thinking on ecological approaches to research is loosely influenced by the work of Sandra Ball-
Rokeach and others (e.g. Kim, & Ball-Rokeach, 2006).
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able to structure and translate this crossing (not to mention, what might be lost in this
translation and my particular framing of the crossing). Of course, I cannot speak on
behalf of “a culture,” much less represent several in all of their complexity, porousness,
and mutability. What I attempt might be better described as a “border-crossing,” to
borrow from Henry Giroux (2005; see also Leonard & McLaren, 1993).
40
Thinking
across intellectual and cultural borders (which, of course, are porous and ever-shifting)
allows one to critically engage the struggle over those territories, spaces, and
contact zones where power operates to either expand or to shrink the distance and
connectedness among individuals, groups, and places. . . . At stake here is the
possibility of imagining and struggling for new forms of civic courage and
citizenship that expand the boundaries of a global democracy. (Giroux, 2005, pp.
2, 6)

This study represents multiple, intentional—and certainly subjective—border-crossings.
Of course, this is a challenging task and one that is rife with limitations. Finding
myself in a city I knew relatively little about prior to my arrival, and speaking a language
(Spanish) that I was comfortable using but certainly not proficient in its local nuances, I
was very aware of my limitations from the start of my fieldwork.
41
I had to begin with an
ethnographic approach—primarily participant observation and open-ended interviews—
to situate myself and start to grasp the complexities of the context. With the permission of
my research participants (a term I prefer to “research subjects”), I recorded most of my
interviews, took field notes and photographs, and reviewed existing materials. I attended
formal/public events, such as conferences and a protest march, as well as informal social
events (particularly as my relationships with the research participants developed),
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My thinking on border-crossings in social analysis is also influenced by Renato Rosaldo (1993).
41
During my fieldwork, I learned a great deal of vernacular vocabulary used by youth in Medellín, thanks
to the help of my research participants, my local research assistant, and my friends and colleagues in
Medellín. Nonetheless, I undoubtedly missed certain nuances during the data collection due to these
language barriers.
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including parties and casual “hanging out.” I later complemented these with other
methods, including research workshops and an audience survey. These qualitative
methods were chosen to help build theory, rather than to verify it.
I understand reality and knowledge as historically contingent and constituted
through the social production of meaning, but also shaped by material dynamics specific
to each context. Ethnographic and other qualitative methods are well-suited to this
perspective (Rosaldo, 1993). My approach was inspired by the work of critical
ethnographers (e.g., James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, Elizabeth Bird, among others) and
critical discourse analysis in the vein of Michel Foucault’s work. Both approaches
foreground considerations of how power is produced through discourses and practices.
Critical anthropologists, in particular, problematize the subject position of the foreign
researcher and the ways in which power is (re)produced through the creation of scholarly
knowledge. This critical understanding emerged in response to the problematic history of
ethnographic practices since the colonial era, which positioned the Western, white male
as the author of knowledge about peoples and places entirely foreign to him, silencing
indigenous voices and knowledges and reinforcing relations of marginalization and
subjugation (Clifford, 1983).
A critical ethnographic approach required that I interrogate my subjectivity as a
foreign researcher in Colombia, as well as the asymmetrical relations of power in
research practices; problems of validity in the production of knowledge about a context
that is not one’s own; the “othering” of research subjects; and the risk of exploiting
research participants through extractive research. To address some of these concerns, I
collaborated with Colombian researchers from the Universidad de Medellín and the
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Universidad de Antioquia; they informally advised me on my selection of cases, helped
me to understand the Medellín context, directed me to invaluable existing research, and
generously shared their contacts. I also collaborated more formally with researchers at the
Universidad de Medellín, jointly facilitating group workshops that used participatory
research techniques (described below) in an effort to achieve a greater balance of power
in the research process, improve validity, and avoid extractive research. Throughout my
fieldwork, I sought to identify ways that my research might benefit the groups I was
studying, or to reciprocate by offering my knowledge and skills as a researcher and
practitioner to meet a separate need identified by my research participants. For example,
the qualitative audience survey at the hip hop festival Revolución Sin Muertos (see below
and Chapter 4) was created with input from the festival organizers, La Red de Hip Hop
La Elite (The Elite Hip Hop Network), and their partner the Asociación Cristiana de
Jóvenes-YMCA (Christian Youth Association, a YMCA affiliate). It was designed not
only for the purposes of my study, but also to help the organizers learn how the festival
and its impacts were perceived by audience members. I wrote a separate report on the
findings of the survey for their use (see Appendix C). In another instance, I helped a
community media organization study the impact of their work using the most significant
change evaluation methodology.
42

In other cases, my status as foreigner facilitated my research. For example, many
of my youth and other interviewees were eager for exposure outside of Medellín, and
they were therefore generous with their time and conscientious in sharing information
and offering their own analyses. My analyses reflect these invaluable and insightful
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Most Significant Change is a participatory evaluation methodology in which participants analyze change
they or their communities have experienced as a result of a program (Davies & Dart, 2005).
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contributions. On a more theoretical level, I found that cultural and discourse analysis
sometimes benefits from distance from the subject matter, in the sense that the researcher
has less work to do to de-naturalize discourses that may be so entrenched in local culture
as to be easily reified or taken for granted. For example, the discourse of participation
itself, which has a long history in Colombia but was mainstreamed in the last two decades
(see Chapter 3), was remarkable to me and yet something that had become very
normalized among most of my contacts in Medellín (even if they felt that the promises of
the discourse had not been fully realized). As Rosaldo writes, “the ethnographic
perspective develops an interplay between making the familiar strange and the strange
familiar” (1993, p. 39).
The tendency among anthropologists and other scholars to use self-reflexivity to
try to redeem one’s work from the problems that arise through the power dynamics of
field research is crucial, but it can also be taken to an extreme. I experienced this while
listening to a white, male Canadian researcher spend all of his 20 minutes of allocated
time on a conference panel reflecting on his subject position in relation to his black,
female, Ghanaian research “subjects.” By the time his 20 minutes were up, he was still
talking about himself and had yet to “give voice” to his research subjects and their
contributions—not to mention that he had cut into the time allocated for the following
(female) researcher’s presentation. The irony that his efforts at self-reflexivity simply
perpetuated the white male-centrism he was trying to avoid was seemingly lost on him.
In my writing of this study, I have intentionally taken a position somewhat on the
other end of the spectrum, choosing to minimize the word count spent on reflecting on
my subject position in favor of content about or by my research participants. I
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acknowledge, however, that my recounting of this material is inevitably flawed and
heavily determined by my personal perspective. I will say that my limited “partial view”
(Haraway, 2003) is informed not only by my subjectivity as a white, highly educated,
middle-class, female researcher from the United States, but also by my background as a
practitioner of participatory media and communication for social change in the United
States, Africa, Mexico, and elsewhere. It is also shaped by my commitment to
community-based/participatory action research (Chambers, 1994; Cornwall & Jewkes,
1995; Fals Borda & Rahman, 1991; Freire, 2003) to find a greater balance of power
between the researcher and the “researched,” and to make the research process and its
outcomes of some mutual benefit. While this study is not action research in the sense of
being driven by a community-identified need, I took inspiration from community-based
researchers, such as Paulo Freire, Ricardo Ramirez, and Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, on creative
approaches to both co-constructing knowledge and listening. I used participatory research
methods whenever possible (see below) to achieve a greater balance of power with
research participants by involving them in the co-construction of knowledge, and to
improve the descriptive and interpretive validity of my analyses (Cornwall & Jewkes,
1995; Maxwell, 1992).

Case Selection
I did not pre-select case studies based on a predetermined set of criteria; rather, I
approached my fieldwork by taking an ecological perspective in which I tried to
understand the cultural, political, and communicative life of the city across different
societal levels and sociocultural geographies. I studied several more organizations and
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cases of youth participation than I had room to include in this analysis, “casting a wide
net” before moving to “more focused observation” (Padgett, 2008, p. 89). While it
became clear to me during my fieldwork that certain cases provided better opportunities
to explore the questions driving my research than others—and I therefore dedicated more
time to them—I did not make the final selection of cases to include in this analysis until
after I had completed my fieldwork and reviewed my data for the most fruitful
intersections, comparisons, and juxtapositions between them.
While I visited one youth program in the wealthiest part of Medellín, I focused
primarily on youth groups operating in some of the most marginalized neighborhoods.
This is because one of the primary reasons for promoting participation in public life is to
increase social equality. As a result, the most innovative and compelling cases of youth
participation were being forged in some of the most difficult circumstances.
I also chose not to consider participation in gangs as a counterpoint to the youth
groups analyzed here (although this would be a worthwhile project), for both logistical
and political reasons. Security and access were the obvious logistical concerns. A great
deal of attention has been paid to youth who engage in gang violence; there are rich
analyses of youth gang members by local researchers and others (e.g., Salazar, 1990). I
preferred to join a growing group of researchers who are bringing attention to youth-led
initiatives to bring about positive social change through nonviolent measures (see above
and Chapter 2).

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Interviews
Over the course of nearly a year, I carried out more than 100 semi-structured,
open-ended interviews (in some cases, these were group interviews) with members of
grassroots youth groups, nongovernmental/civic organizations, and city and national
government (see Appendix A). My approach to interviewing youth for this study is
perhaps best described by the visual anthropologist Alicia Blum-Ross in her recent work
on participatory filmmaking: “I chose to adopt a research methodology of research with,
rather than on young people (Mayall, 2000); I allowed them to choose the questions they
wanted to answer . . . and, in many instances, to determine informally the direction of the
research questions” (2011, p. 24). While I asked certain questions based on the broad
questions framing this study, using a flexible and fluid interview style with my youth
interviewees was most socially appropriate, enabled me to be a more responsive listener
than if I had followed a strict interview protocol, and thus helped me to learn about
nuances of the context I might not have inquired about otherwise. With adult
professionals, I tended to have slightly more structured interviews, but I still remained
open and flexible, so as to gather as much relevant information as possible. In all cases, I
tried to be sensitive of topics that might be considered taboo or even dangerous; given the
potentially sensitive nature of discussions of dynamics of violence, I anticipated that
many of my interviewees would prefer not to discuss these. While I learned that the ways
in which violence is talked about (or is not talked about) are often subtle and nuanced
(e.g., see Chapter 4, note 224; see also Riaño-Alcalá, 2006), I generally found my
interviewees open to discussing the ways in which violence shaped their lives; many
considered themselves nonviolent activists working against these dynamics and were
therefore committed to voicing their stories.
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While several of the public activities I observed included youth under age 18, all
of my interviewees were over the age of 18. I anonymized all interviews except those
who specifically asked to be acknowledged by name. I used a relatively free form
“snowball” method, typically starting by interviewing the leaders or most accessible
spokespeople of youth collectives (and branching out from there), as well as staff of
associated organizations (such as the YMCA affiliate the Asociación Cristiana de
Jóvenes, and the Instituto Popular de Capacitación) and representatives from the
department of youth programs (Metrojuventud) in the Mayor’s Office. I also found
interviewees by observing the activities of the collectives, so that I was able to interview
less prominent members. Nearly all of my interviewees were generous with both their
time and their contacts. I am deeply indebted to all of them.

Participant Observation
I observed a number of public events, such as conferences and participatory
budgeting meetings, as well as meetings and other activities of the youth collectives. In
many cases, I was able to make audio recordings of the events. I took notes following
each experience, which resulted in over 200 pages of field notes. I often consulted local
researchers on my observations, so as to clarify and nuance my understanding. In some
instances, I participated more directly in the activity, such as in some of the weekly
assembly meetings of the Red de Hip Hop La Elite and some of Ciudad Comuna’s citizen
media workshops, offering my perspective as a practitioner and researcher when asked.
Obviously my presence in such cases impacted the dynamic of the group to some extent,
but the trade-off was that I was able to build stronger relationships with them, which led
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to more opportunities for research, and to what I would consider to be a more mutually
beneficial exchange and a greater balance of power.

Workshops
During my fieldwork, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to collaborate
directly with three Colombian researchers who work extensively on the topics of youth,
culture, and communication: Jair Vega of the Universidad del Norte, and Ángela Garcés
Montoya and Gladys Acosta Valencia of the Universidad de Medellín. They invited me
to participate in their study of youth collectives, “Comunicación, Juventud y Ciudadanía”
(Communication, Youth, and Citizenship). I participated as a co-facilitator in four
research workshops using qualitative, participatory research methodologies adapted from
Riaño-Alcalá (2000) and Davies and Dart (2005) by Jair Vega. Each workshop was
carried out with a youth collective that had volunteered to participate in the study. The
workshop involved each of the participants reflecting on and sharing their own history of
involvement in the collective, including the experiences that prompted them to
participate, moments in which they experienced the “most significant change” (Davies &
Dart, 2005) during their participation, and visions of the future of the group and their
participation within it. This approach used memory, a visual prompt, narrative, and
dialogue to understand individual experiences of participation, but also to develop a
collective memory of the group and to collaboratively analyze its significance to
participants. By drawing a timeline and then sharing with the group, participants reflected
on the origin, the present dynamics, and the future of the collective, as well as any
personal transformations they had experienced being part of it. A complete description of
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the workshops and the methodologies used is provided in Acosta and Garcés (2012,
2013a; see also Acosta & Garcés, 2013b; Garcés & Acosta 2013). Some of the stories
and reflections shared and documented during these workshops inform this study’s
analysis, specifically in the cases of La Red de Hip Hop La Elite (Chapter 4) and Ciudad
Comuna (Chapter 5).

Qualitative Survey
In collaboration with the Red de Hip Hop La Elite, I carried out a semi-structured
qualitative survey during the first day of the 2011 hip hop festival Revolución Sin
Muertos in the Comuna 13 district of Medellín. La Elite was interested in whether
audience members perceived the festival as having the positive impacts they aimed for
(and so was I). I consulted with them in developing the survey questions and produced a
report of the results for their own use, as well as to inform my own analysis.
With the help of volunteer research assistants who were both local and foreign
(yet familiar with the context of Comuna 13), a total of 57 surveys were completed,
recorded by audio recorder and transcribed. Of these, 30 respondents were female and 27
male. The participants’ average age was 22, and 43% were residents of Comuna 13,
while the remainder came from other parts of the city. Approximately 70% were direct
participants in hip hop culture in some way.
I organized and interpreted the data with the help of one of my local research
assistants. The resulting analysis was verified by a local professional with decades of
experience in youth organizing, as well as several years of experience observing and
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collaborating with La Elite. (See Appendix C for survey questions and the summary
report provided to La Elite.)

Supplemental Materials
Before, during, and after my fieldwork, I collected and reviewed relevant
documents produced at the different levels studied, from youth collectives to civil society
organizations, to government. I also reviewed existing research by both local and foreign
scholars. I took photographs of graffiti and billboards, watched videos and listened to
songs produced by the youth collectives, reviewed other documents they had produced,
and read press coverage of relevant topics.

Data Analysis
Most of my interviews, notes, and supplemental materials were transcribed by
local research assistants or myself. I reviewed these transcriptions multiple times, and I
used the data management software Dedoose to organize the data into thematic areas. I
then considered the relationships between these thematic areas, drawing on existing
theories and developing my own in order to arrive at the analytical framework proposed
in Chapter 6.

Limitations of the Study
I have discussed some of the challenges of intellectual and cultural border-
crossing, and of my subjectivity as a foreign researcher. Language (particularly local
vernacular) and cultural differences were undoubtedly a barrier to understanding certain
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nuances and their historical and contextual significances. The value of this study does not
lie primarily in its factual account, but in the questions and insights it raises. I humbly
acknowledge that, in this attempted “border-crossing” and the literal and cultural
translations it required, I have likely made some mistakes, despite my best efforts. I hope
to correct these in subsequent iterations of this research.
By the end of nearly a year spent in Medellín, I had gathered a great deal of
thought-provoking material and developed strong relationships that continue to inform
and inspire my work. Nonetheless, having had more time in Medellín while writing this
analysis would certainly have benefited the study. The analytical framework developed
here would also benefit from its application and refinement in a comparative context,
something I welcome other researchers to do and hope to do myself in future.

Conclusion
“Participation” has been an expedient concept at different moments in history in
the United States, Colombia, and internationally, experiencing its most recent
resurgence—and commodification—with the advent of Web 2.0. Chris Kelty writes, “We
proliferate ways of governing ourselves and others as we proliferate these tools,
technologies, platforms, or networks”—and, I would add, discourses and practices of
participation—“and in the process change what it means (and meant) to interact, vote,
and protest. Participating in Twitter, or Facebook, or Free Software is not the same thing
as participating in democracy, but it does change what democracy will become” (2013, p.
29). If we are indeed proliferating new “ways of governing ourselves and others” and
justifying these through discourses of participation, developing analytical tools for
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studying them is crucial. I attempt to do so by elaborating the concept of participatory
public culture and thinking across the interrelated realms of communication, culture, and
politics.
As I have reviewed in this chapter, in the field of communication, participation
has primarily been theorized by scholars of participatory culture or participatory
development communication. Our ability to analyze youth engagement and social change
in the contemporary moment is limited by the fact that these bodies of work have
developed largely in isolation from one another, constrained by disciplinary as well as
geographical and language barriers. And while both fields have much to contribute to our
understanding of youth engagement in public life, why it matters, and how it’s changing
in the digital era, they each have certain limitations that might be addressed by putting
them in dialogue. This study is an effort to do so through a cross-cultural, multilevel
analysis of discourses and practices of youth participation in Medellín, Colombia. It
develops an analytical framework to advance our ability to theorize and practice
participatory public cultures, and to support emerging modes of youth participation in
public life in the digital age.
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CHAPTER 2: Medellín in Context: Youth, Violence, and the Promise of Participation

In 2013, Citigroup, the Wall Street Journal, and the Urban Land Institute named
Medellín, Colombia, the “Innovative City of the Year”:
Few cities have transformed the way that Medellín, Colombia’s second largest
city, has in the past 20 years. Medellín’s homicide rate has plunged, nearly 80%
from 1991 to 2010. The city built public libraries, parks, and schools in poor
hillside neighborhoods and constructed a series of transportation links from there
to its commercial and industrial centers. . . . The local government, along with
businesses, community organizations, and universities worked together to fight
violence and to modernize Medellín. . . . In addition, Medellín is one of the largest
cities to successfully implement participatory budgeting, which allows citizens to
define priorities and allocate a portion of the municipal budget. Community
organizations, health centers, and youth groups have formed, empowering citizens
to declare ownership of their neighborhoods. (Urban Land Institute, n.d.)

The city’s transformation since the era of Pablo Escobar and the Medellín drug cartel has
been called by many “the Miracle of Medellín,”
43
inspiring statements like, “For decades
it was a city dominated by murder, drugs and fear. Today it is a center of innovation and
hope” (Fink, 2013).
This is hyperbole; Medellín remains a city challenged by multiple forms of
violence and criminality, including drug trafficking and structural violence. And its
progress has not been a “miracle,” but rather, the hard-won outcome of extensive efforts
by government officials, local business people, academics, community groups, and youth
organizers. While the contemporary international narrative of Medellín tends to credit the
unique administration of Mayor Sergio Fajardo (2004–2007),
44
several other factors have
played important roles, in particular youth participation.
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43
For example, see Faiola (2008) and Fukuyama and Colby (2011).
44
See, for example, Romero (2007) and Bagley (2013).
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The previous chapter critically situated the concept of participation within
historical and contemporary scholarly discourses, and also outlined the concept of
participatory public culture that frames this study. This chapter grounds the analysis in
the particular context of Medellín, one that is especially well-suited to the study of
youth
45
engagement in public life because of multilevel efforts to use participatory
culture, communication, and political processes to increase youth participation in local
governance and civic initiatives. Indeed, youth engagement is widely seen as crucial to
resisting or transforming the widespread violence that has plagued the city.
While my fieldwork took place in 2010 and 2011, the analysis elaborated in the
following chapters focuses primarily on the changes that occurred during the two
Compromiso Ciudadano administrations spanning the years 2004–2011. This chapter
historicizes and contextualizes this time period, tracing the destruction and reconstruction
of public life in Medellín in the context of narcotrafficking and armed conflict. It sets the
stage for the subsequent analysis of how the concept of participation (and the
construction of participatory public culture more broadly) has become a central resource
for both government institutions and grassroots efforts to promote greater civic and
political engagement, reduce violence, and develop the city.

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45
“Youth” is a varyingly constructed social category. In Medellín, it legally refers to “a social group
between ages 14 and 26 years . . . whose members are defined as rights-bearing subjects with their own
characteristics that are not only biological, psychosocial and cultural, but also those that are constructed
from political, social, and economic factors that influence their recognition and forms of appearing in the
public sphere” (Concejo de Medellín, Acuerdo Municicpal 076 de 2006, por el cual se adopta el Plan
Estratégico Municipal de Desarrollo Juvenil de Medellín 2007–2015). In this study I use the term “youth”
slightly more broadly, as it often is colloquially in Medellín, to refer to the age range between 14 and 29.
Refer to Chapter 1 for further discussion.
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Medellín: A City of Contrasts
Lodged between Andean mountains in the northwestern Aburrá Valley, Medellín
is the capital of the Department of Antioquia and home to approximately 2.4 million
people (DANE & Municipio de Medellín, 2010b). Approximately 44% of the population
is under age 30 (ibid.), down somewhat from the late 1990s, when this segment
accounted for approximately 53% of the total population (Bernal, 2005, p. 28).
The city is divided into 16 administrative districts referred to as comunas, and five
surrounding rural corregimientos (townships). Together, these include 249 officially
registered neighborhoods and several more informal settlements on the periphery of the
city—formed largely by people fleeing armed violence in the countryside. Medellín has a
dramatic topography and a relatively segregated urban landscape, which ranges from
well-appointed shopping malls, luxury car dealerships, and high-rise condominiums to
the shantytowns in the mountainsides encircling the city. There is a wealthy southern
section of the city, which contrasts its impoverished north (see Figure 2.2). While
approximately 80% of the population belongs to the three lowest of Colombia’s six
socioeconomic strata
46
, Medellín is one of Colombia’s wealthiest cities and home to
some of the country’s richest landowners and industrialists (Departamento
Administrativo de Planeación, Alcaldía de Medellín, 2009; Arias Sandoval, 2012;
Lowenthal & Rojas Mejía, 2010). With vast natural resources in the surrounding region
and an industrious culture, Medellín has historically been a prosperous, largely self-
sufficient city (Lowenthal & Rojas Mejía, 2010). Its economy first boomed because of
gold mining in the late 19th century, followed by coffee and textile exports; in the mid-
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46
The Colombian government uses 6 strata to describe socioeconomic status, where estrato 1 is considered
very low, estrato 2 is low, and so on.
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twentieth century, it led Latin America as the largest textile exporter (Roldán, 2003). Yet
by the second half of the 20th century, the city’s infrastructure was unable to keep up
with the flood of rural migrants coming to the city for economic reasons or displaced by
natural disasters and the national armed conflict. Informal settlements crawled up the
mountainsides, with many residents organizing to demand official recognition of their
neighborhoods and the provision of public services to them (Villa Martínez, 2007).
47

Figure 2.1. View of Medellín from the Metrocable Line K.
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47
For detailed discussion of the emergence of these neighborhoods, the socioeconomic dynamics and
illegal markets in which they were traded, and their development through collective work, see Naranjo
Giraldo (1992, 1997).
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Figure 2.2. Map of Medellín by neighborhood and socioeconomic strata (0-6), 2006.
Alcaldía de Medellín (2007).

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Medellín has a long history of community organizing, but also a long history of
exclusion.
48
It is a city “where paternalism, civic duty, a tradition of non-partisan public
service, and ascent based on merit have always coexisted with exclusion, discrimination,
parochialism and selective repression” (Roldán, 2003, p. 129). Paisas, as locals refer to
themselves, are known among other things for their local pride; they will often
distinguish their history from that of much of the rest of Colombia, starting with the
settlement of the area by Spanish Jews in the late 16th century. This “different” cultural
identity is strongly asserted as normatively white (Uribe, 1990), despite the hundreds of
thousands of Afro-Colombians and other people of color living in the city (see Chapter
4).
By the 1970s, the rapid decline of the textile and manufacturing industries, which
had been weakened by global competition, led to rising unemployment, and the number
of unemployed male youths between ages 12 and 29 became the highest in the country
(Roldán, 2003). The situation was exacerbated by the neoliberal policies of the 1980s and
1990s that further “opened” Colombia’s manufacturing to global competition and
mandated public spending cutbacks through economic restructuring (ibid.). The
weakened economy and high unemployment fueled the growth of narcotrafficking and
other illegal markets (Salazar & Jaramillo, 1992).

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48
These histories are further elaborated below and in subsequent chapters.
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Violence and the Fracturing of Public Life
Medellín became known internationally for being home to the world’s most
notorious narcotrafficker in the 1980s and early 1990s, Pablo Escobar, head of the
Medellín drug cartel
49
, and for having the world’s highest per capita murder rate
(Amnesty International, 2005). During this time, homicide rates reached 40 times higher
than the UN marker of an “epidemic” (Felbab-Brown, 2011). While circumstances have
changed significantly since the 1990s, armed violence remains Medellín’s unshakeable
shadow; a determining yet elusive characteristic that is ever-changing, and one that the
vast majority of its citizens long intensely to overcome. Violence is one of the first topics
its citizens will raise, and yet the last thing for which they want to be known. It has
profoundly shaped youth subjectivities and their struggles for livelihood, empowerment,
and dignity in the city. This is especially true among the lower socioeconomic strata,
which comprise the vast majority of the city’s population.
Medellín’s history of violence has been widely stigmatized, sensationalized, and
commodified in both journalistic and entertainment media in and outside of Colombia.
50

There is danger in reifying Medellín’s violence; in a global context, it has very real
economic and social consequences for the city’s inhabitants. However, understanding
participatory public culture and youth engagement in the Medellín context requires
historicization of its armed violence and of the reification of youth as violent protagonists
in it, because it has dramatically limited non-violent youth participation in public life.
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49
Escobar co-founded the Medellín cartel with the Ochoa Vásquez brothers.
50
As Martin (2012) writes, “Every national and international newspaper of repute sent a war correspondent
to Medellín” (p.266). Hollywood examples include American Desperado, in which Mark Wahlberg will
reportedly play a kingpin smuggler for the cartel in the forthcoming Hollywood film (Kroll, 2013), and the
HBO series Entourage (2004-2011), in which the main protagonist endeavors to make a dramatic film
about the Medellín cartel. Visitors to Medellín can take Pablo Escobar tours, although these are frowned
upon by the tourism bureau for perpetuating the negative association with the city (Catchpole, 2013).
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And it is the violence (in addition to other social, cultural, political, and economic
dynamics) that the youth I interviewed were aiming to change through a variety of
participatory practices. To be clear, the history of violence is not the only factor that has
motivated or affected youth participation in the recent history of Medellín; and youth
have organized around civic, political, recreational, and cultural topics largely
independently of the issue of violence. However, it has significantly shaped the context
of much of this organizing in ways that are necessary to understand. It is also one of the
factors that have helped to constitute and spread a pervasive discourse of participation.
Medellín’s history of armed violence is imbricated in the longer national history
of Colombia’s civil war, which, from the period known as La Violencia (1946–1958)
51
to
today, has driven hundreds of thousands of displaced people from the countryside to
Medellín.
52
Decades of ongoing conflict over land disputes and political control between
state, paramilitary, and guerrilla actors—most notably the Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC)—have
rendered Colombia home to the largest population of internally displaced people in the
world.
53
This has increased rates of unemployment and strained public services and urban
planning in Colombia’s cities. Starting in the 1970s, Colombia’s internal conflict was
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51
La Violencia (The Violence) refers to a time period of more than a decade in which the warring Liberal
and Conservative parties, the two traditional parties of Colombia, attempted to consolidate power through
the use of violence, primarily in the countryside. See Chapter 3.
52
In 2011, there were over 216,000 registered displaced people in Medellín, and the actual figure could
have been higher (Secretaría de Bienestar Social, 2011). Each year, tens of thousands more arrive in
Medellín; one estimate holds that 80,000 displaced people moved to Medellín in the year 2000 alone
(Restrepo, 2000, in Bernal, 2005, p. 28). In 2012, Medellín reportedly received 37,938 displaced people.
They are disproportionately Afro-Colombian and indigenous (“Antioquia recibe el mayor número,” 2013).
53
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that there are approximately
five million internally displaced people in Colombia (UNHCR, n.d.). Internal displacement from the
conflict continues today (ICRC-WFP, 2007).
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exacerbated by the prolific rise of narcotrafficking driven by various family-based
criminal networks, the most famous one being the Medellín cartel run by Pablo Escobar.
While the national conflict has had lasting impacts on Medellín, the culture,
politics, and violence of narcotrafficking have had a particularly determining influence on
the contemporary public culture of the city. Therefore, rather than offer a comprehensive
review of a very long and complex history of violence in Colombia,
54
I focus here on the
period that has most heavily shaped the contemporary context of youth participation, the
time frame stretching from the rise of narcotrafficking in the 1970s to 2011, the end of
the second Compromiso Ciudadano administration (and the year I carried out the
majority of my field research). This period encompasses a fracturing
55
and reshaping of
the public life of the city, in which key roles have been played by youth.

Narcotrafficking and Its Youth Protagonists
The cultivation and exporting of marijuana from Colombia (primarily to the
United States) began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It waned shortly thereafter as
cultivation in the United States increased, but the exporting networks persisted to some
extent (Castells, 1998). From the mid/late 1970s on, cocaine became a more lucrative and
viable drug trade in Colombia (Pécaut, 2006). Through networked partnerships between
smugglers like Pablo Escobar (who started amassing his wealth by trafficking stolen
tombstones) and North American mafia organizations, by the mid-1980s, Colombia had
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54
Refer to Chernick (2008), Pécaut (2006), and Castells (1998) for discussions of the ways in which the
history of narcotrafficking may be traced back to the period of conflict known as La Violencia (1946–
1957).
55
It is worth noting that public life in Medellín prior to narcotrafficking was not without its problems and
should not be romanticized, but narcotrafficking has been particularly destructive to the social fabric of the
city.
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become the epicenter of narcotrafficking and the primary supplier of cocaine to the North
American market (Castells, 1998; Pécaut, 2006; Salazar & Jaramillo, 1992). In 1986, 40
of the 60 tons of cocaine entering the United States came from Colombia (Pécaut, 2006).
The culture and politics of narcotrafficking (which included the use of bribery,
kidnapping, and murder to exert power) proliferated in Medellín and throughout much of
Colombia, causing a crisis in the political and justice systems. Crime bosses—
particularly Pablo Escobar
56
—gained control of parts of the police forces and justice
systems through bribes and the threat or use of violence. They also infiltrated the political
system through traditional means at a number of levels (ibid.); in 1982, Pablo Escobar
was elected to parliament as a Liberal (one of Colombia’s two traditional parties) in his
effort to fight legislation permitting the extradition of narcotraffickers to the United
States. He was expelled shortly thereafter, due to efforts by the proactive Minister of
Justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and influence from the U.S. government.
57

By the mid-1980s, some of Medellín’s youth (particularly boys and young men
from poorer neighborhoods) had joined the growing number of street gangs and were
playing a key role in the criminal organizations in charge of the cocaine business.
58
Gang
members typically between the ages of 15 and 19 (or younger)
59
, were hired as sicarios
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56
Pablo Escobar was from a middle-class family, but in running Colombia’s largest and most lethal drug
cartel, he amassed unparalleled wealth and power that threatened Colombia’s traditional elites and
institutions.
57
As Castells’ (1998) analysis explains, the extradition of drug traffickers to the United States was just one
of the various ways in which the U.S. war on drugs played a determining role in the history of
narcotrafficking, its criminalization, and the response of the Colombian state. See also Salazar and
Jaramillo (1992).
58
Salazar and Jaramillo (1992) point out that these gangs were not formed by narcotraffickers, but rather,
emerged out of social and familial associations in the context of increasing economic hardship and the
failure of civic and political institutions. They took on new forms as they adapted to and became key
players in the narcotrafficking and other illicit economies. See also Bernal (2005) and Martin (2012).
59
While 15-19 is a widely cited age range, Martin describes the majority of gang members as being youth
between ages 12 (or younger) and 26 (2012, p.141).
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(hitmen) by narcotraffickers to kill journalists, politicians, judges, human rights workers,
activists, and others who had become enemies of the drug cartel by exposing or otherwise
challenging their operations. The phenomenon spread beyond narcotrafficking as a range
of actors, including politicians and citizens, hired sicarios to settle feuds through the
“mercado de la muerte” (“death market”; Salazar & Jaramillo, 1992). While these gang
members were a minority of Medellín’s youth (and the majority were not involved in the
violence; Martin, 2012), the impact of their actions dramatically affected youth across the
city and the society at large.
In April 1984, two sicarios hired by the Medellín drug cartel murdered Lara
Bonilla in another move to stop the Colombian government’s legalization of the
extradition of narcotraffickers to the United States. One of the assassins was killed; the
other, sixteen-year-old Byron de Jesús Velásquez, was captured and became the media’s
poster child for a new youth subject—the narco hitman—representing both the
increasingly visible impact of narcotrafficking on Colombian society and the protagonism
of poor youth within it. It was seen as a pivotal moment in a trend toward “public and
media representations of [Medellín’s] youth as social threat and criminal other” (Riaño-
Alcalá, 2006, p. 1). (It was also one of the catalysts for the Colombian government’s
subsequent “open war against the Medellín cartel”; Martin & Ceballos, 2004, p.103.) A
negative imaginary of youth from lower socioeconomic strata developed (Riaño-Alcalá,
2006; Salazar & Jaramillo, 1992) and was perpetuated by local, national, and foreign
media; one that continues to shape youth subjectivities today, particularly in Medellín's
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poorer neighborhoods.
60
In all of the youth-led, grassroots projects and organizations
analyzed in the following chapters (a hip hop network, an Afro-Colombian cultural
collective, and a citizen media project), the stigmatization of youth in the mass media and
in the public sphere more broadly was cited as a motivating factor for their work. While
circumstances have changed since the 1980s (see below), many of my youth interviewees
still expressed a sense of being misrepresented and criminalized in public discourse; this
motivated them to try to self-represent and resignify their subjectivities through a variety
of forms, a dynamic that is further analyzed in Chapter 4.
The downturn in the formal economy was one reason for the protagonism of
youth in narco-violence (Bernal, 2005; Roldán, 2003; Salazar & Jaramillo, 1992). The
lack of economic and social opportunities weighed heavily on Medellín's working class
youth, approximately half of whom came from households headed by a single mother
(Departamento Administrativo de Planeación, Alcaldía de Medellín, 2009).
61
Economic
need contrasted sharply with narcotrafficking consumer culture, in which “bling” (the
ostentatious display of jewelry, brand-name clothing, and other consumer goods), plastic
surgery, and luxury commodities became visible and somewhat normalized, even in some
cases among the poorest sectors of the city. Joining an armed gang offered some youth
unprecedented access to economic power, conspicuous consumption, and the social status
that came along with these (Salazar & Jaramillo, 1992).
In addition to its economic and political impacts, narcotrafficking thus changed
the cultural and aesthetic landscape of the city, as well as the expectations of its youth
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60
A smaller number of upper class youth also became involved in the criminal activity (Martin, 2012),
though not on the same scale and in different ways. They were not publicly stigmatized as youth from
lower-class neighborhoods were. These youth are not the focus of this study.
61
In 2004, when the Compromiso Ciudadano party came into power, unemployment of youth between the
ages of 14 and 26 was still high, at 23% (Fierst, 2013).
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(Bernal, 2005; Roldán, 2003; Salazar & Jaramillo, 1992). Youth bodies—particularly
poor male bodies, but also plastic surgery-perfected female bodies—became
commodified within a market of death, territoriality, and media spectacle. For their part,
some young women seeking financial resources and social prestige increasingly altered
their bodies to appeal to the growing aesthetic of narco-culture bling (Roldán, 2003).
From the mid 1980s on, gangs, urban militias
62
, and paramilitary activity
63

(categories that sometimes blurred and overlapped) proliferated (Martin, 2012; Salazar &
Jaramillo, 1992). Urban militias carried out “social cleansing” campaigns, acted as a de
facto police force in the poor parts of the city, and solicited bribes from local business
owners in exchange for their protection. Paramilitaries did much of the same, frequently
operating through existing criminal gangs (primarily of youth and children). The
corruption and social cleansing campaigns themselves spawned other “self-defense” (i.e.
“neighborhood watch” or vigilante) groups (Jaramillo Ceballos & Villa, 1998, in Riaño-
Alcalá, 2006; Martin, 2012; Roldán, 2003). The lines between criminal gangs, militias,
and paramilitaries increasingly blurred, as did the distinction between private and public
security forces.
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62
There have been a variety of kinds of urban militias in Medellín’s recent history. In the 1980s, the
militias were primarily comprised of youth and children associated with guerrilla groups like the FARC and
ELN, responsible for “dispensing ‘justice’ in the poor neighborhoods by carrying out ‘social cleansing’
operations against petty criminals, drug addicts and members of criminal gangs. . . .… The militias also
‘taxed’ local businesses in return for ‘protection’ and kidnapped wealthy businesspeople to fund their
activities” (Amnesty International 2005, p. 27). See also Riaño-Alcalá, 2006.
63
In the 1980s, right-wing paramilitary groups developed across Colombia through various alliances
between local businessmen, politicians, drug traffickers, and others interested in curbing the power and
influence of leftist guerrillas. They carried out targeted murders and death squads, and enforced
conservative values in the areas they controlled, often in collaboration with state actors. In Medellín and
elsewhere, paramilitary groups also became involved in drug trafficking, ultimately controlling much of the
drug trade after the fall of Escobar’s cartel. They typically operated through existing criminal gangs; this
made it possible for authorities to deny the presence of paramilitaries in the city (Amnesty International,
2005), and to blame the violence on criminal gangs of youth. See Martin (2012) and Amnesty International
(2005) for more on the history of paramilitarism in Medellín.
!
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82!
82!
These ‘social cleansing’ practices—the murder of people considered disposable,
unproductive, or dangerous—on occasion were also carried out clandestinely by
members of the police force or in triangulation with a gang, generally with the
passive support of the neighborhood. . . . [Violent gangs] ‘calentaron’ los
barrios [escalated the violence in the neighborhoods], displacing traditional forms
of youth socialization, and taking justice and ‘social cleansing’ in their own
hands, and obstructing the precarious processes of local development. It was as if
another Pandora’s box had been opened, in addition to narcotrafficking, la
guerrilla, and the paramilitary phenomenon. In reality . . . all of these phenomena
ended up interconnected in one way or another (Martin, 2012, p.137).

Criminal and state-sanctioned violence blurred, as off-duty “rogue” policemen
perpetrated masked killings and accusations of politicians’ links to illegal paramilitary
activity became frequent (Roldán, 2003, p. 144).
64
Salazar and Jaramillo’s analysis
therefore concluded that, “in this period one can’t speak simply of the absence of the
state, but [rather/also] of its illegitimate presence. The levels of corruption implicated [the
state] as yet another factor in the conflict. The configuration of a parainstitutionality, that
carried out a marginal ‘justice’, transformed the state into an enemy of the citizens.”
(1992, p. 92). In many ways this applied to both the municipal and national levels of the
state; the police force in Medellín was run by the national government, and corruption
and “debilidad institucional” (institutional weakness) could be found at all levels of
government (Martin & Ceballos, 2004, p. 104).
On the other hand, in some cases Medellin’s drug lords, namely Pablo Escobar,
financed recreational activities, housing, schools, and other infrastructure in their local
communities, partially filling certain roles neglected by the state. Escobar was seen as an
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64
At the national level, the conflict between the government, leftist guerrilla groups (most prominently the
FARC), and paramilitaries also became imbricated in narcotrafficking; both guerrilla and paramilitary
groups used it to finance their campaigns, and international aid (primarily from the United States) flowed
heavily to Colombia’s military to fight the “war on drugs”.
!
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83!
83!
altruistic patrón in certain neighborhoods of the city; narcotrafficking brought resources
to these communities that the state had failed to provide.
By the end of the 1980s, over 150 gangs were officially documented in
metropolitan Medellín, and the actual number was likely significantly higher (Salazar &
Jaramillo, 1992). Medellín’s reputation as one of the most violent cities in the world was
solidified as homicides peaked in 1991–1992 at a rate of 444 per 100,000 inhabitants, the
majority of victims being males in the 15–24 age bracket.
65
By the early 1990s, between
30 and 40 young men died every weekend (Roldán, 2003); 40,000 youth deaths were
documented between 1985 and 2002 (Riaño-Alcalá, 2006; see Figure 2.3; see also
Bernal, 2005). Young sicarios had become the public face of death (Riaño-Alcalá, 2006).

Figure 2.3. Annual Homicide Rate in Medellín, 1987–2012

(adapted from Medellín
Cómo Vamos, 2013).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
65
Between 1987 and 1990, nearly 80% of violent deaths in Medellín were of male youth between 15 and
24 years old, primarily from lower socioeconomic strata (Consejería Presidencial para Medellín, 1992;
Riaño-Alcalá, 2006).
!
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84!
84!
The violence eroded the already tenuous social fabric and civic institutions of the
city, and fear and silence came to characterize much of public life. Many community-
based organizations disappeared as armed gangs increasingly controlled life in Medellín’s
barrios (neighborhoods, especially lower-income; Salazar & Jaramillo, 1992).
In the poorer neighborhoods of the city, those youth not directly involved in the
violence were often unwillingly engaged in it through family or other social connections,
or through their physical addresses. Neighborhoods were divided into gang territories,
and fronteras invisibles (“invisible borders”) were enforced by warring gangs with the
threat of death. The physical mobility of youth through the city—even between adjacent
neighborhoods or blocks—was severely restricted, making it even more difficult to
pursue formal employment and educational opportunities. Some youth found it necessary
to leave their homes and birthplaces to avoid danger by association. While the landscape
of narcotrafficking and violence has changed significantly and homicide rates are much
lower than their peak in the early 1990s (see Figure 2.3), this dynamic of restricted
mobility (and even displacement) continues in certain neighborhoods today. The
fronteras invisibles were repeatedly cited by my young interviewees as a determining
factor in their lives, and were often a motivation for their civic/political participation.
66

It is difficult as an outsider to comprehend—much less adequately relay—the
lived experiences of these dynamics. As such, here, I will quote one of my interviewees
at length about his experience, as it is one that illustrates the challenges and complex
webs of violence faced by many youth. He was born in 1984 and grew up in Villaniza
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
66
Sadly, they were also a factor in the deaths of several youth members of the collectives I studied,
including during the time of my research in 2010-2011.
!
!
85!
85!
(Comuna 2, Santa Cruz), a low-income neighborhood in the northeastern part of
Medellín. He was 26 at the time of the interview in 2011.
From age 12 or 14 I was involved a lot with problems in the neighborhood, like
violence, gangs, drugs; this was characteristic of where I lived . . . but I felt that it
wasn’t my spirit. . . . At this age, in adolescence, I felt the need to find a place, a
referente [example or role model] . . . and for many of my friends it seemed that
the referente was the gang leader, who established themselves as paternal figures.
. . . I am an only child, without a father . . . and my mother was always working . .
. so it was also about finding paternal male figures in them, emotionally. . . .

Various members of our family had gotten heavily involved in the violence and
the conflict; five of my cousins were murdered . . . and the average life span of
my cousins, for example, was between 17 and 18. The last who was killed, which
was about 15 days ago, made it to 29.

At times I have flashbacks of my life, of moments of violence in the barrio, for
example, I remember clearly once when I was a kid I was sleeping at home, in my
room, where there was a window onto the street. One day a group of milicias
arrived, which is like a sort of urban guerrilla, and started shooting at the house, I
was in the first bed next to the window and I woke up and saw the bullets passing
by. My mom grabbed me and dragged me away. . . .

When I was finishing high school, something really bad happened in my
neighborhood, more specifically in my family. . . . [T]wo cousins were sent to
prison, but they had had a certain power in the barrio, in the area, they were part
of a gang. . . . [W]hen one of them got out he was murdered right outside of the
prison, killed with another four people including his sister. . . . [W]hen they fell,
we lost the protection of the family; because they’d been involved [in the gang]
they had protected the family, but this protection can also become a threat. . . .
[Y]ou start to become recognized as family members of the gang leader . . . so we
no longer had their protection and started to be threatened. . . . By the time I
started university there was a lot of pressure, and I had to leave the barrio for four
or five years, until last year I went back. . . . The situation was so bad I had to
change my appearance. . . .

In the university I got involved with leftist movements, with very subversive and
leftist factions of the country, like one of the groups that operate in the country as
guerrillas, and I was very involved in the student movements. But for me it was
an intense experience because various of my friends who left [to join guerrilla
activities outside of the city] ended up dead, so I realized that that wasn’t the route
either, even though I wanted to promote social change. . . . [B]ut in the end I said
to myself, “If I left such an intense problem in the barrio, which was because of
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86!
86!
the use of arms, why do I have to be confronted with it here?” So I distanced
myself from it.
67

Ultimately, photography, as well as his participation in a youth-led audiovisual
collective
68
, became his method of coping with the violence that had so shaped his life.

Violence and the State After Escobar
The violence of Pablo Escobar’s era of narcotrafficking peaked in 1990-1991 as
the state and paramilitary war against his cartel escalated. Escobar was ultimately killed
in a gun battle with the Colombian National Police in 1993. His cartel had been
weakened in the years leading up to his death by the state and paramilitary activity, and
by the fact that paramilitary networks (and some guerrilla networks) had come to control
an increasing portion of the illegal drug trade.
69
The fall of Escobar shored up the
strength of narco-paramilitary bosses and their control over the majority of the drug-
trafficking business in Medellín (Martin, 2012; Roldán, 2003), which resulted in a period
of declining homicide rates as their power went relatively unchallenged (see Figure 2.3).
Yet by 2000–2001, the influence of the national armed conflict was felt locally in
Medellín, as guerrillas and narco-paramilitary factions fought for territorial control of
strategic parts of the city, such as those that offered access to key transportation and trade
routes. This has been described as the “urbanization” of Colombia’s armed conflict
(Riaño-Alcalá, 2006; Villa Martínez, Sánchez Medina, & Jaramillo Arbeláez, 2003).
Again, youth were a heavily recruited asset, as they represented potential fighters—many
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
67
Interview with 26-year-old male, Medellín, October 3, 2010. All translations are mine, unless otherwise
noted.
68
See below for a discussion of youth collectives.
69
For an analysis of paramilitary involvement in narcotrafficking in Medellín, see Martin, 2012.
!
!
87!
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already “trained”—with local knowledge, accustomed to a culture in which life was seen
as expendable (Amnesty International, 2005).
70
Territorial struggles between guerrilla
groups and paramilitaries (who eventually dominated) also became struggles for—and
between—youth fighters in gangs, as the violence escalated again (see Figure 2.3).
71

As in much of the history of Colombia, state or state-sanctioned violence played a
central role.
72
Most dramatically, in 2002, a series of operations were carried out by the
Colombian military, including Operation Mariscal, the commander of which was
subsequently penalized for the excessive use of indiscriminate force against civilians, and
other human rights abuses carried out during the operation (Angarita Cañas et al.,
2008).
73
Yet having failed to meet its purpose of eliminating the guerrilla groups the
FARC, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army, ELN), and the
Comandos Armados del Pueblo (People’s Armed Commandos, CAP) from their
strongholds in the city, another operation—known as Orión—was launched in October
2002 under then-President Álvaro Uribe. It was carried out in the district known as
Comuna 13 (also the site of Mariscal), the epicenter of the conflict in Medellín at the
time.
74
The residents of Comuna 13, which is also one of the city’s most densely
populated areas (Angarita Cañas et al., 2008), were subjected to more than two days of
gunfire, during which some 15 people died, 20 were wounded, and more than 70 people
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
70
According to a survey of demobilized paramilitary fighters published by the Mayor’s Office, the primary
reasons youth joined paramilitary groups were economic necessity, threats against their lives, and personal
vengeances (Alcaldía de Medellín, n.d.).
71
It was estimated that, in 2000, there were approximately 8,000 youth linked to criminal gangs in
Medellín (Vélez Rinón in Amnesty International, 2005).
72
The U.S. military aid program Plan Colombia, launched in 2000 to help the Colombian government
combat narcotrafficking and guerrilla activity, contributed to the intensification of the “war on drugs” and
the resulting displacement of people from surrounding rural areas to the urban shantytowns of Medellín.
73
For further discussion of Operation Mariscal and its impact on residents of Comuna 13 see Grupo de
Memoria Histórica (2011).
74
Eleven military operations were carried out in Comuna 13 in 2002 (Grupo de Memoria Histórica, 2011,
p. 76).
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were subsequently reported missing (BBC, 2002; Bright, 2011; see also Grupo de
Memoria, 2011).
75
Many residents remained captive indoors, hiding under mattresses and
furniture to avoid stray bullets. While the violence in and around Comuna 13 in the
months leading up to these operations had taken more lives (Martin, 2012)
76
, these
dramatic incidences of indiscriminant violence inflicted by the state in urban residential
zones were particularly traumatizing to its citizens.
77

The Mariscal and Orión operations were without precedent in Colombia’s cities
and made a huge impact on the population because of the number of armed troops
that participated, the type of weapons used (M60 machine guns, rifles, artilleried
helicopters, and snipers) and the actions against civilians (murders, arbitrary
detentions, indiscriminate attacks, and disappearances). (Grupo de Memoria,
2011, p. 77)

Not surprisingly, they were frequently referenced by my youth interviewees from
Comuna 13 as a milestone in their politicization.
78

Operation Orión eradicated the primary competitors of the narco-paramilitary
crime bosses, whose networks of paramilitaries and associated gangs filled the
subsequent power vacuum.
79
By 2003, narcotrafficking had shifted from the
organizational structure of the cartel to more localized, low-profile drug lords controlled
by paramilitary forces (primarily the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia or Self-Defense
Forces of Colombia [AUC], and the associated Bloque Cacique Nutibara or Cacique
Nutibara Bloc [BCN], led by the crime boss known as “Don Berna”) “in their hybrid
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
75
Some reports of the numbers killed and wounded are higher, but less specific.
76
There were 209 documented homicides in Comuna 13 in 2001 and 299 in 2002 (Martin, 2012, p. 609).
77
Angarita Cañas et al., 2008, Grupo de Memoria, 2011, and various interviews in Medellín, 2010-2011.
78
Various interviews in Medellín, 2011.
79
Most paramilitary groups in Medellín at this time belonged to the narco-paramilitary network the
Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, AUC), created by the brothers
Carlos and Vicente Castaño, which was active across most of Colombia. Former members of the AUC,
including Don Berna, later testified to having collaborated with military and police forces during some of
these operations, including Operation Orión (Angarita Cañas et al., 2008, p. 56; Grupo de Memoria
Histórica, p. 78; see also Amnesty International, 2005). Martin (2012) notes, however, that paramilitary
crime bosses and their networks of associated gangs had operated across the city since the 1980s.
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roles as violent entrepreneurs, social regulators, drug lords, war lords” (Riaño-Alcalá,
2006, p. 181).
Finding fewer challenges to their control of the illicit economy and following a
national ceasefire declared by the AUC, the BCN agreed to demobilize in 2003, as part of
a national demobilization initiative of the central government (nonetheless, the network
maintained economic and territorial control over much of the area through killings,
disappearances, and other crimes). In exchange for laying down their arms and abiding
by Colombia’s anti-drug laws, combatants were enrolled in “rehabilitation courses” and
other social programs, given amnesty, and returned home. While homicide rates fell by
nearly 50% between 2002 and 2007 (Fukuyama & Colby, 2011), the demobilization
process has been widely criticized by observers in and outside of Colombia for being too
lenient, not rigorously enforced, and ineffective at reintegrating former paramilitary
soldiers (more than 70% of whom were functionally illiterate and had few employable
skills in the formal economy), and for continuing to mask relationships between
Colombian elite and paramilitary actors.
80
Paramilitary activities continued following the
demobilization, carried out largely through criminal gangs, so as to obfuscate the
increasingly covert presence of the paramilitary bosses (Amnesty International, 2005).
Nonetheless, the city experienced a period of relative “peace” in the years 2003-2008.
Analysts disagree, however, on which factors were responsible for the reduction
in violence that corresponded with the mayoral administration of Sergio Fajardo (2004-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
80
There were also allegations that, in advance of the demobilization, paramilitaries recruited unemployed
youth to pose as demobilizing combatants, raising concerns that only a small number of actual combatants
demobilized. Further, many “demobilized” combatants were subsequently hired by private security firms
operating throughout the city, which Amnesty International and others argue has “recycled” the combatants
back into the conflict (Amnesty International, 2005, p. 41). See also BBC (2002), Bright (2007), Fukuyama
and Colby (2011), and Richter and Miller (2007).
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2007), when homicide rates were at their lowest in decades. Many speculate that it was
Don Berna’s continued control of Medellín’s underworld and the lack of a significant
challenge to his network, rather than the demobilization.
81
Martin (2012) argues that Don
Berna’s power has been exaggerated, and that the AUC’s 2002 ceasefire plus the national
government’s demobilization initiatives and other security measures better account for
the reduction in homicides.
82
What is clear is that the reduction in violence was one of
several conditions that made it possible for the Fajardo administration to carry out the
large public works projects that helped Medellín earn its reputation for innovation and
transformation.
83

The extradition of Don Berna and several other powerful narco-paramilitary
commanders to the United States on drug charges in 2008, however, left another power
vacuum. Territorial struggles once again escalated, doubling the murder rate prior to their
extradition (Bronstein, 2009; however, murder rates were still lower than they were in the
1990s). Youth were again disproportionately affected, accounting for 40–45% of
homicide victims in 2008 and 2009 (Secretaría de Gobierno, 2010). At the time of my
research in 2011, homicide rates were falling, but they still remained higher than the
period from 2004–2007 (see Figure 2.3).
Territorial dynamics of violence are thus ever-changing, adapting to changes at
levels ranging from the neighborhood up to national and international dynamics.
Narcotrafficking in Medellín in 2011 was characterized as “microtrafficking,” carried out
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
81
Various interviews, Medellín, 2010-2011; personal correspondence with Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, February 9,
2014; Amnesty International, 2005; Human Rights Watch, 2005.
82
Martin (2012) and personal correspondence with Gerard Martin, January 15, 2014.
83
Medellín’s crisis of violence has played multiple roles in the events that brought Fajardo’s party,
Compromiso Ciudadano, into power, and in the changes they implemented thereafter. The violence was
one of the factors that created the political opportunity for the party to come into power, while its relative
decline made it more feasible to implement certain initiatives once in power. See further discussion below.
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by a multiplicity of gangs. These were primarily under the overarching control of two
warring organizations: the crime syndicate Oficina de Envigado (formed in the 1980s to
supply sicarios to Escobar’s cartel, and later led by Don Berna) and the neo-paramilitary
group Los Urabeños (formed by mid-level commanders from the demobilized AUC—to
which Don Berna also had ties).
These dynamics of violence have heavily determined the actions of the local and
national government, as well as citizens’ perceptions of these. Since the 1980s,
government actors have often been constrained by (and at times implicated in) the power
wielded by Pablo Escobar and subsequent crime bosses, and since the mid-1990s, by the
urbanization of Colombia’s national conflict and the presence of guerrilla and
paramilitary forces fighting for territorial control of the city’s comunas. The gravity of
the national conflict and the crisis of legitimacy of the government led to significant
structural changes in Colombia’s political system in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
including the first mandate for mayors to be elected by popular vote (rather than
appointed by governors); the decentralizing of certain government functions to the
municipal level (including some responsibilities for security, though the police force
remained national); and a new constitution in 1991 (see Chapter 3). While these resulted
in very significant changes in Medellín’s local governance, national, international, and
civil society actors were more significant players in addressing the city’s crisis for much
of the 1990s. Myriam Merchán Bonilla and Óscar Arcos Palma (2011) in fact describe a
“retiro del Estado local” (“withdrawal of the local government”) in the second half of the
1990s, in which local government officials gradually shed responsibility for the security
of the city, particularly in las periferias (the poorer neighborhoods of the city on its
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periphery). The argument was that the violence had roots far outside of Medellín, and
therefore was not the responsibility of the local government to resolve. During this time,
security in the city was privatized in a number of ways (Angarita Cañas et al., 2008),
including through pacts with illegal armed groups to achieve “gobernabilidad”
(“governability”). This enabled
the consolidation of numerous armed organizations ready to offer the services and
functions of private security and justice in the communities. In effect, this “retiro
del Estado local” facilitated the strengthening of guerrilla militias and
paramilitary groups and their control of certain comunas of the city, and the
subsequent development of a conflict over territory between these illegal groups
between 1996–2002. (Merchán Bonilla & Arcos Palma, 2011, p. 54, emphasis in
original)

The resulting experience for Medellín’s citizens—especially those living in its poorer
neighborhoods—fueled their distrust of the state, which was exacerbated by the military
operations like Orión.
However, Medellín’s crisis ultimately created an unprecedented opening in its
political structure for new actors, and an unparalleled interest in the role that youth could
play in recuperating the city’s social fabric. It propelled the need for citizen participation
to the forefront of policy discussions at both the local and national levels. “The majority
of victims of [Colombia’s] conflict are civilians. . . . The increase in violence in
Colombian cities since the early 1980s obligated [first the national, then the local
government] to set policies to eradicate it, which included citizen participation as one of
its principal components” (Velásquez & González, 2003, pp. 93, 89).

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Compromiso Ciudadano

At the peak of the violence in the early 1990s, the national government partnered
with international aid organizations and local civil society organizations to create the
Consejería Presidencial de Medellín, an office meant to advise the president on the crisis,
to help develop infrastructure and programs for youth in poor parts of the city, and to
strengthen civil society. The initiative brought greater attention to and investment in at-
risk youth, as well as public policies targeting them. (However, the subsequent policies of
Mayor Luis Pérez’s administration [2001-2003] enervated a lot of the youth-oriented
social programs in the city, as his administration limited funding to employment-related
programs; Martin, 2012, p. 407.) Yet the involvement of local civil society organizations
in these efforts set a precedent for their participation in local governance and helped to
foment a political movement led in part by some of the civil society participants. This
ultimately formed the base (and much of the leadership) of the independent Compromiso
Ciudadano party, which was a unique alliance of local business leaders, academics,
student leaders, and other grassroots activists. As Sergio Fajardo reflected,
[It] started with what seemed a dreamers’ utopia, when a group composed of 50
people committed to organizing ourselves in a movimiento cívico-independiente
[civic-independent movement] . . . without leaders in the traditional sense,
without a dime, equipped with a set of basic principles that expressed our vision
of politics and a proposal to transform Medellín. . . . The formula is easy to
articulate: reduce the violence and immediately convert that reduction into social
opportunities. (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2008a, pp.
8, 11)

Compromiso Ciudadano explicitly developed a “proyecto de ciudad” (a citywide
project or agenda) to appeal to citizens of all classes, steering away from many traditional
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political ideologies on both the left and right. Instead, they emphasized bridging the
divide between the local government, historically run by elites through clientelist
relationships, and Medellín’s middle and lower classes—but without alienating its elite.
They developed a discourse of “corresponsabilidad” (“shared responsibility”) for the
city, emphasizing transparency and good governance, as well as inclusivity and citizen
participation—thus appealing to some members of the elite business class, as well as their
popular base. Addressing socioeconomic inequality was a central agenda. Yet instead of
this focus being seen as a threat by the business class of Medellín, the crisis caused by the
inequality and its expression through narcotrafficking meant that addressing it had
become a necessity.
84

After a failed first bid in 1999, Fajardo and the Compromiso Ciudadano won the
2003 mayoral election on a platform based largely on discourses of civic participation
and education.
85
It was the first time an independent party held the office. Fajardo’s
administration was comprised largely of former grassroots organizers and other non-
traditional power holders who had extensive experience in participatory practices.
Fajardo himself was an academic—a very charismatic one—whose relative political
neutrality helped him to lead the diverse coalition that comprised Compromiso
Ciudadano. Alonso Salazar, his successor from the same party, was also an academic,
journalist, and community activist; he had written extensively about youth in the context
of narcotrafficking and was very active in civic movements in the 1990s.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
84
Medellín has a history of local business elites engaging in urban planning and development, and some
were involved in efforts in the 1990s to combat the violence.
85
The platform was also inspired by approaches to urban transformation in Bogotá. See Martin & Ceballos
Arévalo (2004).
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95!
Under these two Compromiso Ciudadano administrations, the government
partnered with both the private and public sectors to implement a variety of initiatives to
stabilize the city, strengthen public culture, promote government transparency and citizen
participation, and restore the public’s faith in local governance (Fajardo, 2007).
86
Youth
participation was a strategic focus of many of these initiatives, seen as an indispensable
resource for reducing the violence. The administration launched a citywide participatory
budgeting process (the topic of Chapter 3) through which residents ages 14 and older help
determine how a percentage of the city budget will be allocated for the development of
their neighborhoods. They invested heavily in public education, allocating approximately
40% of the entire city budget to improving access, infrastructure, and teacher training
(Alcaldía de Medellín, 2008a).
87
They also created impressive physical public spaces,
such as the Parques Biblioteca (Library Parks)
88
with computer labs, in some of the most
impoverished and violent sectors of the city—the son of an architect, Fajardo saw value
in well-designed public spaces. New forms of public transportation were established
(such as outdoor escalators and the Metrocable gondola system
89
) to integrate the poor
neighborhoods on the periphery with the center. They also began to transform the city
into a hub for digital industry, innovation, and “digital citizenship” (see Chapter 5).
Under Salazar, Medellín began developing what is being called Latin America’s largest
technology district, in an area that spans three neighborhoods near the center of the city
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86
Much of this was financed by the locally-based Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM), a publically-
owned utility company and one of the region’s wealthiest, and public-private partnerships.
87
According to the Mayor’s Office, applications for postsecondary education increased approximately 15%
between 2005 and 2006; a survey by the Secretaría de Educación (Ministry of Education) of high school
graduates found that, between 2004 and 2006, there was a 14% increase in those who intended to seek
higher education (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2008a).
88
Refer to Chapter 1.
89
The MetroCable gondola system was developed during the administration of Mayor Luís Pérez (2001–
2004) but opened in 2004, during the Fajardo administration.
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(Agencia EFE, 2013). The U.S.-based information technology corporation Hewlett-
Packard is setting up a Global Services Center there, and other foreign companies are
following.
The municipality of Medellín operates much like a city-state in which the stature
of the mayor is nearly presidential (Leyva Botero, 2010). But during his term as mayor,
Fajardo rose beyond local to international fame for these innovative policy changes and
public works projects. His administration branded the “transformation” of the city, and in
so doing attracted the attention of international investors, donors, and researchers (see
Alcaldía de Medellín, 2008b; Mesa, 2011). Their initiatives were heavily branded with
the insignia of the Mayor’s Office and taglines such as “Medellín, la más educada”
(“Medellín, the most educated”), “Medellín, un espacio para el encuentro ciudadano”
(“Medellín, a meeting space for citizens”), and “Medellín gobernable y participativa”
(“Medellín, governable and participatory”).
Fajardo’s administration thus shifted the rhetoric of the local government to focus
heavily on civic participation, particularly as a way to fight corruption and clientelism,
and implemented changes to reconfigure and rebrand the city as a participatory one in
which all citizens—including and especially youth—would be actively engaged in,
responsible for, and benefiting from its development. In a sense, Medellín was being
positioned as a model participatory city, work that continued under the Salazar
administration.
90
How this “participatory city” was experienced and reconfigured by
youth at the grassroots is investigated in Chapter 4. Here, I contextualize and historicize
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Salazar’s administration branded the Modelo Medellín de Buen Gobierno y Desarrollo Social Integral, or
the Medellín Model of Good Governance and Integrated Social Development.
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the contributions made by Medellín’s youth to this transformation, specifically to the
recuperation of its social fabric.

Youth as Agents of Nonviolent Change and Collective Action
Youth organizing experienced a surge in the 1990s, partly, though certainly not
exclusively, in response to the crisis of violence. Challenges to the culture of violence
and much-needed alternatives to gang membership were developed by civil society, often
by youth themselves. Much of this was initiated at the grassroots and went largely
unrecognized by the state and elites, or was promoted by collaborations between civil
society organizations and the Consejería Presidencial, as well as international institutions,
such as the German agency GTZ (now the German Society for International Cooperation,
or GIZ) and UNESCO.
Medellín, and Colombia more broadly, have a long history of youth organizing
through both adult-led institutions and autonomous, youth-led groups or colectivos
(collectives; Uribe Neira, 2009). In the 1960s and 1970s, political and social movements,
particularly student movements on the left, were the most visible spaces of youth political
engagement (Garcés Montoya, 2010). The student movement in Colombia (as elsewhere)
became a primary space of youth politicization and a recruiting ground for other leftist
movements. Influences such as the Cuban Revolution, anti-American sentiment in
response to the Vietnam War and U.S. intervention in Latin American countries, the
Marxist leadership of Camilo Torres Restrepo and the growth of leftist guerrilla
movements, and resistance to the global expansion of capitalist ideology (particularly
neoliberalism) all fueled the embrace of socialist ideals and opposition to individualist
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hegemonies that were seen as propelling the stark inequalities apparent in Colombian
society. Emphasis on collective, rather than individual, interests gained cultural
significance.
91

With the rise of narcotrafficking, the concurrent increase in violence, and the
militarization of the state, youth participation in political and civic life necessarily came
to focus on resisting the violence (ibid.). For many youth in stigmatized neighborhoods,
this required alternative forms and practices of citizenship. As adult-led institutions—
from international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to certain government
departments, to community-based organizations—attempted to organize spaces of youth
participation, alternative spaces of autonomous youth organizing also proliferated at the
grassroots. Together, these initiatives (ranging from religious to recreational, artistic to
political) burgeoned in the 1990s; by 2007, there were nearly 300 documented youth
groups in Medellín, the majority of which had a cultural/artistic focus.
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Political participation in any institution or process of the state had become
increasingly delegitimized because of the complex web of relations between
narcotrafficking, paramilitaries, and state-sanctioned violence against citizens. Cultural
resistance became the primary space of youth and social movement organizing. The
stigmatization of poor, male youth was also a motivation for cultural struggle over the
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And while the leftist guerrilla movements in Colombia changed over time and became increasingly
characterized by violence and narcotrafficking rather than a collectivist political agenda, non-violent
collective projects continued to thrive in other sectors of civil society.
92
A 1995 study by the Red Paisa Joven (Paisa Youth Network) identified 570 active youth organizations
across the city. A similar number were registered by the municipal Oficina de la Juventud (Office of
Youth) in 2003. Angela Garcés Montoya (2010), one of the foremost researchers of youth culture in
Medellín, published data from 2007 showing just under 300 documented youth groups in the city, 55.5% of
which had a cultural focus (art, music, performance, etc.). A 2009 study published by the municipal
government in collaboration with the Federación Anitoqueña de ONG (Antioquian Federation of Non-
Governmental Organizations) found that 93% of the 30 youth networks studied across the city had some
degree of a cultural/artistic focus (Uribe Neira, 2009).
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terms of their representation. In other words, since the latter part of the 20th century,
cultural “codes,” to borrow from Alberto Melucci (1996), have been the central terrain in
which youth citizenship and agency were struggled over and defined.
93

As I do in this study, Garcés Montoya distinguishes between youth organizations
with institutional affiliations that are structured by and within an “adult logic,” and
colectivos juveniles (youth collectives) that “are driven by youth themselves in response
to necessities or challenges to authority and adult institutions; these collectives find their
niche of political action in culture and aesthetics. . . . [T]hey resist hierarchical and adult-
centric organization
94
and prefer horizontal governance, self-management/financing and
champion the ‘culturización’ of politics” (2010, p. 62). Such youth-driven cultural
collectives have gained great visibility across the city, particularly the two collectives in
Comuna 13 that are the focus of Chapter 4.
The concept of the colectivo is central to understanding their discourses and
practices of participation. In Medellín, colectivos represent a more structured
organizational form (featuring, for example, a shared vision or set of goals, some
established form of decision-making and priority-setting, etc.) than a youth subculture,
but one that is less structured than a formal organization.
Collectives have a defined and public group identity, imply the presence of some
basic consensus and disregard unnecessary formalities. Their discourse
prominently reveals the democratic-participatory character of collectives: all
members think, decide, and act; there is no censorship, no bosses, representation
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Youth engagement thus followed a similar trajectory as the new social movements documented in other
parts of the Western world by scholars such as Alain Touraine (1985) and Alberto Melucci (1996),
characterized by increasingly fluid, flexible, and networked organizational forms; growing distrust of
traditional institutions; and a commitment to cultural change as much as any traditionally conceived
political change.
94
However, Uribe Neira notes that, of 30 youth networks studied in Medellín, community organizations or
non-governmental organizations played a role in the formation of 40% of these (2009, p. 194).
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is limited to those who want to participate; that is to say, participation
subordinates representation. (ibid., p. 5)
95

Uribe Neira et al.’s study of youth collectives and networks
96
in Medellín found
that 60% have a community development or political agenda, with the latter broadly
conceived as the intention of provoking change in “youth’s social, cultural, political,
environmental, economic, and personal realities” (2009, p. 191). Common themes
promoted are participación juvenil (youth participation), youth rights, communication, art
and culture, democracy, nonviolent and peaceful coexistence, political and civic
participation, and gender equity. Art and culture (music, dance, theater, writing, etc.) is
often seen as a means to social transformation, rather than an end in itself.
The political focus of youth collectives in Medellín is typically not on state power
or institutions, but on everyday issues, particularly local concerns, “conceiving of power
not as something that one takes, but rather, associating it with the positive potential of
collective work. The youth of these collectives understand power as linked to the ‘hacer
juntos’ [‘doing together’].” In other words, the focus is on power exercised by “doing
together,” rather than on “power over” (Garcés Montoya, 2010, p. 5).
Chapter 4 considers how some youth collectives offer alternative visions of youth
citizenship, forged in the context of disillusionment and the delegitimization of traditional
structures and spaces of participation. They have resonance far beyond the Medellín
context, as disillusionment with government and other traditional institutions among
contemporary youth has been well-documented in many contexts.
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95
Other characteristics of youth cultural collectives in this context often include a commitment to
independent financing (as opposed to economic dependence upon the state or any one particular
institution), pluralism, and a critical but proactive stance on issues of public concern. See Chapter 4.
96
Many of these youth collectives are also part of larger networks organized among themselves, or in
partnership with more formal (typically non-profit) organizations.
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Conclusion: Medellín as a Site for the Study of Participatory Public Culture

Medellín is a case in which participation has become a central episteme in the
reconstruction of public life, necessitated by the vast destruction of the city’s social fabric
over decades of narco and other violence. Youth have been both the protagonists and
victims of a disproportionate amount of this destruction. Youth from lower
socioeconomic strata, in particular, have experienced their subjectivities, mobility, and
life choices as being profoundly shaped by the narcotrafficking, guerrilla, and
paramilitary action, and state responses to these.
The resulting crisis created a political opening for new actors independent of
traditional party politics to enter into local government—an opportunity that was seized
by Sergio Fajardo and the Compromiso Ciudadano party. This unprecedented alliance of
academics, business people, community organizers, and others brought an administration
into power that placed citizen participation at the center of its agenda.
The crisis also positioned youth to become recognized as crucial agents of change
in the city’s development and helped fuel a vibrant ecology of youth organizing.
Discourses and practices of participation proliferated. Participation in public life was at
once conceived by the municipal government as a tool for the integration, stabilization,
and development of the city, and harnessed as a resource for resistant practices by
grassroots groups. How and why these logics operated simultaneously, at times
synergistically and at times contradictorily, will be investigated in the following chapters.
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CHAPTER 3: Political Participation and Governmentality: Participatory Budgeting and
Youth Engagement in Medellín

Participation, as a strategy and public policy, is part of the stamp of
Medellín today. . . . The transformation that people experience in Medellín
today . . . is also a transformation in the form of governance and in the
strategies and approaches that motivate community participation; greater
institutional legitimacy is sought by improving the mechanisms of
participation, so that these are real and not just on paper, so that
participation is not just quantity but also quality.
– Jorge Melguizo, former Minister of Social Development of Medellín
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Since the election of Mayor Sergio Fajardo Valderrama and the Compromiso
Ciudadano party in 2004, “participation” has been a central trope in the government’s
efforts to transform and develop Medellín. Increasing citizen participation in governance
was crucial to the administration’s attempts to gain legitimacy in the eyes of a public
disillusioned by decades of politiquería,
98
clientelism, and corruption; for promoting
greater government transparency and gaining public trust; and ultimately, for making the
city more governable.
This chapter considers how the concept of participation has become a central
resource for government institutions in their efforts to stabilize and develop the city. I
focus on the institutionalization of participation, specifically political participation, by
analyzing the case of participatory budgeting, with an emphasis on youth engagement.
Chantal Mouffe (1999) makes an important distinction between “politics” and
“the political”; she understands “the political” as spanning all aspects of social life, in the
sense that conflict and power struggles exist throughout it. She defines “politics”
somewhat more narrowly as “the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that
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Melguizo (2011).
98
The closest translation of politiquería is “politicking,” in a manipulative or otherwise negative sense.
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seek to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence in conditions that are
always potentially conflictual” (Mouffe, 1999, p. 754). While both of these concepts
inform my analysis of participation throughout this study, this chapter focuses primarily
on political participation in the sense of “politics”, as a domain in which struggles over
relations of power and control are made particularly explicit. This definition still
encompasses a comparatively broad understanding of politics as including the discourses
and social practices that surround, and give meaning to, institutions of governance.
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Exploring participation through this lens foregrounds the inherently political dimension
of the notion of participation itself, and how institutionalized discourses, practices, and
structures of participation can be understood as forms of governmentality. At the same
time, the case of Medellín (and participatory budgeting in particular) shows how the
institutionalization of participation can help to expand participatory public culture,
particularly for youth, by putting in place (somewhat) more accessible structures for
political participation and catalyzing public discussion of what constitutes citizen
participation.
The case of participatory budgeting (PB) was selected for this analysis because it
was one of the Fajardo administration’s flagship initiatives; because youth are significant
actors in this process, and PB, in turn, has affected youth organizing in the city;
100
and
because PB continues to spread globally and is therefore relevant to a broader discussion
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In contrast, in political science, the concept of political participation has traditionally been associated
with interactions with government institutions, confining it to a narrow definition of citizenship and the
ways individuals and groups may access or enact political agency (e.g., Verba, Schlozman, & Brady,
1995). Refer to Chapter 1 for further discussion.
100
There are other platforms for youth political participation in Medellín, such as the Consejo Municipal de
Juventud (Municipal Youth Council), which, while remarkable for being one of the first of its kind in Latin
America (Riaño-Alcalá, 2006), has had arguably less of an impact on youth engagement in Medellín than
PB (various interviews, Medellín, 2010-2011).
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of participatory public culture. This chapter considers PB in Medellín through 2011,
researched through approximately 40 in-depth interviews with participants, government
administrators, and representatives of local nongovernmental organizations; participant
observation of meetings and other relevant events over the course of more than seven
months; and a review of existing data and analyses by local and foreign scholars.

The Turn Toward Participatory Democracy in Colombia
For a country whose political culture is better known for clientelism, corruption,
and exclusivity (Pécaut, 1999, 2006; Velásquez & González, 2003), the episteme of
participation has been surprisingly central to Colombia’s political discourse in the past
three decades. Velásquez and González identified 29 different laws in Colombia that
address the question of participation in the political system (2003, p. 21). The country’s
constitution, re-written in 1991, makes a significant commitment to principles of
participatory democracy. In what follows, I explain how that came to be, and its
relevance to Medellín’s political and public culture today.
The turn toward participatory democracy in Colombia was prompted by the
escalation of popular movements in the 1970s and 1980s, the armed conflict, and the
crisis of legitimacy of the state. The country’s political system had long been controlled
by elites and was permeated by a political culture of clientelism in which “the definition
of lo público [the public sphere] was limited to help and favors through political
loyalties” (ibid., p. 45). The national political system had been particularly closed since
the mid-century pact known as the Frente Nacional (National Front), between the warring
traditional Liberal and Conservative parties. The pact, which lasted from 1958-1974,
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brought an end to a decade of armed conflict between them known as La Violencia,
which had played out primarily in rural parts of the country.
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The pact mandated that
the presidency would be held alternately by a member of each party, and that the two
parties would have equal representation in government, effectively shutting third parties
out of the political system.
Social movements fomented, influenced by global trends in student, anti-
authoritarian, socialist, indigenous, and feminist movements. As in other parts of Latin
America, a leftist discourse of participation emerged (Fals Borda, 1990) among
Colombian activists and intellectuals to critique the elitist, clientelist, and increasingly
authoritarian tendencies of the government, as well as the neoliberal interventions of
international finance and development organizations, such as the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank, which were seen as further widening socioeconomic
inequalities.
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Both urban and rural protests heightened in the 1970s and early 1980s,
particularly youth-led student movements. Faced with this pressure, the crisis of
legitimacy, and ongoing conflict throughout much of the country, the national
government responded by decentralizing certain mechanisms of governance to the
municipalities through policies such as Law 11 of 1986, which mandated greater citizen
participation in local planning and development processes. Yet protests intensified again
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101
Many displaced by the conflict in the countryside of the Department of Antioquia fled to Medellín
during that time.
102
In exchange for loans and other financing, these organizations mandated neoliberal structural
readjustment packages and other top-down development agendas for “modernization,” developed in the
global North, which were widely critiqued in Latin America for continuing to serve the interests of elite
classes and increasing the poverty and marginalization of the working classes. Colombian intellectuals and
activists, such as Orlando Fals Borda, contributed to both a transnational critique and the development of
bottom-up, participatory practices in communication, the arts, scholarly research, and politics as
alternatives to these “blueprints” for modernization.
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following the assassination of the Liberal party’s presidential candidate, Luis Carlos
Galán, in 1989. Finally, a popular election was held to designate a national constituent
assembly to revise the country’s constitution, and as a result, student and other social
movement actors were able to contribute to its drafting. The new constitution was ratified
in 1991; it contained a political mandate for greater democratic participation and
identified the promotion of citizen participation as a key function of the state
(Observatorio Legislativo, 2012; Velásquez & González, 2003).
103
Participation thus
became a public policy agenda in the 1990s, at both the national and municipal levels
(Leyva Botero, 2010).
While maintaining a system of primarily representative democracy, the turn
toward a more participatory democracy in the Colombian constitution was meant to
create new spaces and mechanisms of public decision-making, and to diversify the range
of citizens participating in the democratic process (Londoño, 1997). Article 40 states, “all
citizens have the right to participate in the structure, exercise, and control of political
power. To exercise this right [all citizens] can . . . take part in elections, plebiscites,
referendums, popular consultations, and other forms of democratic participation.” Article
95 mandates citizen participation thus: “All people are obligated to comply with the
Constitution and laws. [The following] are duties of the citizen: . . . 5) Participate in the
political, civic, and community-based life of the country.”
The policy changes of the late 1980s and the new constitution thus marked a
discursive (and to some extent, structural) shift toward principles of participatory
democracy. As Velásquez and González write,
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103
See especially Articles 2, 40, 95, and 103. Retrieved April 5, 2013, from
http://pdba.georgetown.edu/constitutions/colombia/col91.html#mozTocId792303
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The institutionalization of spaces of citizen participation, associated with the
decentralizing policies of the 1980s (Law 11 of 1986), implied a radical change in
the architecture of the political system: people could intervene directly in the
discussion of public policy and government programs at the local level, breaking
the monopoly that the political elites (mayors and city councilmen) had over
public decisions. (2003, p. 50)

It was the first time the concept of “participation” was constitutionally recognized in
Colombia (Giraldo, 2011), and this further propelled discourses of participation across
many spheres of public life, as government and civic institutions sought ways of
implementing (and institutionalizing) the principles of participatory democracy
established in the constitution.
Modern thinking on participatory democracy had gained momentum in parts of
both the global North (including the United States) and the global South in the 1960s and
1970s.
104
This was primarily a response to perceived failures of representative
democracy, including the fact that various sectors of society continued to be
underrepresented and marginalized. While participatory democracy has been conceived
in a variety of different ways and contexts since, the primary difference between
participatory and representative democracy in their theoretical form is that, “in the
former, citizens are directly involved in political decisions whilst, in the latter, they are
indirectly involved through representatives elected by the people” (Fuchs, 2013, p.
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104
For an overview, see Barber (1995), Fuchs (2013), and Pateman (1970). While participatory democracy
largely fell out of vogue among political theorists in the United States and Europe in the 1980s (Pateman,
2012), for the reasons elaborated above it has remained of interest in much of Latin America. See Cornwall
(2011) for additional discussions of participatory governance in the global South, including Ranjita
Mohanty’s account tracing the history of the institutionalization of “participatory” governance back to
colonial institutions. More recently, work on deliberative democracy has renewed scholarly attention to
questions of democratic participation in the United States and Europe (see Delli Carpini, Cook, & Jacobs,
2004; Fishkin, 1991, 2002; Pateman, 2012).
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165).
105
Carole Pateman, an early contributor to contemporary theories of participatory
democracy in the United States, drew from the work of Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and
G. D. H. Cole to understand participatory democracy theory as posing an argument for
“changes that will make our own social and political life more democratic, that will
provide opportunities for individuals to participate in decision-making in their every-day
lives as well as in the wider political system” (2012, p. 10; see also Pateman, 1970). The
role of the citizen is theorized as active, rather than passive; for Benjamin R. Barber,
participatory democracy “involves extensive and active engagement of citizens in the
self-governing process; it means government not just for but by and of the people” (1995,
p. 921).
Because of its call for direct participation of citizens in deliberation and
consensus-building, participatory democracy poses a problem of scale and has
historically only been practiced in local and municipal governments, or in very small
republics (ibid.).
106
In practice, it has taken a variety of forms, with different modes and
degrees of citizen participation, determined by the particular context.
In Colombia, the concept of participation itself was understood and implemented
in diverse and often ambiguous ways, generally “as a means for the formulation,
discussion and adoption of broad consensuses on development and peaceful coexistence”
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105
The earliest forms of democracy, such as in ancient Athens and some of the town republics of early
modern Europe, were participatory in this direct sense. Yet while all citizens were expected to participate,
who qualified as a “citizen” was highly restricted—for example, to locally-born males of “civic virtue”
(Barber, 1995, p. 921). Barber notes that, in Athens, this amounted only to approximately one-fifth of the
population being allowed to participate. Aristotle, among others, considered women, non-Greeks, and
slaves as unfit to be self-ruling citizens (ibid., pp. 921–922).
106
Barber (1995) notes that new communication technologies present the possibility of overcoming some
of the problems of scale, as digital networks facilitate connections across time and space. The use of these
technologies in participatory democracy initiatives in Medellín has been minimal to date, and therefore, it is
not a focus of this analysis.
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(Velásquez & González, 2003, p. 20). It implied a more direct involvement of citizens in
shaping public life and its social and political organization, though, in practice, this is
often still mediated through elected representatives. According to Velásquez and
González, ideally, “participatory democracy [in Colombia] modifies the forms of relation
between society and the State through increasing the integration of new social actors in
the public arena, in political deliberation, and in decision-making” (2003, p. 56); and
further, “the asymmetries in the process are of a horizontal character. Not all participants
are endowed with the same resources (material, informational, or power, for example),
but it is assumed that no sector by definition has privilege in the process” (ibid., p. 59). In
practice, procedures of participation have been developed and implemented across
Colombia in inconsistent manners and degrees, with varied results. This has prompted
ongoing debates about the problems of institutionalized participation (ibid.).
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The institutionalization of participation often explicitly concerned youth. Article
45 of the Constitution mandates: “The State and society guarantee the active participation
of youth in the public and private agencies that are responsible for the protection,
education, and advancement of youth.” In Medellín, youth have been discursively
positioned as key actors in the development and stabilization of the city, as in Acuerdo
Municipal No. 02 de 2000 (Municipal Agreement Number 2 of 2000, based on national
policy adopted in 1997), which states that a primary objective of the municipal
government is to “strengthen the civic engagement of youth so that they become strategic
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Some analysts feel that the implementation of processes of participation (mandated by the 1991
constitution and other policy reforms) have largely failed for reasons including lack of public awareness,
bureaucratic obstacles to participation, and ineffective structures of participation (see Observatorio
Legislativo, 2012).
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actors in the city’s development” (Consejo de Medellín, 2000). I return to the question of
youth participation below.
Optimists saw the new constitution and subsequent changes in public policy as
creating an opportunity, however tenuous, to better meet the needs and demands of
Colombia’s growing population of poor citizens. They hoped that the institutionalization
of participation in governance would help to reduce clientelism, strengthen the public
sphere, reestablish the credibility of the state, improve the efficacy of public planning,
and modernize the political process, as well as facilitate more direct, horizontal dialogue
between citizens and government actors. The cynical view was that it represented simply
a co-optation of popular discourse by the nation’s elite—a rhetorical institutionalization
of grassroots participation and a hollow gesture to assuage the masses and maintain
power (Bernal, 2005; Fals Borda, 1996; Londoño, 1997; Velásquez and González, 2003).
And while it was remarkably progressive in its language, the 1991 constitution has since
been critiqued for lacking concrete mechanisms for citizen participation in the political
system (Bernal, 2005; Velásquez & González, 2003). Further, in Medellín, the promises
of greater citizen participation were not significantly realized until over a decade later,
with the initiatives of Fajardo’s administration.
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Whether viewed optimistically or pessimistically, another way to understand
Colombia's partial turn toward participatory democracy is through Yúdice’s (2003) lens
of “expediency,” as I suggested in Chapter 1: Participation became reified as a political
resource for both traditional power holders (responding to the crisis of legitimacy, the
armed conflict, and the limited governability of much of the country) and social
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Veeduría Plan de Desarrollo de Medellín, 2012; see also Bernal, 2005.
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111!
movement actors (responding to clientelism, elitism, and corruption, and seeking greater
access to power). In the Colombian case, we can trace the interpellation of the episteme
of participation from social movements into government discourse and policy.
Understanding participation as expedient in this context highlights the ways in which its
institutionalization shifts it from a counter-hegemonic to a hegemonic practice of
governance.

Participation and Governmentality
Michel Foucault used the analytic of governmentality to theorize how power
operates in modern society largely through rationalities and discourses of individual
responsibility and self-governance. These function as technologies of the self, a term used
“to describe how an individual’s freedom and agency are technical achievements that
involve working on, watching over, and applying oneself in particular ways” (Ouellette &
Hay, 2008, p. 15). According to Lemke (2002), the concept of governmentality offered a
theoretical link between the production of individual autonomy and self-governance
(technologies of the self), and political rule and economic exploitation (technologies of
domination). This use implies that governmentality is inherently negative.
Foucault’s use of the concept was arguably less normative
109
, though his aim was
to understand how power and control operate. Governmentality, according to Foucault,
can be “understood in the broad sense of techniques and procedures for directing human
behavior. Government of children, government of souls and consciences, government of
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And, as Yúdice writes, “The notion of governmentality is more or less neutral with respect to social
change” (2003, p. 107).
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a household, of a state, or of oneself” (Foucault, 1997, p. 82). Analysis of
governmentality requires investigating the ever-changing logics and techniques employed
in systems of daily life and governance broadly conceived; the “ensemble formed by the
institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations” of modern forms of
“disciplining” citizens and exercising power (Foucault, 1979, p. 20, in Rose, O’Malley, &
Valverde, 2006, p. 86).
110

An analysis of governmentalities then, is one that seeks to identify these different
styles of thought, their conditions of formation, the principles and knowledges
that they borrow from and generate, the practices that they consist of, how they
are carried out, their contestations and alliances with other arts of governing.
(Rose et al., 2006, p. 84)

Institutionalized discourses and practices of citizen participation can be
understood as a form of governmentality. For example, the state may be bolstered by a
cultural and political ethos of citizen participation, as individuals help to legitimize and
expand the exercise of state power by participating in its discourses and institutions. We
can also consider how institutions of civil society may exert power through discourses
and practices of participation to establish their legitimacy and secure their bases of
support. A discourse of participation can serve as a governing concept, in both senses of
the term; and arguably one that has the potential to promote, but does not guarantee, more
power-sharing and inclusivity than other concepts used to govern society (for example,
certain discourses of citizenship).
While much of the literature on governmentality addresses trends in liberalism,
advanced liberalism, and neoliberalism in the United States and Europe, it prompts the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
110
Lemke (2002) notes that Foucault’s use of governmentality offered a corrective to his earlier work on
discipline as a technology of government, to better account for the production of individual subjectivity and
self-governance in relationship to power and the state. It did not replace the notion of disciplinary power,
but further elaborated other political rationalities and forms of exercising power.
!
!
113!
113!
more broadly applicable question of “how those who seek to govern imagine their world
and seek to fashion it anew” (ibid., p. 100). It offers a critical lens through which to
analyze recent attempts to transform Medellín through discourses and technologies of
participation. Participation as a form of governmentality can be understood not only as a
technology for shifting relations of power (e.g., from more vertical to more horizontal, or
from traditional power holders to a more diverse range of participants); it can also be
understood as a way to legitimate the state and other institutions, and perhaps even to
shed a degree of responsibility onto its citizens, or “responsibilization” (Rose, 2000).
Without simplistically equating participation with exploitation (see Blank, Brown, Deuze,
Ems, Lewis, McWilliams, & Speers, 2013), in this study, I use the heuristic to
denaturalize discourses of participation in Medellín and analyze how power circulates
through these.

Medellín: “Governable and Participatory”
The Fajardo administration inherited a legacy of skepticism and distrust of the
state among Medellín’s youth and the broader public, due in large part to the municipal
government’s failure to contain narcotrafficking and other forms of violence,
controversies over ties and pacts between state and paramilitary actors, clientelism and
corruption, military operations like Orion,
111
and the widely criticized initiatives to
demobilize paramilitary fighters (see Chapter 2). The legitimacy of the state and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
111
Operation Orion was one in a series of military operations carried out in 2002 in Medellín under then-
President Alvaro Uribe, to eliminate guerrilla groups from the city. The residents of the targeted areas were
subjected to days of gunfire in their neighborhoods. See Chapter 2.
!
!
114!
114!
perceptions of formal political processes were severely compromised (Alcaldía de
Medellín, 2007; Angarita Cañas, Gallo & Jiménez Zuluaga, 2008).
112

Part of Compromiso Ciudadano’s strategy was to re-imagine the city as
“gobernable y participativa”; a governable and participatory city, a direct challenge to
the violence and illicit power networks that had proliferated, fueled by narcotrafficking.
They saw this as a “radical change in the form of doing politics in the city” (Alcaldía de
Medellín, 2008c, p. 231):
What drives [this proposal of] democracy is participation, as a privileged
instrument for exercising governability and attaining legitimacy, because
the daily life of the city and its communities is full of administrative
processes, planning, monitoring and evaluation of public works and
projects that require it, making participatory democracy a reality as a form
of governance and a form of life. (ibid., pp. 231–232).

Fajardo’s administration (2004–2007) proposed “the principle of co-responsibility” to
suggest that the development of the city “should be the responsibility of all of its
inhabitants” (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2004, p. 11), configuring citizen participation as a
technology of governance. Greater citizen participation was seen as a mechanism for
legitimizing and strengthening the local government in the face of challenges that
included forced displacement both within and outside of the city, high levels of poverty
and unemployment, a vast illegal economy, and a political culture characterized by
clientelism and corruption (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2007). “In this way [the Fajardo
administration] marks a sharp transition, from the state as a provider of goods and
services to a state working with the community to achieve the wellbeing of all of society
and the progress of the city” (Veeduría Plan de Desarrollo de Medellín, 2012, p. 79).
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
112
A number of interviews with youth in Medellín confirmed this perception.
!
!
115!
115!
This approach could be interpreted as an effort to strengthen and centralize the
power of the municipal government and reestablish its legitimacy through technologies of
participation, rather than force (Leyva Botero, 2010). Seeing this as purely a strategy of
the state, however, is problematic. The structures and boundaries of states are not
monolithic, but porous and changing; they are comprised of particular people holding
particular ideologies, in particular configurations of power. Compromiso Ciudadano and
Fajardo’s administration were comprised largely of community organizers, academics,
and activists (rather than elites from the two traditional political parties), whose very
presence in the municipal administration was a significant shift in the political culture of
the city’s government. They made an intentional effort to reduce the gap between
government institutions and grassroots organizing.
113

At the time of my research, for example, the Deputy Minister of Metrojuventud
(the municipal department focusing on issues related to youth and culture) was a young
community organizer who was raised in a makeshift shack and then government-
subsidized housing in one of the most impoverished and violent neighborhoods in the
city, one that had historically had a conflicted relationship with the state. By age 15, he
was a member (and ultimately, the director) of a community-based, participatory
development organization. Mayor Alonso Salazar, Fajardo’s successor from the same
party, was a leftist community activist and intellectual with years of experience working
at the grassroots level. As explained in Chapter 2, the crisis of urban warfare in Medellín
helped to create an opportunity for actors such as these to enter government institutions
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
113
The party was formed through an alliance of a variety of civil society and academic actors; it rejected
both Soviet-style socialism and maximalist governments, as well as the neoliberal model of minimalist
government (Fierst, 2013b, p. 38). See Rodríguez (2011) for an explanation of how a similar dynamic
occurred at the federal level in the 1990s, resulting in progressive policies promoting community media in
an otherwise conservative government.
!
!
116!
116!
that had previously been controlled by traditional elites. With the Fajardo and Salazar
administrations, “There were different political actors, an openness to new opportunities
for inclusion of the population in public concerns; in other words, a new vision of the
public sphere, as something of the people rather than of the state.”
114

Participatory Budgeting as a Form of Participatory Democracy in Medellín
Despite the new constitution’s ratification in 1991, mechanisms of participatory
democracy were not significantly developed and implemented in Medellín until Fajardo
and Compromiso Ciudadano came to power in 2004. A senior member of their
administration explained,
At that time, we understood participatory democracy to be a fundamental
component for civic life and for the sustainability of institutions and processes of
participation . . . [our agenda] was based on the concept of participation as
fundamental, cutting across governability, economic development, social
development, the development of physical [public] spaces, etc.
115

This agenda was also, in part, a response to the asistencialismo (“hand-out” or aid
dependency) of internationally funded development initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s
that tended to cultivate financial dependency and be top-down, rather than bottom-up.
The Fajardo administration aimed to make a structural change to the local development
process (Foronda Cano, 2007), in order “to construct a more democratic and inclusive
city, with greater possibilities for the real participation of its citizens, [and] with
incentives for local development starting from collective decisions” (Restrepo Mesa,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
114
Interview with government official in Metrojuventud (the office of youth programs), by Sonya Fierst,
Medellín, June 5, 2012.
115
Interview with senior government and Participatory Budgeting administrator, Medellín, October 15,
2011.
!
!
117!
117!
2007, p. 5). Technologies of participatory democracy were not meant to fully replace
those of representative democracy, but rather, to balance and improve them by more
directly engaging a broader swath of citizens in planning, budgeting, and implementing
development plans.
116
Medellín’s political system today is still conceived as a liberal
model of representative democracy, but one that includes limited structures of direct
participation.
One of the most significant of these structures is participatory planning and
budgeting. Participatory planning is a process that engages the public in the creation of
local development plans for each of the city’s 16 comunas (administrative districts) and
five corregimientos (rural townships that fall within the city’s jurisdiction); it is
understood as a way to democratize public decision-making processes, to strengthen
relations between civil society and the state, and to improve local development by more
specifically addressing localized needs (Leyva Botero, 2010; see also Jaramillo, 2003, in
Velásquez & González, 2003).
Participatory budgeting (PB)
117
is “a process by which citizens, either as
individuals or through civic associations, can voluntarily and regularly contribute to
decision-making over at least part of a public budget through an annual series of
scheduled meetings with government authorities” (Goldfrank, 2007, p. 92). Some also
define PB as,
a process that is open to any citizen who wants to participate, combines direct and
representative democracy, involves deliberation (not merely consultation),
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
116
As mentioned in Chapter 1, there is an extensive and relevant literature on participatory development,
which aims “to increase the involvement of socially and economically marginalized peoples in decision-
making over their own lives” (Guijt, 1998, in Cooke & Kothari, 2001, p. 5).
117
I focus primarily on participatory budgeting, rather than planning, in this chapter, as the budgeting
process was underway during the time of my field research, while the planning had already been
completed. Further, PB takes place on an annual basis and is more widely practiced internationally.
!
!
118!
118!
redistributes resources toward the poor, and is self-regulating, such that
participants help define the rules governing the process, including the criteria by
which resources are allocated. (ibid.)

According to Anwar Shah, former director of the World Bank Institute’s Governance
Program, the potential benefits of PB include that,
It offers citizens at large an opportunity to learn about government operations and
to deliberate, debate, and influence the allocation of public resources. It is a tool
for educating, engaging, and empowering citizens and strengthening demand for
good governance. The enhanced transparency and accountability that
participatory budgeting creates can help reduce government inefficiency and curb
clientelism, patronage, and corruption. Participatory budgeting also strengthens
inclusive governance by giving marginalized and excluded groups the opportunity
to have their voices heard and to influence public decision making vital to their
interests. Done right, it has the potential to make governments more responsive to
citizens’ needs and preferences and more accountable to them for performance in
resource allocation and service delivery. (2007, p. 1)

PB was first attempted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, under conditions that
share some similarity to those in Medellín (and some important differences, such as the
particular dynamics of violence in the latter). Despite being relatively wealthy by
Brazilian standards, Porto Alegre struggled with grave economic disparities and a
clientelistic government. These problems became the focus of a progressive political
party, the Workers’ Party, which had won the mayoral election based on a campaign for
more democratic participation and greater distribution of public resources to the poorest
parts of the city (Wampler, 2007, p. 23; see also Fung & Wright, 2001). While the
Workers’ Party was largely responsible for disseminating participatory budgeting across
Brazil and other parts of Latin America in the 1990s, PB has since been conceived and
practiced in a number of ways worldwide, influenced by a broad range of radical leftist,
liberal, and conservative perspectives (see Goldfrank, 2007, 2012). It has also been
advocated by international development institutions (Goldfrank, 2007; see also Cabannes,
!
!
119!
119!
2004); in the 2000s, the World Bank surpassed the Workers’ Party as the primary
international advocate of PB (Goldfrank, 2012).
118

At the time of this writing, PB was being practiced in over 1,500 locations
worldwide, including several hundred cities in Latin America and Europe, and was being
implemented in New York City, Chicago, and Vallejo, California, among other locations
in North America (Participatory Budgeting Project, n.d.).
119
These practices vary widely
in structure, scale, and implementation. On average, between 2% and 10% of a municipal
budget is allocated through participatory budgeting (Cabannes, 2004, p. 34). According
to Goldfrank’s (2007) review of existing studies, participatory budgeting has been found
to
achieve many of the goals envisioned by both the radical democratic and liberal
perspectives, especially in terms of redirecting public resources toward poor
neighborhoods; extending service provision; democratizing existing and spurring
the creation of new civic associations; and increasing transparency and
accountability, while reducing clientelism and enhancing democratic
representation for the formerly excluded. They show that these outcomes are by
no means guaranteed by participatory budgeting and that even well-regarded
cases show some contradictory results. (Goldfrank, 2007, p. 98, citations omitted)

The Process of Participatory Budgeting in Medellín
Participatory budgeting was launched in Medellín in 2004, localizing budgetary
decisions for 5% of the municipal budget to its 16 comunas and five corregimientos.
120

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
118
Goldfrank estimates that the World Bank has provided “loans or grants of at least 280 million dollars in
support of PB and PB-related projects in at least fifteen countries since 2002” (2012, p. 3). However, he
also documents that PB programs and advocates within the World Bank remain marginalized relative to the
bank’s other agendas and investments.
119
Nonetheless, it remains one of few such mechanisms of participatory democracy being implemented in
contemporary democracies.
120
Initial but limited steps toward PB and other forms of citizen participation were made by previous
administrations to comply with national policy, but none to the degree taken by the Fajardo and Salazar
administrations. Attempts under the Naranjo (1995-1997), Juan Gómez (1998–2000), and Luis Pérez
(2001–2003) administrations have been characterized as limited in their practical outcomes; the Pérez
!
!
120!
120!
The government’s objectives in implementing PB included cultivating civic participation;
curtailing the high degree of distrust of formal politics in poorer communities;
establishing the legitimacy of the municipal government and the formal economy in areas
where informal markets and armed, non-state actors prevail; and reducing poverty and
developing the city.
121
According to the then-Minister of Social Development, Medellín’s
PB included
various mechanisms of direct participation to facilitate citizen participation, in
which [representatives of] recognized [community-based] organizations in each
comuna . . . as well as citizens elected by neighborhood, decide how investments
will be carried out in their territories through diagnostic, public debate, and
negotiation exercises. (Restrepo Mesa, 2007, p. 10)
These exercises take place over the course of several months each year, in stages.
The first, Asambleas Barriales y Veredales (Neighborhood Assemblies
122
), involves
information-sharing and a diagnostic process, in which the public is notified of the status
of the local development plan for their comuna (previously created through a separate
participatory process). The public votes on broad priorities related to that plan, and elects
individual delegates to the participatory budgeting process. Delegates from community
organizations are also elected at this time. The second stage includes Consejos
Consultivos Comunales (council meetings) of all of the comuna’s PB delegates; these are
open to the public and also attended by municipal government authorities. In the first of
these, the priorities established in the Asambleas Barriales y Veredales are further
debated in relation to the overall budget for the comuna, and the budget is subdivided by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
administration was known more for favoritism than participation (see Veeduría Plan de Desarrollo de
Medellín, 2012, p. 69; see also Castañeda Osorio & Botero Valencia, 2007).
121
The reduction of poverty is a common goal in PB processes worldwide, although research does not
verify that this as a frequent outcome (Goldfrank, 2007, p. 116). Within the parameters of this study, this
chapter focuses on outcomes related to political and civic participation, rather than economic outcomes.
122
“Asambleas Veredales” refers to the assemblies that take place in the corregimientos, rural
neighborhoods at the outskirts of Medellín that fall within the city’s jurisdiction.
!
!
121!
121!
theme (including education, culture, economic development, public works, the
environment, sports and recreation, and security and peaceful coexistence). Delegates are
then assigned to thematic working groups (Comisiones Temáticas de Trabajo) on these
topics. They meet weekly for four or more weeks to present, debate, and ultimately select
economic, social, cultural, educational, and infrastructural development projects for the
coming year; these are meant to be based on the local development plan and the
prioritization from the popular vote. Although meetings are open to the public and project
proposals or initiatives may be submitted by any formally constituted community
organization, they are typically presented by the elected delegates themselves, and only
delegates may vote to select or reject each proposal. The PB process thus combines both
direct and representative participation.
The municipal government reviews the approved proposals for viability and may
suggest adjustments to them, ultimately retaining the power to reject proposals deemed
unviable (this being one of the limitations to participation). After the working groups
have made any requested adjustments and agreed on their proposed initiatives, the
delegates approve these in another Consejo Consultivo Comunal that is open to the
public, but in which only delegates may vote. Finally, an annual operating plan is drawn
up by government authorities based on these selections, and submitted to the city council
for approval. An annual evaluation of the PB process is then carried out, which informs
subsequent adjustments to the process. All of the government representatives interviewed
for this study considered the PB process as a system in constant need of adaptation and
improvement to respond to local circumstances, rather than a static system; the process
!
!
122!
122!
has, indeed, been changed in a number of ways since its first implementation (one such
example is provided below).
The municipal government oversees the contracting of the selected proposals to
private and nonprofit entities to implement them.
123
PB thus involves the interests of the
state, the private and nonprofit sectors, and civil society, and it is permeated by their
distinct—and often contentious—logics. The contracting process itself is widely
contested, by some for being overly bureaucratic to the exclusion of grassroots groups,
and by others for being too easily subject to corruption (see Chapter 4).
From 2005 to 2012, over US$400 million (averaging approximately US$50
million year), were allocated to 11,923 initiatives (averaging 1,490 initiatives per year)
through PB (see Figure 3.1).
124
The total budget allocation for each of the comunas and
corregimientos is determined by the rate of local participation,
125
socioeconomic data
(including the Human Development Index
126
), and the amount invested in the area in
previous years; this ensures that the poorest neighborhoods receive the largest portions of
the budget.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
123
For an example of the allocation of PB funds in Medellín in 2011, see Alcaldía de Medellín (2011c).
124
Initiatives include scholarships for higher education, recreational programs, alternative media projects,
health programs, entrepreneurship development, etc.
125
The rate of participation was not one of the original criteria for determining the budget allocations, but
was later added to increase the incentive to participate.
126
The Human Development Index, created by Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen, is a composite
calculation for measuring development that accounts for factors in addition to economics that influence
people’s wellbeing (e.g., life expectancy, standard of living, and education). See
http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/
!
!
123!
123!

Figure 3.1. Participatory budgeting (PB) annual allocations and number of
initiatives/projects funded, 2005-2013 (Secretaría de Participación Ciudadana de la
Alcaldía de Medellín, personal communication, May 14, 2013).

Participatory Politics? (Youth) Citizen Engagement in Participatory Budgeting
The majority of citizen participation in PB occurs through debating and voting on
development priorities and electing delegates to the local PB process; acting as a delegate
is a more intensive and direct form of participation. Youth over the age of 14 are eligible
not only to vote, but also to participate as a delegate, either by being elected by popular
vote or by serving as a representative of a legally constituted community-based
organization. This offers them an active role in deliberation and decision-making about
local development, education, cultural events, and other budgetary plans.
!
!
124!
124!
Figures 3.2 and 3.3 show the number of participants in the Asambleas Barriales y
Veredales from 2006–2012, which ranges from 31,066 in 2007 (1.4% of the city's
population) to 110,455 in 2011 (4.7% of the population; Secretaría de Participación
Ciudadana de la Alcaldía de Medellín, personal communication, May 14, 2013).
127
In
2011, youth between the ages of 14 and 26 comprised 22.5 % (24,884) of the voters,
adults 41.0%, and seniors 36.5%. Of all participants, 59.2% were female, 40.8% were
male; the participation of women has been, on average, approximately 30% higher than
men (ibid.). Under Fajardo’s successor, Alonso Salazar, “the number [of participants in
PB] exceeded the number proposed in the Development Plan of 43,000, at 332,457
128
(an
increase of 773.16%), and . . . in 2010, in the prioritization and election of delegates,
103,656 voters attended, an increase of 115%” (Veeduría Plan de Desarrollo de Medellín,
2012, p. 74).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
127
As a point of comparison, approximately 13,000 people voted in eight participating City Council
districts of New York City’s PB process in 2013 (http://www.participatorybudgeting.org/blog/pb-wrap-up-
20000-people-16-7-million-91-projects/, accessed September, 2013.)
128
This refers to cumulative participation between 2008–2011.
!
!
125!
125!

Figure 3.2. Citizen participation in Asambleas Barriales y Veredales by age group, 2006-
2012 (Secretaría de Participación Ciudadana de la Alcaldía de Medellín, personal
communication, May 14, 2013).

Figure 3.3. Citizen participation in Asambleas Barriales y Veredales by gender, 2006-
2012 (Secretaría de Participación Ciudadana de la Alcaldía de Medellín, personal
communication, May 14, 2013).

In 2010, the highest rates of participation per comuna ranged between 4.14% and
6.12% of the population (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2011a). Studies of PB in Brazil have
found that participation rates typically vary between 1% and 7% of the population, with
!
!
126!
126!
rates tending to increase over time (Cabannes, 2004; Wampler, 2007); the Medellín
experience reflects similar trends.
129

Figure 3.4 shows the number of delegates that participated in PB from 2010 to
2012. In 2011, 4,138 delegates were elected, with another 2,226 delegates representing
local organizations. Twenty-two percent (22%, or 1,400) of the delegates were youth,
39.2% were adults, and 37.9% were seniors. Female participation (55.2%) is notably
higher than male (44.8%; Secretaría de Participación Ciudadana de la Alcaldía de
Medellín, personal communication, May 14, 2013).

Figure 3.4. Delegate Participation in PB by Age Group, 2004-2007 and 2010-2012
(Secretaría de Participación Ciudadana de la Alcaldía de Medellín, personal
communication, May 14, 2013; Subsecretaría de Metrojuventud, 2009a).

In PB’s first four years, a total of over 1,000 youth participated as delegates in the
weekly PB meetings, and over 30% of the total PB was allocated to initiatives that benefit
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
129
However, as a point of comparison with a more traditional form of political participation, voting rates in
mayoral and gubernatorial elections currently tend to be over 50% of the population of Medellín (Medellín
Como Vamos, 2012). Bernal notes that Medellín has historically had relatively high rates of voting
abstention (2005, p. 128).
Year
%
Youth
2004 11.0%
2005 9.0%
2006 13.0%
2007 15.0%
2008-
2009 (n/a)
2010 22.1%
2011 22.0%
2012 15.7%
!
!
127!
127!
youth. The proportion of youth delegates has ranged between 9% and nearly 25%,
reaching the later figure in Comuna 13 (San Javier), which has one of the largest PB
allocations. In 2007, nearly 15% of all delegates were youth; the Mayor's Office
estimates that approximately US$4 million (of the approximately US$38 million budget)
were allocated that year with direct youth involvement (Subsecretaría de Metrojuventud,
2009a). So, while the overall percentage of youth delegates remains proportionately
lower than adults, it is not drastically disproportionate to the overall proportion of youth
in the city (approximately 21%), and youth have clearly influenced the outcomes of
budgetary decisions.
130
Youth participation has been highest in the working groups on
convivencia (peaceful coexistence), civic participation, culture, recreation and sports, and
education, with less participation in the groups for health, social protection, public works
and the environment, and economic development (Subsecretaría de Metrojuventud,
2009a).
Participation rates of both youth and adults is often higher in comunas with lower
socioeconomic averages; for example, in Comuna 13 (San Javier), 5.3% of the population
participated in the Asambleas Barriales y Veredales in 2012, whereas only 1.5% of the
population of the wealthiest comuna (14, El Poblado) participated (Secretaría de
Participación Ciudadana de la Alcaldía de Medellín, personal communication, May 14,
2013). In some comunas, the relative proportion of youth who participate in the
Asambleas Barriales y Veredales has been higher than the relative proportion of adults
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
130
There is limited comparable data available regarding youth participation in PB processes elsewhere. PB
differs significantly by context, and the majority of existing data on youth participation refers to youth-
specific participatory budgeting processes or tangential programs (see, e.g., Cabannes, 2006), rather than
youth participation in PB for the general population, as is the case in Medellín.
!
!
128!
128!
and seniors; for example, in Comuna 1 (Popular) in 2012, 7.22% of youth in the comuna
participated, while 5.7% of adults and 5.3% of seniors participated.
Taken together, this data provides some evidence that groups that have been
historically underrepresented in processes of governance (namely youth, women, and
citizens of low socioeconomic status) have participated in disproportionately high
numbers. Novy and Leubolt (2005) found similar results in Porto Alegre.
Initially, however, the participation of youth as PB delegates was minimal (Bravo
Lara, 2011).
131
This was likely due to several factors, including the time commitment;
lack of knowledge of the process; and an apathy, distrust, or even antagonism toward
government institutions. This may have been particularly so among youth in the comunas
most affected by the violence, where their first encounter with the state was often in acts
of resistance against the war.
132
To change this perception and increase youth
participation in PB, the city piloted a seeding program in 2007 called Presupuesto
Participativo Joven (Youth Participatory Budgeting, hereafter PPJ), which aimed to
cultivate youth leaders and future delegates through civic education and training for
participation in PB.
133
By 2010, over 700 youth had been trained in PPJ. As of 2009, over
one-third of the youth who had participated in PPJ went on to become delegates in the PB
process.
134
The proportion of youth delegates in the city’s participatory budgeting process
increased from nearly 15% (roughly 400 youth) in 2007 to 22% (1,400 youth) in 2011
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
131
Specific data was not provided.
132
Personal communication between senior government and PB administrator and Sonya Fierst, March 3,
2012; personal communication between senior government administrator in the Secretaría de Cultura
Ciudadana (Ministry of Civic Culture), department of youth programs, and Sonya Fierst May 6, 2012. See
also Fierst, 2013b, p. 123.
133
For other cases of youth-targeted PB programs, see Cabannes, 2006, and Guerra, 2002.
134
Personal correspondence, senior government administrator in the Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana,
department of youth programs, May, 2013.
!
!
129!
129!
(Secretaría de Participación Ciudadana de la Alcaldía de Medellín, personal
communication, May 14, 2013). However, while participation rates have increased,
government administrators interviewed for this study felt that rates of youth participation
in PB would ideally be higher.
135
Further, the rates of deserting the PB process are often
higher among youth than other groups (Fierst 2013a, p. 124), for reasons including the
timing and duration of meetings, intergenerational tensions, and dangers of attending
meetings at night in gang-controlled areas. These are further explored from the
perspectives of youths, in Chapter 4.
Measured by number of participants (the most common indicator used by the
government), the results on youth engagement in PB are thus mixed. Yet youth have had
significant impacts on the outcomes of PB in Medellín, and, as I explore in more depth in
Chapter 4, PB in turn has impacted youth culture and organizing in the city. This is
especially so among youth who are already politically or civically active, and among
existing youth groups, particularly those engaged in musical and cultural activities
(Subsecretaría de Metrojuventud, 2009b). A number of youth groups have learned to
engage in PB strategically, mobilizing to position their members as delegates. As a result,
several such groups have directly benefited from budget allocations to cultural and
educational programs.
For example, since 2007, La Red de Hip Hop La Elite (The Elite Hip Hop
Network), a group of young hip hop artists and activists working to reduce violence in
Comuna 13, has managed to position their members as PB delegates. By 2011, La Elite
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135
Interview with senior government administrator in the Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana, department of
youth programs, Medellín, December 13, 2010. Interview with former senior government administrator and
PB administrator (2), Medellín, April 12, 2011. The Salazar administration’s 2008–2010 development plan
also noted low levels of youth participation in democratic practices in the city, such as participatory
budgeting (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2008c).
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130!
had benefitted from the equivalent of approximately US$138,000 in contracts funded
through PB.
136
This, along with funding from other donors and branches of the
government, has enabled this youth-led network to produce an annual hip hop festival
promoting non-violence, as well as launch a hip hop “school” in which young hip hop
artists offer classes to children and teens in graffiti, break dance, rap, and DJing, as well
as civic and political awareness. This case is analyzed in depth in the following chapter.
In a relevant study of the role of youth in participatory budgeting in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, Cabannes found that,
In returning to visit some of the young councillors [PB participants] in Barra
Mansa after five or six years, it is striking to see these outspoken, thoughtful,
socially active young people who continue to carry their experience into their
adult lives. Even when the formal processes deteriorate with changes in
administration, or disappear entirely, it is important not to see them as failures,
but to consider the impression they have made on a generation of young people
and the ripple effects for those around them. These new adults are the real
sustainability factor in building citizenship and participatory democracy. (2006, p.
218)

In Del miedo a la esperanza (“From fear to hope”; Alcaldía de Medellín, 2008a),
Fajardo’s administration celebrated the success of Medellín’s PB, claiming that it had
promoted greater citizen participation and cultivated non-traditional leaders, including
youth.
We saw [PB] as a form of renovating community participation in decision-
making and cultivating new leaders among youth, ethnic minorities and
citizens that had never found a way to participate in decisions about where
and how to invest resources. . . . [I]ts accomplishments go beyond social
investment. Today’s citizenry is more aware of the life of their community
and more committed to its development and to the development of the
city. . . . We have better prepared leaders, more active communities and
public servants more willing to dialogue. (ibid., pp. 115, 120)
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136
Interview and personal correspondence with member and spokesperson of the Elite Hip Hop Network,
Medellín, April, 2011; personal correspondence with staff person of the Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes-
YMCA Medellín, January, 2014.
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131!
131!

However, in a 2009 citywide survey published by the Mayor’s Office, 70% of the 1,095
youth respondents were unaware of the participatory budgeting process, and the same
percentage expressed no interest in participating in formal politics, though some did
express interest in participating in protests. Interestingly, the highest rates of interest in
participating in political processes were found among indigenous and street youth (some
of the most marginalized youth in the city), while Afro-Colombian youth, also
significantly marginalized, were the most reluctant to participate in formal politics
(Subsecretaría de Metrojuventud, 2009b). In contrast, a 2011 survey of 8,000 youth in
Medellín found that the rate of participation in community activities was similar across
Afro-Colombian, Mestizo, and Caucasian youth, though Afro-Colombian youth had a
slightly lower rate of participation in protests (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2011b). Yet here,
too, the data is mixed; in the same 2011 citywide survey, 57.3% of youth felt it was
important or very important to participate in municipal programs (including PPJ, as well
as other recreational and educational programs run by the administration), while 38.5%
felt it was important or very important to participate in marches, protests, and other forms
of collective action outside of (or in direct conflict with) municipal systems (ibid.). While
the data is not comparable or conclusive, it may signal changing attitudes among youth
toward the municipal government during this period.
Analyzing youth engagement in PB strictly by number of participants offers a
very limited understanding of the relationship between youth engagement and political
participation. Such a metric may serve the interests of the government (when numbers are
favorable), providing a simple, and relatively superficial, indicator of youth engagement
in local development. However, it does not serve the interests of the youth participants,
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for whom the quality and outcome of their experiences of participation are far more
significant. The literature on participation in the field of development has extensively
debated how best to measure participation (see Gumucio Dagron, 2001, 2009; Huesca,
2002; Tufte & Mefalopulos, 2009). The aim here is not to stake a normative claim in this
complex debate, but to point out that the metric of number of youth participants falls
within a logic of governmentality that some have gone so far as to call a “tyranny of
participation” (Cooke & Kothari, 2001).
137

In his review of several Latin American experiences of participatory budgeting,
Benjamin Goldfrank measured “success” along five dimensions: formality of structure
(“how open the participatory budgeting process is to individual citizens and how much it
privileges existing organizations and local authorities”); decision-making power
(“whether the participants debate and decide on spending priorities, how much of the
budget is affected by these decisions, and whether authorities respect the decisions”);
participation rate; expansion/redistribution of services; and transparency (Goldfrank
2007, pp. 114–115). These indicators are not youth-specific, though along these
dimensions Medellín would likely be rated relatively high. (However, this would be
tempered by fact that the dimensions of decision-making power and
expansion/redistribution of services are limited by the allocation of only 5% of the
municipal budget to the PB process.) Yet these dimensions do not capture the outcomes
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137
In their collection Participation: The New Tyranny?, editors Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari analyze how
participation has become a sort of “orthodoxy” in the field of development, and offer cases in which
practices of participatory development were either manipulative or harmful, rather than empowering to
participants. In addition to questioning methods of practicing and evaluating participation, the collection
interrogates “how the discourse itself, and not just the practice, embodies the potential for an unjustified
exercise of power” (2001, p. 4). See Chapter 1.
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of PB in terms of civic/political engagement, changes in public culture, or the quality of
the experience of participation for youth.

Participatory Budgeting as a Structural Shift Toward Participatory Public Culture
Prior to the implementation of participatory budgeting in Medellín, opportunities
for direct citizen participation in public governance were relatively limited (Castañeda
Osorio & Botero Valencia, 2007).
138
This was true both structurally (formal governance
was primarily practiced through elected representatives), and culturally (local politics
were heavily shaped by clientelism, much of which continues today). Structurally, PB has
created new spaces of deliberation in which decisions of public concern are made with
the direct and indirect influence of local citizens (Pimienta Betancur, 2008); these are
spaces in which groups traditionally marginalized from the political process—most
notably youth—have a somewhat greater chance of being heard and influencing
outcomes. Government authorities interviewed for this study see PB as a space in which
youth directly participate in local governance and gain access to representatives of the
municipal administration in a new forum:
139

Participatory budgeting has brought youth first and foremost a space that the city
did not have, in which they can intervene in public affairs, to the extent that
participatory budgeting is based in the neighborhood and universally convenes
people from the age of 14. . . . In Comuna 13 youth have focused on a series of
proposals aimed at strengthening cultural movements for youth. But they have
that opportunity because of the deliberative space of this participatory process; it
creates an opportunity to influence part of the budget that they will be able to help
direct toward initiatives based on the local development plan.
140

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138
Interview with senior government official, Secretaría de Desarrollo Social (Ministry of Social
Development), Medellín, July 12, 2011.
139
Interview with former senior government administrator and PB administrator (2), Medellín, April 12,
2011.
140
Interview with senior government and PB administrator, Medellín, October 15, 2011.
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134!

. . . young people have caught on; I feel that the traditional model of community
development does not include them, for example the traditional model of thinking
more about public works does not recognize that youth have needs such as
recreation apart from traditional sports fields (which is always a soccer field), but,
for example, into this [traditional] logic, youth are introducing ideas such as
making a skate park for extreme sports. If they were not there [in PB] I am sure
that no adult would propose an idea like that; it is important that they are there
[participating] in these scenarios.
141

Real, effective, permanent, and mass participation has led to . . . the emergence of
new forms of leadership, especially among children, youth, and women
(Melguizo, 2011).

Existing studies provide evidence supporting this claim that Medellín’s PB
cultivates non-traditional leaders, including among youth (Fierst, 2013a; Gómez
Hernández, 2007; Pimienta Betancur, 2008); my own research also confirmed this
finding, as I show in the following chapter. In addition, PB in Medellín may offer a space
for civic education; promote listening, dialogue, and the valuing of other viewpoints; and
raise public awareness about the importance of participation (Pimienta Betancur, 2008, p.
4)—though the published data supporting these conclusions is limited. My own research
suggests PB may have these impacts among those who participate; however, I found
limited (and mixed) evidence that it has significantly raised awareness about the
importance of civic/political participation among the broader public yet. PB does not
appear to be notably contributing to greater participation in community-based
organizations, nor to greater awareness of the possibility of citizen participation in the
city, at least not between 2009-2011; during this period, there was a decline in both
(Medellín Como Vamos, 2011), even though participation in PB rose over 200% in this
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141
Interview with senior government administrator in the Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana (Ministry of
Civic Culture), department of youth programs, Medellín, March 21, 2011.
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135!
same period.
142
(Interestingly, there was also a rise in participation in electoral voting in
this period.) Yet again, measuring the significance of participatory budgeting solely by
participation rates offers a very limited understanding of its impacts, such as the quality
of participation and its outcomes (particularly long-term outcomes, such as leadership
development). Nonetheless, statistics show that there is clearly room for increasing public
awareness of and participation in PB.
143

Has the structural change in opportunities for political participation contributed to
a more participatory public culture in Medellín? I define participatory public culture as
one of relatively horizontal decision-making, based in practices of dialogic
communication, with low barriers to participation, and through which issues of public
consequence are negotiated. It is a culture that values the voices and participation of non-
hegemonic groups. PB can be understood as having helped to create spaces and structures
for more horizontal decision-making and dialogic communication around issues of local
development in Medellín. It has comparatively lower barriers to participation for non-
hegemonic groups than other forms of governance in the city—for example, for Afro-
Colombians, who are otherwise scarcely represented in city governance (see Chapter
4).
144
A member of the municipal administration reported that PB has also enabled some
government authorities to become familiar with more community groups and
organizations, particularly youth groups, than they had previously been aware of,
145
and
appears to have increased communication between the government and some of these
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142
There were likely several factors mediating this decline, such as a rise in violence in 2010.
143
In 2011, only 21% of respondents in this citywide survey knew of participatory budgeting’s existence
(Medellín Como Vamos, 2011, p. 47).
144
At the time of this writing, precise data on the rate of participation of Afro-Colombians in PB was not
available. This statement is based on observation and interviews.
145
Interview, government administrator in the Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana (Ministry of Civic Culture),
department of youth programs, Medellín, May 17, 2011.
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groups.
146
The participation of marginalized youth is valued and encouraged by the
municipal government, motivated in part by the need to stabilize the areas in which these
youth reside. PB is a forum in which participants learn how to participate in public
decision-making, and it is helping to cultivate new leaders (see Chapter 4)—which, it is
hoped, will slowly change the political culture of the city from one characterized by
exclusive clientelism and corruption to one that is more inclusive, horizontal, transparent,
and participatory.
The introduction of PB bolstered the perceived legitimacy and effectiveness of the
Fajardo administration both locally and internationally; it helped the administration earn
a reputation for having recuperated public trust in public management, and it incentivized
community organizing (Veeduría Plan de Desarrollo de Medellín, 2012).
At the start of his term, however, Salazar’s administration (2008–2011)
acknowledged that, while citizen participation had been significantly advanced by
Fajardo’s administration, the percentage of citizens that “know, understand and enact
their rights and duties [as citizens]” remained low (Veeduría Plan de Desarrollo de
Medellín, 2012, p. 69). According to a review by a committee of nongovernmental
organizations, “the topic [of citizen participation] has advanced considerably . . . but
there is still much to do. The greatest enemies are traditional leaders that prefer to control
resources through clientelism, for their own benefit” (ibid., pp. 72, 74).
147

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146
I am indebted to Sonya Fierst for this observation (personal correspondence, July 10, 2012).
147
Clientelism and corruption remain a part of the political culture of the city to varying degrees, though it
is difficult to document and measure, and data is somewhat limited. A question about corruption was
included in the citywide annual survey Encuesta de Percepción Ciudadano (Survey of Citizen Perceptions)
for the first time in 2011, published by a network of nongovernmental organizations (Medellín Cómo
Vamos). When asked whether they thought that the level of corruption in Medellín had changed in the last
four years (under the Salazar administration), 55% responded that it hadn’t changed, 23% reported that it
had increased, and 22% responded that it had declined (Medellín Cómo Vamos, 2011, p. 54). Zamboni
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In his review of participatory budgeting experiences in Latin America (not
including Medellín), Goldfrank (2007) tentatively identified certain conditions that, in
varying combinations, may correlate with a successful process, including:
• the municipality has sufficient revenues to make significant investments in public
works or programs;
• the mayor is indigenous, from a party on the left, or both;
• opposition from local political elites is weak or nonexistent; and
• there is a tradition of participation and cooperation within and among local civic
associations that has not been severely damaged by guerrilla warfare or clientelist
politics (Goldfrank, 2007, p. 116).

All of these factors existed to some degree in Medellín
148
under the Fajardo and Salazar
administrations, but by no means are they assured moving forward. What is clear is that
the political culture of Medellín remains volatile, and clientelism and corruption threaten
the future of participatory budgeting.
PB in Medellín can thus be understood as a “technology” for relatively direct,
relatively widespread participation in public governance, and as a structure that may
support (though not guarantee) a somewhat more participatory public culture. While
youth participation may be limited to a relatively small percentage of the city’s youth, PB
has created an institutionalized space for youth participation, with lower barriers than
most traditional government institutions. It has become a terrain in which some youth
(and other citizens) engage in dialogue, decision-making, and the construction of a
(debatably) more participatory public culture—albeit one that remains contested and
fraught with obstacles to participation. PB is more of a structural than a cultural shift in
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(2007) presents some evidence that Brazilian counties with PB have lower rates of corruption in
government. See also Sintomer, Herzberg, Allegretti, and Röcke (2010, p. 31, cited in Goldfrank, 2012).
148
Regarding the latter, Medellín does have a tradition of civic participation, but this was damaged to
varying degrees by warfare and clientelist politics.
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political participation, which is one of its limitations (see the following chapter for more
on the role of culture). Importantly, however, this shift toward more participatory
governance through PB is one that is slightly more in favor of marginalized groups and
other non-traditional power holders. Yet the limitations of, and obstacles to, participation
remain significant.

Challenges of and to Participation in Participatory Budgeting
PB is permeated by the distinct logics of its various stakeholders, from
government bureaucrats to traditional community leaders, to new leaders (including
youth). It is also infiltrated by the interests of armed groups and their networks of power,
who maintain connections and influence with local leaders, organizations, and other
participants in PB. Criminal activities affecting the PB process include bribes and misuse
of contracted funds (Cano, n.d.; Jiménez Morales, 2013). In other words, PB is not
isolated from local politics and networks of power.
This, of course, is not unique to Medellín. Anwar Shah, a key advocate of PB in
his former position at the World Bank, noted that PB processes are shaped by the
preexisting relations of power, and that
Participatory processes can sometimes be captured by interest groups, masking
the undemocratic, exclusive, or elite nature of public decision making, and giving
the appearance of broader participation and inclusive governance, while at the
same time using public funds to advance the interests of powerful elites. (2008, p.
212)

The distinct logics of its stakeholders frequently clash within the PB process,
prompting public debate over what participation means. For example, when PB was first
implemented in Medellín, the municipal government offered a menu of options from
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which each local PB process could choose. These options were based on the municipal
government’s development plan, and significantly restricted the decision-making power
of the local communities. In response to public criticism, the municipal government
changed the procedure of PB in 2009 so that it would be based on the local development
plans for each of the comunas. A former government advisor to the PB process and a co-
founder of a community-based organization in Medellín reflected, “[W]hen we started
listening to them [the local communities], the whole thing changed, because they were
proposing strategies that worked.”
149
This shift from PB based on the municipal
governments plan to a model based on the local development plans for each comuna was
fraught with political conflict (and implemented to varying degrees of success in different
parts of the city), but it also represented a move toward a more localized and participatory
process, with greater autonomy and decision-making power at the level of the comunas.
“The challenge in participatory budgeting was about the idea of participation that the
municipality had versus the idea that the community had”;
150
thus far, both have ceded
and gained ground in an ongoing negotiation of the terms of participation.
This is further complicated by conflicting logics regarding what constitutes the
local in local development; Medellín’s comuna-based PB system sets territorial
parameters for local development that do not always best reflect local dynamics.
The administration doesn't understand the porousness between the comunas and
the relationships between them. . . . The good and bad thing about PB is that it
pushes people to think about their own identities related to a particular space
within a comuna. It localizes everything; so “I’m from comuna three or four”
instead of “I’m from Medellín.” Some cultural groups were created between
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149
Interview with former government advisor to the PB process and a co-founder of a community-based
organization, Medellín, October 15, 2012.
150
Interview with former government advisor to the PB process and a co-founder of a community-based
organization, Medellín, October 15, 2012. See Urán (2012, p. 37) for an example of popular mobilization to
change the PB process of a particular comuna (Popular, Comuna 1).
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people that live in different comunas of the city, so to where do they belong?
Their identity as a group doesn't belong to just one neighborhood.
151

A comuna is primarily an administrative territory, and its boundaries reflect a limited
political reality, rather than the sociocultural complexities of its urban geography.
Further, as Urán (2012, drawing on Purcell, 2006) points out, the very concept of local
development reifies the local scale (in this case, the level of the comunas) as inherently,
and simplistically, “better” than the municipal or other levels.
Further, there are generational differences in perspective regarding what
constitutes local development; for example, youth participants often favor cultural
initiatives, while older participants tend to favor infrastructural projects (see Chapter 3;
see also Bravo Lara, 2011; Fierst, 2013a). The ways in which the PB process helps to
shape local dynamics—territorially, intergenerationally, etc.—mean that it is a space of
continual contestation and negotiation.
There is also a conflicting logic of individualism versus communitarianism; there
is widespread concern in Medellín that, despite the communitarian intention of the PB,
individuals and community organizations participate in PB to lobby for their own
interests, rather than those of the comuna. The promotion of self-interest in the PB was a
commonly cited criticism among both youth and adult interviewees.
152
“There is a
problem when local organizations think about the PB as the only way to fund their work.
Because instead of participating in PB for local development, they are fighting for the
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151
Interview with former government advisor to the PB process and a co-founder of a community-based
organization, Medellín, October 15, 2012.
152
In the PB meetings I observed, monitors from the municipal administration often reminded delegates
that they were participating as representatives of the public, and that their decisions should be based on the
needs of the comuna, rather than their own projects.
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survival of their organization.”
153
Of the youth delegates interviewed for this study,
however, all expressed both an interest in lobbying for their own groups’ agendas and a
commitment to participating in decisions for the betterment of their comuna as a whole.
Further, if PB in Medellín is understood as a form of participatory democracy, it
is one that is mediated by the existing system of representative democracy and the
political parties that dominate it (Londoño ,1997); this limits its capacity to catalyze
structural change. Bernal (2005, p. 120) contends that compromise and power-sharing are
not characteristic of the political culture of Medellín historically, and that this has limited
the effectiveness of participatory democracy initiatives.
PB is inevitably a flawed process of participation, in that different citizens face
different barriers to participation. For example, women with household and employment
responsibilities, particularly single mothers, find it difficult to find the time to
participate.
154
Youth living in comunas with high rates of violence and fronteras
invisibles (invisible borders patrolled by competing gangs) may not be able to attend PB
meetings—which are often held at night—without putting themselves in danger. Indeed,
Medellín’s PB must be understood as particularly shaped by its context of violence, and
could never be completely isolated from it. This is a sensitive topic and one about which
many interviewees did not speak freely. One senior government administrator with whom
I spoke in early 2011 offered an example of how it affects PB:
[T]he upsurge in violence . . . that was so strong in late 2009 and throughout 2010
until a few months ago, greatly affected the mobility of people getting to
meetings. Also, here there are obviously some—not all, but some—comunas
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153
Interview with former government advisor to the PB process and a co-founder of a community-based
organization, Medellín, October 15, 2012.
154
At the time of my research, only one female member of the youth collectives studied in Comuna 13 (see
Chapter 4) was participating in the process.
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where armed groups have interest in participating or in accompanying
participation exercises . . . because of the logics of contracts. So there is also
intimidation or the presence of armed groups in these settings, which results in
people leaving the process.
155

I explore this concern from youth perspectives in the following chapter.
Interviewees cited several other logistical and bureaucratic issues as posing limits
to participation and its outcomes, such as the time commitment required (including
weekly meetings of two to three hours each, which may last for as many as nine or ten
weeks). On the other hand, several of my youth interviewees criticized the timeline of the
PB process for requiring short-term periods for implementation of the resulting projects.
PB-funded projects are implemented over the course of one year following the year in
which they are approved, and the bureaucratic process for channeling the budget to the
approved projects was often criticized for consuming much of the year in which the
projects are meant to be implemented, leaving little time for actual implementation. The
annual timeline is more conducive to short-term, rather than long-term projects, which
may limit the extent to which PB projects can address entrenched problems.
156

The Discourse of Participation and Medellín’s Public Culture
These tensions and problems in the PB process have spawned public debate over
the very terms of participation. This includes the ways in which existing social and
political dynamics are replicated in the PB process (e.g., co-opted by those traditionally
in positions of power); problems with the institutionalization of participation; and the
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155
Interview with senior government administrator in the Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana (Ministry of
Civic Culture), department of youth programs (Metrojuventud), Medellín, March 21, 2011.
156
Interview with former government advisor to the PB process and a co-founder of a community-based
organization, Medellín, October 15, 2012. For additional critiques and suggestions for improvements of
Medellín’s PB see Fierst (2013a, 2013b) and Veeduría Plan de Desarrollo de Medellín, (2012).
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impacts of this “adult logic” of participation on youth culture in the city (see chapters 4
and 5). From youth activists to academics, to municipal government representatives, the
strengths and weaknesses of the PB process are widely debated, and it is often criticized
as much as it is celebrated—if not more so. This is a constructive tension that has
prompted critical discussion of what it means to participate in local governance and what
constitutes direct participation in the public sphere. Further, the broader discourse of
participatory democracy is one that can be (and is) appropriated by citizens outside of
institutionalized spaces of participation; Londoño writes, “[I]n many cases citizens have
appropriated this concept to reconfigure their relation to the State and redefine in practice
the way in which democracy is understood” through non-institutionalized forms of
political participation like marches and strikes (1997, p. 22).
The fact that PB has sparked debate about the terms of citizen participation offers
early evidence of its impact on Medellín’s public culture.
157
As one interviewee
described, PB has helped contribute to
the transformation of the mentality of the city, to allow people to be more
engaged in the decision-making process, even though it’s not happening all of the
time. . . . It could be improved a lot, but it’s doing a great job of posing a problem
to the city about citizen’s participation, and posing a problem that encourages
people to think about “What if I can make the decisions myself?” and by inviting
them to that position of decision-making, it’s increasing the levels of self-
awareness of the local situation, and thinking about solutions. Even if they can’t
be achieved, thinking about local strategies and solutions to local problems is a
good way to increase the awareness of our context and encourage people to get
more involved.
158

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157
As previously noted, some survey data suggests that between 20-30% of Medellín’s citizens are aware
of the PB process (Medellín Como Vamos, 2011; Subsecretaría de Metrojuventud, 2009b), so debates
about participation in and around PB probably do not circulate beyond that percentage of the public.
Nonetheless, this is still a significant swath of the population who may be directly engaged in or influenced
by these conversations.
158
Interview with former government advisor to the PB process and a co-founder of a community-based
organization, Medellín, October 15, 2012.
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However, this case also illustrates the fact that creating institutionalized spaces of public
participation in decision-making about local development does not inherently constitute a
cultural shift, but more simply a discursive and structural one; it changes the terms and
the terrain of ongoing negotiations between different actors struggling to exert agency,
but does not necessarily change the culture in which existing relations of power are
entrenched and maintained.

Participatory Budgeting as Governmentality
Participatory Budgeting has increased trust in the municipal government and it
has become a key part of the democratic governability of the city.
– Clara Inés Restrepo Mesa (2007), Former Minister of Social Development,
Medellín

The wielding of discourses of participation as a form of governmentality is
exemplified in participatory budgeting. The implementation of PB was intended, in part,
to strengthen the presence of the municipal government in locales that are dominated by
illicit power networks, and to improve its international image for development investment
(Pimienta Betancur, 2008). Participatory budgeting is of interest to international aid
organizations and investors (Gómez Hernández, 2007), and it has been a key strategy
promoted by the World Bank as a mechanism for fighting clientelism and corruption, and
stabilizing municipal governments (Goldfrank, 2012). Gómez Hernández argues that, in
Medellín,
the search for legitimacy in the face of local communities and to obtain a
favorable image at the international level has been a constant in the design and
implementation of strategies of participation. . . . We are witnessing, then, a neo-
participationism linked to public administration, without a politics that gives it
meaning, converted into a simple instrument to maintain the fiction of
governability. (Gómez Hernández, 2007, p. 67, citation omitted)
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Drawing on Jeffrey Jackson’s The Globalizers (2005), Benjamin Goldfrank
(2012) asks whether PB should be considered a “global cultural script” for international
development agencies like the World Bank to promote their neoliberal agenda of
reducing the role of the state (e.g., in providing public services) across the global
South.
159
Through this lens, a once counter-hegemonic practice to empower marginalized
groups has been co-opted by international financial institutions and become a mechanism
for rendering cities safer investments. Goldfrank cites the former manager of the World
Bank Institute’s urban program, Tim Campbell:
[L]ocal democratic participation is becoming a potentially important underpinning
in the responsible management of the financial system and, ultimately, part of the
mechanism to guarantee macroeconomic stability. . . . Municipalities in leading
cities began to take on attributes of private businesses attending to customers. No
practice is more illustrative of this change than participatory budgeting in Porto
Alegre. (Campbell, 2003, in Goldfrank, 2012)

This view of PB is a far cry from its origins as a transformative process for the
empowerment of marginalized sectors of society and the more equitable (re)distribution
of public resources. Goldfrank (2012) concludes, however, that while PB is a cultural
script for the municipal governments that practice it (and in some cases for their
international financial partners), it remains a relatively marginalized agenda within the
World Bank. Further, he argues that such financial institutions should continue to
promote PB because of its benefits at the local level, most of which are entirely out of the
control of these institutions (and as such, cities have more to gain than to loose from
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Similar critiques have been made of the co-optation of discourses of participation more broadly by
international financial institutions, both to curtail critiques of neoliberal policy prescriptions, and to
redefine (and reduce) the role of states in the provision of public services. See Chapter 1.
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these institutions’ promotion of PB). Goldfrank does not find evidence that the World
Bank’s promotion of PB has led to greater acceptance of the neoliberal agenda at the
local level, and argues that PB “helps start a broad conversation about social and
economic priorities, and once started . . . it can develop into the democratizing and
redistributive process” (Goldfrank, 2012, p. 14).
In Medellín, participatory budgeting requires the government to relinquish only
partial control over only 5% of its total annual operating budget to a more citizen-driven
process of decision-making, while perhaps disproportionately increasing the political
capital and perceived legitimacy of the administration. Pimienta Betancur argues that
the participatory planning and budgeting program constitutes a strategy of
governability [gobernabilidad] that could contribute to a legitimacy that perhaps
the municipal government didn’t have in other spaces of local power, such as in
the city council. . . . Community/civic organizations and their leaders have very
little autonomy and have accepted almost all of the mechanisms presented by the
municipal administration to regulate participation and action. Therefore, the
political capital of this citizen participation has been claimed and capitalized on
by the administration and not by the community/civic organizations and civil
society. (2008, p. 7)

While the author does not provide detailed evidence in support of this claim—and the PB
process has evolved and changed in various ways since 2008—the critique is an
important one. It suggests that the technical and bureaucratic process of PB is a form of
disciplining citizen (and nongovernmental organization) participation in the public
sphere. PB structures and controls public participation in ways that not only aim to shore
up the legitimacy of the government, but also minimize resistance to it—promoting a
practice of citizenship that “tends to legitimate the municipal government and that leaves
social transformation in its hands. Ultimately it is a return, in a way, to a representative
democracy” (Pimienta Betancur, 2008, p. 8; see also Gómez Hernández, 2007). Pimienta
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Betancur therefore contends that Medellín’s PB (as of 2008) had only cultivated a
complacent form of citizenship, one in which participation was still confined by technical
bureaucracies, rather than cultivating citizens capable of taking a critical stance and
addressing the root causes of ongoing poverty, violence, and social exclusion. This falls
within the “dutiful citizen” paradigm, in which civic and political engagement is “a
matter of duty or obligation” (Bennett et al., 2010, p. 397; see also Bennett, 2008), rather
than citizenship being constructed through ongoing political engagement (e.g., Chantal
Mouffe’s [1992a, 1992b] notion of radical democratic citizenship). It is a sort of
“responsibilization” of the citizen subject as one who participates dutifully in
institutionalized governance, while constraining this participation within particular
bureaucratic systems and logics that may limit challenges to hegemonic power and
change. At the same time, it partially obfuscates the responsibility that the state holds for
structural inequalities in poverty and unemployment, shifting some of this responsibility
onto civil society and community organizations at the level of the comunas. In other
words, discourses and practices of participation in PB may function as a sort of
“palliative” treatment of the problems of poverty in the city, rather than a meaningful and
expansive structural solution to a fraught economic system (Fierst, 2013b; Gómez
Hernández, 2007; Pimienta Betancur, 2008, p. 9).
However, while these critiques are important, my own research with youth
participants suggests that Pimienta Betancur’s argument is too structurally deterministic;
the PB process does not over-determine the modes of citizenship practiced within it (i.e.,
youth exhibit agency in their expressions of citizenship, some of which are more radical
than dutiful; see Chapter 4). It can partially constrain and shape practices of citizenship—
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and therefore this critique is important in thinking about the design of PB processes—but
it does not entirely limit the agency of individual participants to express alternative
conceptions of citizenship, to challenge discourses and practices of participation, or to
influence the public culture being cultivated in and around PB. Nor does it foreclose
citizens from engaging simultaneously in more radical forms of participation. What’s
more, the existing political culture in which PB is carried out greatly influences its
outcomes (Fierst, 2013a; Goldfrank, 2007).
However, concerns similar to Pimienta Betancur’s were raised by some of my
interviewees, particularly about how uninstitutionalized grassroots practices (what I refer
to as “tactics” in Chapter 4) adapt to the parameters of institutionalized strategies in order
to participate. Some interviewees from community organizations argued that there is a
cycle of institutionalization, corruption, and exclusion that is catalyzed by PB funding
and the resultant contracts. For example, youth collectives that are intentionally youth-
driven and largely independent of adult logics,
start to see that to access resources they have to institutionalize themselves. This
has created many problems in the city, because many processes that are not yet
mature institutionalize themselves just to participate in the use of the resources
[from PB]. This has created crises and ruptures of groups because there are also
ethical problems in the management of these resources, which [in turn] has
generated distrust [on the part of the government] in contracting out to groups, so
that every year there are more requirements to be able to enter into a contract
[with the municipal government] and new groups have few of those conditions to
receive a contract.
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The concern is that providing an institutionalized space of participation does not
inherently change a culture unaccustomed to (and skeptical of) democratic, transparent
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Interview with executive director of a local, youth-focused nonprofit organization, Medellín, March 10,
2011.
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civic and political participation. This is evidenced in disparities between the initiatives
prioritized through participatory budgeting and the existing local development plans
approved by residents of the comuna; in the replication of existing power dynamics
within the participatory budgeting process; in the influence of individual agendas; and the
various challenges youth have faced in integrating themselves into the bureaucratic
nature of the process.
There is a tension between the widely perceived need to improve government
transparency and accountability for the use of public funds (one of the motivations for the
creation of PB in Medellín), and structuring PB as a highly technical and bureaucratic
process that may not only discourage participation, but also undermine public critique of
the state. A less technical and bureaucratic process might be more participatory in theory,
but it would likely also be more vulnerable to corrupt uses of public funds and ongoing
clientelism.
It is important to reemphasize that “the state,” particularly Fajardo’s and his
successor’s administrations, cannot be conceived as a monolithic entity whose sole
interest is in shoring up power. Compromiso Ciudadano’s agenda was largely a
participatory one, and one of its aims was to challenge certain traditional relations of
power. Further, PB is not exclusively controlled by state actors; it is a space in which a
variety of actors and interests interface, a terrain in which power dynamics are struggled
over and contested.

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Conclusion: The Role of Political Participation in Participatory Public Culture
In the final analysis it doesn’t really matter what the political system is. . . . We don’t
need perfect political systems; we need perfect participation.
– Cesar Chavez (2008)

Participatory budgeting can be understood as both a technology of
governmentality and an imperfect but productive mechanism for encouraging a more
participatory public culture. The extent to which PB succeeds in cultivating a more
participatory public culture depends in large part on who is in power at both the
government and local community levels, and on the political culture they espouse.
Fajardo’s and Salazar’s administrations, both composed largely of the community
organizers, academics, and activists that comprised Compromiso Ciudadano, were less
predisposed to clientelist relationships and corruption than previous administrations of
traditional political party elites. Yet the experiences and outcomes of PB within each
comuna have been heavily shaped by their local political/public cultures and networks of
power. The discourses and practices of citizen participation that are encompassed in PB
form a terrain of struggle and negotiation, one in which underrepresented voices may be
heard and have an impact, although this is never guaranteed.
In this chapter, I have traced some of the ways in which the episteme of
participation is wielded by state actors to stabilize and govern.
161
For the
municipal administration of Medellín, participatory budgeting is an instrument for
promoting more engagement and transparency at the local (comuna) level; it is
also a discursive and structural mechanism through which to establish a greater
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Grassroots actors also depend upon discourses and practices of participation, as I explore in the
following chapters.
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presence of the state in the poorest and least governable parts of the city. In the
context of the violence and narcotrafficking that has shaped much of Medellín’s
public culture in recent decades, citizen participation has become an expedient
episteme for the municipal government. I analyzed how this episteme operates
through government discourses and practices as a form of governmentality. I
focused primarily on the relationship between the state and the political
participation of youth through an institutionalized form of participation, which I
contrast with non-institutionalized forms of participation in the following chapter.
I interrogated some of the ways in which logics, discourses, and technologies of
participation structure practices that may displace the work of the state onto the
public. The slipperiness of the episteme of participation becomes evident; it is
imbued with meaning and utility from a variety of ideological standpoints and
may serve many distinct, even conflicting, agendas. The focus on the political in
this chapter—specifically, on participatory budgeting as a mode of political
participation—highlights how structures of participation function as spaces of
negotiation of relations of power. It illustrates that there is no pure or “perfect”
form of participation—rather, “participation” is an episteme through which
relations of power are enacted and contested.
There are both generative and problematic outcomes of participatory budgeting as
both a method of cultivating a more participatory public culture and a technology of
governmentality. Despite various shortcomings, however, PB has created new spaces for
participation of (some) citizens not traditionally involved in political decision-making,
particularly youth, and has contributed to the development of new youth leaders, as I
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illustrate in the following chapter. It has thus made a structural shift toward a more
participatory public culture, one that may support more horizontal decision-making and
dialogic communication, and which has lower barriers to participation for marginalized
groups and nontraditional leaders than other institutions of governance. It has also
catalyzed public debate over the very logic and terms of participation, changing the
discourse through which public culture is constructed.
So while participatory budgeting in Medellín had, as of 2011, made more of a
structural change than a change in the public (or political) culture of the city, it has the
potential to help change both. At the time of this research, Medellín in general, and PB in
particular, were still shaped by a political culture imbricated in clientelism and
corruption. Ways in which youth actors were working to change the culture of the city is
the topic of the next chapter.
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CHAPTER 4: Participatory Cultures and Youth Citizenship: Comuna 13, the Territory of
Artists

These lyrics are from the song “Esta es la 13” (“This is [Comuna] 13”) by the hip
hop group Esk-lones, members of a network of young hip hop artists and activists in
Comuna 13.
162
I introduced this study by relaying my first conversation with two other
members of this network (JEIHHCO and El Perro), and my surprise at the relationships
between these youth and government administrators in Medellín. This chapter explains
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I am grateful to Clemencia Rodríguez for her assistance with all song translations.
Hablar sobre me barrio no me costará trabajo
Vivo en una parte alta del nivel social más bajo
Donde las paredes hablan, las cortinas no están
quietas
Es el mejor refugio que ha encontrado este poeta
Siempre hay algo que contar, rumores vienen y
van,
los chismes siempre llegan solos, pa’ enterarme
no hay afán.
¿Que han oído de la 13? que es el barrio más
caliente.
Mucha publicidad, nos visitó hasta el presidente.
Las casitas de bla bla son llamadas invasión,
el barrio cambió su nombre por ‘Operación
Orión’.
¿Qué recuerdan de la 13? Plomo de arriba pa’
bajo,
no recuerdan a su gente ni el dolor que eso les
trajo”.
Pero claro! No hablan sino las cosas malas
En vez de mostrar artistas, muestran cocas en las
balas
No reflejan las virtudes de la gente emprendedora
Publican mejor humor, entrevistan madres que
lloran
No es lo que uno quiere ver es solamente lo que le
muestran
Pero para mi concepto este amarillismo apesta
Occidente sigue al frente por cultura no caliente
Orgulloso de mi barrio en el pasado y el
presente.!
To speak of my barrio isn’t hard
I live up high in part of the lowest socioeconomic
level
Where the walls speak, the curtains are not quiet,
It’s the best refuge that this poet has found
There is always something to relate, rumors come
and go,
Gossip always arrives alone, I’m in no rush to
learn.
What have you heard of the 13th? That it’s the most
violent barrio.
A lot of publicity, even the president visited.
The houses of bla bla are called invasions [illegal
settlements],
the barrio changed its name to “Operation Orión”.
What do people remember of the 13th? Bullets from
high and low,
They don’t remember its people nor the pain that
this brought them.
But, of course! They only talk about the bad things,
Instead of showing artists, they show cocaine and
bullets.
They don’t reflect the virtues of the enterprising
people,
Instead they publish jokes, they interview crying
mothers.
It’s not what people want to see, it’s only what they
want to show us
But from my perspective this sensationalist
journalism stinks.
The west side still leads in non-violent culture
I’m proud of my barrio in the past and the present.
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what made such relationships possible, but more important, it considers some of the ways
in which youth are practicing and promoting cultures of participation. The chapter
analyzes both participatory cultures and participation through culture—that is, groups
whose discourses and practices cultivate a culture in which participation is the norm, and
who use cultural forms to participate in public life. It also explores how these interface
with practices of communication and political participation (the topics of Chapters 3 and
5). Building on the findings of the previous chapter, I argue that cultural participation is
central to broader cultural and social change; structural change through public policy
initiatives alone cannot cultivate a participatory public culture without cultural change
occurring in tandem, if more slowly.
163

Cultural participation is a primary space in which citizenship and relations of
power between youth and institutions are negotiated; through cultural spaces and
practices, participation in public life is channeled in a way that is meaningful to both
youth and, in the Medellín model, some state institutions. Cultural participation is
particularly meaningful to youth, because it is often a venue for self-expression and
identity formation. The two cases in this chapter, the youth collectives La Elite and Son
Batá, are examples of cultural participation that support the development of both
individual and collective identities. Cultural self-expression is often the initial draw for
youth, yet in the daily activities of the collectives, they develop both their individual and
collective identities and become more engaged in public and political life. Both cases
offer examples of what I am calling grassroots tactics of participation, and illustrate the
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Both cultures and structures of participation are crucial to the analytical model developed in Chapter 6.
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rich and complex ways in which they interface with institutional strategies of
participation.

The Significance of Culture to Participation
What does culture bring to the question of participation? Culture is produced
through everyday encounters; it is imbricated in economic and other material relations,
and it is through culture that hegemonic and counter-hegemonic meanings, social
patterns, and relations of power are negotiated and renegotiated (Gramsci, 1971; Hall,
1996, 1997; Williams, 1958). Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar
writes, “Power inhabits meaning, and meanings are a main source of social power;
struggles over meaning are thus central to the structuring of the social and of the physical
world itself” (Escobar, 2008, p. 14). The significance of “participation” is and always has
been a question of culture, as it is also a question of communication, politics, and
power.
164
Participation is also a form of labor, as is the production of any culture
(Williams, 1958/2011). As I argue throughout this study, participation in public life is a
political, communicative, and cultural labor that produces both stability and instability,
governance and resistance.
Culture can be used for resistance, just as it can be a tool of hegemonic
control; it is one of the sites of struggle between the two (Gramsci, 1971).
Countercultures or cultural resistance (culture used “to resist and/or change the
dominant political, economic and/or social structure”) may “provide a sort of ‘free
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Similarly, citizenship—while it is recognized and “granted” politically—is understood culturally;
citizenship is a cultural construct.
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space’ for developing ideas and practices . . . new ways of seeing and being”
(Duncombe, 2002, p.5).
The relationship between culture and politics has long been debated;
cultural practices have been theorized as being political along a spectrum that
ranges from intentional acts (“culture consciously created for political resistance
and used for that purpose”) to “culture that may serve the function of resistance,
but was not created with that in mind” (ibid., p. 7). Culture, as Stephen Duncombe
(2002) observes, can convey political meaning through its content, its form, its
interpretation, and even through the very act of producing it.
The increasing interconnectedness of cultural and political expression in
postindustrial societies has been well documented (see, for example, Bennett, 2008;
Castells, 1997; Giddens, 1991; Melucci, 1996; Touraine, 1985). The notion of cultural
citizenship has been proposed by scholars who see younger generations becoming
civically and politically engaged in new and different ways, related less to electoral
politics or government or civic organizations, and more to personal interests, social
networks, and cultural activism (e.g., Bennett, Freelon, & Wells, 2010; Burgess, Foth, &
Klaebe, 2006; Cohen, 2010; Higgins-D'Allessandro, 2010; Jenkins, 2006a; Jenkins et al.,
2006; Levine, 2008; Livingstone, 2009; Pettingill, 2007; Torney‐Purta, Amadeo, &
Andolina, 2010).
In the study of social movements, Alain Touraine (1985) emphasized what he saw
as a shift in postindustrial society from “sociopolitical” forms of collective action (that
traditionally sought greater access to, and/or transformations of, the state in response to
labor and economic problems), to more “sociocultural” movements. These “new” social
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movements are struggles over cultural and ethical problems, waged over—and through—
“symbolic goods, that is, of information and images, of culture itself” (1985, p. 774).
Social movements challenge existing configurations of power by producing and diffusing
alternative cultural “codes” and discourses in society, such as new ways of living, new
forms of language, etc. (Melucci, 1996). Manuel Castells (1997) theorized power in the
networked “Information Age” as increasingly exercised (and challenged) through cultural
meaning:
The new power lies in the codes of information and in the images of
representation around which societies organize their institutions, and
people build their lives, and decide their behavior. The sites of this power
are people’s minds. This is why power in the Information Age is at the
same time identifiable and diffused. . . . [P]ower is a function of an endless
battle around the cultural codes of society. (Castells, 1997, pp. 359–360,
emphasis in the original)

In Colombia, despite its status as a democratic republic, power is still
often (though of course not exclusively) exercised through force across all levels
of society. At the same time, for decades and with varying degrees of success,
social movements and other actors (both governmental and nongovernmental)
have been trying to shift Colombian society toward a more peaceful, democratic,
and more participatory culture.
In Medellín, many of the innovative, participatory initiatives at both the
municipal and grassroots levels aim, at least in part, to change the culture(s) of
violence that have constrained its public life. A culture of violence can be
understood as “a set of relationships and discursive practices that legitimize
violence or make violence seem an acceptable means of responding to conflict”
(Rodríguez, 2011, p. 254, citing Galtung, 1991, 1998). A culture of violence is
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one that symbolically and discursively legitimates the use of force in the exercise
of power. Challenging such a culture requires different discursive practices,
different cultural norms and codes. Promoting a more participatory culture is, in
some ways, antithetical to a culture of violence, because it implies that power
should be negotiated through dialogue and self-expression, rather than through
force. The cultural practices that I analyze in this chapter are examples of
discursive interventions and nonviolent, physical/symbolic self-expression that
not only promote participation, but also challenge the culture of violence.

Tactics and Strategies of Participation
What makes Medellín such an important case for analyzing youth participation in
public life is the proliferation of both institutional and non-institutional, or grassroots,
efforts to promote such participation. I am calling these grassroots “tactics” and
institutional “strategies” of participation, respectively. At times, these work in synergy; at
others, they work in tension.
These terms are an adaptation from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) work on power
and resistance in everyday cultural practices. In de Certeau’s use, the term strategies
describes mechanisms of institutionalized (and institutionalizing) power, while the term
tactics describes non-institutional (or even anti-institutional) efforts by those outside of
established positions of power to negotiate their own terms of participation in the face of,
or within, institutionalized terrain.
The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a
terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. . . . It takes
advantage of “opportunities” and depends on them. . . . It must vigilantly make
use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the
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proprietary powers. It poaches in them. In short, a tactic is an art of the weak.
(1984, p. 37)

Tactics and strategies are mutually constitutive, a point of contact whose boundaries are
porous and constantly negotiated in relation to each other; they shape and reshape the
terrain of power and participation.
When understood dialectically, rather than as binaries (Buchanan, 2000, p. 92),
these constructs offer a heuristic for analyzing the productive tensions between
institutional and non-institutional forms of participation.
165
De Certeau did not theorize
participation, per se; this is my adaptation, and I see tactics and strategies as fluid and
interdependent characterizations of relations of power that function dialectically. I do not
use these as a theoretical framework, but as organizing concepts, because they may help
avoid binary thinking that simplistically opposes participation and resistance, or
institutional and non-institutional modes of participation. The irony, however, of using
terms that originate from military planning to analyze efforts to counter armed violence
in the Colombian context gives me pause. Still, I follow in the footsteps of many others,
including activists of many stripes (e.g., Boyd & Mitchell, 2012; Fine, 2012), who have
utilized these terms in numerous ways and contexts to think about social change.
De Certeau’s work, like Foucault’s, can help us to think about power as ever-
circulating through and across different levels of society, through discourses, practices,
and institutions. The boundaries between institutional strategies and non-institutional
tactics of participation are, of course, porous. In Medellín, some strategies of
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As Ian Buchanan (2000) has pointed out (and de Certeau himself acknowledged), de Certeau’s
conceptualization of strategies and tactics as a theoretical framework was never fully fleshed out. If one
mistakes strategies and tactics as a simple binary, de Certeau’s analysis of power can be overly simplistic,
particularly when applied to culture, which often operates in contradictory ways.
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participation are informed by grassroots tactics, and some tactics are shaped by
institutional strategies.
166
The relationship between them produces both stasis and
change; and this is central, I argue, to the construction of a participatory public culture.
Youth citizenship and participation are defined and contested at the intersections of
strategies and tactics.
Chapter 3 explained how and why institutionalized discourses and practices
(strategies) of participation created some conditions for a more participatory public
culture while also becoming a central form of governmentality in Medellín. In this
chapter, I focus on tactics of participation, and then consider their relationships to these
strategies. The proliferation of the discourse (and, to varying degrees, practice) of
participation across these different levels of society created certain opportunities, seized
by some youth, to change the role of youth in public culture.
In what follows, I analyze two distinct case studies of youth-run cultural
colectivos (collectives)
167
: La Red de Hip Hop la Elite (The Elite Hip Hop Network,
commonly referred to as La Elite), and the Afro-Colombian cultural collective Son
Batá.
168
These are participatory cultures with a horizontal collectivist orientation, but
which also prioritize individual self-expression. That is, they tend to value both the
expression of individual voices and the strength gleaned from collective action and
decision-making. Both developed their own grassroots tactics of participation in public
life, while at the same time negotiating their sometimes conflictual, sometimes
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166
As explained in Chapter 2, in Medellín, the lines between them have been intentionally blurred since
2004, when the administration of Sergio Fajardo brought many grassroots community leaders into
government positions.
167
Refer to Chapter 2 for discussion of the history and significance of colectivos in Colombia.
168
These collectives have changed over time since their creation in the early/mid-2000s; this chapter
focuses primarily on their work at the time of my research in 2011, as well as on some of their prior history.
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collaborative relationship with government strategies. While tactics of participation can
be observed in a number of youth practices in everyday life, this chapter focuses on the
following four: the resignification of social or cultural referentes (references) and youth
subjectivities, the reterritorialization of public space through cultural expression, popular
education and mentorship, and participatory decision-making. Finally, I analyze the
relationship between these tactics and the state’s participatory budgeting strategy, from
the perspective of the youth in these cultural collectives.
While there are many youth collectives in Medellín (see Chapter 2; see also Uribe
Neira et al., 2009), La Elite and Son Batá are two of the most widely recognized, and
everyone I spoke with in Medellín had heard of or was familiar with them. They have
gained significant social capital across the city (and even nationally and internationally),
evidenced by their relationships with government officials, sponsors, and other donors;
media coverage; and public attendance at their performances.
La Elite and Son Batá were selected as cases for several reasons: the degree of
recognition and power they have gained in the city through their work as youth
collectives; their tactics of participation, both internally in the collective and publicly; the
significance of their sociogeographical positions within the city; and because they
illustrate a direct connection between cultural and political participation. The cases were
researched through approximately 40 in-depth interviews with participants, as well as
advisors or mentors to the groups; participant observation of meetings, events, and other
activities over the course of more than six months; and a review of documents produced
by the collectives (including online publications, songs, and videos), as well as existing
research by local scholars. In the case of La Elite, data is also drawn from a qualitative
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survey of the audience at their 2011 annual hip hop festival Revolución Sin Muertos
(Revolution Without Deaths),
169
and from a collective memory-based, participatory
research workshop.
170

Collectives like La Elite and Son Batá have developed their own visions of youth
citizenship informed by their particular contexts, and yet their work and the lessons
learned from it resonate far beyond Medellín. First, however, the particularities of their
context must be understood.

Comuna 13: Contested Territory, Conflicted Citizenship
Comuna 13 (San Javier) is situated at the westernmost reaches of Medellín, near
the Túnel del Occidente (the Western Tunnel) that burrows through the mountain range
and connects the city to the coastal Urabá region on the Caribbean Sea (see Figure 4.1).
All traffic to and from the coast passes through this area, rendering it of great geopolitical
and economic significance—and therefore a historically contested area. The comuna is
comprised of twenty neighborhoods. During the height of the urban warfare in 2002,
Comuna 13 was home to 130,804 residents, or approximately 6.4% of the total
population of the city.
171
Many of these residents had come to Medellín displaced by the
armed conflict in the countryside.

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169
Refer to Appendix C.
170
Details of these methodological approaches are provided in Chapter 1 and in Acosta Valencia and
Garcés Montoya (2012, 2013).
171
The population of Comuna 13 at the time of this research in 2011 was approximately 135,000 (DANE &
Municipio de Medellín, 2010a, 2010b).
!
!
163!
163!

Figure 4.1. Map of the comunas of Medellín.
Compared to the 2.95 square meters of public space per inhabitant averaged in the
city as a whole, the density of Comuna 13 averages 0.38 square meters per inhabitant.
Approximately 75% of the residents are classified as living in the two lowest
socioeconomic strata, and some 40% of homes have single-mother heads of household
(Departamento Administrativo de Planeación, 2012). Approximately 60% of children
under the age of five suffer from malnutrition (Angarita Cañas et al. 2008, p. 36). The
levels of education in the comuna are some of the lowest in the city. The populace of
Comuna 13 has been shaped by the impacts of forced displacement
172
, “poverty,
exclusion, and social, economic and political discrimination” produced in part by the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
172
See Grupo de Memoria (2011).
!
!
164!
164!
relative absence (until recently) of state institutions and of public investment (Angarita
Cañas et al. 2008, p. 36).
Comuna 13 is known for its ad hoc settlements that sprawl up the side of the
mountains. While some of the comuna was settled legally, unofficial or “pirate” division
of the land characterized its development in the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1979 and
1981, the comuna experienced the rapid growth of informal slum settlements, or
shantytowns, as displaced populations—particularly Afro-Colombians—flooded in,
fleeing the national armed conflict.
The recent history of Comuna 13 has been heavily influenced by the presence of
nearly all of the different armed actors (both legal and illegal) that represent the national
and international dynamics of Colombia’s armed conflict, including leftist guerrillas,
networks of narcotraffickers, armed gangs of youth with varied allegiances,
paramilitaries, and dramatic military interventions by the federal government—the most
notorious of which was Operation Orión in 2002, described in Chapter 2. As a result, the
comuna was known for having the highest rates of violence and homicides, as well as the
greatest concentration of illegal armed actors in the city during the 2000s (the period in
which both La Elite and Son Batá were formed). As Angarita Cañas et al. describe,
rape, killings, kidnappings, disappearances, extortions, threats, forced evictions of
residents, the use of the population as a human shield and the exercise of control
and surveillance by means of [forced] compliance with rules of social and
individual behavior, all . . . contributed to the configuration of a climate of terror
and generated trauma and fear, but also the construction of mechanisms of
resistance and adaptation, of participation in the dynamics of the war and in the
processes of the construction of peace. (2008. p. 5)

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, military operations in the comuna were the
state’s primary strategy for securing and controlling the area, and were initially presented
!
!
165!
165!
by the national government as a model of their approach to urban instability nationwide
(Angarita Cañas et al., 2008). The social, economic, and political marginalization of the
comuna’s populace due to the relative absence of state institutions other than the military
has been described as a violation of human rights and the manifestation of a second form
of violence: structural violence (Angarita Cañas et al., 2008, p .53). The relationship
between the citizens of Comuna 13 and the municipal and national governments is
therefore doubly fraught. The combination of these factors has shaped the context in
which La Elite and Son Batá’s tactics of participation have been developed.

Red de Hip Hop La Elite (The Elite Hip Hop Network)

– Zinagoga Crew, “Reportando Sucesos” (“Reporting Events”)

Rappers and hip hoppers are evidence of the transformation of Medellín.
– Alonso Salazar Jaramillo, Mayor of Medellín 2008–2011
173

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
173
In Medina Holguín, Castrillón Guzmán, Garcés Montoya & Rincón Ochoa (2008, p. 4).
Vamos luchando contra el adversarios
haz sentir tu voz latina en los vecindarios
Nuestro itinerario en las calles,
rap que represente los barrios
Mas que pleito en el barrio, parce

Seguimos siendo las voces de los que no tienen
voz en los barrios
Se cuentan las historias reales se vive con
sonrisas y con llantos . . .

No moriré, seguiré en el barrio
No callaré reportando sucesos de ayer en
vecindarios
Yo viviré, seguiré en el barrio
Yo seguiré en vecindarios
!
We continue fighting against the adversary,
make your Latino voice heard in the neighborhoods
Our itinerary in the streets,
rap that represents the barrios
Instead of confrontation in the barrio, dude

We continue being the voices of those who have no
voice in the barrios
Telling the real stories of living with smiles and
tears . . .

I will not die, I will carry on in the barrio
I will not keep quiet reporting yesterday’s events in
the neighborhoods
I will live, I will carry on in the barrio
I will carry on in the neighborhoods!
!
!
166!
166!
Of the hundreds of youth groups in Medellín,
174
some of the most prolific and
widely recognized are hip hop collectives. Hip hop is a popular youth subculture in
Medellín, bolstered in recent years by the use of digital recording and social media
technologies, and by increased access to resources through the participatory budgeting
process. La Elite is one of the three most- established hip hop collectives in the city; it
has gained national recognition for its annual hip hop festival Revolución Sin Muertos
(the second-largest hip hop festival in Colombia at the time of my research), its cultural
resistance to violence, and its effective fundraising and collaboration with the local
government. In 2011, La Elite was comprised of 23 different hip hop groups, totaling
approximately 85 individual members.

Hip Hop and Its Significance in Medellín
Hip hop first emerged in the Bronx, New York, in the mid-1970s among African-
American and Afro-Caribbean youth in a context not entirely dissimilar to Comuna 13’s:
low-income neighborhoods that had been shaped by large immigrant populations, an
erosion or absence of public institutions, poverty, and gang violence (Rose, 1994). As
Ana María Muñoz Guzmán writes, “The situations lived in the ghettos of the United
States, despite their distinctiveness, were not distant from the realities lived by thousands
of youth in the popular barrios of Medellín, barrios that since the mid-twentieth century
have been stigmatized and marginalized” (2009, p. 26).
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
174
Garcés Montoya (2010) reports that 271 youth groups were identified in Medellín between 2006–2007,
with a variety of thematic priorities and organizational forms.
!
!
167!
167!
The recurring patterns of physical, as well as structural, violence that exist in
marginalized neighborhoods worldwide help to explain hip hop’s popularity among their
youth. Alternative or independent hip hop—commonly known as “underground”—often
has a social justice orientation, including a commitment to voicing these realities as a
form of social protest (Hooks, 1990; Rose, 1991). Such hip hop movements, now
worldwide, frequently aim at raising critical consciousness among marginalized youth,
creating spaces in which their voices can be projected, and trying to change the way in
which society perceives them.
Some youth looking for ways to access and express agency outside of
membership in armed gangs are drawn to the social status and collective identity attained
by belonging to a particular hip hop “crew” or posse (Rose, 1994). The preexisting notion
of the youth collective in Medellín was easily compatible with this aspect of hip hop
culture.
The four different aesthetic elements of hip hop—rap (MCing), DJing, graffiti,
and break dancing—offer youth varied entry points and modes of self-expression that
make it a relatively open cultural form, one that can be practiced by youth who may, for
example, prefer physical or visual expressions over musical or verbal expressions. In
other words, the barriers to entry into hip hop culture are relatively low.
175
Of course,
graffiti artists need paint cans, DJs need turntables (a scarce resource in Medellín, and
therefore the weakest of the four elements in the city), rappers may need microphones,
and breakdancers need space; these barriers to entry become a key focus of fundraising
efforts by hip hop collectives across Medellín.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
175
This is one of Jenkins et al.’s (2006) defining attributes of participatory cultures. Refer to Chapter 1.
!
!
168!
168!
Hip hop first arrived in Medellín through North American films like Beat Street
(1984) and Wild Style (1983) in the early 1980s. Breakdance was the first of the elements
to spread locally, but the three others followed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as did
the first hip hop “battles” (referred to as retos or “challenges” in Medellín), in which
breakdancers or rappers face off in symbolic battles to showcase their talent and build the
reputation of their crew (Medina Holguín et al., 2008; Garcés Montoya, 2005).
At certain points in its history, hip hop culture in Medellín has been stigmatized in
public discourse as a violent youth subculture (García Guzmán & Giraldo Obando,
2011).
176
In the mid-1990s, hoppers (as they call themselves) networked for collective
action to gain positive visibility and support for local hip hop, but consensus-building
among them was minimal. Following attempts by some politicians to co-opt local hip hop
events,
177
a schism emerged in the movement and efforts toward citywide mobilization
dwindled (Medina Holguín et al., 2008). The movement
178
became more localized by
neighborhood and comuna—and in some cases, more competitive and conflictual (García
Guzmán & Giraldo Obando, 2011)—and lost a degree of momentum until the early to
mid-2000s, when reactions to an increase in violence and access to new resources
(including new media technologies) reinvigorated the movement. By 2005, there were
220 documented hip hop groups in the city, primarily in the barrios populares (low-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
176
For example, Natalia García Guzmán and Johrman Giraldo Obando (2011) note that, between 1997 and
2000, some hip hoppers in Medellín followed trends in gangsta rap in the Unite States, including violent
confrontations between crews, which fueled the stigmatization of hip hop in the city.
177
For example, a well-known local hip hop artist and advocate recounted that the former mayor Luis Pérez
took the stage at a hip hop concert to suggest that, if elected, he would hold an international hip hop festival
(Medina Holguín et al., 2008).
178
The extent to which it can be called a movement, insofar as there is consistent networked collective
action with shared goals, is a topic of ongoing debate among researchers and practitioners in the hip hop
community. Collective actions can be identified at various times over the past two decades, though not
consistently and never consolidated (Interview with hip hop artist and activist, Medellín, February 19,
2011; Garcés Montoya, 2005). I use the term movement here to refer to this loose network of actors who
idenitfy themselves as part of the “hip hop movement” in Medellín.
!
!
169!
169!
income neighborhoods; Garcés Montoya, 2005, p. 210).
179
Garcés Montoya sees this as
remarkable, given the limited amount of support and spaces (both public spaces and
concert venues) in which to feature hip hop artists in the city at the time (ibid.).
Despite its foreign roots, hip hop artists localized (or, in Nestor Garcia Canclini's
terms, “hybridized”) their styles and practices as they responded to and made use of their
daily contexts, reconfiguring them through symbolic form (Garcés Montoya, 2005). “In
general what one would hear in the first local rap lyrics were responses to a society
marked by urban warfare, in which narcotrafficking, insurgency, abuses by law
enforcement and gangs of hit men, social inequality and the lack of opportunities”
enveloped the daily lives of youth (Medina Holguín et al., 2008, p. 15). Early pioneers of
the local hip hop culture “understood RAP to mean ‘Revolución Artistica Popular,’
[‘Popular Artistic Revolution’] as a channel for denouncing poverty, marginality, the
abuses of the police forces in their neighborhoods and the necessity of a critical and
revolutionary social consciousness, even though groups also existed with lyrics that
invited listeners to live daily life with happiness” (ibid.).
180

Hip Hop in Comuna 13 and the Formation of the Red de Hip Hop la Elite
A 2009 survey identified approximately 50 artistic groups in Comuna 13, the
majority of which were hip hop groups.
181
At the suggestion of a community worker at
the nonprofit, local YMCA affiliate the Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes (Christian
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
179
In a 2011 interview, a member of the La Elite suggested there were more than 300 hip hop groups in
Medellín (Medellín, July 18, 2011).
180
For an extensive history of hip hop in Medellín, see Medina Holguín et al. (2008), Garcés Montoya
(2005), García Guzmán and Giraldo Obando (2011), and Muñóz Guzmán (2009).
181
In a 2011 interview, a member of La Elite reported that nearly 60 hip hop groups from Comuna 13 had
applied to perform in one of their festivals (Medellín, July 18, 2011).
!
!
170!
170!
Association of Youth), La Elite was formed in 2002 in the months between the infamous
military operations Mariscal and Orión. Several of the groups that first joined were
already organizing events and doing informal mentoring of other youth and children to
develop hip hop culture in the comuna. While the Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes has
accompanied and supported La Elite, the network functions autonomously as a youth-led
collective, describing itself as an “initiative for peace and nonviolence through the culture
of hip hop in the Comuna 13 of Medellín” (La Elite project document, n.d.).
The rappers, graffiti artists, breakdancers (“bboys” and “bgirls”), and DJs of La
Elite call themselves gestores culturales juveniles (loosely translated as “youth cultural
advocates”). At the time of my research, seventy percent were between the ages of 14 and
23; nearly all were under the age of 28 (see Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2. Composition of La Elite network by age in 2010 (approximate). These figures
do not include the ages of participants in La Elite's popular education workshops, who
tend to be younger children (Proyecto Gestores Culturales Comuna 13, 2011).

Of these, approximately 80% are male and 20% female; interestingly, over half of the
members in the 14–18 age range are female, reflecting the network’s recent efforts to
!
!
171!
171!
involve more female participants (I elaborate on the gendered dimension of participation
below). The majority have completed secondary education but not completed higher or
technical education. Over 30% have their own children (Proyecto Gestores Culturales
Comuna 13, 2010).
182
La Elite is thus a mix of teenagers, youth in their early 20s (many
of whom joined the network as teenagers), and young adults with adult responsibilities,
which reflects the relatively long-term commitment of many of the network’s
participants.
183
Despite this age range, the collective identity of La Elite remains firmly
rooted in youth culture and discourses of youth empowerment.
The stated goals of the collective include:
• Strengthening and professionalizing hip hop,
• Networking and unifying groups and solo hip hop artists in Comuna 13 and across
the city,
• Offering new opportunities for youth,
• Popular education
184
of children from Comuna 13 in the hip hop arts,
• De-stigmatizing the image of hip hop in the city,
• Articulating youths’ dissatisfactions with their social realities,
• Changing the way youth think about their social realities,
• Creating an alternative to the culture and practice of violence,
• Exchanging knowledge and skills among the members of the network,
• Promoting the social and political participation of members of the network,
•
Making a positive contribution to the development of the comuna and the city,
and
!
• Promoting greater gender equity in the network (Red de Hip Hop La Elite, 2010a,
2010b).

In addition to these formalized goals, many of the members interviewed talked
about creating other referentes (positive references) of youth in Comuna 13, meaning
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
182
This data is from a 2010 survey of 50 of the network's most active members carried out by
Metrojuventud in the Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana (Ministry of Civic Culture) as part of the Gestores
Culturales Comuna 13 project.
183
This has resulted in mentoring relationships, as well as tensions between the first generation of network
members and those who have joined more recently—particularly when it comes to distribution of resources
and paid salaries for particular projects.
184
See below for an explanation of popular education in the Latin American context.
!
!
172!
172!
both creating role models for younger children who might follow in their footsteps rather
than join an armed gang, and changing the stigmatized public image of youth from
Comuna 13. As explained in Chapter 2, local and national mass media have frequently
used—and reinforced—the stereotype of youth as delinquent, armed, and violent in
narrating the violence in the city, particularly male youth from areas like Comuna 13.
Comuna 13 itself became synonymous with Medellín’s crisis of violence in mass media
frames, stigmatizing its inhabitants (Angarita Cañas et al., 2008). This has material
consequences for young people, “prefiguring difficulties for these shantytown inhabitants
in accessing goods, services, recognition and the exercise of their rights” (ibid., p. 64).
Being young, male, and from Comuna 13 implies a predetermined deficit of social capital
that has very material consequences, such as difficulty obtaining employment because of
one’s address of residence (ibid., p. 251). Youth in Comuna 13 have thus experienced a
kind of representational violence, in which media frames reify the stigmatization of
Comuna 13’s youth as violent entities, further “ghettoizing” their social and political
status in the public eye.
In addition, then, to resisting the culture of violence within the comuna, La Elite,
Son Batá, and other youth collectives also try to reconfigure their public image through a
variety of cultural interventions, challenging the “codes” (Melucci, 1996) within which
they have been unwillingly and detrimentally inscribed. The process of empowerment for
these youth must necessarily begin with this struggle over the codes and frames that over-
determine their public voice. In other words, in the context of Comuna 13, participation
in public life necessitates a direct struggle over the terms of public discourse. Describing
their work, a member and frequent spokesperson for La Elite explained, “there is a
!
!
173!
173!
political intervention which is to change a culture through changing the referentes;
because in Medellín, we have a history in which the referentes are the narcotraffickers,
the thug, the gangster, and to change—to provide other referentes—this is a great
achievement.”
185
Many members of La Elite shared the goal of resignifying their
subjectivity as youth from Comuna 13; doing so held the potential to both shift public
discourse and increase the level of respect and power ascribed to these youth in the
political and cultural life of the city. This is a semiotic intervention—and clearly a
communicative, political, and cultural one—aimed at disrupting the relationship between
signifier (e.g., media representations and public stereotypes of youth from Comuna 13)
and signified (the youths’ own bodies and identities) by proposing new signifiers in the
public sphere.
186

For many members of La Elite, the hip hop collective shapes their daily lives;
they often dedicate several hours a day or the majority of their week to working toward
the goals of the network. They cite various motivations for doing so: personal
satisfaction; dissatisfaction with their social reality; the possibility of financial income;
social status; the chance to express oneself; desire to help meet the needs in the comuna;
desire to share knowledge/skills with other youth; and the opportunity to denounce what
they see as injustices, inequalities, or abuses of power.
187
Significantly, when asked to
identify key moments in their life that led to their active involvement in La Elite, 9 of 12
respondents identified the first time they heard a hip hop song as one key moment;
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
185
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, January 29, 2011.
186
I am indebted to Clemencia Rodríguez for her contribution to this semiotic analysis.
187
From Red de Hip Hop La Elite (2010a) and various interviews, Medellín, 2011.
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!
174!
174!
several remembered the exact song or the date.
188
The cultural artifact (hip hop music)
played a motivating role in their trajectories toward participation.
189
Other commonly
identified moments related to direct experiences of violence and the loss of loved ones.
I return to an analysis of La Elite’s activities as tactics of participation following
an introduction to the comparative case of Son Batá, which complicates and nuances an
understanding of youth citizenship forged through cultural participation.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
188
This data comes from a memory-based, participatory research workshop on July 21, 2011 with 12
members of La Elite, designed by Jair Vega of the Universidad del Norte. It was based on the Most
Significant Change methodology (Dart & Davies, 2005) and memory-based methodologies developed by
Pilar Riaño (2000). Angela Garcés Montoya and Gladys Acosta Valenica at the University of Medellín led
the workshop; I was asked to co-facilitate it with them as part of the research project “Comunicación,
juventud y ciudadanías. Una aproximación a partir de cuatro experiencias organizativas.” See Chapter 1.
189
Interestingly, a 2011 survey of La Elite carried out by Metrojuventud found that the majority of
participants’ family members (nearly 64%) did not participate in civic life; of these, nearly 36% reported
this was due to a lack of interest on their part (Proyecto Gestores Culturales Comuna 13, 2011). This data
supports the hypothesis that other factors (such as hip hop culture) may be more influential on youth
participation than family influence.
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!
175!
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Son Batá: Youth Citizenship Contested

– Son Batá, “Mi Identidad” (“My Identity”)
The Afro-Colombian music and cultural collective Son Batá is based in the
uppermost reaches of Comuna 13, in what are colloquially referred to as las periferias
(marginalized neighborhoods on the periphery)—distanced from the developed center of
the city both geographically and socioeconomically. To get there, you take the metro to
the very last stop on the San Javier line, and then take the El Deposito bus to the end of
its route. As the bus climbs up and up, fewer and fewer of the buildings are painted and
cleanly roofed. The narrow alleyways, raw red brick, and patchwork of corrugated metal
roofs signal the hurried settlement of displaced migrants. Next to where the bus stops is a
graffiti mural that reads: Comuna 13, territorio de artistas, Son Batá (“Comuna 13,
territory of artists, Son Batá”; see Figure 4.3).
Culpable, sí he lo aquí ese soy yo,
de no ser esclavo y optar por otra nación,
hacer de este movimiento la más firme religión,
culpable soy. . . .
No soy igual a ustedes de eso si estoy
convencido
yo sí sé de dónde vengo y qué tierra es que me
ha parido
Más que lengua más piel, más que un color
oscuro es toda una forma de ser
mi identidad, hija del mar pacifico de dioses
cubanos y yo de negros palenqueros
Mis padres chocoanos y ahora es 13.
Barrios periféricos ghettos de la ciudad
hay más desarrollo urbano, pero menos
equidad. . . .
África Colombia revolución,
te estoy hablando de el que trajo la primera
violación
un perro llamado Cristóbal colon,
sólo le pido a dios que se acabe la injusticia.
Con mi raza negra mi real milicia
represen skl mi camada Son Batá…

Guilty, yes I am,
of not being a slave and opting for a different
nation,
of making this movement the most firm religion, I
am guilty. . . .
I am not the same as you, of this I am convinced
I do know where I come from and which land
birthed me.
More than language, more than skin, more than a
dark color, it’s a whole way of being
my identity, daughter of the Pacific Ocean, of
Cuban gods, and me, of escaped Black slaves
My parents from Chocó, and now it’s the 13[th].
Marginalized neighborhoods, ghettos of the city,
there’s more urban development but less
equity. . . .

Africa Colombia revolution,
I’m talking to you about the one who brought the
first violation
a dog named Christopher Colombus.
I just ask god that injustice ends.
With my black race, my real militia,
represent skl my posse Son Batá . . .

!
!
!
176!
176!

Figure 4.3. Mural near Son Batá’s cultural center, Comuna 13, Medellín.

Son Batá was started in 2004 by three teenagers, neighborhood friends who had
their own hip hop group.
190
By 2011, they were running six different cultural groups (of
theater, dance, and music) with approximately 80 youth members (primarily Afro-
Colombian), and a popular education-style “school” with approximately 150 children and
youth participants.
191
Through these activities, Son Batá works to replace membership in
armed gangs with membership in a music group that has gained citywide, national, and
international recognition.
As one of the founders of the collective explains,
Son Batá is committed to the transformation of lives through art and
music, because they are tools to generate discipline; commitment; values;
good practices; a commitment to development; a sense of belonging; to
generate civic capacities and social and political participation. It is a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
190
Son Batá is a play on words that can be translated as both the sound of drums and “they are drums.”
191
At the time of my fieldwork, Son Batá was also expanding to offer workshops and organize groups in
other parts of the city.
!
!
177!
177!
process of change, [including] how to generate economic resources, how
to strengthen one’s capacities, one’s abilities to communicate, how to
establish a clear life plan, if one wants to go to university.
192

At the center of their theory of change is the creation of other referentes for Afro-
Colombian youth whose primary example of (and access to) power for decades has been
armed gangs. At the same time, like La Elite, they are creating a positive referente for the
comuna as a whole, reclaiming and reconfiguring its reputation as a zone of conflict into
a one as a zone of cultural production, social transformation, and development. In doing
so, they find themselves developing new tactics of participation in public life and
negotiating a complex relationship with institutional forms of participation that both
provide new opportunities and perpetuate old forms of exclusion.

Afro-Colombian Identity, Citizenship, and Marginalization
An important difference between Son Batá and La Elite resides at the intersection
of race, identity, and citizenship. While there are Afro-Colombian members of La Elite,
ethnic and racial identity is not overtly a part of the collective identity of the group, as it
is in the case of Son Batá. This raises different questions about the construction of youth
citizenship and dynamics of participation. The relationship between the Afro-Colombian
population and the Colombian state has always been a troubled one, dating back to the
16th century, when African slaves were first brought to the region. Here, I briefly trace
some of the dynamics particular to Afro-Colombians in Medellín, which shape the way
youth citizenship is experienced and articulated by members of Son Batá and directly
influence how they engage in discourses and practices of participation.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
192
Interview with male founding member 1 of Son Batá, Medellín, February 22, 2011.
!
!
178!
178!
Afro-Colombians are often associated with the pacific coastal region of
Colombia, especially the department of Chocó, although they reside throughout the
country. In the second half of the 20th century, many residents of Chocó arrived in
Medellín as economic migrants to fill the labor needs of Medellín’s growing industrial
sectors. From the 1980s on, Afro-Colombians from various parts of the country,
including Chocó, arrived in Medellín fleeing Colombia’s armed conflict, often having
been forcibly and illegally displaced in land disputes.
193
The ironically named Nuevos
Conquistadores (New Conquerers) neighborhood in Comuna 13, where Son Batá is based
and most of its participants live, is a shantytown settlement that resulted from these
migrations.
There are no conclusive figures, but estimates of the total Afro-Colombian
population in Medellín range from approximately 140,000 to 300,000.
194
And yet, despite
hundreds of years of Afro-Colombian presence in the region, the hegemonic identity of
Antioquians is strictly white.
The Antioquian region has been built upon a sociocultural ethos defined by a
series of values, beliefs and social practices that are known nationally as
antioqueñidad, characterized by strong regionalism and the idea of the existence
of an Antioquian “race” and “homeland” . . . and a population conceived as
racially “white.” (García Sánchez, 2009, p. 12; see also Uribe, 1990)

Sociologist María Teresa Uribe (1990) has documented how historically this has required
minorities to distance themselves from their ethnic identities in order to assert their
identities as Paisas, the colloquial name for the people of Antioquia. “Afro-Colombian
youth in the city in general are victims of discrimination and exclusion, and see
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193
For socioeconomic and cultural reasons, Colombia’s rural ethnic communities have been
disproportionately affected by the war. See García Sánchez (2009).
194
Today, the department of Antioquia is home to the second largest population of Afro-Colombians in the
country (García Sánchez, 2009).
!
!
179!
179!
themselves pressured by processes of ‘blanqueamiento’ [whitening] as a requirement for
their social acceptance and inclusion” (García Sánchez, 2009, p. 40). The alternative has
been to assert an outsider identity, even if the youth in question was born in Medellín.
Many of the Afro-Colombian youth I spoke with in Medellín identified as Chocoanos or
Pacíficos, rather than as Paisas; yet the fact of their being born in Medellín challenges the
Paisa identity as normatively white.
195

There is a documented lack of research and reliable data on Afro-Colombian
youth in Medellín (García Sánchez, 2009), which is another way in which they remain
relatively invisible in the eyes of the state and the public. In what data there is, Afro-
Colombians consistently report higher levels of poverty and lower levels of wellbeing
compared to other populations in the city (ibid., p. 25). A 2007 study by a local think tank
and the municipal government found that, in many instances, Afro-Colombian youth
fear the impossibility of [financially] sustaining themselves and the constant
economic problems, the lack of opportunities and their frustrated dreams . . . the
lack of support and respect. . . . [T]hey feel excluded and marginalized. . . . [I]n
the university they lose their identity and are also stigmatized. (Castrillón, 2007)

In many ways, communities like those that are home to Son Batá have lived
largely apart from mechanisms, institutions, and cultures of the state and of civil society.
Further, until very recently, there were relatively few dedicated Afro-Colombian
organizations and institutions, and even fewer focused on or led by youth. Son Batá is
relatively unique in Medellín for being a youth-led cultural collective with an explicit
focus on Afro-Colombian identity and culture. For their members, most other
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
195
Personal correspondence, Angela Garcés Montoya, Medellín, 2011.
!
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180!
180!
opportunities for participation in public life imply a de-racialization and homogenization
of their subjectivities (see García Sánchez, 2009).
The long history of inequality and structural violence, the direct physical violence
against residents of Comuna 13 by the state in the military operations of the early 2000s,
and this entrenched outsider mentality experienced by Afro-Colombian youth all have
direct implications for citizenship and participation. The difference in youth’s civic
subjectivities in Son Batá compared to the other groups I studied was palpable; the
distance between them and public institutions is not only geographically greater (since
they live in the upper reaches of Comuna 13), but also symbolically, politically, and
culturally greater. The barriers to participation in public life and to a sense of empowered
citizenship—even a sense of belonging as a citizen—are not only socioeconomic, but
also cultural, political, and racial. Son Batá’s youth leaders see this as triple
marginalization: first as Afro-Colombian youth, second as youth whose culture does not
prepare them well for political participation because of its historical marginalization, and
third as youth from the stigmatized Comuna 13. In the words of one of Son Batá’s
founders,
Afro-Colombians are usually located in the periferia of the cities, in the most
hostile places, in the places where fewest institutions exist, where the fewest
opportunities exist. . . . Normally in the barrios in the outskirts of the city la
ciudadanía no llega [citizenship and civic culture do not arrive here]; exercising
your rights, participating in the development of the community . . . in the Afro-
Colombian population there is a reluctance to participate, and indifference in
terms of the process of developing their communities. Because our parents
haven’t taught it to us, because they came to this city to work and that’s it. . . .
What we live day to day is violence, social exclusion, racial exclusion and
marginality.
196

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
196
Interview with male founding member 1 of Son Batá, Medellín, February 22, 2011.
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181!
181!
He commented that Medellín’s city council lacked a single Afro-Colombian
representative,
197
and that generations of Afro-Colombian youth had grown up without
seeing themselves represented in positions of power; in other words, they had few, if any,
powerful referentes in the realms of civic and political life. Another of Son Batá’s
founders expressed their sense of invisibility in the public sphere thusly:
[W]e’re in a city that isn't ours, but many of us were born here; I was born here. I
think that Afro-Colombian culture has contributed a lot to the construction of this
city. But what happens is that the Afro-Colombian population is invisible to the
local state, or rather there’s an ignorance on the part of the local state; the mayor’s
office doesn't know how many Afro-Colombians there are in Medellín, in what
conditions we’re living, and how many arrive every month due to constant forced
displacement. . . . [A]nd they don't recognize that we have educated and built this
city. These contributions are made invisible, not to mention culture, music,
dance.
198

The members of Son Batá see this as a self-perpetuating cycle of marginality and
violence that they are fighting to escape: “The only way to break this cycle is to
recuperate and wake up the capacity of children to dream at an early age; that’s why Son
Batá focuses on the artistic process.”
199
Like La Elite, artistic and cultural expression—in
this case, Afro-Colombian forms—become the space in which individuals may gain a
sense of empowerment, cultural and social norms may be changed, nonviolent
embodiments of power and success can be modeled, and civic and political engagement
can be promoted with the aim of demarginalizing the Afro-Colombian community.
Our focus on Afro-Colombian culture isn’t to rescue our values, but to
conscientizar [raise critical awareness among] the population that we have to be
active political agents in our city. . . . [W]e have to have a more protagonistic,
more decisive role in our city. . . . We are influencing youth to study, to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
197
A separate Consejo Municipal para Asuntos y Políticas Públicas de las Comunidades Afrodescendientes
(Council on Afro-Colombian Affairs and Public Policy) was created in 2006. However, it remains
relatively marginalized and its powers limited; the center of power and decision-making in the city resides
primarily with the general City Council and the Mayor’s Office.
198
Interview with male founding member 2 of Son Batá, Medellín, April 11, 2011.
199
Ibid.
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182!
participate in political projects for our community; la política [politics and public
policy] is our responsibility also.
200

A female member, age 24, articulated the connection in this way:
We can contribute to greater things than staying here working in construction,
being a housewife, which is what people say I’m destined to do. This doesn’t
depend on the characteristics or color of my skin, nor of my socioeconomic status;
these are my dreams and if I want to be a lawyer I’ll be one, if I want to be a
doctor, I’ll be one because I have the same capacities as everyone else, but I have
to assert my rights and also be responsible with my duties.
201

Because relatively few other examples exist, members of Son Batá have to model these
kinds of outcomes for their younger mentees and to the public. The Fajardo
administration’s improvement of public schools and scholarships for higher education
have helped to make this a possibility. Yet Son Batá is also modeling other forms of
accomplishment, like becoming successful musicians for hire at local, national, and
international events, including opening for a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in Bogotá
and appearing on Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony’s reality television show Q’Viva:
The Chosen, in Los Angeles, California.
202
Like La Elite, Son Batá has made notable
inroads in promoting public participation through a variety of tactics.

Cultural Tactics of Participation
Much of the power of participation lies in the ability to influence decisions that
directly affect one’s individual and community wellbeing. This requires the ability to
access and participate effectively in spaces of decision-making and public influence. La
Elite and Son Batá promote cultures of participation through tactics that 1) help reduce
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
200
Interview with male founding member 1 of Son Batá, Medellín, February 22, 2011.
201
Interview with female member of Son Batá, Medellín, February 22, 2011.
202
See Conclusion.
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!
183!
183!
barriers to participation and 2) help develop youths' capacities to participate effectively.
Here, I analyze four tactics in particular, starting with two that help reduce the barriers to
participation: the use of culture both to resignify youth subjectivities and the kinds of life
choices available to them, and to reterritorialize public space. Next, I analyze tactics that
develop the capacity of youth to participate in public life: the cultivation of critical
consciousness and empowerment through popular education and horizontal learning, and
enacting a more participatory culture through processes of participatory decision-making.

Reducing Barriers to Participation: Resignification and Reterritorialization
They give the impression of symbolic guerrilleros whose battle
field is the urban space.
– Leslie Serna
203

In a context in which their subjectivities as poor, Afro-Colombian youth from
Comuna 13 render them either invisible or criminal (that is, visible in the wrong way),
participation in public life for members of Son Batá must begin with a resignification of
their subjectivities; for some, it is even seen as a matter of life and death. Converting
themselves into nonviolent public figures with a higher degree of positive visibility has
provided what one member described as a sort of shield that helps protect the members of
their collective from being implicated in the gang violence entrenched in their
community. Despite having lost some members of the collective to the violence
(commonly understood to have been caught in a crossfire or misidentified and killed
mistakenly), “we have arrived at a conclusion and that is that the more visible [you are],
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
203
Serna (2000) in Garcés Montoya (2010).
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184!
the more bullet-proof you are because a person that appears in the media, in interviews, a
person that is constantly working for the community and that won’t just be like any other
death, people will think twice before attacking you.”
204

Through their participation in what has become a very successful music and
cultural collective, members of Son Batá have gained a degree of positive visibility,
respect, and social capital unprecedented in their community and the city at large. In
doing so, they have resignified their subjectivities at a number of levels, starting in their
neighborhood:
Twenty kids on a terrace at 6pm, in a city, in a comuna where normally
you're accustomed to hearing gun shots. . . . [T]o suddenly hear the sound
of musical instruments, laughter, songs; everyone comes out to their
balconies, windows, to see what they’re doing. From there more kids
began to want to imitate this, they began to grab pots, lids, spoons, things
from the kitchen, and they began to try to make the music that we were
playing with the instruments. . . . [S]o it was no longer a process for us to
learn music but it had become a referente for the community. They called
us “los músicos de la terraza.” “There go the musicians from the terrace.”
And more kids would want to make music, and it was a tremendous chain
reaction that achieved acceptance, legitimation.
205

[K]ids are constantly seeing war . . . but if we sow this [Son Batá] in their
mind, we are the referent, the role models that they will follow . . .
examples of personal growth and triumph, of youth that finish high school
despite the difficulties.
206

The physical performance of culture is important here. Whether on a terrace or a
rooftop in their neighborhood, on stage in the center of the city, or performing on
television, their bodies literally enact their self-actualized empowerment and the
commitment they have made to a more participatory, nonviolent culture and lifestyle.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
204
Interview with male founding member 2 of Son Batá, Medellín, April 11, 2011.
205
Interview with male founding member 2 of Son Batá, Medellín, February 22, 2011.
206
Interview with male founding member 2 of Son Batá, Medellín, April 11, 2011.
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!
185!
185!
Through their performance, Son Batá physically stake a claim about the change they are
working to bring about, positioning themselves as role models while also living the
experience of peace and empowerment as they perform.
207
Particularly for Afro-
Colombian youth, whose bodies are so imbued with criminality by the mainstream media
and in the dominant narrative of the city’s recent history, the physical performances of
groups like Son Batá are acts of political and cultural resistance, resignification and
reterritorialization.
The accomplishments and public visibility of Son Batá offer an alternative vision
of success and power for local children and youth. Participation in a gang may be forgone
for participation in a widely respected cultural practice that—importantly—may also
generate income for members and their families through contracted performances. Son
Batá’s music, dance and theater groups are hired to perform locally and nationally;
payment is split amongst the performers, who in turn “donate” 30% of their earnings
back to the collective to help cover administrative and supply costs.
208
Income generation
is one of several goals of the collective, which they see as a form of community
development, as well as a tool for reducing youth participation in gang violence. In this
sense, the collective is also resignifying economic possibility for local youth,
intentionally aiming to replace guns with instruments as tools for income generation.
The collective’s identity is explicitly linked to the valorization and promotion of
Afro-Colombian culture, and participation in the collective appears to promote greater
critical consciousness and identity formation in relation to members’ Afro-Colombian
subjectivities. To one member,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
207
Rodríguez, 2011, pp. 256-257, for a relevant discussion of performance.
208
This form of income generation for sustaining the collective itself was unique among my cases.
!
!
186!
186!
Son Batá was like this ray of sun . . . [illuminating] that I have to
recognize my history, I have to value myself for who I am. . . . [T[hrough
Son Batá I started to construct my identity as a person. . . . When I began
to know this history, learn our rights through Son Batá, was when I could
rightly say to people: the fact that we are Afros doesn't mean that we are
all the same. . . . [W]e are very different, we don’t all have the same
dreams or know how to dance (as they stigmatize us . . . Afro-Colombian
women have to know how to dance and as I have always said I don’t know
how to dance) but there are other things that we like, that we like to study.
. . . [W]e are human beings above all. . . . We have already accomplished a
lot in the city; people recognize us, they know our story.
209

Some members reported gaining a sense of both self-respect and the respect of the public,
including from representatives of the municipal government.
210
Thus, participating in Son
Batá may resignify both individual subjectivities, as well as Afro-Colombian subjectivity
in the city at large.
Finally, through cultural participation, Son Batá works to resignify Comuna 13 as
a “territory of artists”—and in doing so, enact a sort of reterritorialization. This is a theme
that runs through their discourse and events (see Figure 4.3). In sum, through
participation, Son Batá is resignifying youth and Afro-Colombian subjectivities;
perceived modes of access to power and income; and the public image of Comuna 13 as a
territory of artists, rather than of armed gangs and sicarios (hitmen).
Similarly, one of the tactics employed by La Elite is using hip hop culture to
reterritorialize public space and resignify it from a space controlled through armed
violence to one of nonviolent youth empowerment, community solidarity, and
participation. The limited public space that existed in Comuna 13 prior to the Fajardo
administration was typically controlled and surveilled by armed groups (who were
mainly youth, too). The administration’s institutional efforts to both reclaim public
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
209
Interview with female member of Son Batá, Medellín, March 11, 2011.
210
Various interviews, Medellín, 2011.
!
!
187!
187!
spaces and forge new ones has been met with the appropriation of these spaces by the
hoppers, most clearly exemplified in their use of the patio of the San Javier Park Library
(where I first met JEIHHCO and El Perro) for breakdancing practice. On any given day,
to enter the library, you pass by girls, boys, young men, and young women practicing
their dance moves and developing choreography as music plays out of a hand-held stereo.
In a sense, they are performing a symbolic and physical re-territorializing of what was
once (and in some cases, continues to be) contested space, their bodies expressing the
commitment they have made to a nonviolent lifestyle.
Residents of Comuna 13—and several other parts of the city—must navigate the
fronteras invisibles (invisible borders) that are violently enforced by competing armed
gangs block to block throughout the comuna; this heavily restricts residents' mobility and
often threaten the lives of youth (see Chapter 2). In their use of public spaces like the
patio of the library for breakdancing, the hoppers literally perform a kind of public
mobility that contrasts with the restrictions placed on physical mobility in their daily
lives.
Until only a few months ago we were restricted from using public space between
one block and another within our neighborhood because there was an armed
group for each block. So we often used hip hop as a shield; people would get to
know us [as hoppers] and because of that sometimes we could pass from one
place to another. But as time passes the armed actors change; one goes, another
comes, including sometimes they’re not even the youth of our comuna, but they
send people from other neighborhoods to defend their interests, so there’s been a
big problem of restriction [of mobility].
. . .

[W]e even defy some invisible borders, challenging the borders that exist—we
know they are real, they’re invisible but palpable—because we’ve unfortunately
lost some members of the hip hop community.
211

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211
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, July 18, 2011.
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188!
Several hoppers have been killed in this dynamic, including four in Comuna 13 during
the ten months of my field research.
212

Youth in Comuna 13 have also been subject to state-imposed curfews that further
restrict their mobility and affect the organizing of events like hip hop concerts,
but similarly we take over the spaces, fields, high schools; we’re there creating
hip hop, having events, doing “battles” in the auditoriums . . . not just because of
the slogan of the mayor's office [“Medellín: A meeting space for citizens”] but
because it’s a struggle we’ve been waging for a while now . . . the struggle to
recover all of these spaces, precisely because they are public spaces, they are
ours.
213

These hoppers tactically reterritorialize public space, playing on terrain imposed on them
in the ongoing struggle between the state and conflicting armed gangs—all of whom
understand public spaces as spaces in which control is exerted.
The activity that most animates the hip hop collective La Elite is its annual two-
day hip hop festival, Revolución Sin Muertos, held in a sports field in the Comuna 13.
Local and national artists apply to gain a place in the lineup of performers, and a well-
known hip hop group from elsewhere in Colombia or abroad is invited to headline when
the budget permits. In 2010, Revolución Sin Muertos drew an estimated 20,000–30,000
people (its largest audience by the time of my research) from across the city and country
to a comuna that is otherwise rarely visited by nonresidents.
Members of La Elite see the festival as a cultural, social, and political intervention
by youth. They feel they are offering a platform for youth to develop and showcase their
identities as artists, helping to create alternative “life options” (including earning a small
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
212
This led some hip hoppers and their supporters to speculate as to whether hip hop activists were being
targeted by armed gangs because of their nonviolent agenda. However, the predominant opinion at the time
was that the only difference between hip hop activists and other youth caught in the crossfire of gang
warfare is that their deaths received more publicity in the media due to their public profile. Opinions on the
matter differ and continue to change.
213
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, July 18, 2011.
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189!
income for their performances), and presenting a positive public image of youth.
214

Members experience the festival as something that brings them pride, respect, and
visibility among other youth, adults, and the media:
It’s a very important event and everyone wants to be there to see what the youth
are creating . . . the will and strength of each youth in the comuna. . . . Especially
the parents come to see what the youth are doing. It’s an event created by youth,
so everyone’s like, “I'm going to go have a look, these guys are doing something
productive, I can let my child go [to the festival].”
215

The success of the festival—evidenced by attendance, public support, and its growing
reputation nationally and internationally—is seen by members of La Elite as proof that
their work, and hip hop culture more broadly, can help youth to choose life paths that do
not involve violence. The accomplishment of putting on the festival becomes
representative of the capacity of youth to accomplish other dreams. In this sense, they see
Revolución Sin Muertos as a positive referente for other youth, as well as a political
intervention that demonstrates an alternative to the culture of violence; through it, they
resignify youth subjectivities and the culture that constrains them.
To understand whether audience members perceived the Revolución Sin Muertos
festival in similar ways, I carried out a semi-structured qualitative survey during the first
day of the 2011 festival, with the help of volunteer assistants who were both local and
foreign.
216
Of the 57 audience respondents, approximately 70% identified themselves as
associated with hip hop culture, either as hip hop artists or fans. While many reported
coming to the concert to enjoy the entertainment, the majority perceived the festival’s
primary significance to be its promotion of convivencia (peaceful coexistence). Eighty-
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214
Various interviews, Medellín, 2011.
215
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, July 18, 2011.
216
See Appendix C.
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190!
190!
four percent (84%) viewed the festival as having a positive impact on Comuna 13,
particularly as an event signifying peace, peacebuilding, and positive youth self-
expression. Seventy percent (70%) felt that the festival had a positive impact on the city
as a whole, primarily as a signifier of peaceful coexistence among people from different
territorios (regions, local and beyond), and of social change through music. “For the city
this [festival] is very important. . . . [E]very time it grows larger and creates more and
more distance between people and guns, so that they choose rap instead of killing
someone.”
217
“I have seen examples. I have seen kids who were in armed gangs, they’ve
come together in the comuna and they left that behind. . . . I like this festival because it
brings together the youth of the comuna and they realize there’s a lot of talent [here], and
that the right path isn’t drugs or arms but these festivals.”
218
“It is like a tool that
transforms the city, that is transforming the youth, that is making people’s consciousness
evolve and this is important—that youth are involving themselves in this and not in other
things.”
219
Such responses support the analysis that, by cultivating critical consciousness
(or what Paulo Freire called conscientization
220
), La Elite’s work has become a force for
cultural change, an impact that I analyze further in the section on popular education.
In addition to resignification, Revolución Sin Muertos has the effect of
reterritorializing Comuna 13 for the two days of the festival, drawing residents of the city
who would otherwise not risk traveling to the neighborhood in which the concert takes
place. This includes residents of neighboring barrios controlled by competing gangs, and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
217
Male survey respondent, age 20.
218
Male respondent, age 60.
219
Male respondent, age 22.
220
“Conscientization,” or conscientizaçao, “refers to learning to perceive social, political and economic
contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Freire, 2003, p. 35). The
importance of conscientization, for Freire, was that people need to perceive the causes of their reality in
order to bring about change (ibid., p. 131).
!
!
191!
191!
residents from less marginalized communities around the city who otherwise rarely, if
ever, come to this part of Comuna 13. The location of the festival is intentional and
strategic on the part of La Elite, to promote precisely this transcendence of invisible
borders.
From the last house in the uppermost neighborhood they come down on foot
without caring that they’re crossing [an invisible] border. . . . There are people
who normally can’t come down here but they’re like, “I can’t miss this concert,
Los Aldeanos [a Cuban hip hop group that headlined in 2010], the groups from
the comuna, or the group my friend is in who lives below, I’ll risk it or go all the
way around to attend the concert with my friends.” . . . This concert mobilizes
people. . . . Because there are times when you feel trapped, that you can’t go out.
I’ve also felt that way because everyone knows me, but just because I was from
one part of the Comuna, I was associated with those combos [armed gangs].
221

Figure 4.4. Breakdancing performance, Revolución Sin Muertos Hip Hop Festival, 2011.
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221
Interview with member of La Elite, Medellín, July 18, 2011.
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192!

Of the audience survey respondents, 43% were from Comuna 13, but the majority had
traveled from other parts of the city to attend the festival. Only eight survey respondents
(14 %) expressed any degree of concern about their safety in traveling to or from the
festival. In the six years the festival had run by the time of my research, there were no
documented violent incidents with armed gangs in or around it; local gangs appear to
respect and even appreciate the concert—and the work of La Elite more broadly—
sometimes attending as audience members.
222
They must be unarmed to enter the venue.
One 18-year-old respondent from another comuna said, “Before, people spoke
badly about this neighborhood but now I see that everything has changed.” While clearly
everything has not changed, this response reflects both the stigmatization of Comuna 13,
as well as the general sense of peace and stability at the festival. The festival was
perceived as transcending the invisible borders: “Hip hop for the comuna means that we
come together, people of all the different barrios, we knock down the invisible borders
. . . the invisible borders stop here, we see that there are no borders.”
223
The fact that this
statement was made by a 60-year-old attendee not directly affiliated with La Elite
suggests that their tactics to resignify and reterritorialize public space in the comuna into
spaces of peaceful public gathering, self-expression, and cultural performance are having
an impact on a broader public.
Graffiti is another tactic of participation that symbolically reterritorializes public
space. Graffiti is a literal marking (through stylized spray painting) of one’s artistic
territory that has historically included transgressive “tagging” of public property, such as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
222
Various interviews, Medellín, 2011.
223
Male survey respondent, age 60.
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193!
subway trains, bridges, and buildings. It is also a display of the artist’s unique style and
skill; graffiti artists typically develop their own tags (a stylized, spray-painted signature)
and a particular aesthetic meant to be recognizable as their own.

Figure 4.5. Graffiti artist tags an overturned couch during a march against the violence in
Comuna 13.

While graffiti started in Medellín (as elsewhere) as a clandestine activity carried
out largely under cover of darkness, over the past two decades it has become widely
accepted by the public as a form of public art, and it adorns vast swaths of the city’s
walls. Graffiti and grafiteros (graffiti artists) have been resignified from illicit to
legitimate—and even appreciated—in the public sphere. In a mutually reinforcing way,
this acceptance has brought graffiti artists financial and material support to produce more
complex and larger paintings, as well as the opportunity to do them in broad daylight.
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194!
194!
Graffiti artists may attain some degree of cultural capital as public artists—a personally
empowering experience for youth who attain it—that, in a small number of cases, has
resulted in opportunities for economic capital through commissioned works. For
example, the municipal government and some NGOs have hired young hip hop graffiti
artists to paint public murals.
Through their art, grafiteros in Medellín have also been able to transcend some of
the restrictions on mobility experienced by other youth. They have done this by
networking themselves, such that,
almost all of the graffiti artists know each other and they can all go to other parts
of the city to paint, obviously with the help of someone from that area. Here in
Medellín invisible borders don’t exist between graffiti artists. You won’t clash
with another graffiti artist from that area because there’s like this agreement
between everyone and it’s very cool because you can paint where you want—
obviously, respecting the pieces of others because one has to respect the work that
others do.
But at times, yes, invisible borders exist between los malos.
224
It’s more
for other people than for graffiti artists. . . . People can’t pass between one
neighborhood and another because of the intolerance that the armed youth feel,
they distrust everyone; so being a youth in a neighborhood that isn’t yours makes
you a target because they think you’re going to harm them in some way or cause a
problem.
. . . If I go with someone known in the neighborhood, the [gangs] will let me
paint. I’ve even had experiences where I’m painting, and los malos arrive and tell
me that that the piece is turning out cool, and that I can paint there whenever I
want. . . . Yes, being a grafitero has served me as a shield; being part of La Elite
has also served me well.
225

The cultural practices of La Elite and Son Batá have thus become resources for
resignifying their subjectivities from potentially criminal youth into respected artists, for
fashioning themselves as public figures that serve as positive role models for other youth,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
224
Los malos (“the bad guys”) is used to refer to illegal armed actors without having to name any in
particular. See Riaño-Alcalá (2006, 2010) for further discussion of the cautious use of language among
youth in Medellín to discuss the dynamics of the conflict.
225
Interview with El Perro, Medellín, July 18, 2011.
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195!
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for encouraging public participation, for challenging invisible borders, and for
reterritorializing public space.
226
And through cultural performance, they practice
nonviolent participation in the public sphere, enacting a more participatory culture and
prefiguring peaceful coexistence. “In this way, they dare to deconstruct discourses
established at the centers of power, and, even better, begin also to deconstruct the
stigmatizing imaginaries that predetermine the condition of their youth” (Uribe Neira et
al., 2009, p. 35). These tactics reduce some of the barriers to the participation of youth in
the public sphere, creating modes and spaces of participation in which they may be
recognized, respected, and heard.

Developing the Capacity to Participate: Popular Education and Participatory Decision-
Making
The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one
really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical process to
date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an
inventory.
– Antonio Gramsci (1971)

Popular education and horizontal learning
Popular education is a pedagogical philosophy that has been practiced in social
justice movements in much of Latin America and elsewhere since the middle of the 20th
century. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire helped to theorize and popularize several
principles of this pedagogical approach, including horizontal processes of learning and
decision-making, as opposed to what he called the “banking method” of traditional
education, in which “the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as
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226
For more on youth, territoriality, and uses of public space in Medellín, see Uribe Neira et al. (2009) and
Riaño-Alcalá (2006, 2010).
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196!
receiving, filing, and storing the deposits” (2003, p. 72). Instead, Freire emphasized
dialogical communication, cultural specificity, and the valuing of local and popular
knowledge—with the goal of conscientization—to empower traditionally marginalized
groups and increase their participation in decision-making and social change.
La Elite runs a popular education “school” that blends some of these principles of
popular education with those of hip hop. La Escuela de Hip Hop Kolacho (The Kolacho
School of Hip Hop) is an initiative of “education and social outreach directed at children
and youth of the Comuna 13 to promote the principles of non-violence, respect for
diversity, community work and solidarity through the art of hip hop.”
227
Between 10 and
15 established members of La Elite are selected by consensus of the network to be
“popular educators” and offer daily or weekly workshops in the arts of graffiti, rap,
breakdancing, and DJing. The workshops teach the technical skills of each element, but
also address issues of gender equity, civic and political participation, how to organize and
promote events, and how to seek resources for the ongoing practice of each art form. La
Elite sees this as a way to offer the children and youth of Comuna 13 an alternative to
joining a gang, and to develop themselves personally, artistically, civically, and
politically.
While members of La Elite have long carried out informal practices of mentorship
to pass on the four elements of hip hop, the municipal government offered to finance a
pilot of a more formalized mentoring process starting in 2010. This was prompted by the
death of the hip hop artist, activist, and member of La Elite known as “Kolacho” in
August of 2009, which had drawn renewed media and public attention to the violence
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
227
La Elite project document, n.d.
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affecting youth in the comuna. The municipal government perceived La Elite and their
social capital in Comuna 13 as a valuable resource for preventing future gang
membership. The Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana funded three months of workshops
with modest salaries for La Elite’s popular educators. The network expected
approximately 150 participants, but 345 children and youth between the ages of 10 and
20 attempted to enroll. They accommodated approximately 265 participants.
The Kolacho School of Hip Hop is not the first of its kind; popular education has
flourished in the city since the 1980s in the form of hip hop, theater, animation, and other
grassroots cultural and communication projects. Popular education was first propagated
in Medellín by liberation theologians working in the poorer neighborhoods of the city in
the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, youth movements and other grassroots initiatives had
adopted such practices.
The first popular education school of hip hop in Medellín that was recognized as
such was founded in the 1990s and has spread to become a network of schools known as
Cultura y Libertad (Culture and Liberty; García Guzmán & Giraldo Obando, 2011). By
2011, there were hip hop “schools” in many of the low-income areas of the city. In
addition, the Fajardo administration (staffed by several former community organizers
with experience in popular education) began to institutionalize the concept in the mid-
2000s, helping to create and finance popular education schools for sports, music, cultural
centers, and community media.
La Elite’s approach to the Kolacho School is based on horizontal learning; one of
its stated objectives is to cultivate self-empowered youth citizens through “a process of
learning in which the educator and the learner are in continual individual and collective
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transformation.”
228
Students are intentionally referred to as participants or asistentes al
taller (workshop attendees), rather than students. As a popular educator of graffiti,
explained, “I don't try to teach like a professor, but rather more like a friend that can offer
them some knowledge . . . so that they don’t see me as the person that knows the most,
but as another participant exploring different approaches. . . . [I]t’s a space that belongs to
everyone.”
229
One of the original founders of La Elite and one of its oldest members at
the time of my research added, “What we want is to create a space of equality where all
of the kids see each other equally. When I give a hip hop workshop to children or youth I
go not to teach, but to show a little bit of what I know and to learn a little from what the
kids know.”
230

While the initiative is still incipient, La Elite members have observed various
early signs of impact. El Perro, for example, observed that there is now more graffiti in
the comuna by new artists from the school, and,
this has various implications. It’s political, because someone stopping to paint
graffiti in the street is already political, it’s a political act. Because politics is not
just about who is speaking from a political party but is about how people debate
and speak out about something. I also think it’s cultural because you can see more
hip hop culture in the city, you breathe more hip hop. . . . [V]arious kids who
unfortunately had contact with armed gangs have shown up at my class and asked
me permission to be in it. They said they wanted to participate and learn about hip
hop and that they wanted to be like me. For me, this is making an impact because
it’s very cool to see that I’m doing positive work, and that the kids really are
looking for a different path.
231

The clearest immediate impact of the Kolacho school is the personal and
leadership development of the youth and young adult members of La Elite who are
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228
La Elite project document, n.d.
229
Interview with El Perro, Medellín, April 25, 2011.
230
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, July 17, 2011.
231
Interview with El Perro, Medellín, April 25, 2011.
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199!
leading the workshops. Interviews with them reflected a degree of pride in the
responsibility they had taken on, and a sense of becoming a positive referente or a public
figure respected not only by the school’s participants but also by their parents—with
whom they had experienced an immediate shift in the typical youth-adult relation of
power. Several interviewees recounted with surprise that parents of their workshop
participants had come to them asking for advice about their children: “[T]hat a person
older than you takes your opinions into account on such important matters such as how
their child behaves at home is really gratifying; the parents are giving us their trust and
believe in us.”
232
In tandem, workshop facilitators acknowledged that feeling a greater
sense of responsibility was affecting their composure and daily behavior, such as how
they dressed, how they spoke, and whether or not they chose to consume alcohol and
drugs.
I think that La Elite has a lot of responsibility, actually it’s not that we have it it’s
that we want to assume it, the responsibility of influencing more youth. We want
the violence in the comuna to cease. If a kid doesn’t have any way to help his
mom nor the resources to study, we try to take responsibility so that they come to
us and we help. That’s why we look for resources wherever they can be found,
that’s why we founded the school, so that kids aren’t out on the street corner with
nothing to do. . . . [I]f the kid has nothing to do then they can come here and we’ll
teach them how to draw. . . . [M]any parents now trust us, so these are
responsibilities.
233

This recognition by adults is a transformative stage in the development of their public
subjectivities.
The financing of the school illustrates one dimension of the synergistic and
conflictual relationship between institutional and non-institutional efforts to promote
participation. Funding for the Kolacho School was first offered by the municipal
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
232
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, April 25, 2011.
233
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, April 14, 2011.
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government’s Secretaría de Gobierno (Ministry of Government), which runs a
controversial initiative, Fuerza Joven (Youth Power) that targets at-risk youth and offers
incentives for gang members to disarm. The youth I interviewed in Medellín were widely
critical of this initiative, because they see it as ineffective at keeping young people out of
gangs; they argue that many simply turn in a gun, receive the incentives, and then return
to gang life, and thus the initiative may, in fact, provide greater incentives to own a gun
than to join a nonviolent youth group. They argue that the culture of violence (as well as
its economy) remains unchanged.
Four members of La Elite, between the ages of 18 and 25, attended meetings with
the municipal government to negotiate the terms of the collaboration for the launch of the
Kolacho School:
We had to go to the mayor’s office with proposals of what we wanted to do. . . .
[T]hey sent us to Fuerza Joven, which is a process for high-risk youth, but
obviously we said “but we’re not high risk youth, we don’t want to be involved in
any gang, we are very clear about what we want.” An intense discussion began
because we didn’t want to participate in any way with Fuerza Joven, in other
words the money had to come from somewhere else because we wouldn’t touch
that, because we’re not in agreement and because the kids that are involved in
[Fuerza Joven] are those that have guns and are in gangs but we’re very clear that
that’s not our thing, our thing is music and art. . . . We fought with them over this
and said no, so they decided to send the money to the Secretaría de Cultura
Ciudadana so we calmed down and started talking to Yesid [Henao, Deputy
Minister of Metrojuventud, in the department of youth programs in the Ministry
of Civic Culture].
234

This negotiation illustrates a moment in which institutional strategies and grassroots
tactics clashed in the process of trying to institutionalize youth participation. In this case,
it was largely a productive tension in which youth leaders asserted a position of power (to
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234
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, April 14, 2011.
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which the government ceded in the negotiation), strengthening their public voice and
learning more about navigating institutional systems in the process.
235

Son Batá holds similar popular education-style workshops for local youth and
children in music, theater, and dance. These are also meant to develop a critical
consciousness among participants about their Afro-Colombian heritage, human rights,
self-enfranchisement, and participation in local politics and community development. As
one of the co-founders explained, the aim is
to conscientizar the public that we have to be active political agents in our
city, to begin to change our cycle, to begin to change our reality . . . [so]
that the Afro-Colombian population begins to have another status, another
level of participation. . . . [W]e [Son Batá] already have another
perspective . . . not such a negative perspective but a perspective more of
analysis, of understanding things to be able to propose solutions to
things.
236

As a result, Son Batá has become known by some in Comuna 13 as “educadores del
barrio” (neighborhood or community educators; Saldarriaga, 2011). These initiatives of
Son Batá’s and La Elite’s integrate cultural, political, and civic participation as a form of
critical social practice—or praxis—and in so doing, develop participants’ capacities to
participate in public life.
Popular education has thus continued to thrive as a praxis in the Medellín context,
though its methodologies, philosophy, and boundaries are often loose and amorphous.
Recent efforts to re-theorize a participatory pedagogy for the digital age—from Freirian,
Marxist, and Habermasian approaches (see Castells et al., 1999), to those of scholars of
digital media and learning (primarily in the United States and Europe; see, e.g., the
MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative)—suggest that it remains
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235
Ibid.
236
Interview with male founding member 1 of Son Batá, Medellín, February 22, 2011.
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relevant across different fields of theory and practice, despite the fact that these fields
have rarely overlapped to date. Key concepts that resonate across both the U.S. digital
media and learning scholarship and Latin American approaches to popular education
include the importance of horizontal learning and mentorship, self-representation and
cultivating “voice” (see Chapter 5), collaboration, and collective intelligence.
237
Much of
this work also theorizes engagement with cultural material (e.g., remixing music into hip
hop songs) as a sort of gateway to or facilitator of participation in public life (see, e.g.,
Ito, 2010; Kahne, Lee, & Feezell, 2011; Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2013; Kligler-
Vilenchik, 2013). The cases of La Elite and Son Batá both exemplify this gateway
dynamic, while also illustrating the crucial role that education and horizontal learning can
play in preparing people to participate effectively in public life, and in strengthening
youth movements.

Participatory decision-making
Participation can be understood as having a voice in decisions that affect an
individual’s and his or her community’s wellbeing (see Chapter 5); one could argue that a
participatory culture should be characterized as such based upon whether participants
have meaningful influence over decisions that affect themselves, their communities of
practice, and ultimately the culture itself. In such a context, the process of decision-
making becomes central and, as the case of La Elite illustrates, can be understood as a
tactic of grassroots participation. This is particularly significant for youth cultures that
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237
On collective intelligence, see Lévy (1999). See also Jenkins et al. (2006) and Lankshear and Knobel
(2006).
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interface with institutionalized processes, the latter being much more vertical in their
decision-making structures.
La Elite makes decisions in their weekly assembly meetings, to which
representatives of each hip hop group are meant to attend as per their network’s rules.
238

All major decisions of the network are made in these meetings, either by consensus or
voting. At the time of my research in 2011, the network had started placing an expressly
political emphasis on making decisions by consensus, which they saw as more truly
democratic than decision by vote. While such participatory decision-making is often
time-consuming, members showed a remarkable degree of commitment to the process.
This included sitting through several hours of meetings that often took most of an
afternoon; some interviewees lamented that the time they spent in meetings detracted
significantly from the time they had to practice their music or art, and yet they still
remained committed to decision-by-consensus.
239
The assembly meetings I observed
contained moments of tension as well as solidarity and consensus, often fluctuating
quickly between the two as debates about the network’s various activities, commitments,
resources, and priorities unfolded. The identity of the collective itself is imbricated in this
participatory decision-making process.
Horizontality is often articulated as a central characteristic of a participatory
communication (see, e.g., Gumucio Dagron & Tufte, 2006; Servaes, 2008; Tufte &
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
238
Attendance fluctuates, but in the six meetings I observed, there were between 20 and 25 participants on
average, for the 23 groups of the network. At the time of my research, JEIHHCO, who held the title of
“Coordinador General” (General Coordinator) for the network, typically facilitated the assemblies,
suggesting a number of agenda items and asking participants to contribute additional topics for discussion.
239
Various interviews with members of La Elite, Medellín, July, 2011; interview with government
administrator from the department of youth programs, Medellín, May 17, 2011. When time-sensitive
decisions were made without the input of the full network, tensions arose and were openly voiced and
debated in subsequent assembly meetings, often accompanied by accusations of self-interest.
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Mefalopulos, 2009), and is either seen by supporters as fundamental to social justice, or
dismissed by critics as impractical, inefficient, and ineffective (Cooke & Kothari, 2001;
Heeks, 1999). As an outcome of La Elite’s increased collaboration with such institutional
bodies as the municipal government and foundations (primarily in the form of funded
contracts and grants), La Elite began to “professionalize” themselves as an organization,
implementing a somewhat more hierarchically structured organizational form than they
had previously, and developing a multi-year strategic plan through the participation of
approximately 35 of the network’s members.
240
Institutional, “adult logics,” such as
organizational structure and strategy, were thus being integrated into La Elite’s practices
of participation; their tactics were, in a sense, becoming more strategic.
241

Yet despite these shifts toward somewhat more institutional, hierarchically
structured practices, the vast majority of decision-making within the network remained
participatory. In his chapter “From Participation to Power,” Christopher Kelty asks, “are
networks and hierarchies mutually exclusive?” The case of La Elite reflects continual
negotiation between institutional, relatively hierarchical strategies, and more tactical,
horizontal, networked approaches to youth participation. What emerges is not necessarily
contradictory or mutually exclusive, but a productive dialectic in which power and the
terms of participation are constantly being negotiated not only between youth themselves,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
240
For example, by 2011 there were eight “coordinators” taking on leadership roles heading up six
committees, but who still answered to La Elite as a whole. For more detailed information on the
organizational structure of the network at the time of this research, refer to Appendix B.
241
While the network has been critiqued by other members of the hip hop community who see these
strategies as signs of becoming dependent upon or beholden to traditional authorities (such as the municipal
government), I found this critique to be largely inaccurate based on my observations of La Elite’s
relationship with the government, the network’s daily operations, and its ongoing commitment to resistant
or alternative practices of participation. There are greater threats to the network’s autonomy and
sustainability, such as the internal tensions that arise over the distribution of the limited funding they raise;
and in many instances, members of La Elite have experienced a greater sense of empowerment in their
dealings with the government than a dynamic of dependency. Raising funds for their annual hip hop
festival and the school, however, remains their greatest challenge.
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but also between the youth and the “adult” institutions with which they engage. For
example, within the more formalized organizing structure of La Elite’s committees, some
of my interviewees reported additional mentoring and learning of new skills:
[I]n the fundraising committee I’ve learned a lot because I didn’t know how to
develop a project, send a letter, draw up documents and in this committee I’ve had
the opportunity to learn who to reach out to, if I have a proposal who to address it
to, what entities might support us. . . . [T]he good thing is that if you don’t know
something, there are others that help you, they sort of leave their legacy there.
242

These are civic and political skills (organizing, campaign-building, fundraising, proposal-
writing, negotiation, leadership, etc.), which are not typically learned in most traditional
education. The committees ideally offer a slightly more formalized space for mentorship
that also projects a certain formality and legitimacy to other institutions and the public,
while still maintaining a relatively open and horizontal structure, as well as the pre-
existing informal mentorship that has long been a part of La Elite’s culture.
The institutional support offered by the Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes-YMCA
(such as assistance in administering their finances and contracts; see Appendix B)
provides certain resources that enable La Elite to remain open and relatively
uninstitutionalized, while at the same time rendering it capable of engaging with formal
institutions to obtain resources for their activities. This model of collaboration is one of
mutual benefit; it helps to protect the autonomy of the youth collective (and its identity as
a youth-run, participatory initiative), while also enabling it to interface with state and
other institutions. The Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes, in turn, receives a great deal of
added attention, visibility, and credibility among state and donor institutions for being
allied with such a successful youth initiative. This symbiotic relationship provides a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
242
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, April 25, 2011.
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model of how horizontal and vertical organizing structures may operate synergistically,
while still promoting participatory decision-making that empowers participants to
influence the direction of the group.
That said, discourses of participation have frequently conflated participation with
“purely” horizontal decision-making, something that any analysis of relations of power at
the micro level would have to problematize. Even if the aim is to promote perfectly equal
relations of power, participation in decision-making happens with varying degrees of
“voice” and influence, due to the existing social configurations of power in which such
processes are embedded (see Chapter 5). For example, in the case of La Elite, the low
participation of women in leadership positions reflects the ongoing gender disparities
within the collective, as well as in the hip hop movement in Medellín more broadly. The
lower participation rates of women—compounded by the legacy of gender discrimination
in society at large—means that women’s interests and perspectives have less influence
over the network’s activities and over hip hop culture more broadly. Addressing this issue
was one of the strategic goals of the network at the time of my research, toward which
they had progressed at least at the level of discourse (according to the female members
interviewed
243
), and in practice among the few members (four female, one male) of the
committee on gender. Participatory decision-making is no panacea; but in the case of La
Elite, it is both a structural and cultural practice (a system and a mindset) through which
its members experience—and prefigure—a more participatory culture.
What I have labeled here as “tactics” of grassroots youth participation through
cultural practices (the symbolic resignification of youth subjectivities; the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
243
Various interviews with female members of La Elite, Medellín, 2011.
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207!
reterritorialization of public space; popular education and horizontal learning; and
participatory decision-making) promoted greater youth participation in public life in
Medellín. These tactics helped to reduce the barriers of participation for some youth
244
,
while also strengthening these youths’ capacities to participate. Through them, spaces
and cultures of participation (or participatory cultures) were forged. Many participants
articulated a sense of empowerment and greater self-efficacy; they gained some
recognition and legitimacy in the eyes of their communities and government institutions;
they developed a collective identity and cultivated a commitment to working for the
betterment of their communities; and they acquired some of the skills necessary to do so.
The following section analyzes how these tactics function in both synergy and tension
with institutional modes of participation. Without these tactics, effective youth
participation in institutional spaces of participation would be unlikely.

Navigating Institutional Strategies of Participation: Youth Tactics in the
Participatory Budgeting Process
One of the most productive intersections of strategies and tactics of participation
occurs through youth collectives’ engagement with the participatory budgeting process.
As discussed in Chapter 3, the participatory budgeting process is a contested terrain of
institutionalized participation. Here, I trace the involvement of La Elite in Comuna 13’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
244
It is important to note that this remains a minority of youth in Comuna 13. See below for a discussion of
the limits of participation in these collectives.
!
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208!
participatory budgeting process as a crucial intersection of tactics and strategies of
participation characterized by both synergy and tension.
245

Comuna 13 has been a central focus of municipal strategies of participation, and it
receives the largest budget allocation for its participatory budgeting process, both because
of its economic deficit, and because of the city’s “social debt” to the comuna (Angarita
Cañas et al., 2008). Youth have played a significant role in the process here, as well as in
other comunas. In turn, participatory budgeting has impacted the ecology of youth
organizing by increasing allocations of funding for youth-related programs (particularly
cultural initiatives; see Chapter 3), and by providing a civic and political education for
the youth delegates, developing both their capacities and reputations as community
leaders.
This is partly because youth over the age of 14 may become delegates in the
participatory budgeting process, either by popular vote, or by being endorsed by a legally
established local community organization to represent it in the process.
246
La Elite has
used both approaches, though primarily the latter, obtaining endorsements from a number
of organizations with which the network’s members are individually affiliated, and thus
placing several delegates in the participatory budgeting process every year. In 2011, there
were eight delegates (out of 378) in Comuna 13’s participatory budgeting process that
were La Elite network members.
247
My interviewees saw the process of becoming a
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245
While some members of Son Batá are very active in participatory budgeting, it is not one of their
primary sources of funding, and as such, it is somewhat less of a focus of their efforts compared to La Elite.
I focus primarily on La Elite here, with select references to Son Batá’s participation.
246
Chapter 3 details the structure and procedures (as well as the history) of the participatory budgeting
process in Medellín.
247
Personal Correspondence, Subsecretaría de Planeación y Presupuesto Participativo (Sub-Ministry of
Planning and Participatory Budgeting), Secretaría de Participación Ciudadana (Ministry of Civic
!
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209!
delegate as very bureaucratic, as it requires the collection and filing of paperwork; in fact,
some members have been vetted out of the process due to lack of signatures, late filing,
or for having missed participatory budgeting meetings in previous years. Yet many also
critiqued the political structures that predated the participatory budgeting, such as the
Juntas de Acción Comunal
248
(Community Action Boards) and Juntas Administradoras
Locales (Local Administrative Boards), as corrupt and controlled by the self-interest of
traditional power holders. For these youth, participatory budgeting is seen as an imperfect
improvement in the governance system and a space in which they have had greater
success in participating.
While initially funded through alternative (nongovernmental) sources, La Elite
has financed the majority of its annual hip hop festival, Revolución Sin Muertos, through
participatory budgeting allocations in 2006 and 2008–2011. In 2010, through its
participation in various participatory budgeting working groups, La Elite helped channel
the equivalent of nearly US$120,000 toward the hip hop festival—a remarkable sum in
this context.
249
However, due to the government’s rules and regulations of contracting,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Participation), July, 2012. Since La Elite began participating in participatory budgeting in 2005, they have
typically placed six to nine delegates into the process each year.
248
The JAC are elected citizens’ committees for each comuna established to promote participatory
democracy and local development. JACs were established by law in 1958. Colombian sociologist and
advocate of citizen participation Orlando Fals Borda contributed to the development of the concept; they
were meant to promote peaceful coexistence by involving community members in local development
decisions (Jaramillo, Mora, & Cubides, 1986, in Rodríguez, 2011). The JAC played a significant role in
social justice movements at the time (Rodríguez, 2011). The JALs, another comuna-based committee
elected by popular vote, were established later, mandated by the Colombian constitution to improve public
services and municipal development through citizen participation and oversight. In some cases, the JACs
and JALs in Medellín have come to be shaped by dominant power holders in the comunas and subject to
corruption and clientelism, rather than entities that promote diverse and transparent participation. By the
time of my research, these structures of participation were seen by my youth interviewees as representing
the “old school,” or as dominated by “traditional” power holders, while groups like La Elite represented the
newest generation of activists trying to forge new cultures of participation.
249
This estimate is based on figures provided by La Elite and Metrojuventud, the department of youth
programs in the municipal government. The youth network that has raised the most funds to date through
participation in participatory budgeting is the hip hop movement in Comuna 4 (best known for the group
!
!
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210!
these funds were not awarded directly to La Elite, but rather, to contractors whose
proposals won the bids to provide each service needed for the festival.
250
Such
experiences prompted widespread critique from La Elite and other youth groups who
participate in participatory budgeting, but which are not legally formalized as
organizations and therefore cannot compete for the contracts resulting from the
allocations. Many youth expressed frustration that their ideas were implemented by other
entities who might not stay true to the initial intent of the proposed project, or might not
implement it in the manner the youth had envisioned.
251
From the perspective of
government staff, such regulations protect abuse of the participatory budgeting process
for individual benefit and are required to legitimate and protect the investment of public
funds.
252

La Elite operated within—and in many ways embraced—the procedures
established by the municipal government for participatory budgeting, but they also took
advantage of the opportunities it afforded, playing within this institutional terrain and
“poaching” this space of participation in the service of youth and hip hop culture. La
Elite’s more experienced delegates fanned out across nearly all of the working groups of
the participatory budgeting process—e.g., education, culture, youth programs,
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Crew Peligrosos), which, since 2006, has benefitted from the cumulative allocation of over US$450,000
(information provided by the Sub-Ministry Metrojuventud, 2011).
250
Members of La Elite carried out their work organizing the festival for free.
251
Various interviews, Medellín, 2011.
252
Various interviews with municipal government staff, Medellín, 2011. Son Batá has the legal status to
contract with the government, but it has many critiques of the process. One member of Son Batá explained
that, “Son Batá as such doesn’t [frequently] participate in contracting [with the government on projects
resulting from participatory budgeting funding allocations] because of the dynamics of the mayor’s office
process. Like, a project that was going to be carried out over eight months you have to execute in three
months, so you and your organization end up looking bad, you do the work poorly, not in the way you had
planned. So Son Batá doesn’t engage in contracting with the mayor’s office, but we do engage in political
spaces [like participatory budgeting] because that is where important decisions are made in terms of the
direction of the city” (Interview with male founding member 2 of Son Batá, Medellín, April 11, 2011). This
is another example of tensions between institutional/state and grassroots approaches to participation.
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convivencia (peaceful coexistence), etc.—taking their younger delegates with them to
learn how to effectively participate, as well as to add their vote to each committee. In the
network’s weekly assemblies, they reached a consensus in advance on which initiatives
their delegates would propose in the budgeting process, so that delegates across each
working group were working to secure resources for the same initiatives. Often, the
network would also coordinate with other youth groups, including Son Batá, or with
other leaders sympathetic to youth concerns, to mobilize as many delegate votes in
support of youth-focused initiatives as possible. As one former delegate from La Elite
told me, “obviously since it’s all by vote, it depends on the alliances that you make within
each working group.”
253
As a result of the alliances they have made, youth participation
in Comuna 13’s participatory budgeting was largely responsible for the fact that, at the
time of this research, the greatest allocation of funds was to arts and culture initiatives
(Saldarriaga, 2011).
Such tactics have received significant criticism and pushback by adult participants
in the process (particularly those whose traditional hold on power in the comuna is
threatened). However, a former technical director of participatory budgeting in the
municipal administration saw these tactics in a positive light:
The youth have succeeded in getting themselves into working groups that are
different than those that naturally correspond to youth, which is culture and art.
. . . And this was difficult, there was confrontation, older adults were saying,
“Why, if they already have a working group to go to for their festivals?” and
JEIHHCO was one of the youth who said to each working group successively,
“I’m sorry, but a festival without the convivencia component is useless. We need
people here that work for the promotion of peace and coexistence that we can
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253
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, April 14, 2011.
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coordinate with for the festival.” So, they have successfully converted themselves
into political strategists of their own development.
254

The strong presence of youth delegates and the influence of groups like La Elite has
posed a challenge to existing relations of power in the comuna, and to hegemonic
conceptions of community development.
We go there to pelear [argue or fight], so to speak, with the traditional political
community of this comuna, who are older adults; men of 40 years or older who
were the dueños [owners] and the presidents of the Juntas de Acción Comunal,
the Junta Administradora Local. They keep a certain distance from us because the
problem with them is that they don’t see development if there isn’t cement. . . .
[I]f there isn’t a new street supposedly there isn’t development. . . . For them, the
only form of development of the comuna and of community participation is
building a new street and putting the community to work there. . . . [B]ecause of
this we scatter various youth across different working groups and there they make
the argument for giving more resources to culture, health, education—finding
resources wherever we can to try to be self-sustaining.
255

So while a clear outcome of youth participation in participatory budgeting has been an
increase in budget allocation toward cultural initiatives, youth delegates also engage in
other areas of political debate in order to influence local development, and they have a
direct impact on decisions made for the comuna.
256
The concept and terms of community
development are debated and contested in this process.
According to some of the youth delegates interviewed, the significant influence of
youth in Comuna 13’s participatory budgeting process was intentionally blocked by
traditional power holders in the 2010 budgeting cycle. Several youth were prevented
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254
Interview with former senior government administrator and participatory budgeting administrator,
Medellín, April 12, 2011.
255
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, July 18, 2011. Clemencia Rodríguez has pointed out
that older leaders and members of the Juntas de Acción Comunal may prioritize public works not as part of
an instrumental or neoliberal agenda, but rather, because of their experience fighting to bring basic
infrastructure into these neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s (personal correspondence, August 21,
2012).
256
Serving the interest of the comuna (and not just their own group) was a goal shared by the more than 10
youth delegates I interviewed in Comuna 13.
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from assuming their delegate roles through charges of absenteeism, incorrectly filed
paperwork, or representing community organizations that did not fully meet the criteria
for participation. According to one youth delegate,
all of the important [youth] leaders were pulled out of the process, [including]
some members of [La Elite and] Son Batá, for reasons of supposedly not having
enough signatures or the signatures never arrived, things like that. . . . This was in
2010. In 2009 nearly 50% of the participants in participatory budgeting were
youth and the majority of the budget was allocated to youth programs, culture,
and education. So, seeing that they were losing the wall for the neighborhood, the
stairs, all of that . . . they tried to take us out [of the process] the next year.
257

This claim was not fully verifiable, but it reflects intergenerational tensions and struggles
between youth organizers and traditional power holders in the comuna that play out in
this space of institutionalized participation.
On the other hand, many adult delegates appeared to respect the youth’s
contributions and visions for development. In a July 2011 meeting of the working group
on culture that I observed, several delegates (primarily adults not affiliated with La Elite)
repeatedly referenced Revolución Sin Muertos; the event appeared to be widely viewed
as a well-established and valuable annual activity for the comuna.
For those youth who have participated in the participatory budgeting process, a
significant outcome of the experience has been learning how to navigate institutional
political processes and local power relations. All of the youth delegates (former or
present) interviewed reported having learned various civic, political, and leadership
skills. One of the most active and publicly recognized members of La Elite stated,
For me personally, the majority of my training was because of participatory
budgeting. Learning to speak, to justify why hip hop is important, learning how to
create initiatives, do projects, learning about the laws, statutes, decrees, learning
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257
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, April 14, 2011 (1).
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to tolerate others and how diversity works. If you go and listen to the elderly
wanting to do a dance project—wow, what a beautiful thing! So they should get
some funding, it doesn’t matter if less is left for the rest of us; so this also gets us
to support the comuna. We also learn about bad behavior and what not to do . . .
we learn to recognize and anticipate the corrupt leaders.
258

A younger member reported,
It’s been really important because obviously you learn to defend yourself and
defend what you want and you realize how things work within participatory
budgeting, how you have to argue . . . [and] gather contacts; often people from the
mayor’s office or from many important places go. You make alliances so you
know who you can count on and who you can’t. So for me this experience has
been very important but also very difficult because you realize that when you’re a
leader they want to cut you down from your position. . . . By the second year you
already know how things go in participatory budgeting . . . already you start to
make yourself noticed as a leader, people begin to recognize you, you learn to
reason more, to know how and when you have to say things.
259

In one of the participatory budgeting meetings I attended (the Economic
Development working group), four members of Son Batá were present as delegates;
260

the one female delegate (age 24) was acting as the secretary of the working group, and
another male delegate, also 24, was sitting in as the temporary chair of the meeting. The
two most significant positions within the meeting were thus being held by Afro-
Colombian youth from one of the most marginalized parts of the comuna; they were
participating both to promote the agenda of Afro-Colombian youth, as well as to
influence how other development projects were prioritized for the comuna. As a delegate
from La Elite argued, “youth have a lot of influence [in Comuna 13’s participatory
budgeting], we’ve empowered ourselves in this process over time and in reality we’re the
ones pushing the process.”
261
The former technical director of the process agrees:
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258
Interview, male member of La Elite, Medellín, July 21, 2011.
259
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, April 14, 2011 (1).
260
By 2011, more than 10 different members of Son Batá had acted as delegates in Comuna 13’s
participatory budgeting process, some serving in multiple years (interview with male founding member 2 of
Son Batá, Medellín, April 11, 2011).
261
Interview with male member of La Elite, Medellín, April 14, 2011 (2).
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“[Y]outh at the moment are really making decisions, with some tools that permit them to
approach the public administration in a transparent way.”
262
Of course, as explained in
Chapter 3, this refers to a proportionately small number of Medellín's youth, but it is
significant nonetheless.
While all of the youth delegates interviewed remained critical of several aspects
of the participatory budgeting process, they also expressed a sense of empowerment,
influence, and accomplishment through their participation. They perceived positive
outcomes of their participation at the individual (personal), group
(organizational/collective), and community (comuna) levels; this included developing
leadership skills, attaining resources and public support for their collective’s activities,
and helping to influence the development of the comuna through budgetary allocations.
Participatory budgeting has appealed to youth who are not drawn to other, more
traditional political participation; in La Elite’s case, their members consistently expressed
disinterest in participating in the Consejo Municipal de Juventud (a youth council run by
the municipal government), but proactively engaged in participatory budgeting. While a
primary attraction to it is the possibility of channeling resources toward the hip hop
movement, the opportunities to influence other local initiatives and establish themselves
as local leaders were also important motives.
The work of groups like La Elite and Son Batá, which practice new cultures of
participation that aim to reconfigure how people relate to and interact with their
communities, is a crucial complement to the macro-level structural change that
participatory budgeting represents. Without cultural change, the structure of participation
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262
Interview with former senior government administrator and participatory budgeting administrator,
Medellín, April 12, 2011.
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promoted by participatory budgeting is likely to catalyze only limited changes in relations
of power.
There is thus a productive, dialectic relationship between this institutionalized
form of participation and alternative, relatively uninstitutionalized youth movements.
This relationship is characterized by both tension (e.g., between institutional, hierarchical
bureaucracies, and more horizontal, autonomous youth practices) and synergy (e.g.,
between the benefits youth leaders attain through participating, and the slight increase in
legitimacy gained by the government in otherwise hostile neighborhoods). Strategies
attempt to incorporate tactics, and tactics adapt to take advantage of strategies; all
capitalize on discourses and practices of participation.

The Role of Communication and New Media Technologies, by Way of a Brief
Example

Thus far I have traced some of the ways in which youth in Comuna 13 have
intervened in the realms of culture and politics and helped forge a more participatory
public culture. A third and crucial dimension of analysis is the role that communicative
practices played in this dynamic. The communicative elements of all of the participatory
activities analyzed above are largely self-evident, such as the dialogical processes of
collective decision-making, and the communication of cultural and political messages
through hip hop and other artistic genres. Here, I focus on the role of digital
communication, specifically how social media platforms were utilized to enhance these
youth practices and their impact.
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Most of the activities of La Elite and Son Batá predate the widespread adoption of
social media platforms in the mid to late 2000s; and participatory forms of
communication have been practiced by similar youth collectives for decades. However,
the networked capacities for sharing information and user-generated content that
characterize social media platforms have significantly reduced the costs of
communication, networking, and mobilization.
At the time of my research, most youth in lower-income neighborhoods in
Medellín accessed the Internet in schools, public libraries, or Internet cafés at minimal or
no cost, thanks in part to recent efforts by the municipal government to provide Internet
access throughout the city (see Chapter 5). The online social network Facebook was used
among youth in Medellín as a relatively public space (as opposed to a closed social
network, which was the intended purpose of an early iteration of the platform), and as a
primary communication tool in addition to cellular phones.
263
Among the youth
collectives I interviewed, “status updates”
264
posted to Facebook had largely replaced the
need for printing flyers and posters to mobilize public participation in their activities.
While private communication occurred using Facebook’s chat and messaging features,
status updates tended to be very publically oriented, such as announcements and links to
a new hip hop song, publishing the schedule of concerts and festivals, or recruiting
participants for the popular education schools run by both Son Batá and La Elite.
Facebook was the primary tool used by both collectives to mobilize their audiences;
while very few owned a personal computer or a smart phone with private Internet access,
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263
Internet World Stats (2011) reports that approximately 37% of all Colombians used Facebook in 2011.
To my knowledge, nearly all of the youth interviewed for this study used Facebook. See Chapter 1.
264
Status updates allow users to post messages to their network of “friends” on Facebook. Friends may
respond with a comment or by clicking the “like” button. In some cases, status updates prompt online
conversations between multiple users.
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nearly all of my youth interviewees from the two groups each had over 1,500 Facebook
“friends,” and many had several thousand.
Facebook status updates were also used dialogically. For example, La Elite
elicited requests from their Facebook “publics” about which hip hop groups to recruit to
headline the Revolución Sin Muertos festival; extensive online discussion ensued.
Dialogue with the municipal government also occurred on Facebook; my interviewees
reported using Facebook and Twitter regularly to communicate with government staff.
Figure 4.6 shows a brief example of two messages from youth organizers (P1 and P2, one
of whom is part of the hip hop movement but not a member of La Elite or Son Batá), to
staff (M1 and M2) in the department of youth programs in the municipal government,
following the March 2011 murders of two hip hoppers in Comuna 13.
265

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All user names have been blackout out.
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Figure 4.6. Screen shot of a Facebook dialogue, Medellín, March 2011. M1 and M2 were
staff in the municipal government at the time. P1 and P2 are informal youth organizers.

Translation:
P1: Another artist dead in Comuna 13, and nothing is happening. . . . [I]s
it that they have to kill Juanes for people to recognize the city is in crisis?
M2: Not Juanes nor anyone else. . . . [Y]ou know that every day we are
working so that this doesn’t happen [in the future].
P2: What anguish. . . . [W]ith every death the pain, rage and
despair/hopelessness grows.
M1: Let’s not succumb to tragedy. Every death should build our strength
and will power to keep combating the hate and terror. What we need least
now is pessimism and divisiveness.

In this exchange, Facebook users P1 and P2 directly pressured youth-focused
representatives of the municipal government through a semi-public conversation on
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Facebook.
266
In this screen shot, we see 18 participants but cannot ascertain how many
others read this dialogue, or subsequent comments; however, based on each participant’s
Facebook friend network, it is safe to assume that several thousand people—if not tens of
thousands—had access to this conversation.
267
Several similar comments circulated; a
member of Son Batá posted, “Gentlemen of the Mayor’s Office, How many youth artists
from Comuna 13 need to die before there will be real security measures put in place [to
protect] our projects?”
268

Shortly after this dialogue, youth and community leaders (including members of
La Elite and Son Batá) organized a march protesting the violence, largely using status
updates and Facebook groups to mobilize participants. Subsequent Facebook status
updates requested transportation and other forms of support from the mayor’s office, to
enable more youth to participate in the march. Ultimately, the municipal government
(specifically, the department to which M1 and M2 in Figure 4.6 belong) supported the
march by providing logistical resources for the concert following it. It is highly unlikely
that the mobilization—organized in a couple of days—would have reached the same
scale and drawn the same degree of attention from the local government (and
subsequently, the media), without the use of these online communication tools.
269

The semi-public visibility of these exchanges was important; Facebook served as
a kind of public sphere, predominantly of youth, but also—crucially—including
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266
“El Gordo” is the stage name of one of the deceased hoppers; Juanes is the stage name of a world-
renowned Colombian pop star from Medellín.
267
The participants in the dialogue average approximately 2,800 Facebook “friends” each, and there were
18 different users who had commented or “liked” this dialogue at the time of the screen capture; meaning at
least 18 users made the dialogue visible to their own Facebook friend networks. However, it is likely that
many of these Facebook friend networks overlap significantly.
268
Facebook status update posted by a member of Son Batá, April, 2011.
269
Reports of the size of the march vary between 1,000 and 2,000 estimated participants (“Capturan a dos
presunto asesinos,” 2011; Monroy Giraldo & Guillermo Duque, 2011).
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government administrators. It is one in which youth not only attempt to dialogue with
270
,
but openly criticize, the government. In a related example, a member of La Elite posted
this commentary criticizing the mayoral administration that followed Salazar’s, led by
Aníbal Gaviria of the traditional Colombian Liberal Party:
Concerts like this are good and necessary in the city because they are spaces
where we youth can demonstrate that we are agents of change and of positive
transformation for society, but, they shouldn’t be used as a public relations
campaign to try to recuperate the image of an administration that has done little
for the youth of Medellín. . . . [It is] using a discourse of youth deciding and
participating, when [all that] they offer are buses and concerts so that the
community is convinced that they are participating and deciding. The only thing
this does is make youth participate in media and administrative circuses, to
distract people from the real problems and realities of the city and distance them
even more from true spaces of influence and decision.
271

In addition to being a forum for critique and for contacting representatives in the
municipal government, Son Batá and La Elite members see Facebook as a key resource
for making their work more visible,
272
and for marketing and contracting out their
services as musical performers. They also see it as a space in which to counter
mainstream media frames, illustrating the interconnectedness of culture, politics, and
communication in these youths’ approaches to participatory culture. New media
technologies have not shaped these participatory cultures, but they have strengthened
them, in some cases reducing the costs of organizing, and enabling scale shifts (Tarrow,
2005) in their visibility and mobilizations (e.g., from localized to citywide). The
networked, user-generated platforms that characterize social media have offered
additional spaces in which La Elite, Son Batá, and other youth organizers can connect,
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270
Future research could consider the quality, outcomes, and limitations of the dialogue that occurs online
between citizen and government actors in this context. I begin to address relevant questions in Chapter 5.
271
Facebook status update posted by a member of La Elite, August, 2013.
272
They also frequently use YouTube to distribute videos of their songs and performances online.
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share information, dialogue, and even speak directly to government representatives—
reducing the barriers to participation and bolstering their capacity to participate in public
life. I further explore digital communication technologies and their uses in relation to
public life in Chapter 5.

Challenges of and to Participation
It is perhaps easy to romanticize these youth collectives. Yet the cases of La Elite
and Son Batá illustrate ways in which discourses of participation may obfuscate and
perpetuate existing hegemonies, inequalities, and marginalizations. While Son Batá and
La Elite represent an alternative to gang violence chosen by many youth, these are still
only a small proportion of Comuna 13’s over 18,000 youth between the ages of 15 and 29
(DANE & Municipio de Medellin, 2010a). They do not represent the youth of Comuna
13 at large, and they may not catalyze widespread change for youth outside of these
collectives. And in some ways, the power and visibility they have gained create new
hegemonies that—however unintentionally—leave other youth overshadowed on the
periphery. As one of the most demographically diverse comunas in the city, Comuna 13
is home to many youth who do not identify with Afro-Colombian or hip hop culture and
therefore do not experience these groups as opportunities for participation. These youth
collectives are clearly not a panacea for all social inequalities, nor are they examples of
perfect participation. (There are, of course, no perfectly balanced relations of power, and
no perfectly inclusive practices of participation.) There are many imperfections,
limitations, and challenges in the work of these youth collectives that must be
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acknowledged; here, I consider those most relevant to a broader discussion of
participatory culture.
Gender disparities and the problematic position of Afro-Colombian youth were
two issues that emerged from these cases, to say nothing of another group that remains
nearly invisible across most of the city—Medellín’s indigenous populations. Regrettably,
the lack of visibility of indigenous youth groups and other logistical constraints on this
research limited their inclusion in this study. So while these cases illustrate the
empowerment of some groups, they also point to the ongoing marginalization of others.
Sustainability is another challenge. It remains unclear what will happen to
collectives like La Elite or Son Batá if any of the following enabling factors change: if
their access to financial and other resources eventually have a distracting, if not
dependency-producing, corrupting, or divisive effect; if traditional power brokers reclaim
some of the influence they have ceded or lost to these groups; if pressures to
institutionalize youth collectives diminish their resonance with, and effectiveness for,
youth; or crucially, if their members (particularly their most charismatic and effective
leaders) find greater economic stability through other forms of employment and thus
withdraw from participating. All of the youth collectives I studied while in Medellín had
a small number (often two or three) of particularly strong, charismatic leaders within the
group, the exits of whom would likely drastically affect its future.
One additional concern that merits mention here (a point several interviewees
outside of these collectives made) is the way in which the rhetoric of violence is
exploited by these youth collectives just as much as—if not more so than—discourses of
participation. Both groups constantly reference the violence in the comuna as one of their
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raisons d'être; they have developed a sort of discursive dependency on the trope of
violence that may pose a challenge to changing that same culture of violence. This is in
part a direct response to—and a cooptation of—the predominant rhetoric in the
mainstream media. Yet while many of their references to violence can be seen as part of
their tactics to resignify cultural codes (such as claiming that their words, drums, or paint
cans are their “weapons”), they can also be understood as perpetuating the very discourse
that has marginalized their subjectivities. Lastly, as a point of comparison, one might
study the internal dynamics of armed gangs, youth subjectivities, and participation, as
armed gangs have their own cultural and pedagogical processes for developing youth
participation in alternative systems of power. And while it cannot be argued that armed
gangs in Medellín promote a more participatory public culture, they appear to meet some
of the same needs (e.g., providing a sense of belonging) that the youth collectives do.

Conclusion: The Role of Culture in Participatory Public Culture
Today it is clear that the youth of the city are effective protagonists in
creating their own symbols of resistance, counter-cultural proposals and
critique—in many cases proposing solutions, in the face of an
anachronistic political system.
– Gloria Patricia Uribe Neira
273

In the cases of La Elite and Son Batá, and in other collectives elsewhere in the
city (Garcés Montoya, 2010), youth access and wield power in large part through cultural
practices. Their politics are enacted in and through the space of culture, and the lines
between the two are constantly, and often inextricably, blurred. Mexican youth culture
scholar Rossana Reguillo (2003) calls this the “culturization of politics.” In these cases,
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273
Uribe Neira et al., 2009, p. 33.
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participatory culture becomes a resource for cultural, political, and in some instances,
structural change.
Rather than being attracted first by a political agenda for social change, youth
often join these collectives out of an interest in cultural self-expression and the social
status that may follow it (a relatively individualist motive). Yet in belonging to and
working with a collective, individual and collective identity are cultivated in relation to
the context in which the youth are living; within this process, politicization occurs both
intentionally and spontaneously through the shared discourse and daily activities of the
collective.
La Elite, in particular, developed its own internal group culture characterized by
horizontality and collectivism, but not corporatism—that is, they cultivated collective
identities and practices, but they also supported the development and expression of
individual identity. In other words, while they were relatively communitarian in nature,
they also valorized personal development and self-expression of the individual.
Using hip hop and other music genres to promote a culture of nonviolence among
youth in marginalized urban neighborhoods is not new.
274
What is distinct about these
cases in Medellín is how they interface with state strategies to promote participation and
more democratic governance. The dialectic relationship between youth tactics and state
strategies weaves a distinct sociopolitical fabric of participation in Medellín from which
we can learn about the relationship between cultural and structural change. The
progressive, grassroots-friendly stance of certain government representatives and offices
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274
One example is AfroReggae in Brazil (see Yúdice, 2001).
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has been crucial to the development of this sociopolitical fabric in favor of greater
participation, advancing stances such as these:
Institutions are obligated to detach themselves from their omnipotent
roles, and instead to create conditions that favor intergenerational
interaction and integration, through the valorizing of these [youth] forms
of expression, of the creation of symbols and meanings that are ever
renewed, through which youth name and remake life. . . . Public
institutions have a responsibility to continue supporting the strengthening
of youth group processes in accordance with social and political
participation. Nonetheless, it is recommended that special attention be
given to the tendency to institutionalize the youth processes, which is
almost always a result of state intervention.
275

This research-based policy recommendation speaks to the intentional but nuanced stance
on youth participation developed by actors with community-based experience. It
underscores the complex but potentially productive relationship between institutional and
non-institutional approaches to public participation.
Without these grassroots tactics of participation, it is unlikely that youth
engagement in public life would be as significant. The municipal administration’s
strategies for participation have inevitably been more structural; and while such changes
may occur more quickly (such as implementing a participatory budgeting process,
allocating more resources to public education, providing Internet access, or other
measures to address economic inequality), the ultimate efficacy of their strategies rests on
the extent of cultural change occurring in society in tandem.
Cultural and structural change are thus interdependent, yet they do not occur in
the same ways or in the same time frame. Medellín is a case that illustrates efforts across
different levels of society to change both through participation, with a notable degree of
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275
From a 2009 city-wide study of youth groups co-published by the municipal government and an
association of non-governmental organizations (Uribe Neira et al., 2009, p. 36).
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synergy between the two. The three primary factors that have enabled this synergy are: 1)
a youth movement fueled by collectives that promote proactive citizenship and—while
maintaining a critical stance—engage with the local government; 2) institutional entities
such as the Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes and participatory budgeting that facilitate
youth participation in public life (e.g., through leadership training and administrative or
logistical support), but do not try to overly appropriate and control it (see Appendix B);
and 3) a municipal administration sympathetic to community-based organizing that has
implemented initiatives aimed at engaging disenfranchised groups. These three factors
are mutually reinforcing.
In sum, the cases of La Elite and Son Batá offer examples of several tactics of
participation in public life: resignification, reterritorialization, popular education and
horizontal learning, and participatory decision-making. These tactics are also mutually
reinforcing. They reduce the barriers to youth participation and increase youths’ capacity
to do so, and they also prefigure the characteristics of a more participatory public culture.
By negotiating the relationship between tactics and strategies in this ecology of
participation, youth in Comuna 13 are articulating alternative forms of self-actualized
citizenship (Bennett, 2008; see Chapter 1)—citizenship based on the notions of
participation and horizontality, rather than representation; and on cultural/social change,
rather than traditional politics and dominant notions of development.
276
These are helping
to (re)shape public culture in Comuna 13 and in the city more broadly. The surprise I
experienced when youth hip hop activists offered me the cell phone numbers of
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276
This includes development agendas advanced by previous generations of community and social
movement leaders. I am indebted to Clemencia Rodríguez for pointing this out.
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municipal government officials thus started to make sense as I learned more about the
sociopolitical ecology of participation in Medellín.
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CHAPTER 5: Communication, Digital Citizenship, and Participation

Digital Culture initiatives can play a fundamental role in shaking away the inertia of the
traditional politics that has secluded society from public life, generating a vacuum of
critical political thinking and even producing cynicism, especially in the governmental
sector. We need to acknowledge that traditional politics is failing in advancing
democracy and social development.
– Gilberto Gil
277

So proclaimed the internationally renowned musician and former Minister of
Culture of Brazil, the country that now leads Latin America in digital culture and
innovation. During his tenure in the cabinet (2003–2008), Gil joined the clarion call of
cyber optimists worldwide who see digital communication technologies and their
surrounding cultures of use as resources to advance democratic practices, citizen
participation, and social inclusion.
There are many recent examples worldwide of civic/political engagement and
transnational activism being enhanced by the use of online, user-generated content
(UGC) platforms or “social media”
278
: the high participation of youth in Barack Obama’s
2008 U.S. presidential campaign, the Saffron Revolution, the Arab Spring, and the
Occupy movement, to name a few. All of these seem a testament to the potential for
harnessing Internet platforms to increase public participation and amplify citizen voices.
Many see the Internet as providing new spaces for public dialogue and deliberation, and
the tools for the participatory shaping of these very spaces (e.g., Benkler, 2006; Bollier,
2008; Chadwick, 2006 in Carpentier, 2011; Kelty, 2008; Shirky, 2008). The interactive,
networked, horizontal, and in some cases, open architectures of Internet-based
communication platforms seem to far exceed the potential of older media, such as
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277
In de Luca Pretto & Bailey, 2010, p. 279.
278
Social media refers to digitally networked platforms for communicating and sharing user-generated
content (UGC), also commonly called Web 2.0.
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television, to engage citizens of all ages in discourse and action in public spheres. Yet
who participates, how, and with what impact, are fundamental questions—too often
overlooked—that loom over celebratory claims of the democratizing potential of the
Internet. Understanding the social implications of using digital communication
technologies for participation in public life requires case-based studies and contextual
specificity that take these questions into account.
Since the Fajardo administration (2004–2007), the municipal government of
Medellín has invested heavily in cultivating “digital citizens” as a way to increase social
inclusion and public participation, and as part of its broader development agenda to
become a “digital city.”
279
This is outlined in the government’s 2004–2007 Plan de
Desarollo (Development Plan) to encourage
the construction of a “Governable and Participatory Medellín” . . . promoting
citizen participation to help improve living conditions; a “Socially Inclusive
Medellín,” contributing to the quality of education and social inclusion through
access to technology; a “Productive, [and] Competitive . . . Medellín” . . . [to
meet] the competitive demands of the global economy; and a “Medellín
Integrated with the Region and the World,” allowing Medellín to interact with the
world through ICTs [information and communication technologies]. (Escobar
Arango, 2008, p. 34)
280

The government’s development agenda with regard to ICTs has taken form in various
ways. Most significantly, through Medellín Digital, it aims to integrate digital
communication tools and practices into all of the city’s public schools and, as a way to
increase efficiency and transparency, into some of its processes of governance. The
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279
The concept of a “digital city” was popularized in the mid-1990s, becoming somewhat of a buzz phrase
for certain commercial ICT systems and municipal e-government initiatives. It has been used to mean a
digitally-wired city (as in the case of Medellín), or metaphorically, to represent a virtual system (as in the
early case of America Online [see Ishida, 2000]). More recently, global rhetoric has shifted to “smart,”
rather than digital cities, with a broader focus on social and environmental capital, rather than solely on
ICTs. The municipal government’s initiative Medellín Digital has followed this trend.
280
This and all other translations in this chapter are mine, unless noted.
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government also hopes this will promote digital innovation and entrepreneurship in the
new technology sector. According to some, Medellín ranks highly in terms of
participation and inclusion through ICTs (see below). Others see the city as a potential
“Silicon Valley of Latin America” (Ha, 2012). Major corporate actors in the ICT sector,
like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, have taken notice of Medellín’s transformation and
brought some of their business to what is being called Latin America’s largest technology
district (Agencia EFE, 2013).
On the other end of the spectrum, grassroots actors, such as citizen bloggers,
online radio, and other alternative or community media, are also defining the relationship
between communication and participation in the city. One example is the Corporación
para la Comunicación Ciudad Comuna (the Ciudad Comuna Association for
Communication, referred to as “Ciudad Comuna”), a local, youth-driven community
media project that uses a variety of new and traditional media to meet its social and
development goals. Ciudad Comuna reflects both Latin America’s history of popular
communication, as well as innovations in the use of digital media to promote citizen
engagement.
Drawing on the two cases of Ciudad Comuna and Medellín Digital, this chapter
investigates the relationship between communication and participation by considering
both bottom-up and top-down initiatives that aim to promote public participation and
social inclusion using digital communication tools. The distinct ideologies, practices,
networks, and even software choices (i.e., open vs. closed platforms) of these various
initiatives result in different conceptions of digital inclusion, citizenship, and
participation that have fundamental implications for how we analyze participatory public
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culture. In considering these, the concepts of voice, digital citizenship, and the limits of
digital participation are interrogated. Dimensions for analysis of communicative practices
and spaces in relation to participatory public culture are proposed; namely, horizontality,
dialogue, openness, and autonomy.
Both Ciudad Comuna and Medellín Digital (which developed and operate
independently of one another) are relatively new; this study covers roughly the first five
years of their existence, spanning the time from 2006 to 2011/2012. These cases were
researched through a variety of methods, including approximately 25 in-depth interviews
with Ciudad Comuna participants, Medellín Digital staff, municipal and national
government officials, and representatives from other relevant organizations; participant
observation of workshops, events, and other activities; a memory-based research
workshop carried out with Ciudad Comuna in collaboration with the University of
Medellín; a review of documents, websites, and other content produced by each initiative;
and existing research by local scholars.
281

Medellín Digital and Ciudad Comuna are of different scales, societal levels, and
objectives, and therefore, they are not comparable cases in a strict sense. However,
contrasting them highlights crucial dynamics surrounding the questions of how
communication and participation are related, and how digital communication may bolster
participatory public cultures. The emphasis in the previous chapter on participatory
cultures that are not focused primarily on the digital public sphere serve as a counterpoint
to the potential technocentrism of this discussion, calling into question the tendency to
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281
Refer to Chapter 1 for details of the memory-based research workshop methodology.
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equate participatory culture with new media, or to assume that digital citizenship is
inherently participatory.

Communication and Society
La configuración de relaciones entre los componentes de una sociedad se da,
precisamente, en el espacio de la comunicación.

The configuration of relations between the components of a society occurs, precisely, in
the space of communication.
– Jesús Martín Barbero
282

I have argued throughout this study that theorizing participation in contemporary
public life necessitates thinking across the interrelated dimensions of politics, culture, and
communication. Here, I focus primarily on the role of communication, be it digital,
analogue, or face-to-face, in cultivating a more participatory society.
Communication is the process through which we articulate and share the
meanings that shape our realities. James Carey theorized communication as
a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and
transformed. . . . [R]eality is brought into existence, is produced, by
communication—by, in short, the construction, apprehension, and utilization of
symbolic forms. Reality, while not a mere function of symbolic forms, is
produced by terministic systems. . . . All human activity is such an exercise (can
one resist the word “ritual”?) in squaring the circle. We first produce the world by
symbolic work and then take up residence in the world we have produced. (1989,
pp. 43, 44, 46; emphasis added)

By using the term ritual to describe the process of communication, Carey emphasizes its
function in the social construction of society. This was meant as a direct challenge to
transmission models of communication dominant particularly in U.S. scholarship since
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282
In Villegas et al. 2005, p. 5.
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the 1920s; the transmission paradigm sees communication as a process through which
messages are transmitted from sender to receiver to achieve informational and persuasive
goals. This paradigm has been critiqued for being too linear and instrumental to
adequately describe the complexities of human communication, and for obfuscating the
social and cultural production that takes place in the way (or the “rituals” through which)
such information is communicated and received (Carey, 1989).
Carey’s ritual view of communication helps to frame an analysis of the
relationship between communication and participation; of the processes through which
discourses and practices of participation are created, imbued with meaning, and
maintained. Carey himself directly associates the ritual view of communication with the
term participation, as well as with “sharing” and “community,” seeing communication as
the process through which we create and represent shared beliefs (ibid., p. 40).
The discourses surrounding digital or “new” media are currently reshaping how
we think about communication, and suggest a growing predominance of the ritual view of
communication. This includes the proliferation of terms such as social or participatory
media; networks vs. channels of communication; communities of practice vs. audiences;
and even digital citizenship. In the digital age, the transmission view appears almost
secondary, as we strive to make sense of many-to-many or participatory flows of
communication. At the same time, transmission-model thinking is still pervasive in the
rhetoric and initiatives aimed at bridging the digital divide
283
by providing access to the
Internet as a channel for receiving information.
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283
The digital divide can be understood as “differential access to and use of the internet according to
gender, income, race and location” (Rice, 2002, p. 106). See also Norris (2003).
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Yet rather than seeing the transmission and ritual models of communication as a
binary, we must understand communication through both. That is, the transmission of
information occurs within and through communicative practices (rituals). These
communicative practices both shape and are shaped by cultural and social orders;
communication and society are mutually constitutive. Understanding the social
implications of using digital communication technologies for participation in public life
thus requires thinking through the lenses of both the transmission and ritual models. As
the cases below illustrate, promoting communication technology adoption for the
delivery of information (the transmission model paradigm) does not necessarily promote
more participatory cultures (the ritual model paradigm). Beyond simply identifying
whether certain discourses and practices reflect a transmission or ritual understanding of
the role of communication in participation in public life, however, this chapter asks:
What communicative practices help to promote citizen participation in the contemporary
moment, and what spaces or structures of communication support these?

Communication and Voice as Participation: Horizontality, Dialogue, Openness, and
Autonomy
Participation can be defined as having a voice in, or a degree of influence over,
decisions that affect one’s experience or wellbeing (Lapsansky, 2012). For example, as
discussed in Chapter 1, Paulo Freire characterized participation as being “an exercise in
voice, in having voice, in involvement, in decision making at certain levels of power . . .
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a right of citizenship” (in Castells et al., p. 88; see also Singhal & Devi, 2003; Tacchi &
Kiran, 2008).
284

The conflation of participation with having a voice is common. Cornwall rightly
pushes back against this when she argues that, “Being involved in a process is not
equivalent to having a voice... Translating voice into influence requires more than simply
effective ways of capturing what people want to say” (2008, p. 278). Rarely is the
concept of voice clearly defined or theorized. An exception is Nick Couldry’s Why voice
matters: Culture and politics after neoliberalism (2010), which suggests that a more
participatory, democratic culture is one that values voice and supports processes of public
expression. Couldry theorizes voice at two levels: first as “the process of giving an
account of oneself”; and second, “voice as a value . . . appreciates ways of organizing
human life that themselves put value on people’s opportunities for voice as a process”
(ibid., p. 100; emphasis added).
285
For Couldry, valuing voice is recognizing that humans
are fundamentally story-telling beings, and that “[t]he denial of this aspect of self is a
fundamental denial of someone's status as human” (ibid.; see also Bordenave, 1994).
However, voice conceived simply as an expression of opinion does not articulate
its relation to power or acknowledge the structural inequalities in which each individual
expression of voice is embedded. Couldry thus argues that the recognition of voice within
its particular context is central to a theory of voice, emphasizing the two-way
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284
Communication rights advocates have similarly argued that “having a voice” is a fundamental human
and citizenship right (Lister, 2004).
285
In response to the poststructuralist critique of understanding voice as an authentic representation of a
unified self, Couldry insists that he is not defending voice as a coherent expression of individualism, but as
a cultural and political concept that can and should be wielded as a value (“defending the potential of
voices anywhere to matter”) to promote processes that may lead to a more just society (2010, p. 9). This is
particularly important in the contemporary context of the dominant neoliberal order, which, he argues, has
damagingly privileged its economic logic over voice and other social and cultural values, such as
democratic participation.
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communicative dimension of voice that requires both the act of speaking and the act of
listening. The recognition of voice is a recognition and legitimation of political agency
(Couldry, 2010, pp. 69, 109).
286
A culture that values voice is one that values individual
and collective political agency, participation, and the contributions of a diversity of
viewpoints in the social construction of a democratic society; it is one where listening
becomes as important as speaking.
287

This idea is not new; participation as it has been theorized across many fields,
from urban planning and development to media studies,
288
almost always implies or
presupposes dialogue (as opposed to one-way transmission of information) as one of its
central dynamics. Bertolt Brecht, an early theorist of participation, argued in 1932 that
radio is one-sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution,
for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over
from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible
communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it
would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener
speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating
him. (Brecht, 1932/1964)

Brecht’s prescient call for a medium of multi-directional communication suggests the
significance of being in relationship through dialogue (a ritual view of communication),
and he sees the shift from passive listener to active producer as a shift in relations of
power from relatively vertical to relatively horizontal. In other words, more horizontal
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286
Couldry bases this work on Fraser (2000) and predecessors such as John Dewey, who theorize
democracy as a mode of social organization.
287
Relevant to this is Chantal Mouffe’s vision of “radical and plural democracy” (1992b, p. 372, developed
with Ernesto Laclau), in which the “articulation” of different standpoints of groups struggling for political
agency is crucial. This situates communication and participation at the center of democratic citizenship.
Mouffe contends we must constantly challenge normative conceptualizations of the citizen as a unified
subject, instead seeing the citizen as a fluid, contested “articulation of an ensemble of subject positions,
corresponding to the multiplicity of social relations . . . in which situations of domination exist that must be
challenged if the principles of liberty and equality are to apply” (ibid., pp. 376, 378). Regarding listening,
see also Quarry and Ramirez (2009).
288
For a useful overview, see Carpentier, 2011, chapter one.
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communication implies more participation and a greater balance of power between
participants.
289
If social reality is constructed through communication, then social
equality requires the participation of many, rather than a few, in the communication
process. A society in which only the voices of the powerful are heard is clearly not a
participatory society.
For decades, starting well before the proliferation of the Internet, proponents of
participatory communication—particularly in Latin America—advocated horizontal
modes of communication and dialogue as a way to help promote democratic practices,
more locally-relevant solutions to development concerns, and greater social equity and
inclusion. A frequently cited example is the Bolivian miners’ network of radio stations
founded in 1949, which were initiated, owned, and operated by and for local community
members to share information (Gumucio Dagron, 2001; Huesca, 1995). In “Participative
Communication as Part of Building the Participative Society,” Bordenave argued that, in
Latin America,
We have witnessed the gradual movement from an almost exclusively diffusion
[transmission] approach to a group communication approach and, more recently,
to a participative approach, not in the commercial media, but in what is called
popular communication. Participatory communication is widespread in Latin
America. . . . A basic factor in participation is self-expression. Media, as
extensions of man, should be natural channels for citizens to express their views
and feelings. They should not be reserved to communication professionals. . . .
Communication media can act as tools for diagnosis . . . [and] problem
articulation among persons, groups, and communities. (1994, pp. 43, 44, emphasis
in the original)

Participatory communication can be understood as a horizontal, dialogic (two-
way or multi-directional) process of communication through which grassroots
participation in decision-making for community development is prioritized (Bordenave,
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289
See also Chapter 4 on horizontality in participatory cultures.
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1994; Freire, 2003; Singhal & Devi, 2003; Servaes, Jacobson, & White, 1996). What
makes it participatory is an emphasis on the active involvement of grassroots and
marginalized groups whose voices are not typically heard or valued, helping to amplify
these in local decision-making and development processes. It usually entails placing the
means of media production—or what is referred to in new media studies as content
creation—in the hands of such groups.
In Latin America, participatory communication emerged as a critical response to
the dominant modernist paradigm of development that was advocated by international
development and financial institutions from the global North for the global South. Prior
to the 1970s, development communication—driven primarily by U.S. and European
institutions—had been based on one-way, transmission models of information delivery,
in which information was instrumentally transmitted unilaterally (in a top-down manner)
in order to reach pre-determined aims for modernization, often at the expense of
grassroots knowledge and priorities.
290
A central concern of participatory communication
in Latin America (and other parts of the global South) since the mid-20th century has
thus been to reconfigure relations of power in and through the communication process—
specifically, through horizontal, dialogical, participatory processes (Barranquero, 2009;
Carpentier, 2011; Gumucio Dagron, 2001; Huesca, 2002; Servaes, 1999).
As discussed in Chapter 1, Colombia has become a focal point of the study of
community media, where it is often seen as “strengthening public spheres for dialogue
about public policy . . .[and] recognizing different identities as legitimate subjects with
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290
Critics saw these development initiatives as “ideologically and materially related to neocolonialism and
the extension of capitalist relations” (Huesca, 2002, p. 181), a critique that has continued to be levied at the
field of development communication by postcolonial and other scholars since Escobar (1995). For a longer
history of participatory communication as a critical response to these dynamics, see Barranquero (2009),
Gumucio Dagron (2001), Huesca (2002), and Servaes (1999).
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equal rights to access public spheres and voice their interests, goals, and dreams”
(Rodríguez, 2011, p. 286).
291
Community media, while used to describe a variety of
different projects, generally refers to participatory communication initiatives, such as a
newspaper, radio, local television, oral history archives, etc., that are controlled and
operated by a community, whether geographically or otherwise defined.
Like other voluntary associations, community media consciously adopt
participatory decision-making structures and practices that promote a sense of
belonging to, and responsibility toward, the organization, its mission, and its
relationship to the wider community. Equally important, community media
encourage private individuals to work collaboratively in meaningful activities that
not only promote sociability among individual participants but also serve a variety
of local needs and interests. In doing so, community media cultivate a more
deliberate approach to participation in public life, nurture social networks within
and between communities, and, potentially at least, encourage innovative ways to
think about the practice of democracy. (Howley, 2010, in Carpentier, 2011, p. 99)

Community media typically operate as not-for-profit, and often in opposition to
commercial media.
Citizens’ media is a broader category that perhaps better encompasses the plethora
of new and old forms of participatory media in the digital era.
292
Coined by Clemencia
Rodríguez, it refers to “communication spaces where citizens can learn to manipulate
their own languages, codes, signs, and symbols, empowering them to name the world in
their own terms. Citizens’ media . . . purposely cultivate processes of transformation and
empowerment in their producers and audiences” (2011, pp. 24, 25; see also Rodríguez,
2001). Rodríguez describes citizens’ media as “highly participatory by providing access
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291
In the case of Colombia, media activists pressed for democratization of the airwaves in the 1980s and
1990s, ultimately securing community media licensing policies that have enabled the growth of one of the
most rich, diverse ecologies of community media in the world; Rodríguez sees it as “an exceptional
generation of community media” (2011, p. 31). This activism influenced the Colombian Constitution of
1991, which states that all Colombians have the right to create their own mass media (Article 20, in
Rodríguez, 2011, pp. 30, 287).
292
See Chapter 1, p. 23 for discussion of the various uses of the term participatory media.
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and space for people to participate in all phases of media production” (Rodríguez, 2001,
emphasis added).
In participatory communication, this “access and space” is specifically
characterized as relatively horizontal and autonomous
293
, promoting dialogical processes
of communication (see above). In the contemporary context, it might also be
characterized as relatively “open”, and openness can be analyzed at three levels: content,
communicative architecture (including the technologies used), and management.
Openness in terms of content may mean being open to public participation in the
production and editorial processes, as well as openness to a variety of thematic content
and a diversity of viewpoints. In terms of management, openness may mean public
participation in key decision-making for a communication initiative. Open
communicative architecture may mean public administration of a website or the use of
open source software for decentralized design, coding, and management (as the case of
Ciudad Comuna illustrates below), or a communication tool such as theater that has
relatively low barriers to entry and relatively high transparency in terms of how it
functions.
294
These four dimensions of horizontality, dialogue, autonomy, and openness
(see Figure 5.1) can inform critical analysis of efforts to promote participation through
communication.

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293
Autonomous here refers to being independent of censorship by government, corporate, or other
traditional power holders, or by other funding sources. For relevant discussions of autonomous youth
engagement versus “managed” engagement, see Coleman (2008) and Light (in review).
294
For a history of the concept of openness in the development of the Internet, see Kelty (2008).
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Figure 5.1. Four dimensions for analysis of participation through communication.

In sum, the power of citizen voices in public participation is dependent upon the
existence of practices that promote both horizontal relations of power in decision-making,
and dialogic communication across different levels of society, enabled by open and
autonomous spaces for such communication. Expanding the technological capacities for
civic and political practices to take place in the digital sphere does not inherently promote
a more participatory public culture. Such efforts must be linked, I argue, to
communicative practices and spaces characterized by horizontality, dialogue (which may
be two-way or multidirectional), openness, and autonomy. These are necessary to bolster
the power of citizen voices in public life.

New Media, New Opportunities for Participatory Communication?
The capacities of digital communication systems appear highly amenable to more
open, autonomous, horizontal, and dialogical exchanges within and across societies. In
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relation to questions of communication, power, and participation, Manuel Castells (2009)
argued that UGC platforms, which are interconnected with mass communication systems,
increase the opportunities for the participation of individuals in spaces of public
deliberation and may help to amplify citizen voices. He calls this mass self-
communication:
It is mass communication because it can potentially reach a global audience, as in
the posting of a video on YouTube, a blog with RSS links to a number of web
sources, or a message to a massive e-mail list. At the same time, it is self-
communication because the production of the message is self-generated, the
definition of the potential receiver(s) is self-directed, and the retrieval of specific
messages or content from the World Wide Web and electronic networks is self-
selected. The three forms of communication (interpersonal, mass communication,
and mass self-communication) coexist, interact, and complement each other rather
than substituting for one another. What is historically novel, with considerable
consequences for social organization and cultural change, is the articulation of all
forms of communication into a composite, interactive, digital hypertext that
includes, mixes and recombines in their diversity the whole range of cultural
expressions conveyed by human interaction. (ibid., p. 55, emphasis in original)

Similarly, Couldry sees “five new possibilities that recent technologies and software
innovations have enabled”: the potential amplification of more/new voices (particularly if
they travel across UGC to mainstream media platforms; see Brough & Li, 2013); greater
mutual awareness of these new voices; new scales of organization; the centrality of
dynamic networks as spaces of political organization; and “new intensities of listening. . .
Governments cannot any longer say they don't hear” (Couldry 2010, pp .140–141). These
affordances have been amenable to the growth of participatory cultures, characterized as
having low barriers to cultural production, artistic expression and civic engagement, and
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in which participants are both consumers and producers of the culture (Jenkins, 2006b;
Jenkins et al., 2006; see also Chapter 1).
295

While digital technologies themselves do not determine participatory practices, it
is clear that the structural attributes that enable mass self-communication may facilitate
more horizontal, dialogical, open, and autonomous communication, thus enhancing
practices of participatory communication (as well as participatory culture).
296
As the
following cases illustrate, the particular configurations of these forms of communication
vary widely and have significant implications for participation.

Ciudad Comuna

Comuna 8 is situated at the eastern edge of Medellín, almost directly across from
Comuna 13 to the west. Like Comuna 13 (see Chapters 2, 4), Comuna 8 is best known for
the violence it witnessed during the urbanization of Colombia’s armed conflict, which
was made internationally visible in the 2005 documentary La Sierra (Scott Dalton and
Margarita Martinez, Dirs.), about the lawless neighborhood that lies just above where
Ciudad Comuna is based.
Comuna 8 is comprised of 18 or 34 neighborhoods, depending on whom you ask,
some of which are informal settlements of people forcibly displaced from the countryside
in the last 15 years. The population is highly disadvantaged: Of its roughly 150,000
residents, nearly 40% are categorized as living in estrato 1 (a very low socioeconomic
status, the lowest of 6), and another 40% in estrato 2 (a low socioeconomic status).
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295
Jenkins advocates a broad conception of participatory culture independent of particular forms of media
or technology, though he sees new media as favorable for their growth and proliferation.
296
Of course, these same technologies can be used to facilitate practices of censorship and surveillance
(Andrejevic, 2009; Morozov, 2011); the social practices around these technologies shape their impact.
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Approximately 20% have no formal education; 35% completed primary school, 40%
secondary school, and less than 3% have a college degree. Approximately 50% of the
total population falls between the ages of 15 and 44 (SISBÉN, 2011).
Ciudad Comuna describes itself as a communication collective and a “referente of
development and youth participation that supports the construction of social fabric in
Comuna 8 and in the city more broadly” (Ciudad Comuna, 2010a, p.2). The collective is
based in what was a neglected public building located just below the neighborhood of La
Sierra. In 2010, the group occupied the space through a sit-in mobilized largely using
online networking tools, including Facebook and email lists. Ciudad Comuna has
converted the space into a casa de cultura (house of culture) where they publish a
community newspaper and website; produce video and other multimedia investigative
journalism on a number of locally relevant themes; hold a popular education
297

communication “school” consisting of workshops in photography, audio and video
production, and journalism; and hold public film screenings and events.
Ciudad Comuna was founded by a local group of youth and young adults, with
the support of an established community-based organization (CBO) in Comuna 8. Both
the organization and its participants are young; Ciudad Comuna was legally constituted in
early 2009, with its four founders ranging in age from 18 to 26. The eldest and most
experienced of these serves as an informal leader, though the collective operates
primarily through decision-by-consensus.
The project grew out of a budget allocation from the 2006 local participatory
budgeting (PB) process, in which citizens of the comuna prioritized the development of
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297
For a discussion on popular education, see Chapter 4.
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community media. With this allocation of funds, a public university was contracted to
provide teenagers in the comuna with training in multimedia journalism. However, the
training was short-term, as was its perceived direct impact;
298
the community media
activities ceased after the training, and of the several dozen participants that originally
participated, only one returned the following year. This one participant, however, who
soon after began studying communication at the university, joined forces with a local
youth activist in his mid-20s, as well as two others in their early 20s. With support from
the CBO, the group made a bid to be the recipients of that year’s participatory budgeting
funds allocated for community media, and to launch Ciudad Comuna independently of
the university or any other outside institution.
Ciudad Comuna’s response to what they perceived to be a failed institutional (top-
down) attempt to promote community media was to create an ongoing, autonomous
citizens’ media process, rather than short-term capacity building. Content is decided upon
and contributed by local citizens, with an emphasis on human rights, local planning, and
development. The group founded the community newspaper Visión 8 (Vision 8), created
a process for distributing their media, and developed a methodology for offering training
in multimedia journalism to local community members to broaden the range of
contributors. They see their popular education-style trainings as a crucial component of
reaching their broader goals of promoting critical, proactive civic engagement,
particularly among youth:
[T]raining is fundamental, because even though [in the workshops] we’re thinking
about media production, it’s almost like that’s the pretext; because really what
we’re doing is a process of educating so that youth of the comuna find a space of
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298
One participant described the training as “paternalistic” (Interview with member of Ciudad Comuna,
Medellín, July 12, 2011).
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247!
247!
participation, a space in which to propose [ideas/solutions], to speak out, to
criticize, to develop their ideas. . . . [I]f someone is able to see themselves
reflected in [the] media they will be much more conscious of their context, of
their media, of their reality, and from there can begin to be a protagonist in
processes of participation that generate transformation.
299

By the time of this writing in 2013, more than 100 local youth had participated in these
trainings (Ciudad Comuna, n.d.).
The community newspaper Visión 8 is circulated online and offline; 10,000 hard
copies of each issue are distributed throughout the comuna (see Figure 5.2).
300
It is
intended to
serve as a tool for the development of . . . convivencia, inclusion, integration and
dialogue among the communities [of] Comuna 8 in the city of Medellín, and to be
the principal resource for the diffusion of [information about] the Plan de
Desarrollo [Development Plan] of Comuna 8 in Medellín, which . . . emerged
from community initiatives, and in which there is a collective vision from all
social sectors in terms of what the future development of the comuna should be.
(Ciudad Comuna, 2010a, p. 8)

The comuna’s local development plan
301
has greater legitimacy among community
organizers (including Ciudad Comuna) than development initiatives coming from the
municipal government, because it was collectively produced through the participation of
a variety of local community members. In addition, Visión 8 aims to serve as an archive
of the historical and collective memory of the comuna, and to provide informed,
evidence-based critique of local social and political issues—particularly relating to
human rights—to prompt civic mobilization and the development of community-based
solutions. In the case of Ciudad Comuna, the transmission/diffusion approach is thus
situated within a ritual view of communication.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
299
Group interview with members of Ciudad Comuna, Medellín, May 13, 2011.
300
At the time of this writing, Vision 8 was available online at http://issuu.com/ciudadcomuna (accessed
September 13, 2012).
301
The local development plan was created through a participatory planning process. See Chapter 3 (p.
117) for further discussion.
!
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248!
248!

Figure 5.2. Cover of Visión 8, December 2011.

Although the newspaper Visión 8 has been their centerpiece to date, Ciudad
Comuna describes itself first and foremost as a communication collective with a
transmedia approach that bridges multiple on- and offline platforms, determined by their
!
!
249!
249!
social, rather than technological, goals. In addition to circulating a digital version of the
newspaper, the collective also publishes content on web-based video streaming sites like
YouTube and Blip.tv (with the numbers of views ranging between 400 and 1,200 per
video
302
), and online photo galleries like Flickr. In 2011, the collective launched an
online community radio station called Voces de la 8 (Voices of the 8th). They further
disseminate new content on Facebook, the primary online social network used by the
majority of their online readers.
At the time of my research (2011), the collective had nine dedicated members
(primarily between the ages of 16 and 22), twelve other occasional participants, and three
adult advisors who would periodically provide logistical, administrative, and editing
support, but who did not participate in the day-to-day operations of the group. In
addition, during my research, I observed approximately 35 workshop participants, the
majority under the age of 25, with a roughly equal split between males and females.
Other community members of various ages also contribute content for publication.
Finally, Ciudad Comuna has an editorial board that is open to the public and includes
volunteers (both youth and adult) from the community who represent a variety of local
organizations, associations, community leaders, and informal groups.
303
To recruit
community members to participate in the editorial board meetings, Ciudad Comuna sends
out approximately 700 email invitations, makes nearly 50 direct telephone calls, and
publicizes the meetings on their Facebook page and in Visión 8. In 2011, approximately
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302
These numbers are as of the time of this writing in 2013.
303
This information comes from my interviews with Ciudad Comuna founders; I was unable to attend an
editorial board meeting.
!
!
250!
250!
30 people participated; in 2012, approximately 130 people participated, 50 of whom then
contributed content to Ciudad Comuna’s subsequent productions.
304

Challenging Relations of Power through Horizontal, Dialogical Communicative
Practices
The establishment of Ciudad Comuna challenged existing relations of power
within the comuna from its inception. While the earliest edition of the newspaper
included space for traditional local leaders (such as representatives of the Juntas
Administradoras Locales [Local Administrative Boards, JAL] and the Junta de Acción
Comunal [Comuna Action Boards, JAC]
305
) to publish their own content, Ciudad
Comuna rejected the perception shared by many of these power holders that Visión 8
should serve their information and communication needs as public figures. They argued,
instead, that it should serve the interests of the citizens of the comuna and offer in-depth,
investigative coverage of issues of local concern determined by a broader range of
perspectives. In other words, Ciudad Comuna wanted to make the process of creating the
newspaper—a form of media traditionally associated with the transmission model or top-
down, vertical form of information dissemination—into a more horizontal one in which
the concerns and voices of a broad array of citizens and community groups could be
amplified. Some JAC members that had been on the editorial board of the newspaper'’
first edition stepped down, refusing to participate. However, by reaching out to
community-based organizations and other nontraditional leaders in the community,
Ciudad Comuna reestablished its community editorial board, broadened the range of
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304
Interview with member of Ciudad Comuna, October 8, 2013.
305
For a description of the JAL and JAC refer to note 248.
!
!
251!
251!
participants and content contributors, and strengthened their reputation in the comuna as
a community media project.
The founding four members of Ciudad Comuna comprise the Junta Directiva
(board of directors), which takes legal responsibility for the formal association and makes
some of its strategic planning decisions. Yet many decisions within the organization are
made horizontally; decisions about programming, content, and other operations are made
by consensus (a horizontal form of decision-making discussed in Chapter 4) in the
Ciudad Comuna Assembly, which is composed of all of the project’s approximately 24
participants, primarily youth under age 25.
Starting in 2010, Ciudad Comuna took a leading role in disseminating information
about the map and development plan of the comuna, through a collection of reports
released online, in print, and as a multimedia, interactive CD-ROM. The content came
from a community-based collaboration called Memoria y Territorio de la Comuna 8
(Memory and Territory of Comuna 8), led by the working group of the Plan de Desarrollo
Local Comuna 8 (Comuna 8 Local Development Plan) and a local CBO. Members of
Ciudad Comuna and the CBO helped to compile a series of multimedia documents about
the history and geography (cultural, political, social, economic, etc.) of the comuna,
informed and produced by local residents, rather than by an external consultant or
government administrator. With funds prioritized through the comuna’s participatory
budget, Ciudad Comuna produced and distributed the resulting multimedia reports.
Memoria y Territorio emerged as a response to disagreements over the municipal
government’s administrative records of Comuna 8 in the local planning and development
process; some residents and community organizers felt the city’s records did not
!
!
252!
252!
accurately reflect the current map and socioeconomic demographics of the comuna,
which affected the equitable distribution of public resources. As the Visión 8 article “A
New Map for the Comuna” explains,
Since the beginning of the process of Planning and Local Development for
Comuna 8 in 2007, the interpretation of the territory has constituted one of the
greatest challenges, given that: there exist very irregular levels of development
throughout the region; many sectors are not recognized as neighborhoods and are
[therefore] discriminated against in [not receiving] public funding/investment; the
territorial divisions recognized by the municipal administration do not coincide
with the territorial, social, and cultural references of its inhabitants. (Ciudad
Comuna, 2010c, p. 6)

Led by local professionals and community organizers, the resulting project—seemingly
the first of its kind in the city—included a participatory reconstruction of the comuna’s
history, as well as a new administrative map to be used in development planning, budget
allocations, and negotiations with the municipal government. The map was “self-defined
by the community” of Comuna 8 through a multi-year series of local workshops and
consultations in which even the parameters for determining what constituted a
neighborhood were collectively debated.
306
The new map named 30 residential
neighborhoods pertaining to Comuna 8, as opposed to the 18 recognized by the municipal
government as of the year 2000 (Ciudad Comuna, 2010c, p. 7). Ciudad Comuna
published it in the September, 2010 edition of Visión 8 with an invitation to reply with
commentary, feedback, debate, adjustment, and approval by local communities before
community organizers would present it to the municipal administration and advocate its
adoption at the level of city government (see Figure 5.3). Ciudad Comuna also published
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
306
Group interview with members of Ciudad Comuna, Medellín, May 13, 2011; personal correspondence
with local CBO representative and facilitator of the Memoria y Territorio project, November, 2012.
!
!
253!
253!
historical descriptions of each neighborhood, vox pop commentary from residents of the
comuna, and documentary video.

Figure 5.3. “Un nuevo mapa para la comuna” (“A new map for the comuna”; Ciudad
Comuna, 2010c, p. 7).

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!
254!
254!
This special issue of Visión 8 reveals Ciudad Comuna’s and their collaborators’
aim of promoting a “culture of voice” within the comuna, emphasizing dialogue and
recognition:
To have a map of the territory in which all of its neighborhoods are included, and
to know that it is the product of dialogue and recognition between the
communities [of Comuna 8], and not the myopic vision of the territory of some
municipal planning representatives—who, without denying their technical
capacity, it is evident have never traveled across the comuna nor dialogued with
its inhabitants—represents one of the most important achievements of the
planning processes of this territory in recent years. (Ciudad Comuna, 2010c, p. 6)

The editorial (2010b) goes on to directly criticize the branch of the municipal government
that funded both Visión 8 and the Memoria y Territorio project for tending to contract out
such projects to external consultants, rather than to local community organizations. It
emphasizes the legitimacy of the knowledge produced through this unique, participatory,
dialogical process of collective memory creation, as well as the autonomy of the project
from outside institutions.
In “A Cultural Approach to Communication” (1989), James Carey deconstructs
the function of maps to exemplify communication as the process through which social
reality is constructed (the ritual view):
We often argue that a map represents a simplification of or an abstraction from an
environment. Not all the features of an environment are modeled, for the purpose
of the representation is to express not the possible complexity of things but their
simplicity. Space is made manageable by the reduction of information. By doing
this, however, different maps bring the same environment alive in different ways;
they produce quite different realities. Therefore, to live within the purview of
different maps is to live within different realities. Consequently, maps not only
constitute the activity known as mapmaking; they constitute nature itself. (Carey,
1989, p. 46)

!
!
255!
255!
In creating a new map of the comuna, the Memoria y Territorio project made
marginalized areas of the comuna more visible, and more culturally and administratively
recognized. In other words, it performed a resignification and reterritorialization through
a participatory process. The updated map, now recognized by local leaders, community
organizations, researchers, and the working group of the Local Development Plan (who
helped lead its creation), has become a key reference for information about the comuna,
as well as a tool for demanding recognition and services from the municipal government.
To date, however, the map has had greater influence on locally based development
initiatives than on the municipal level; it is acknowledged by some government
representatives who facilitate the participatory budgeting process in Comuna 8, but the
municipal government still uses its previous map. However, it has inspired other
neighborhoods to demand formal recognition and other comunas to carry out similar
mapping processes.
307

Comuna 8’s map-making process stems from an understanding of maps as a tool
of power, control, and governmentality (see Chapter 3). The grassroots remaking of the
map challenged not only the government’s official map, but also its process of meaning-
making and administration of Comuna 8, staking a claim for a more participatory,
horizontal approach. Ciudad Comuna helped to amplify the voices making these claims,
projecting a collective vision of the comuna that has been used to demand better services
or decide upon priorities for local development. Like the cases of La Elite and Son Batá
examined in Chapter 4, Ciudad Comuna is thus another example of a project in which the
expression of individual voices is encouraged, and in many cases amplified, while at the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
307
Personal correspondence with local CBO representative and facilitator of the Memoria y Territorio
project, November 2012.
!
!
256!
256!
same time, a collective voice is also cultivated. Both play an important role in
participatory public culture.

Working Toward Open and Autonomous Spaces of Communication
The relative openness and autonomy of Ciudad Comuna’s approach has helped it
gain legitimacy and increase its impact among citizens in the comuna. This includes a
significant degree of openness across all three levels of content, communicative
architecture, and management.
Decisions about Ciudad Comuna’s thematic priorities for its content are made in
the open editorial board meetings to ensure direct input from a variety of community
members outside of the project. To date, topics have covered a wide range of local and
more universal concerns, including information on the local development plan and
participatory budgeting process; coverage of protests and other mobilizations; coverage
of violence and testimonials from victims of violence; and content focusing on human
rights, education, health and nutrition, gender equity, and the merits of open/free
software.
In 2009, Ciudad Comuna was formalized as a nonprofit, community-based
association, making it eligible to be contracted by the municipal government and funded
through the comuna’s participatory budgeting process.
308
Yet Ciudad Comuna carefully
and strategically maintains their autonomy, and much of the content they publish is
highly critical of the administration.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
308
Ciudad Comuna also tries to contract their production services to other entities to raise funds to support
the collective’s activities.
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257!
257!
Despite functioning with [some] resources from the participatory budget . . .
we’ve maintained a very critical posture and we’ve had a lot of autonomy to
speak out . . . on the programs that the [municipal] administration brings to the
Comuna 8. . . . In the majority of cases we have more criticisms than points to
highlight [celebrate]. . . . The media we create become tools through which people
can denounce situations of exclusion, abandonment [by the state],
marginalization. . . . This process of communication may be the only tool that the
people of Comuna 8 can use to refute information that comes from the municipal
administration or its development reports.
309

The editorial for the Memoria y Territorio project (quoted above) is just one example of
the unfettered critique of the very government branch that funded it.
At the time of my research (2011), the Salazar administration was actively
promoting the autonomy of Medellin’s community media. Community media in Medellin
developed significantly under the Fajardo and Salazar administrations, primarily due to
an increase in funding possibilities through the participatory budgeting process; many
comunas decided to allocate resources to such projects (De La Uribe, 2011). As of 2011,
there were an estimated 70–100 community media projects in Medellin as of 2011; this is
one example of the ways in which PB was enabling a more participatory public
culture.
310
The municipal government required that at least 30% of the funding for a
community media project come from sources other than public funds or the Mayor’s
Office to help promote their independence. As one administration staff person reported,
“the work of the Mayor’s Office . . . is to guarantee the independence of [community
media] and ultimately to guarantee plurality, an indispensable ingredient for the
construction of a democracy” (De La Uribe, 2011).
Ciudad Comuna’s commitment to openness and autonomy extends beyond their
production processes and content to their communication systems and management; they
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309
Group interview with members of Ciudad Comuna, Medellín, May 13, 2011
310
See Chapter 3.
!
!
258!
258!
advocate the use of free and open-source software
311
and open publishing and website
administration. In 2010, Ciudad Comuna launched a website to serve as a sort of virtual
community message board and mobilization tool, using open-source software designed to
facilitate participatory publishing and editing. Any local group (whether a formal
organization or informal collective) with an interest in Comuna 8 could register to be an
administrator and post content. There was no editing or censoring of contributions, aside
from hate speech or other harmful content. Using the site was relatively simple, with low
barriers to use. Basic Internet navigating skills sufficed for most users to be able to post
content to the pre-formatted layout. Ciudad Comuna offered technical and training
assistance, but did not aim to control the content posted by community groups, instead
encouraging them to publish autonomously. The site received approximately 119,000
visits in a year;
312
anyone who registered their email with the site received an email
update when new content was posted. Content published to the site included information
on public meetings and events, the local planning and budgeting process, human rights
advocacy, and housing and other services for displaced families.
While the site was built by a software engineer, it was managed through what
Ciudad Comuna described as horizontal “administración participativa” (participatory site
administration); at the time of my research, approximately 20 local groups or
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311
According to Graham Longford, “The main principles of open source code development today consist of
the following: collaborative and inclusive design; openness and transparency of source code; openness of
the code to ongoing modification, negotiation and refinement; universal access to software at little or no
cost; non-restrictive licensing to encourage use and improvement of the code. . . . Open source coding as a
social movement has emerged and grown into a self-conscious social movement since the late 1990s in
direct response to the colonization of the Internet by a few monopolistic software firms, most notably
Microsoft” (2005, p. 89). The Visión 8 article “Colectivo versus privado: Software libre” further explains
the perceived benefits of and philosophy behind using free and open source software, and is an example of
Ciudad Comuna’s efforts to raise awareness about the movement (Ciudad Comuna, September 2012, p.
13).
312
Interview with member of Ciudad Comuna, September 19, 2012.
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!
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259!
organizations had registered as administrators.
313
Ciudad Comuna saw the decision to use
an open publishing and open administration platform as a method of promoting local
participation and autonomous content publishing, and of cultivating a sense of ownership
over the site among community groups.
314

Evidence that the site has had these impacts was limited by its relative newness, a
lack of available data, and the scope of this study. In August 2012, the community
website was hacked and taken offline, drawing attention to some of the potential
challenges of using open-source platforms—namely security and stability. This was the
first such attack on the website. A member of Ciudad Comuna expressed concern that it
appeared to correspond with similar attacks on other community organization sites
related to human rights issues; a working group on human rights had recently joined as an
administrator on their website.
315
However, it was not verified that this was a coordinated
attack on human rights advocacy websites. In a follow-up interview, one of the founders
of Ciudad Comuna felt that individual contributors to the site were not at risk (in part
because they publish under their group affiliation, rather than as individuals), but that the
participatory process and community organizing enabled by the website had been
severely compromised. By the time of this writing, the site had not been re-launched as
an open publishing platform, and with a turnover in local leadership, interest among other
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313
In 2011, groups and committees posting to the website included the Mesa Interbarrial (a network of
neighborhood organizations), the Red Juvenil (Youth Network), committees of the Plan de Desarrollo
Local (Local Development Plan), the Plan de Convivencia (Plan for Peaceful Coexistence), the Plan de
Desarrollo Cultural (Cultural Development Plan), and the Plan de Seguridad (Security Plan).
314
Carpentier cites the Indymedia network as another example of open publishing “to allow for these more
intense forms of participation in the media. As Mamadouh (2004:486) explains, ‘The main characteristics
of open publishing is [sic] that volunteers maintain the software and the public act as publishers, while
media producers might take care of editorial parts, the editing of the newswire and the producing of other
media products.’” (Carpentier, 2011, pp. 122–123).
315
Interview with member of Ciudad Comuna, September 19, 2012.
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260!
entities in the comuna seemed to have waned. Ciudad Comuna shifted the focus of their
online efforts to their own multimedia website, www.ciudadcomuna.org.
Ciudad Comuna has won recognition for their communication initiatives from the
municipal government and the University of Antioquia, including being recognized as the
best audiovisual community media producers in the Medellín in 2010 and 2011.
316
At the
time of this writing, Ciudad Comuna was also leading an assembly of community media
projects across the city to promote participatory communication more broadly.
317

It is crucial to note that a number of conditions existed to make Ciudad Comuna
possible, including the broader history and valorization of community media in
Colombia; the willingness of the comuna’s PB participants to repeatedly allocate funds to
community media; the support of local leaders, community organizers, and established
CBOs; and founders who had received leadership training and experience in other
community-based projects—a condition common to all of the youth collectives analyzed
in this study.
In these various ways—ranging from content to communicative architecture to
management—Ciudad Comuna is an example of efforts to create relatively horizontal,
open, and autonomous spaces of communication, with the aim of provoking critical
dialogue and community engagement in local development. Of course, not every minute
decision regarding each production is made horizontally, but the collective has
established structures and an organizational culture the foster citizen participation. The
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316
In the 2010 Community Journalism Awards, out of 47 community journalism projects, Ciudad Comuna
won second place for print media, first for audiovisual, and third for the community website. In 2011, out
of 60 community media projects, Ciudad Comuna won third place in print, and first place for audiovisual
media.
317
Interview with member of Ciudad Comuna, October 15, 2013.
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261!
following case of Medellín Digital illustrates some of the implications of choosing more
closed communicative spaces for participation.

Medellín Digital

In 2007, Fajardo’s administration launched Medellín Digital (Digital Medellín)
with the support of various public and private institutions.
318
The primary aims of the
initiative were to reduce the digital divide by increasing free access to communication
technologies in public locations, mainly the Internet, as a means to promote greater social
inclusion and foster digital entrepreneurship and innovation. Despite having the second-
largest economy in Colombia (after Bogotá), Medellín was only the sixth-highest in
terms of computer use (DANE, 2008b). In 2011, just over 50% of households in Medellín
had a computer, and just under 50% had an Internet connection. However, in the lowest
socioeconomic strata, between 23% and 25% of households had computers, and between
17% and 28% had an Internet connection (Departamento Administrativo de Planeación,
Alcaldía de Medellín, 2011).
319
Medellín was ranked second-to-last out of 25 major Latin
America cities in terms of having “digital citizens,” conceived as a populace with easy
access to, and making regular use of, digital communication technologies (Convergencia
Research, 2009).
Medellín Digital was promoted as part of Fajardo’s overall platform of creating a
more governable, inclusive, educated, democratic, participatory, and internationally
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
318
This included the foundation of the public utility company Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM), the
public, regional telecommunications company UNE EPM, the national Ministries of ICTs and Education,
and a private university. To my knowledge, nonprofit or community-based organizations were not
significantly involved, a fact that some of my interviewees criticized.
319
In comparison, in 2012, 78% of households in the developed world and 28% in the developing world
had an Internet connection (International Telecommunication Union, 2013).
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262!
competitive city (Tabares Higuita, 2009). The aim was to integrate a variety of
government-led digital initiatives in the city, placing its initial focus on infrastructure for
citywide, public access to broadband connectivity.
320
In contracts with Microsoft and
later Hewlett-Packard, Medellín Digital created computer labs with high-speed Internet
connections called “aulas abiertas” (open classrooms) in public schools that are meant to
be open to both students and the broader community, as well as free computer centers in
public libraries, business centers, and government locations.
A recent global study of public access to ICTs in low- and middle-income
countries found that over 50% of survey respondents’ use of computers would decrease if
public access venues were not available, with a large proportion of those respondents
being under 25 years old (Sey, Coward, Bar, Sciadas, Rothschild & Koepke, 2013). For
many, free public access venues provided their first opportunities to use computers and
the Internet. A majority of users also reported that public access venues that offer
technical support and trainings were the most important places for developing their
computer and Internet skills (ibid.). There is evidence, then, that Medellín Digital’s
public access initiatives would help to cultivate more “digital citizens.”
During the initial focus on connectivity, it became clear to Medellín Digital’s
leadership (as well as its critics) that infrastructure and access alone were not sufficient to
promote widespread and effective use of the technology, and Medellín Digital thus
emphasized building capacity for apropiación (appropriation, in the sense of adoption) of
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320
Medellín Digital’s early work built on, but changed, the controversial approach started under the
previous mayor, Luis Pérez, that involved selling computers to schools through a credit program (Tabares
Higuita, 2009).
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the technology.
321
This has included basic digital literacy training for teachers, students,
small business people and entrepreneurs, and other community members. At the time of
this research, such trainings typically included Internet browsing skills, as well as the use
of Microsoft programs such as Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. In some instances,
publishing and multimedia skills, such as blogging or basic digital animation, were also
being taught, primarily to students.
Medellín Digital also added a focus on producing new online content and
streamlining it with existing tools and content to support its goals. As of 2012, Medellín
Digital’s website proclaimed that it “has a Red de Portales (Network of Portals) that
supports the construction of the digital city through the development of content and
services for citizens, and active participation through the use of ICTs.”
322
The portals
included one for each of the following:
• education
323
(with learning resources, information on educational opportunities,
educational software and games, tutorials, tools for collaboration such as wikis,
etc.);
• entrepreneurship
324
(providing information, communication, and collaboration
tools for small business entrepreneurs);
• Medellín Digital’s own portal containing municipal government content
325

(including “e-government” services, such as online tax payment forms and
procedures, and vehicle registration);
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321
A 2008 Medellín Digital planning document describes their concept of appropriation as users “feeling
the investment in technology as their own, on the levels of both connectivity and content, and they begin to
make relevant use of these for the improvement of their quality of life” (Grupo de Trabajo de Medellín
Digital, 2008, p. ii). While this definition of appropriation goes beyond mere adoption, it is closer to the
concept of technology adoption than appropriation in the sense used by Bar, Pisani, and Weber (2007).
These authors drew on cultural analyses of technology use in Latin America to define appropriation as, “the
process through which . . . users go beyond mere adoption to make the technology their own and embed it
within their social, economic and political practices”—reinventing the technology in order to engage in a
broader range of social, economic, and political practices, and renegotiating “the power relationship
embodied in a technological system” (ibid., pp. 1, 2, 36). Medellín Digital sees the appropriation of ICTs as
a process of training and adoption, rather than one of reconfiguration and resistance.
322
www.Medellíndigital.gov.co, accessed August 4, 2012.
323
www.Medellín.edu.co, accessed August 4, 2012.
324
www.culturaeMedellín.gov.co, accessed August 4, 2012.
325
http://www.Medellíndigital.gov.co/, accessed August 4, 2012; see also www.Medellín.gov.co.
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• culture
326
(including announcements of events, competitions, and various sections
dedicated to youth programming); and
• one for the network of public libraries (through which a user can reserve public
computers, use the online card catalogue, etc.).

Online “tools for the digital citizen” included services (some predating Medellín Digital,
others created since 2007) such as filing for passports and citizenship cards; digital
literacy trainings that include a guide to browsing and searching the Internet and opening
an email account, and information on authorship rights; information on employment and
educational opportunities; an instant messaging software client; and several informational
video games aimed at children about computer technology or the basic functions of the
municipal government.
In 2011, Medellín Digital reported approximately 140,000 registered users for all
of their portals, though it is unclear how many were repeat users and what uses they made
of the sites.
327
The portals receive a total of approximately 9 million cumulative visits per
year.
328
In an interview in early 2012, a senior Medellín Digital staff person expressed
that they were still hoping for a greater number of unique users, and that interactivity in
the portals was not yet as significant as hoped, which the interviewee associated in part
with technical glitches in the portals, as well as with a lack of a culture of produsage
(both production and consumption online [Bruns, 2008]) in Medellín
329
—the latter
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326
www.Medellíncultura.gov.co, accessed August 4, 2012.
327
Interview with senior staff person of Medellín Digital, Medellín, January 12, 2011. Since simply
accessing the portals requires potential users to register, there are likely fewer regular/repeat users.
328
These figures provided by Medellín Digital in September 2012. The education portal receives over 7
million of those visits per year; Medellín Digital’s portal (with access to government services) accounts for
only approximately 240,000 (or about 3%) of those visits. While these figures clearly indicate that the
education portal is the most widely used (which is not surprising, given their focus on the education sector),
they tell us little about how, and to what ends, the portals are engaged by users. Very limited data is
available on the specific uses of these sites and their outcomes, a fact that reflects not only the relative
difficulty of capturing such information, but also the constraints of Medellín Digital’s measures of
participation.
329
Interview with senior staff person of Medellín Digital, Medellín, January 12, 2011.
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justification being debatable, given the significant number of local community/citizens’
media projects.
330

To familiarize citizens with the portals, and also to reach some of the outermost
neighborhoods of the city that still lack in broadband access, Medellín Digital has a
mobile computer lab on a bus (El Circular Digital) that travels what they call a “route of
inclusion.” Through basic training in computer and Internet use, as well as e-government
and other services available through the portals, Medellín Digital states that the Circular
Digital helps “convert [users] into digital citizens” (Medellín Digital, n.d.).
As this example illustrates, a discourse of citizen participation, inclusion, and
digital citizenship is used to promote the initiative, while at the same time, there is a clear
emphasis on developing Medellín as a hub of digital business and investment. The U.S.-
based Fortune 500 corporations Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have been key
allies in this endeavor; through a contract with Microsoft, the aulas abiertas are outfitted
with Microsoft software, and the company has supported digital literacy trainings for
teachers and students. In 2010, HP chose Medellín to become its global services hub for
Latin America.
What is meant by “inclusion” and “digital citizens”? In 2008, Medellín was
awarded first place for “e-Inclusion” by the fifth Premio Iberoamericano de Ciudades
Digitales (Latin American Digital Cities Prize). Organizers explained that, “for a Digital
City to have meaning, citizens should have digital access, that is, they should have rapid,
easy access to diverse telecommunications networks” (XII Encuentro Iberoamericano de
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330
An independent study drawing on data from 2009–2011 found that less than half of the students
surveyed knew of Medellín Digital’s education portal; of the small business people surveyed, 24% reported
using the entrepreneurship portal, targeted to that population (Patiño Lemos & Vallejo Gómez, 2011).
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Ciudades Digitales (n.d.).
331
This vision of a digital city reflects a technocentric,
transmission view of communication, conflating access to digital technologies with
development and citizenship, and ignoring the cultures and practices of use that imbue
such technologies with their meanings and determine their ultimate impacts.
Similarly, in a 2009 study of 25 Latin American cities by Motorola and
Convergencia Research, Medellín was ranked first (tied with five other cities) for
“participation,” defined as “actors using technology to voice opinions, participate,
propose ideas and express themselves. In the case of public administration websites, it
consists of citizen participation, whether entering into discussion forums or surveys about
municipal services, or the existence of blogs and other Web 2.0 tools” (Convergencia
Research 2009, p. 21). The specific modalities of citizen participation, and the goals or
ideal outcomes of this participation remained undefined; the existence of Web 2.0 tools
are taken to represent participation—with little detail of the purpose, actual use, and
outcomes of using those tools. As is frequently the case in technocentric (and particularly
in commercially driven) discourses of new media and democratization, participation is
simplistically conflated with technology use and hollowed of its political and cultural
significance, as well as of any discussion of the communicative practices and the
structures of power and influence in which it is embedded.
Medellín Digital is not a participatory communication initiative, but citizen
participation in public life is one of its stated aims—specifically, “the active participation
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331
A 2009 regional study by Motorola and Convergencia Research rated Medellín the 14
th
-most “digital
city” in Latin America out of 25 (Sao Paulo, Brazil, was first, and Bogota, Colombia, was ranked eighth).
Of cities with a population over one million inhabitants, Medellín was ranked fifth, behind Sao Paulo,
Brazil; Guadalajara, Mexico; Bogota, Colombia; and Salvador, Brazil (Convergencia Research, 2009, p.
53).
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[of citizens] through the use of ICTs.”
332
Carpentier (2011) articulates an important
structural distinction, however, between participation and access to ICTs: “[T]his
difference between participation on the one hand, and access and interaction on the other
is located within the key role that is attributed to power, and to equal(ized) power
relations in decision-making processes. . . . For instance, in the case of digital divide
discourse, the focus is placed on the access to media technologies (and more specifically
ICTs), which in turn allows people to access media content” (2011, pp. 131, 129), rather
than on modes of participation that help to equalize relations of power. An analysis of
Medellín Digital through the lenses of horizontality, dialogue, openness, and autonomy
thus reveals a very different conception of participation than that illustrated by Ciudad
Comuna.

Medellín Digital’s Communicative Practices and Spaces
According to Medellín Digital, the culture portal provides “participatory tools”
and a “space for dialogue.”
333
Yet Medellín Digital’s portals tend to function most often
as channels for mass communication, with far fewer opportunities for horizontal mass
self-communication or dialogue. Medellín Digital’s e-government services offer citizens
information and provide instruments to ease bureaucratic processes within existing
government services, but they do not enable two-way or multidirectional communication
with government representatives, nor do they create spaces of citizen participation in
government. For example, the portals offer very little in the way of digital tools to
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332
www.Medellíndigital.gov.co/ciudadanodigital/Paginas/default.aspx, accessed August 7, 2012.
333
www.Medellíndigital.gov.co/nuestraestrategia/Paginas/contenidos.aspx, accessed August 7, 2012.
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support participatory planning and budgeting beyond providing limited, basic information
about the process. This is surprising, since it is one of the city’s flagship examples of
citizen participation, and PB processes elsewhere have been enhanced with digital
communication technologies (see, e.g., Peixoto, 2009).
By the time of this research, what the existing data on Medellín Digital’s
programs showed is that they have had the greatest impact in the realm of education,
though indicators remained limited to the number of people trained and the skill levels
attained, rather than how these have affected the use of the technologies and participation
in civic/political life. While the aulas abiertas are meant to be a resource for the broader
communities in which they are located, the vast majority of users and trainees are
students.
334
Independent researchers found that the broader community were the least
impacted by Medellín Digital’s programs; further, only approximately one-third of
teachers who had benefitted from trainings reported being able to independently use the
e-government services intended by Medellín Digital to enhance “digital citizenship.”
335

The ways in which decisions are made about Medellín Digital’s platforms remain
relatively vertical and closed. Again, there is an important distinction to be made here
between content-related participation and structural participation, which includes
participation in the management and policy of communication/media organizations.
Structural participation entails greater participant control over the system (not just the
content), and as such, it can be considered a more “maximalist” version of participation
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334
Of the approximately 337,000 users of the aulas abiertas, students account for approximately 307,000
(91%), while community members account for only 30,000 (approximately 9% of the users). (“Proyecto
Medellín,” 2011, March 21; Grupo de Trabajo de Medellín Digital, 2008, p.2; Marulanda, 2012).
335
Interview with researchers in the Educación en Ambientes Virtuales (Education in Virtual
Environments, EAV) research group at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Medellín, January, 25,
2011; Patiño Lemos and Vallejo Gómez (2011).
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(Carpentier, 2011, p. 131). While both forms of participation are important in
participatory public culture, structural participation allows participants some degree of
control over the very terms and spaces of their participation, in addition to its content.
Medellín Digital has promoted content-related participation to a limited degree; structural
participation has been relatively constrained. The aulas abiertas are managed to an extent
by local committees at each site, rather than centrally by Medellín Digital. Overall,
however, decisions about Medellín Digital’s content and strategies remain centralized,
with limited participation by members of the communities they serve. Despite using
social media tools that enable multidirectional communication, Medellín Digital’s
platforms and content thus tend toward unilateral, vertical communication and the
delivery of information (the transmission model), rather than horizontal communication
and dialogue.
Medellín Digital has more recently encouraged content production by users,
rather than just the consumption of information, though not to the extent of citizens’
media projects such as Ciudad Comuna. They have done this through various trainings on
the use of online tools for user-generated content and digital animation. A study of
Medellín Digital’s impact by Patiño Lemos and Vallejo Gómez (2011) found that 26% of
student respondents were able to independently publish their own content online using
social media platforms; the ability to use such Microsoft software as Word and
PowerPoint was much higher, at 74%. Only 12% of small business people surveyed
reported having skills to produce and publish content online.
336

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336
This data comes from a study carried out between 2009–2011.
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Medellín Digital’s portals and trainings are not being used extensively, if at all, by
local community groups like Ciudad Comuna (nor any of the others I encountered during
my research).
337
None of my interviewees from Ciudad Comuna or the youth collectives
La Elite or Son Batá (Chapter 4) mentioned using Medellín Digital’s platforms, although
it is possible that they consult them for educational and cultural opportunities. One cited
reason for not using Medellín Digital’s services is its use of proprietary Microsoft
platforms, which conflict with the collectives’ goals, philosophies, and practical needs.
338

However, these groups do use other proprietary, closed platforms like Facebook and
YouTube, due to the size of the social networks that can be reached. As explained in
Chapter 4, Facebook (the most popular social networking platform in Medellín and in
Colombia in general) is used as ubiquitously as mobile phones for connecting with
friends and family, but is also used in a very public way to share information; to publicize
services, concerts and other events; and to mobilize people to participate in public events.
The community-based groups’ online content production and distribution takes place on
these more mainstream commercial platforms, or on their collective's or their own blogs.
It is important to note that neither Facebook nor YouTube are open source or open
administration sites, and therefore not participatory in the maximalist sense described by
Carpentier (2011)—i.e., participants do not have control over the architecture,
administration, and management of the media platform. Yet the widespread use of these
platforms by groups that practice participatory cultures illustrates that the two are not
necessarily mutually exclusive; limited structural participation in communication
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337
Various interviews, Medellín, January 2011–July 2011.
338
Various interviews with members of Ciudad Comuna and other communication collectives, Medellín,
2011.
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271!
platforms may constrain participatory cultures in some important ways, but it does not
preclude their existence, nor does it necessarily bar their content-related participation.
Further, structural participation is not always of interest to (or feasible for) all users.
In 2011, the mayor at the time, Alonso Salazar, acknowledged that Medellín
Digital’s focus to date had been on creating utilitarian digital tools, rather than on
promoting local production, dialogue, or a more participatory online culture:
If we want the network to be more of a mirror of ourselves, to reflect ourselves …
and what we want to be, then we are far [from that goal]. . . . What content will
we upload to the network distinct from what we download? What content can we
export? . . . If you asked me what we should do with the network, well it should
also help us [develop our] identity.
339

Such a vision would merge some of the institutional and governance goals of Medellín
Digital’s network of portals with those of citizens’ media that see participatory
communication as a tool for the collective construction of society.
In sum, at the time of this research, Medellín Digital’s software choices, content,
and decision-making processes were, overall, best characterized as relatively closed and
vertical, rather than working for greater horizontality and equity through more
participatory practices. In most instances, they were not promoting openness, dialogue,
autonomy, or horizontality. The architecture of the communicative spaces created by
Medellín Digital (and the management of these) did not, on the whole, reflect a more
participatory culture, despite their use of rhetoric of participation.

The Politics of (Digital) Communication Spaces, by Way of a Brief Point of Comparison
Many of these approaches to the implications of ICTs for democratic citizenship
treat the issue of access as central. To the extent that access to and skilled use of
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339
Interview, Alonso Salazar, Medellín, July 11, 2011.
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the Internet and other new ICTs has become central to economic, social, and
political participation in information societies, so the argument goes, various
digital divides must be narrowed in order to ensure that none are excluded. . . .
Many of these approaches are highly worthwhile; however, most tend to overlook
the vital question of the politics behind the design of the very technologies and
networks whose accessibility they seek to universalize.
– Graham Longford
340

While the communicative spaces created by Medellín Digital remain relatively
closed, vertical, and unidirectional (with some exceptions), the organization has the
potential to promote more open and participatory forms of communication on a citywide
scale. A point of comparison is the case of Brazil, and how its free/open source software
movement has cultivated a more participatory and innovative digital culture.
Like Colombia, a significant challenge to the stability and development of Brazil
is its vast socioeconomic disparities. However, the history of the Internet in Brazil is
more closely linked with activism and social justice initiatives than it has been in
Colombia. According to several analysts (see Horst, 2011), in Brazil, the concepts of
digital inclusion, free culture, and social networking now “dominate attitudes and values
around new media technologies” (ibid., p. 437). In addition to civil society and activist
efforts, much of this has been driven by the relatively unique stance taken by the
Brazilian government to promote the widespread use of minimal-configuration computers
with free/open source software, as well as more open copyright policies to promote remix
culture, spearheaded by Gilberto Gil and others. The resulting policies have prioritized
the use of non-proprietary technologies, such that Brazil is now
a heavy user and promoter of open source software, predominantly Linux, which
is used by governments, universities, telecenters, and even supermarkets. . . . As
Camara and Fonesca (2007) suggest, “Open source software may help developing
countries master the technology of software development and support applications
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Longford, 2005, p. 70.
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that leverage local knowledge” to both support and develop talent for a local
industry, a pragmatic act of resistance to global forces characteristic of Brazil’s
role on the global stage. . . . The direct support of open source platforms
throughout the government institutions was structured as an explicit route to
counteracting the hegemony of global corporate actors such as Microsoft and, in
turn, to saving money which could be used in other areas of need in Brazil.
(Horst, 2011, pp. 447, 454)

These policies and the broader cultures surrounding new media use in Brazil have helped
to position the country at the avant-garde of digital culture in Latin America. Horst’s
assessment, based on a review of the existing research, points to the ways in which this
has challenged certain relations of power (particularly between global corporate actors
and the government of a developing country) and promoted a more participatory digital
culture.
Colombia, in contrast, maintains relatively traditional policies with regard to
copyright, and as of 2011, none of its government institutions had made a commitment to
using open source software.
341
The vast majority of its government-led digital initiatives
can be described as promoting technology adoption, but not more participatory cultures.
In this context, Medellín Digital’s partnership with Microsoft sustains the
dependency of the government on a global corporation, and by basing digital literacy
trainings on Microsoft platforms, it is mitigating the development of a more open digital
culture. Opting for proprietary software is often perceived to be a “safer” and more
secure choice (depending on how safety and security is conceived), but it has significant
implications for participatory culture.
Pradip Thomas (2012) assesses recent moves toward using open “public sector
software” (PSS) in India. Sharing many of the characteristics of free/open source
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Interview with staff people at the Ministry of Culture, Bogotá, April 26, 2011.
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software such as open code for free access and modification, proponents advocate that
PSS be conceived of as a public good necessary for governing in a digital society.
Thomas argues that PSS may help to ensure greater government transparency,
independence, flexibility, and sustainability (due to lower costs)—concerns that have
direct impacts on digital citizenship and opportunities for participation in e-governance.
Specifically, Thomas argues that PSS may help mitigate compatibility and lock in
concerns in which governments become dependent upon products from a sole vendor—
commonly Microsoft—whose digital tools for e-governance are intentionally
incompatible with other systems (ibid., p. 80). Further, being dependent on private sector
software may pose its own set of privacy and security concerns, making large sets of data
available to individual corporations without public oversight, and stifling competition,
innovation, and even efficiency (ibid.). While some Indian states have collaborations with
Microsoft similar to Medellín’s, “it makes sense, in a knowledge economy, to invest also
in cost-effective, non-proprietary, inter-operable public software that can be accessed and
used by citizens in their own development” (ibid., p. 77). Here, Thomas directly links
open-source software with the possibility of greater public participation in development.
Such a goal may not always be practical or attainable, and Thomas notes that, in much of
the world, there is a growing trend toward using mixed software systems in e-governance
(ibid., p. 80).
Of course, there are limits to what technology choices and government policies
alone can accomplish toward promoting more participatory and inclusive public cultures.
In Brazil, Horst writes that
it remains unclear . . . the extent to which such [digital] participation has truly
transformed the well-entrenched hierarchies and inequalities in Brazil. . . . [N]ot
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all appropriations have resulted in transformative social change and inclusion. . . .
[U]pper class Brazilians rarely interact in a meaningful way with residents living
in favelas, even when they join in the same activity. In other words, new media
practices—even of the same media—are diverse, and people’s modes of
engagement in different social and economic locations throughout Brazil often
reflect existing inequalities and dispositions. (2011, pp. 453, 455)

This underscores the limits of promoting technology appropriation to change culturally
and politically entrenched socioeconomic disparities. It is the combination of technology
choices, policies (and their political economic outcomes), user practices, and cultures of
production that together may or may not challenge existing inequalities. But the choice to
use free/open source software carries with it broader political and cultural meaning; and
Medellín Digital’s choice of proprietary software signals limitations to their commitment
to participation.
The question of what type(s) of communicative architecture and degrees of
openness best support participatory cultures has no simple, single answer—as
exemplified by the fact that groups like Ciudad Comuna that practice participatory
culture and advocate free/open source software also make use of proprietary platforms
like Facebook and YouTube. Nonetheless, this admittedly brief point of comparison
helps to highlight the political and cultural implications of such choices in relation to
discourses of participation and digital citizenship.

Digital Citizenship and Digital Literacies
Medellín Digital and Ciudad Comuna both see the potential of networked digital
communication tools to engage citizens in public life, though they engage these tools in
very different ways, including different scales, relative positions of power, ideologies of
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participation and (digital) citizenship, and theories of change. While they are not directly
comparable cases—one cannot replace the other—their juxtaposition highlights how
these two distinct sets of ideologies and practices envision a participatory public culture
in the digital age, and the role of communication in participation. Here, I also consider
what these cases tell us about the kinds of digital literacies and communicative practices
that may promote social inclusion and participation.
Medellín Digital’s “digital citizens” are seemingly those who can use Microsoft
platforms and the Internet for business and basic e-government services, while Ciudad
Comuna aims to cultivate critical, vocal, and engaged citizens using a variety of media.
Medellín Digital emphasizes small business growth and entrepreneurship, while Ciudad
Comuna emphasizes community-based development. Medellín Digital’s web portals use
proprietary software, and content is primarily produced centrally, while Ciudad Comuna
uses some open-source software and publishes content produced by users. Medellín
Digital’s initiatives tend to prioritize information delivery and technological access while
maintaining the status quo structure of operations of the municipal government and its
relationship to citizens; Ciudad Comuna’s initiatives tend to prioritize the participation of
community members in determining content priorities, and to see citizen participation as
central to the process knowledge production for community development (both problem
and solution identification), challenging knowledge produced centrally by the
government. These differences loosely reflect the distinction between the transmission
and ritual paradigms of communication.
Despite the ways in which Medellín Digital’s communicative spaces and practices
tend toward being relatively closed, vertical, one-way, and centralized, the agency still
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employs a discourse of participation through digital citizenship to promote its work,
illustrating the expediency of this discourse and the ease with which it can be dislodged
from any critical valence aimed at creating more equal balances of power. Ciudad
Comuna does not use the rhetoric of digital citizenship as explicitly, in part because they
are less technologically driven and choose their communication formats (not all of which
are digital) based on their broader social goals. However, their commitment to open
software, user-generated content, and horizontal/participatory administration implies a
more radical understanding of digital citizenship, one in which the expression of voice is
a central value.
Like the concept of citizenship itself, digital citizenship is socially constructed
and has been variously conceptualized and applied, depending on the underlying view of
communication. The term has been used to describe simply, “the norms of behavior with
regard to technology use” (Ribble, Baily, & Ross, 2004, p. 7), reducing digital citizenship
to online etiquette and detaching the concept from traditional notions of citizenship that
encompass political or civic participation. A more substantive definition is offered by
Mossberger, Tolbert, and McNeal, who argue that digital citizenship is “the ability to
participate in society online . . . [the] capacity, belonging, and the potential for political
and economic engagement in society in the information age” (2008, pp. 1, 2). A great
deal of recent scholarship links digital citizenship with participation to analyze the ways
in which the Internet can be understood as an expansion of contemporary society, hosting
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digital public spheres (e.g., Bennett, 2003; Byrne, 2008; Mossberger, Tolbert, & McNeal,
2008).
342

The discourse of digital citizenship, like citizenship more broadly, can also be
understood as a form of governmentality (Foucault, 1997), or “how we think about
governing others and ourselves in a wide variety of contexts” (Dean in Ouellette & Hay,
2008, p. 9). An example of this is provided by the Colombian general manager for
Microsoft, who stated that, “For Microsoft, digital governments are the best way to take
advantage of information and communication technologies to promote a unified vision of
the State” (emphasis added; “Medellín, primera ciudad digital,” 2007). This takes on a
particular resonance in the context of a country whose federal and municipal
governments have, for most of its modern history, struggled to construct a stable, unified,
and legitimate state capable of governing despite violent clashes for power.
Not only can digital citizenship be used discursively as a form of
governmentality, but so can the technological architecture of the communicative spaces
in which digital citizenship is enacted; these structure its possibilities. As mentioned in
Chapter 1, Kelty argues that, “We proliferate ways of governing ourselves and others as
we proliferate these tools, technologies, platforms or networks—and in the process
change what it means (and meant) to interact, vote, and protest” (2013, p. 29). Kelty asks
how opportunities for political participation are structured by Internet-based platforms,
and directly questions the relationship between participation and power; he points out
that, too often, the agency to participate in social media platforms is collapsed with the
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However, as Carpentier notes, in 1998, Habermas himself “expressed his reservations about ICTs
fulfilling the conditions of the public sphere: ‘Whereas the growth of systems and networks multiplies
possible contacts and exchanges of information, it does not lead per se to the expansion of an
intersubjectively shared world and to the discursive interweaving of conceptions of relevance, themes, and
contradictions from which political public spheres arise’” (Habermas in Carpentier, 2011, p. 119).
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agency to participate in governing. Going further, Christian Fuchs argues that the notion
of digital citizenship is part of a misplaced Web 2.0 ideology, in which too much agency
is ascribed to users of UGC platforms while ignoring structural limitations to
participation, such as proprietary software and corporate control over the architecture of
participation; he refers to content-related participation in such sites as “pseudo-
participation,” lacking in structural participation (2011, p. 279). While drawing critical
attention to the limits to structural participation in digital spaces is crucial, being entirely
dismissive of the potential for content-related participation in such spaces to yield
meaningful social change outcomes denies users any agency and overlooks the
significance of storytelling and “challenging codes” (Melucci, 1996) to forge a more
participatory and just society. We can consider, for example, the use of UGC platforms to
produce and circulate activist messages during the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement,
and other recent mobilizations (see Thorson et al., 2013); or La Elite and Son Batá’s use
of these platforms, discussed in Chapter 4. Ciudad Comuna tries to promote structural
and content-related participation, using both open and proprietary platforms to do so. As I
have said, both structural and content-related participation are significant to the
participatory public culture project.
Graham Longford contends that
Genuine technological citizenship in the digital era entails a critical
awareness of how code constitutes the conditions of possibility for
different norms, models, and practices of on-line citizenship, along with
the capacity to resist and reshape—to hack, if you will—the prevailing
terms and conditions of cybercitizenship if they no longer serve our needs.
(2005, p. 69)

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In this view, digital citizenship must include the ability to critically evaluate (and change)
the architecture of online communicative spaces, something that neither Medellín Digital
nor Ciudad Comuna has yet accomplished among their users/participants. This is a high
standard for digital citizenship, and one that, to date, remains accessible only to a small
number of techno-elite worldwide.
343
Yet these critical approaches help to maintain an
analytical focus on the fundamental questions of power, participation, and influence that
are at stake.
The differences in how (digital) citizenship and participation are conceived result
in distinct approaches to educating and training citizens to participate. This is apparent in
the kinds of trainings offered by these two cases. Medellín Digital offers digital literacy
trainings that use primarily proprietary software, such as Microsoft Office, while Ciudad
Comuna offers popular education workshops in digital photography, video, and
journalism, with a primary focus on enabling residents to produce informative, critical
content.
Patiño Lemos and Vallejo Gómez (2011) found that Medellín Digital’s digital
literacy trainings of teachers and small business people have increased these groups' use
of computer and Internet technologies in their respective work. However, the researchers
remain skeptical that the digital literacy trainings offered to teachers have enabled them
to move beyond basic, instrumental adoption of these technologies in the classroom and
onto thinking about new pedagogical approaches that these may enable—e.g., those
proposed by Jenkins et al. in “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
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343
Kelty (2008) calls those who have such skills recursive publics, and argues that, through modifying,
subverting, and building new architectures of communicative spaces, they help to reconfigure power and
knowledge.
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Education for the 21st Century” (2006). The authors of this white paper, funded by the
MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative, argue that the
participation gap—“the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and
knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow”

(ibid.,
p. 3)—is as much a concern as the digital divide. To close this gap, pedagogical
approaches in the digital era should incorporate the communicative and cultural
capacities enhanced by new technologies into the classroom. “New media literacies”
training for digital participation should include the capacities of networking, play and
problem-solving, performance and improvisation, simulation, remixing content,
multitasking, working with distributed cognition and collective intelligence models, the
ability to evaluate the sources and credibility of content, transmedia navigation (the
ability to follow content across multiple platforms), and the ability to respect and
negotiate with differing perspectives and norms (ibid.). Sonia Livingstone similarly
argued that the abilities to critically evaluate and produce new media content are crucial
for advancing democratic participation: “Only if these are firmly fore-grounded in a
definition of media literacy will people be positioned not merely as selective, receptive,
and accepting but also as participating, critical; in short, not merely as consumers but also
as citizens” (Livingstone, 2004, p. 11). Ciudad Comuna’s model of media trainings is
more closely aligned with this view.
In Patiño Lemos and Vallejo Gómez’s (2011) study of Medellín Digital, less than
one-third of the students surveyed reported doing collaborative work in class using digital
communication technologies. Further, they found that, despite the goal of having the
aulas abiertas run for (and with oversight by) the local community, “very few of them
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have a program that goes beyond offering [basic] training in computer use, to respond to
a need in the community.”
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Other critiques of Medellín Digital’s approach to digital
literacy include the curriculum being largely limited to the use of proprietary Microsoft
software (while there are pragmatic reasons to teach people Microsoft software because it
is so common in workplaces, there is no reason to limit trainings to this); and the lack of
development of critical literacy of the technology, including an understanding of its
architecture.
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This would enable users to question and understand “the ways in which
citizenship norms, rights, obligations and practices are encoded in the design and
structure of our increasingly digital surroundings” (Longford, 2005, p. 68, emphasis in
original; see also Coleman, 2008). Critical questioning of the dynamics that structure
relations of power within society has often been secondary, if not lost in the widespread
rhetoric of participation among techno-utopianists globally. Critical new media literacy
would enable the user to do more than just use or consume software and computer
technologies at the surface level, but also to analyze them in context, make proactive
choices about their use, and have the capacity to produce and circulate his or her own
content to express voice and engage in dialogue.
The extent to which Medellín Digital has succeeded in converting Medellín into a
“digital city” with more “digital citizens” is thus debatable, further complicated by the
lack of clear and consistent measures of what either concept entails. The initiative has
helped to increase easy/free connectivity to the Internet. This is primarily true for small
business people, teachers, and students using the aulas abiertas at public educational
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344
Group interview with researchers in the Educación en Ambientes Virtuales (Education in Virtual
Environments, EAV) research group at the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Medellín, January, 25,
2011.
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Various interviews, Medellín, January-July, 2011.
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institutions (Patiño Lemos &Vallejo Gómez, 2011). Between 2007 and 2011, the number
of free Internet access points in formal public educational institutions rose from 65 to 247
(nearly all of them), 66 points of access were added in government and other public
locations, and all public libraries (including the Parques Bibliotecas [Library Parks]) now
offer free connectivity.
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In 2007, the year Medellín Digital launched, 42% of people
five years of age or older in Medellín had used a computer that year; by 2011, that figure
had risen to 57.2% of people (though, of course, this rise in computer use cannot be
exclusively attributed to Medellín Digital). In 2011, 54.3% of people ages five and older
in Medellín used the Internet, up from 31.6% in 2007, bringing the city to fifth from sixth
place nationally. However, Medellín’s ratio of Internet users per capita nearly exactly
parallels that of the Colombian population as a whole, signaling that Medellín may not
yet stand out in Colombia for having an exceptionally “digital” populace.
347
In 2011,
Medellín had only the seventh-highest rate in Colombia (33.5%) of people accessing the
Internet at public educational institutions (one of Medellín Digital's primary focuses).
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Further, these measures say very little about the actual digital capacities and activities of
the population, and nothing about the extent to which this has enhanced participation in
public life.
In these broad strokes, then, existing data suggests that, even as free public access
points have significantly increased across the city, this has not rendered Medellín a city
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346
Data provided by Medellín Digital, September 2012. In many cases, the connectivity at the computer
labs at the Parques Biblioteca (Library Parks) was found to be less useful to their surrounding population,
in part because of inconveniences and costs of getting to and from these sites (Patiño Lemos & Vallejo
Gómez, 2011).
347
DANE (2011) and Internet World Stats (2012).
348
In 2011, Medellín had the second-highest percentage of urban populations in Colombia that connected
to the Internet from home (DANE, 2011); this is perhaps not surprising, since it is one of Colombia’s
wealthiest cities.
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of particularly “digital” citizens, nor has it significantly advanced new media literacies
for greater citizen participation. The extent to which greater social inclusion has been
accomplished through Medellín Digital’s efforts appears limited, though still unclear.
That is, Medellín Digital’s initiatives have increased the use of ICTs in educational
settings, but they have not promoted the kinds of skill development that Jenkins et al.
(2006) and others have identified as important for digital participation, rather than just
digital access.

The Limits of (Digital) Participation and Voice
Of course, without the basic infrastructure and access that initiatives like Medellín
Digital set out to provide, such goals for digital participation are premature. Ciudad
Comuna should benefit from citywide Internet access provided by Medellín Digital, as
more people are more easily able to access and contribute to their content online. And
while Ciudad Comuna’s approach is clearly stronger along the dimensions of
participation discussed above, it also functions on a much smaller scale, struggles with
resource constraints, and has much more precarious sustainability.
349
Bottom-up
participatory practices can be very impactful, but they can also be easily romanticized;
their limitations must also be acknowledged.
Indeed, there are limits to the very concept of participatory communication as a
method for promoting greater inclusion and equality. Feminist, postcolonial, and other
scholars have rightly pointed out that “voice,” or the process of “giving account of
oneself” (Butler, 2001), is constrained by socially constructed norms and discourses that
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Funding and sustainability are, of course, consistent challenges for grassroots communication projects.
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perpetuate structural inequalities (see Butler, 2001; Chow, 2001; Fanon, 1986; Spivak,
1994). In other words, marginalized voices must rely on modes of representation readable
within dominant discourse; self-representation (and therefore participation) is shaped by
hegemonic systems of meaning.
350
Equating voice with power implies a voice that can
be—and is—heard by networks of power, such that one’s voice may influence decisions
that affect one’s wellbeing. Thus, the concept of voice is not a perfectly inclusive one,
and voice is always constrained by the structural inequalities and corresponding
discourses embedded within the context in which it is expressed. Particular voices (often
linked to particular types of bodies, such as those of color, or female bodies) face
particular obstacles to expressing viewpoints from positions of marginality and having
them heard; they thus, accordingly, face particular obstacles to public participation.
Any analysis of participatory communication should therefore include the
constraints on being heard, or what Couldry calls “the obstructions to recognition” (2010,
p. 132). I have addressed some potential obstructions in the cases above (e.g., vertical or
closed vs. horizontal or open practices and spaces of communication). A more detailed
review of these cases—or of any other efforts to cultivate a more participatory culture—
would require an intersectional analysis of the social, cultural, and political economic
constraints on the ability to have marginalized voices heard within networks of power.
351

These constraints delimit the ways in which communication technologies may or
may not encourage more inclusive, participatory practices, and whether or not these
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In “Can the Subaltern Speak” (1994), Gayatri Spivak famously argued that subjects trying to speak from
a position of alterity cannot fundamentally speak on their own terms; to be heard, they must speak using the
terms of hegemonic discourse. It should also be acknowledged, however, that subalterns can appropriate
and repurpose hegemonic discourse for resistant practices.
351
Some of these dynamics were further explored in the discussion of Son Batá and Afro-Colombian youth
citizenship in Chapter 4.
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practices challenge inequalities in existing relations of power. Numerous scholars have
pointed out that social disparities and segregations offline are typically mirrored online.
This, of course, has significant implications for the possibilities of digital citizenship and
civic/political engagement facilitated by online platforms. Access, skills, social and
economic capital, and cultural differences have all been identified as contributing to
participation gaps online (boyd, 2012; Everett, 2008; Jenkins, 2009; Jenkins et al., 2006;
Seiter, 2008; Watkins, 2009). The online explosion of user-generated content (in blogs
and microblogs like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and other social networking sites) does
not necessarily mean that more voices are being heard—and when they are heard, the
question is by whom and with what effect. This must be analyzed in context on a case-
by-case basis, rather than making a sweeping conflation of these modes of expression
with participation or democracy. “It is the interactive dimension of voice that is crucial:
technological forms enable, but cannot guarantee, this. Voices may multiply, but
democracy still fail” (Couldry, 2010, p. 143). A flood of expressions can amount to noise
that ultimately drowns out voices—particularly minority voices—rather than amplifying
them.
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Neither of the cases examined here have been particularly successful at promoting
public dialogue in online spaces (and while encouraging offline community dialogue is
one of Ciudad Comuna’s implied goals, it is more difficult to document the extent to
which it has succeeded in doing so). Ciudad Comuna’s communicative architectures are
more explicitly designed to promote both online and offline dialogue. Yet a year after
launching the community website, the majority of user posts were simple information-
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See Alexandra Juhasz’s (2009) relevant conclusions about YouTube.
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sharing, rather than dialogue. One interviewee from Ciudad Comuna attributed this to
digital culture being still relatively limited in the comuna in terms of online interactivity
and dialogue, and thought that more training might be necessary to encourage online
dialogue.
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In the case of Medellín Digital, an initiative focused on enhancing public dialogue
in the participatory budgeting process through digital platforms would be one way to
support a more participatory public culture in the city. Drawing on Yochai Benkler’s
work, Zuckerman (2012) has pointed out that greater online political/civic engagement
might enable more crowdsourcing of solutions to civic issues; digital extensions of the
participatory budgeting process would be a prime opportunity to explore this, and this is
being tested in Europe and elsewhere (Peixoto, 2009). Future research should consider
the differences between dialogues that occur online and offline (i.e., face-to-face) in these
contexts, and their respective significance for civic/political participation.
There are also practical, organizational constraints on participatory
communication. As Carpentier and many others have pointed out, “Organizations that are
horizontally structured, and oriented towards community participation, have to deal with
certain degrees of inefficiency” (2011, p. 102). The consensus-based, flexible, horizontal
nature of participatory communication is often in conflict with the timelines and
expectations of funders or other stakeholders. An insistence on using participatory
communication methods can, itself, be a form of “tyranny,” such as when well-
intentioned participatory methods are imposed in contexts that may not be appropriate
(Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Heeks, 1999). For example, consensus-based decision-making
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Interview with Ciudad Comuna member, Medellín, July, 2011.
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on every detail of an initiative is not always feasible or appropriate when participants’
time is limited. Ciudad Comuna addresses this by having both an assembly in which
decisions are made by consensus of all participants, and a board of directors with the
power to make some of the day-to-day decisions necessary for operation. Similarly,
Kelty’s (2013) analysis of social media and political participation suggests that
hierarchically (vertically) organized spaces of communication and more horizontal
networks of participation are not mutually exclusive; and in fact, both may be needed in
social change efforts.
There are other conditions that may make the development, effectiveness, and
sustainability of participatory communication initiatives more likely. Similar to the cases
explored in Chapter 4, the participatory practices of Ciudad Comuna have been supported
by other institutions and professionals (in some cases, this has included the local
government) and have benefitted from financial resources from the participatory
budgeting process. The collective’s founders had received leadership training and
capacity building in both formal (e.g., university) and informal (e.g., CBO workshop)
educational settings. These conditions may not always be necessary to promote
participatory public cultures, but they are conditions that I saw repeated across a number
of youth-led initiatives in the city, and that clearly played a role in these initiatives’
development and sustainability.
Participatory communication practices have been critiqued for being too localist
in focus and unscalable (Carpentier, 2011; Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Gumucio Dagron,
2009; Heeks, 1999; Hickey & Mohan, 2001; Huesca, 2002; Tufte & Mefalopulos, 2009).
Institutionally-driven programs like Medellín Digital typically aim to find efficient,
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scalable models of communication for development, but participatory communication is
often a locally-specific practice, one that needs to be flexible and responsive to contextual
particularities (Gumucio Dagron, 2001; see also Quarry & Ramirez, 2009; Servaes &
Malikhao, 2005; Tufte & Mefalopulos, 2009). Alfonso Gumucio Dagron has argued that,
“In a more reasonable framework for development, scale would have to do with linking
communities with similar issues of concern and facilitating exchanges, instead of
multiplying rigid models” (2001, p.11). This suggests a network mentality—e.g.,
supporting local digital communication projects like Ciudad Comuna to network with
others across the city—as opposed to a mentality of replicability for scale.
Indeed, the affordances of the digital age challenge both the concepts of
“community” and the “local,” and some scholars celebrate the use of networked new
media technologies to transcend geographic space (e.g., Gee, 2007). Yet the existence of
virtual communities has not replaced or drastically altered the material realities of offline
communities, and the dismissal of conceptualizing communities as geographically-
bounded can have the effect of decontextualizing and obfuscating the specific, structural
inequalities that participatory communication aims to address. In many cases, online
networked publics (boyd, 2007), such as those found on YouTube, may not be the most
appropriate audience(s), while narrowcasting
354
to local audiences may be more effective
and empowering.
In the case of Ciudad Comuna, some participants felt that the process of
producing locally-based and locally-relevant media changed their relationship to their
comuna and city, and prompted their public participation as they became personally
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354
Narrowcasting refers to communication aimed specifically at particular groups for strategic reasons,
rather than at general audiences (see, e.g. Gregory, 2010).
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invested in the issues. The experience of taking part in the creative process of storytelling
about local issues engaged them in the issues. In so doing, they gained recognition by
local leaders and community members, as well as status as local journalists, which further
motivated their participation.
355

A particular challenge for Medellín’s locally-based communication practices like
those of Ciudad Comuna, however, is posed by the complex dynamics of armed violence
that surround them, and how these play out across different relations of power in the
comuna. While a detailed analysis of this is beyond the scope of this chapter,
participatory communication in the context of armed violence raises a particular set of
challenges, as participants strive to maintain their autonomy amidst sometimes dangerous
power struggles. Clemencia Rodríguez’s Citizens’ media against armed conflict:
Disrupting violence in Colombia (2011) elucidates such complexities, as well as some of
the ways in which they are overcome by participatory communication initiatives, and
how these may work against cultures of violence. Rodríguez offers numerous examples
of citizens’ media creating alternatives to cultures of violence and engaging citizens to
reclaim public spheres that had been constrained or co-opted by violent actors.
Perhaps the most fundamental challenge to participatory communication is that,
when truly dialogical, it entails some surrender of control and a shift in relations of
decision-making power that may be—and often is—met with resistance by existing
power holders (see Gumucio Dagron, 2009; Huesca, 2002; Matewa, 2010). By the time
of this research, Ciudad Comuna had met some resistance from local leaders, but it had
also received support from others and from the municipal government, despite the
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Group interview with members of Ciudad Comuna, Medellín, May 13, 2011.
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group’s often critical stance. This support signaled a commitment by some branches of
the Salazar administration to developing a public culture that values voice, even as their
own municipal initiative of digital culture fell short of this task. Ultimately, participatory
public cultures may benefit from both institutional and grassroots (and both transmission
and ritual) communication practices, ideally working synergistically—more so than had
been the case in Medellín at the time of this research.

Conclusion: The Role of Communication in Participatory Public Culture
In this chapter, I considered the social implications of using digital
communication technologies to support participation in public life. Two very different
cases, one top-down (Medellín Digital) and one bottom-up (Ciudad Comuna), reflect
distinct ideologies and practices of citizenship and participation. While both of these
initiatives are still relatively young and data on their impacts are limited, contrasting them
along the dimensions of horizontality, dialogic communication, autonomy, and openness
highlights that the ways in which participation and digital citizenship are constructed and
enacted, and how these have meaningful implications for the advancement of
participatory public culture.
To summarize in broad strokes, the case of Medellín Digital reflects a techno-
centric and relatively limited notion of digital citizenship, a loose concept of participation
that does not challenge existing structures and relations of power, and a tendency toward
the transmission model of communication. Ciudad Comuna’s approach reflects an
understanding of participatory communication that challenges traditional notions of
citizenship and relations of power, and sees digital technologies as secondary to (and as
instruments used in support of) social processes geared toward horizontal, dialogical,
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open, and autonomous communication. Medellín Digital offers limited opportunities for
content participation and (to an even lesser extent) management, but no opportunities for
participation in determining the communicative architecture offered to the public. Ciudad
Comuna has various processes in place to encourage public participation in content
creation, content and website management, and (to a limited degree) the communicative
architecture surrounding these.
While there are exceptions in both cases, these two approaches loosely reflect the
difference between transmission and ritual views of communication, though seeing these
as a binary is erroneous. The two are not necessarily contradictory or mutually exclusive;
effective public participation requires access to information, and therefore,
media/communication systems that promote connectivity and serve the function of
information delivery remain important. Ideally, top-down/bottom-up and
transmission/ritual approaches would work in synergy, rather than in relative isolation.
While the Fajardo and Salazar administrations could have done much more to develop
this synergy, their pro-community media stance was an important first step in this
direction.
That said, just as I was finishing edits on this chapter in September, 2013,
Medellín Digital was re-launched as Medellín Ciudad Inteligente (Medellín, a Smart
City). Led by a new director, the initiative may be taking steps toward promoting a more
participatory public culture, including adding a strategic focus on gobierno abierto (open
government) and “effective communication between citizens and authorities” (Portal
Educativo de Medellín, 2013). It also seems that some steps are being taken toward
developing the synergy between institutional and grassroots communication efforts,
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through activities like trainings for community radio (Tibaduiza, 2013). Future research
on the evolution and iterations of Medellín Ciudad Inteligente would likely continue to
provide useful insights for the study of participatory public culture.
What I have argued for here is that transmission models of communication be
framed within the broader ritual view, which understands social reality as constructed
through processes of communication. This understanding directly links communication
and participation, and it also enables us to deconstruct the social and cultural work
performed through discourses of participation and digital citizenship. For example,
Medellín Digital’s work may prove to have been far more impactful in drawing digital
business investment to the city than in promoting a more participatory public culture,
illustrating how the neoliberal discourse of entrepreneurialism and global market
participation may be easily sutured with the discourse of digital participation and
citizenship.
In practice, it is much easier to capitalize on rhetoric of citizen participation
through digital inclusion than it is to actually accomplish it; and Kelty (2013) was
succinct and accurate in saying that the agency to participate in social media platforms is
too often collapsed with the agency to participate in politics and governing. Just as the
presence of the Internet alone does not guarantee a more democratic culture, the
expansion of “digital citizenship” does not necessarily catalyze a more participatory
public culture. Digitally networked participation must be linked to the public expression
of voice, to dialogue, and ultimately, to the ability to influence decisions that affect one’s
offline, material reality.
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This necessitates that a culture of participation be cultivated across and between
different levels of society, and through horizontal, dialogic communicative practices and
open and autonomous communicative spaces. A culture of participation is a culture that
values the expression of different voices, and that connects such expressions with
systems or structures that enable them to have influence over material outcomes—
keeping in mind that voices are constrained by the discursive and structural limits on
what can be expressed, by whom, and who is listening. Thus, while Couldry’s concept of
voice as both a process and a value is helpful to an analysis of participatory public
culture, another dimension must be added: the connection between voice and influence
over decisions with public outcomes.
Efforts to expand civic and political practices in the digital sphere must be linked
to communicative practices that enable dialogue across multiple levels, to cultures that
value and promote voice, and to political or other structures that link voice to influence in
public decision-making. I am therefore insisting on the intersection of the dimensions of
politics and culture (analyzed in the previous chapters) with communication in order to
theorize participatory public cultures in the digital era. This intersection is the focus of
the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 6: The Medellín Model of Participatory Public Culture: Toward a New
Analytical Approach

A theory is exactly like a box of tools.
– Gilles Deleuze
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In Chapter 1, I expressed my frustration with existing frameworks for analyzing
participation, which tend to be too linear, one-dimensional, lacking in multilevel or
ecological thinking, overly normative, and in some cases, technologically deterministic.
This chapter synthesizes the findings from the case studies in the previous chapters to
develop a new analytical framework—what I am calling the Medellín Model of
Participatory Public Culture—to inform theory and practice in other contexts. I have
defined a participatory public culture as one that is characterized by relatively horizontal
decision-making based in practices of dialogic communication with low barriers to
participation, through which issues of public consequence are negotiated. A participatory
culture is one that values the voices and participation of non-hegemonic groups.

Summary and Synthesis of Findings
In Medellín, youth have frequently been both the target of institutional
initiatives and the leaders of many grassroots efforts to promote citizen
participation in public life. As Chapter 2 explains, the ways in which young
people were both protagonists and victims of the violence related to the drug trade
and paramilitary urban warfare positioned them as a demographic of central
importance to the stabilization and development of Medellín. The stigmatization
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Foucault and Deleuze, 1977, p. 208.
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of (primarily poor) youth in the media and public discourse, the response of youth
organizers to this stigmatization and the ways in which violence constrained their
daily lives, the close relationship between the Compromiso Ciudadano party and
grassroots youth organizing, and the Fajardo administration’s agenda for
investment in education, all meant that youth became a key sociopolitical
demographic. The engagement of youth in public life served the interests of many
young people, their communities, local social organizations, and the municipal
government.
Indeed, faced with a public disillusioned by decades of politiquería, clientelism,
corruption, and the uncontainable effects of narcotrafficking, increasing citizen
participation in local governance was crucial to the Fajardo and Salazar administrations’
efforts to gain public trust in government institutions. It was also part of their efforts to
recuperate public spaces from the dynamics of armed violence, and ultimately, to make
the city more equitable and governable (hence their motto “Medellín Gobernable y
Participativa”). The episteme of participation was therefore of strategic importance—or
“expedient”—to the Fajardo and Salazar administrations, as well as to government actors
at the national level.
357
In Chapter 3, I analyzed this through the lens of Foucault’s notion
governmentality; this was not to discredit these efforts, but to understand the ways in
which an ethos of citizen participation was used to organize and govern society.
The case of Medellín—and its participatory budgeting (PB) process, in
particular—shows how the institutionalization of participation can, in some cases, help to
expand participatory public culture, particularly for youth, both by putting in place
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Chapter 3 traced the institutionalization of participation at both of these levels of government.
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(somewhat) more accessible structures for political participation, and by catalyzing
public discussion of what constitutes citizen participation. Participatory budgeting offers
an institutional but localized space of deliberation that, despite the infiltration of
traditional power holders and their agendas, offers youth and other marginalized groups a
point of access to political and civic influence that has lower barriers to entry than
traditional political structures. For a small portion of the city’s budget, it shifts relations
of power from a centralized process of resource allocation to a more localized, relatively
horizontal decision-making process. Participatory budgeting has appealed to some youth
who are not drawn to other, more traditional forms of political participation, because it is
a space in which they find that their voices may directly influence the allocation of
resources that affect their daily lives. Both my own and existing research provides
evidence that Medellín’s participatory budgeting process has cultivated some non-
traditional leaders, including among youth (see Chapter 3). And in some cases, the
process offers opportunities for civic education and promotes listening, dialogue, and the
valuing of other viewpoints.
During the period analyzed in this study (primarily 2004–2011), participatory
budgeting was affecting the ecology of youth participation in the city in both positive and
negative ways. It was making funding more accessible to youth organizers at the
community level, thereby providing an incentive for some young people to participate in
budgetary decision-making—an area of public life traditionally exclusive of (and perhaps
less appealing to) youth. It was helping to develop some youth’s capacities to participate
and take leadership roles in public life. At the same time, it was bringing an “adult logic”
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of bureaucracy and institutionalization to grassroots youth organizing, and creating new
financial dependencies.
While participatory budgeting was a cornerstone of the Fajardo administration’s
efforts to change the political culture of the city, it offered more of a structural change,
rather than a cultural one. Participatory budgeting can thus be understood as a structure
that may support—though not guarantee—a more participatory public culture. I found
limited, and mixed, evidence that it had significantly raised awareness or changed beliefs
about the importance of civic/political participation among the broader public in
Medellín; there was clearly room for increasing both public awareness of, and public
participation in, the process (see Chapter 3).
Further, there are very significant mediating factors that determine the outcomes
of participatory budgeting. One is that participatory budgeting is inherently context-
specific, enmeshed in local dynamics and networks of power from the community level
through to the city government. At the community level, traditional power holders may
not be willing to relinquish control to a more participatory process. In Medellín, networks
of clientelism and corruption persist, threatening the future of the process. Nor is
participatory budgeting free from the influence of local armed actors and illicit
economies. At the municipal government level, the degree to which each administration
prioritizes participatory budgeting will influence its effectiveness. Not only were the
Fajardo and Salazar administrations politically invested in the process, but both were
composed largely of community organizers, academics, and activists who were less
predisposed to clientelist relationships and corruption than previous administrations of
traditional political party elites. Salazar’s successor, Aníbal Gaviria, has placed less
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emphasis on community-based practices of citizen participation, which will likely
weaken the participatory budgeting process as a whole.
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As an aside, it is worth noting that, while participatory budgeting aims to enable
all citizens—especially those who are typically underrepresented in government—to
directly influence development in their communities, such opportunities for participation
are not necessarily to the exclusion of professionals with expert knowledge. Both the
participatory budgeting process and all of the youth collectives studied here have
benefitted from input by professionals and established organizations with relevant
expertise (another sign of the importance of cultivating synergies between institutional
and grassroots/non-institutional forms of participation).
359
As Carpentier notes more
broadly, “the models that support stronger forms of participation (even the most
maximalist versions) do not aim for the (symbolic) annihilation of elite roles, but try to
transform these roles in order to allow for power-sharing between privileged and non-
privileged (or elite and non-elite) actors” (2011, p. 125).
The imperfections and tensions within the participatory budgeting process in
Medellín catalyzed critical public debate over the very terms of participation, what it
means to participate in local governance, and what constitutes direct participation in the
public sphere. So, while participatory budgeting has been more of a structural than
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In fact, as I was finishing this study, I received an update from one of my interviewees from Ciudad
Comuna (see Chapter 5) that their communication collective had withdrawn from the participatory
budgeting process in political objection. They were protesting both local corruption (armed actors in
Comuna 8 were allegedly soliciting “vacunas,” or bribes, from organizations implementing participatory
budgeting initiatives before allowing them to carry out their operations) and that the new administration
was seemingly turning a blind eye to the problem (Personal correspondence with member of Ciudad
Comuna, October 8, 2013).
359
For example, and for further discussion of this topic in relation to the autonomy of youth groups, see
Appendix B. See also Carpentier in Jenkins and Carpentier (2013), pp. 13–14, regarding the importance of
formalized organizations in helping to structure and support participation.
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300!
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cultural change to date,
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this offers early evidence of some of its impact on Medellín's
public culture.
To investigate the role that culture may play in enhancing youth engagement in
public life, I considered the two youth collectives of the Elite Hip Hop Network (“La
Elite”) and the Afro-Colombian cultural group Son Batá. Like many other examples
across the city, these are cases in which youth who are drawn to participate in cultural
activities frequently become engaged in other areas of public and political life. The
boundaries between their cultural and political expressions are blurred as they resignify
their marginalized or stigmatized subjectivities in public ways (through performances,
street art, etc.) and reterritorialize public spaces. Examples like the hip hop festival
Revolución Sin Muertos illustrate these tactics of participation, as youth perform their
subjectivities as empowered, nonviolent agents of change in a space typically controlled
by armed actors. Their horizontal decision-making practices prefigure a more
participatory public culture.
In late modernity, cultural participation has commonly been an entry point for
youth to participate in public life; the barriers to participation are often less than those for
traditional forms of political participation, and cultural expression can be particularly
meaningful to youth as a venue for self-expression and identity formation. Cultural
participation can also cultivate collective identity formation, as well as the capacities to
participate in public life—as the participatory decision-making, popular education, and
mentoring methods used by La Elite and Son Batá show (see Chapter 4).
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At the time of this writing, participatory budgeting had been practiced for less than 10 years in Medellín.
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301!
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Adapting Michel de Certeau’s terminology, I analyzed these as grassroots tactics
of participation, and contrasted them with institutional strategies of participation, such as
participatory budgeting. I argued that, together, these should be understood dialectically,
rather than as a binary; some strategies of participation are informed by grassroots tactics,
and some tactics are shaped by institutional strategies. Analyzing these youth collectives’
tactical approaches to participation in the participatory budgeting process illustrated that
institutional and grassroots modes of participation can operate in both synergy and
tension. I argued that the relationship between the two is central to the construction of a
participatory public culture.
Youth citizenship and participation are defined and contested at the intersection of
these strategies and tactics. My research found that, by negotiating the relationship
between them, some youth were articulating an alternative form of citizenship (what
Bennett [2007, 2008] would call “self-actualized” citizenship). It is a form of citizenship
based on the notion of participation, rather than representation, and on cultural and social
change, rather than on traditional politics.
Of course, youth citizenship is experienced in very different ways by different
kinds of youth, and certain youth face greater obstacles to participation in public life than
others, as the case of Son Batá illustrates. For these Afro-Colombian youth, grassroots
tactics can, in some cases, serve as a bridge to institutional participation (e.g., in
government or civil society institutions), which may otherwise seem out of reach. Yet for
these youth, such institutional participation remains a fraught terrain, given the history of
marginalization of their communities from spaces of participation and governance.
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The cases of cultural participation analyzed in Chapter 4 illustrate actions that I
am proposing are crucial to the development of participatory public culture, namely
reducing barriers to participation, creating spaces or structures of participation, fomenting
cultures of participation, developing capacities to participate, and linking the expression
of voice to influence over decisions that affect participants’ wellbeing. (These are further
elaborated below.)
Yet examples like Son Batá and La Elite should not be reified as ideal models.
Their nonviolent activist stance is complicated by the aesthetics and gender dynamics of
local hip hop—which in different ways may continue to perpetuate certain forms of
violence—and by the ways in which these two collectives continue to rely upon the
narrative of violence as part of the origin story of their work. In other words, these
collectives do not fully transcend the cultures of violence in which they are embedded.
What’s more, they illustrate how youth collectives can produce their own hegemonies, as
particular groups gain greater recognition, power, and resources than others. And
ultimately, they cannot be reified, because youth groups are particularly transient and
heavily determined by the personalities of their participants (most especially those in
leadership positions), whose interests and commitment levels may frequently change.
From a policy and planning perspective, supporting the work of youth groups may seem
like a high-risk investment of time and resources, but it is one of great importance to the
cultivation of youth citizenship and participatory public culture.
Chapter 5 considered the relationship between communication and participation
in the digital age, and what kinds of communicative practices and spaces—especially, but
not exclusively, digital platforms—help to promote citizen voices in public life in the
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contemporary moment. Medellín Digital’s initiatives to cultivate “digital citizens” and
render Medellín a “digital city” were contrasted with the grassroots, youth-led
communication collective Ciudad Comuna. While both aim (at least in part) to promote
public participation and social inclusion using digital (and other) communication tools,
the stark differences in these top-down and bottom-up approaches reveal distinct
ideologies, practices, and conceptions of digital inclusion, citizenship, and participation.
These differences have fundamental implications for how we analyze participatory public
culture.
Thinking through the lenses of both the transmission model (i.e., information
delivery) and James Carey’s (1989) ritual model of communication (i.e., the social
construction of meaning) can help to clarify the assumptions embedded within different
communicative platforms and practices. Drawing from scholarship on participatory
communication in Latin America, and on participatory culture and new media in the
United States and Europe, I proposed the four concepts of horizontality, dialogue,
autonomy, and openness
361
as analytical dimensions to help distinguish between different
communicative approaches to participation in public life (see Figure 5.1).
As the case of the citizens’ media project Ciudad Comuna illustrates,
autonomous, open, and horizontal practices of communication can challenge existing
relations of power. Horizontal communication is crucial to a participatory public culture
(though this is not necessarily to the exclusion of more vertical forms of communication
and information delivery); indeed, horizontality is a defining characteristic, and it must be
supported by spaces, structures, and cultures that enable it. Of course, power operates
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Explanations of these terms can be found in Chapter 5.
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through more complex dynamics than can be mapped onto a binary conception of
horizontality versus verticality, but this offers one heuristic through which to think
critically about power and participation. Chapter 5 considered the utility of both (and the
relationship between them) to fostering participatory public culture.
The Fajardo and Salazar administrations’ support of community and citizens’
media projects was perhaps a more significant testament to their commitment to
cultivating a participatory public culture than their government’s own initiative, Medellín
Digital. Despite deploying a rhetoric of citizen participation, at the time of my research
Medellín Digital was not, on the whole, creating spaces for or supporting practices of
communication that promoted a more participatory public culture—although it had the
potential to. Medellín Digital’s choices of communicative architecture (e.g., proprietary
versus open software, and centrally controlled versus open publishing) and its relatively
narrowly conceived approaches to digital literacy and digital citizenship did not match its
stated goals for participation and inclusion. As is the tendency in technocentric discourses
of new media and democratization, participation was simplistically conflated with
technology use and hollowed of its political and cultural significance (again underscoring
the importance of analyzing communicative, cultural, and political participation
together). Here, Carpentier’s (2011) distinction between structural participation and
content participation offered a useful analytic for understanding the ways and extent to
which (digital) communication platforms may or may not be participatory. Medellín
Digital afforded very few opportunities for structural participation, and some limited
opportunities for content-related participation. In contrast, Ciudad Comuna sought to do
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both, including developing an open publishing platform for local social organizations and
citizen groups, using open source software.
However, the widespread use of proprietary platforms like Facebook (which offer
limited opportunities for structural participation) by groups that practice participatory
cultures (like Ciudad Comuna, La Elite, and Son Batá) illustrates that the two are not
necessarily mutually exclusive; limited structural participation in communication
platforms may constrain participatory cultures in some important ways, but it does not
preclude their existence or ability to flourish. As the cases of La Elite, Son Batá, and
Ciudad Comuna all showed, important “tactics of participation” (e.g., resignification and
reterritorialization) may be performed through or bolstered by the production and
circulation of content, even on platforms with limited structural participation. Further,
while structural participation is an important form of participation that allows users to
help shape their communication platforms, it is not always of interest to (nor feasible for)
all users; it is often only the “geeks” (Ito et al., 2010; Kelty, 2005) or techno-elite who
experience this level of structural participation in digital communication.
Content-related participation also has its limits. The online explosion of user-
generated content (e.g., in blogs, video streaming platforms, and social networking sites)
does not necessarily mean that more voices are being heard; and when they are heard, the
questions as to whom hears and with what impact are still of concern. Nor does it mean
that meaningful, engaged dialogue (rather than individual expression) is taking place;
neither of the cases examined in Chapter 5 were particularly successful at promoting
public dialogue in online spaces. For these reasons, I argued that content-related
participation must be analyzed in context on a case-by-case basis, rather than making a
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sweeping conflation of these digital modes of expression with participation or
democracy. Analysis should further consider whether content-related participation is
amplifying individual or collective voices; most existing user-generated content
platforms for digital communication may be used for either, but were not designed with
collective voices in mind, and in some ways may hinder these (Jenkins in Jenkins &
Carpentier, 2013; Juhasz, 2009; Papacharissi, 2010).
Citizen voices are constrained by the cultural and structural limits on what can be
expressed, by whom, and who is listening—something which is especially true for the
voices of marginalized youth. Interrogating the concept of voice and how it has been
theorized in both the global North and South, I concluded that a participatory public
culture is one that values citizens’ (especially marginalized citizens’) voices and enables
the expression of these voices—both individually and collectively—to influence public
decisions that affect their wellbeing. The power of citizen voices in public participation is
dependent upon horizontal relations of power in public decision-making, as well as upon
dialogic communication across different levels of society, enabled by open and
autonomous spaces for such communication. I therefore argued that efforts to use digital
communication technologies to enhance civic/political engagement must be linked to
communicative practices that enable dialogue (two-way or multidirectional) across
societal levels; cultures that value and promote citizen voices; and political or other
structures that link these voices to influencing decisions that affect their offline, material
reality. Similar to the findings in Chapter 4 on cultural participation, in this analysis of
communication initiatives I found that participatory public cultures may benefit from
both institutional and grassroots (and both transmission and ritual) communication
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practices, ideally working synergistically—more so than has been the case in Medellín to
date.
In sum, in the course of these analyses, I considered both structural and cultural
(e.g., content-related) modes of participation, seeing them not as a simplistic binary but
as being deeply interconnected and interdependent. At the same time, the distinction is
useful as a way to maintain critical clarity about the kinds and degrees of participation
being discussed. The municipal administration’s strategies for participation have
inevitably been more structural, such as implementing a participatory budgeting process
or providing free Internet access. While such changes may occur relatively quickly, the
ultimate efficacy of their strategies rests on the extent of cultural change happening in
tandem, but this often occurs more slowly.
Institutionalized participation differs from non-institutionalized participation, and
the two can exist in tension or synergy. Medellín between 2004 and 2011 illustrated both
grassroots tactics and institutional strategies of participation, in some cases with a
noteworthy degree of synergy between them. Three factors in particular enabled this
synergy. The first was a youth movement fueled by collectives that promoted proactive
citizenship and often engaged with the local government, while maintaining a critical
stance. Without these grassroots tactics of participation, it is unlikely that youth
engagement in public life would have been as significant. The second was the existence
of some institutional entities that facilitated youth participation in public life, but did not
overly try to control it or appropriate it. And third, there were municipal administrations
sympathetic to community-based organizing that implemented initiatives aimed at
engaging disenfranchised groups. These three factors were mutually reinforcing.
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The case of Medellín is thus particularly helpful for understanding how both
institutional strategies and grassroots tactics of youth participation may be necessary to
cultivate participatory public cultures. This is useful academically, as well as from a
practical policy perspective, as I will explain in the following analytical model.

The Medellín Model of Participatory Public Culture

I have insisted throughout this study that participatory public culture requires
analysis across the interrelated areas of communication, culture, and politics; both
participation and (youth) citizenship implicate all three. Toward that end, the following
framework, which is grounded in the data analyzed in the previous chapters, is presented
as an analytical framework for thinking about—and working toward—youth engagement
and more participatory public cultures (Figure 6.1). It is not intended to be prescriptive or
normative, but to provoke critical analysis useful for both scholarship and practice.

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Figure 6.1. The Medellín model for the analysis of participatory public culture.
Communication Culture Politics
Structural
participation
Content
participation
Structural
participation
Content
participation
Structural
participation
Content
participation
Institutional
strategies
Grassroots
tactics
Institutional
strategies
Grassroots
tactics
Institutional
strategies
Grassroots
tactics
Institutional
strategies
Grassroots
tactics
Institutional
strategies
Grassroots
tactics
Reducing
barriers to
participation
Creating
spaces of
participation
Creating
cultures of
participation
Developing
capacities
to participate
Linking
voice to
influence
Dimensions
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!
310!
310!
In insisting on analysis across the interrelated areas of communication, culture,
and politics, this model suggests a more interdisciplinary approach than has often been
used to date in the scholarship on participatory communication and culture. Within each
of these areas, the model prompts us to consider the kinds of participation in question,
whether structural or content-related. It also proposes five transversal dimensions for
analysis that describe ways in which participatory public cultures and youth engagement
may be enhanced: reducing barriers to participation, creating spaces of participation,
creating cultures of participation, developing (youth) citizens’ capacities to participate,
and linking (youth) voices to influence over decisions that affect their wellbeing. Within
each of these, we can consider both institutional and non-institutional or grassroots
initiatives, as well as the synergies (or tensions) between them.
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!
311!

Figure 6.2. Example of analytical model applied to cases examined in this study.
Communication Culture Politics
Structural
participation
Content
participation
Structural
participation
Content
participation
Structural
participation
Content
participation
Institutional
strategies
(MD)
(PB)
(PB) PB
Grassroots
tactics
Institutional
strategies
(PB) PB!
Grassroots
tactics
Institutional
strategies
Grassroots
tactics
Institutional
strategies
(YPB/PB) YPB/PB
Grassroots
tactics
Institutional
strategies
YPB/PB
Grassroots
tactics
Reducing
barriers to
participation
Creating
spaces of
participation
Creating
cultures of
participation
Developing
capacities
to participate
Linking
voice to
influence
CC {O} (CC)
(CC)
CC {A, D, H, O}
(CC)
(CC)
(CC)
(CC) (CC)
(MD – e.g.,
culture portal)
(PB)
(CC)
EHH
SB
(EHH)
(SB)
EHH
SB
EHH
SB
EHH
SB
EHH
SB
(EHH)
(SB)
(EHH)
(SB)
(EHH)
(SB)
(EHH)
(SB)
EHH
SB
(CC)
EHH
SB
Key: MD = Medellín Digital PB = Participatory budgeting CC = Ciudad Comuna EHH = Elite Hip Hop Network
SB = Son Batá YPB = Youth participatory budgeting program ( ) = Lesser or limited degree
{A = Autonomy D = Dialogue H = Horizontality O = Openness}
CC {A, D, H, O}
CC
Dimensions
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312!
312!
We can map the cases analyzed in this study onto the proposed matrix, starting
with the first dimension of analysis: reducing barriers to participation (see Figure 6.2).
For example, Medellín Digital is an institutional strategy aimed at reducing barriers to
participation by providing widespread public Internet access and capacity-building in the
use of ICTs. During the time of my fieldwork, it attempted to promote content
participation in the areas of communication and culture, but only to limited degrees (and
even less so in the area of politics). Barriers to content-related participation remained;
users were trained in a limited set of skills, primarily based on proprietary Microsoft
platforms, and the majority of the content in its portals was produced centrally, rather
than by users. Structural participation (e.g., in developing or designing the architecture of
its portals) was not significantly promoted. Another missed opportunity in the case of
Medellín Digital was the reduction of barriers to political participation through the use of
ICTs; e.g., enhancing the city’s participatory budgeting process with digital
communication tools that could reduce such obstacles as commuting, time commitments,
and safety concerns related to the fronteras invisibles (gang-controlled invisible borders).
Creating ways for youth and other citizens to engage in participatory budgeting virtually
could increase this form of participation in public life, as long as providing access to
digital communication technologies remains a priority.
Ciudad Comuna was analyzed for its grassroots tactics for increasing youth (and
other citizen) engagement. The collective’s use of relatively (though not exclusively)
open, autonomous, horizontal, and dialogical forms of communication helped to reduce
barriers to participation in public life. They did so particularly in the area of
communication, but also to an extent in politics and culture. By providing multimedia
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313!
313!
channels that both were open to citizen contributions and featured content covering issues
spanning all three areas, they reduced some of the barriers to citizens sharing their
perspectives about issues of public concern. The modes of participation they aimed to
promote included both structural and content-related participation. In the area of
communication, Ciudad Comuna helped to reduce barriers to participation by engaging
and training local citizens in the production of community media and by creating a
platform for open publishing (although it was short-lived); this presented community
groups and citizen-led organizations with opportunities for both content-related and, to
some extent, structural participation. By using open source software, there was the
potential for citizens to engage with the communicative architecture of the publishing
platform, although in actuality, this form of structural participation was quite limited. As
discussed in Chapter 5, structural participation through the use of software code still has
very high barriers to entry (namely, the knowledge and skills to write code).
Ciudad Comuna created greater opportunities for structural participation in their
assembly meetings, in which decisions about the collective’s operations were made in a
horizontal and dialogical manner, and in their public editorial meetings (although the
latter were primarily an opportunity for content-related participation). These are also
examples of the ways in which Ciudad Comuna created spaces and promoted cultures of
participation—two other dimensions of the model—characterized by horizontality,
dialogue, autonomy, and openness. These four characteristics, discussed at length in
Chapter 5, can thus be applied as another sub-level of analysis to the framework (see
Figure 6.2). Through the assemblies and public editorial board meetings, participatory
culture was modeled, and citizens’ capacities to participate were developed as
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participants—primarily youth—learned how to participate in decision-making around
issues of public concern. Ciudad Comuna further developed youths’ capacities to
participate through their popular education trainings in multimedia production, which
taught not only media production skills, but also critical analysis of public issues. Finally,
to a limited degree (that could be increased), Ciudad Comuna helped connect the
expression of citizen voices to influence across the areas of communication, culture, and
politics, simply by creating multiple channels for the amplification of these voices. To
increase their impact, the collective could consider additional tactics for strengthening the
link between the expression/amplification of citizen voices with direct influence over
public issues; this might entail greater engagement with government institutions.
There was relatively little synergy between the Medellín Digital and Ciudad
Comuna initiatives, although the two could be mutually reinforcing. Future analysis
could consider ways to increase the synergy between them, potentially broadening the
scope and reach of the impact of Ciudad Comuna while deepening that of Medellín
Digital.
The cases of La Elite and Son Batá can be understood as reducing the barriers to
cultural participation, and to a lesser extent communicative and political participation.
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To varying degrees, these youth collectives enacted all five dimensions outlined in the
matrix, and promoted both structural and content-related participation—although, to date,
their work has advanced primarily content-related, rather than structural participation in
the areas of communication and politics. For example, through participatory decision-
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362
On the topic of cultural participation, I selected two grassroots initiatives for analysis (rather than one
institutional and one grassroots initiative) because these two cases presented distinct opportunities to delve
more deeply into different dimensions of youth citizenship, and because both initiatives engage
significantly with the institutional strategy of participatory budgeting. Of course, future research could
incorporate analysis of institutional strategies for cultural participation.
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315!
315!
making about its cultural programs like the hip hop festival Revolución Sin Muertos, La
Elite created a culture of both content-related and structural participation (although this
structural participation was limited to members of their network, not the entire public),
one in which participants directly shaped not only the cultural content, but also the
platforms or venue through which it was publically featured. By reterritorializing public
spaces in their gang-controlled neighborhoods, both La Elite and Son Batá created spaces
of youth participation shaped by participants. Their popular education-style schools
developed not only cultural capacities, but also capacities for broader participation in
public life. The success of their efforts drew the attention of the municipal government
(and other nongovernmental institutions), increasing the influence of their participants’
voices in the public sphere. Resignifying their youth subjectivities through public
performance was another tactic that increased the potential influence of their voices in
public life. By sending youth members of their collectives to engage in participatory
budgeting, they directly linked some of these voices to budgetary decisions that affect
their wellbeing, and increased the capacity of these youth to participate in political life.
The institutional strategy of participatory budgeting also intersects all three areas.
It clearly reduced some (though not all) barriers to participation in the area of politics,
enabling citizens to participate in a small percentage of the budgetary decision-making
for their communities. In many cases, it also helped reduce barriers to communicative
and cultural participation to an extent, as communities decided to invest resources in
communication and cultural projects (such as community media and hip hop festivals) for
citizens in their neighborhoods. Participatory budgeting clearly creates spaces of citizen
participation; these are primarily for content-related participation (i.e., decisions over
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budget allocations), although, in some limited ways, it could be argued that PB also helps
reduce barriers to structural participation. One example of this occurred when the
municipal government responded to citizen input regarding how the participatory
budgeting process itself was structured, by no longer limiting the possible initiatives to a
pre-set “menu”; citizen voices thus helped to shape the structural parameters of
participation. On the whole, however, the process in Medellín at the time of this study
was not significantly promoting structural participation. Participatory budgeting and the
youth participatory budgeting process (Presupuesto Participativo Joven) both helped to
develop citizen capacities to participate and linked the expression of citizen voices
directly to influence over decisions that impact their wellbeing. However, it was not clear
that participatory budgeting had significantly changed Medellín’s public/political culture
yet (see Chapter 3), one of the weaknesses of the process in Medellín.
There were notable synergies but also tensions between participatory budgeting as
an institutional strategy and the grassroots tactics of groups like La Elite and Son Batá.
Participatory budgeting enabled youth participation in decision-making on issues of
public concern, and in many instances, it also increased the resources available for youth
organizing. However, it also brought an institutional logic and bureaucracy to the ecology
of youth organizing in Medellín. At the same time, youth participants influenced
participatory budgeting in both positive and negative ways, contributing new ideas and
challenging existing relations of power while simultaneously finding ways to “work the
system” in favor of their youth groups’ particular interests (see Chapter 4).
Ciudad Comuna also had notable synergy and tensions with the participatory
budgeting process. The communication collective was initiated with funding allocated to
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317!
community media via PB, and they benefitted from its resources for several years.
However, in 2013, the collective decided to withdraw from participating, as a form of
political objection to both corruption in the local participatory budgeting process and the
policies of the mayoral administration of Aníbal Gaviria (see note 358, above). Yet while
many of my interviewees voiced criticisms of how participatory budgeting was being
carried out in Medellín, none—including the interviewee from Ciudad Comuna who
informed me of their withdrawal—thought that the program should be cut completely.
This example shows the vulnerability of government strategies of participation to
changes in leadership (a vulnerability of grassroots tactics as well), and the relative
precariousness of relations between grassroots and institutional actors.
Mapping each initiative onto the matrix can thus prompt consideration of the
ways in which they may be contributing to a more participatory culture along the five
dimensions, and of the synergies and tensions between the initiatives. Each cell of the
matrix can be used to generate analysis of existing or possible initiatives that would
promote participatory public culture in the areas of communication, culture, and politics,
and also along the dimensions of reducing barriers, creating spaces and cultures of
participation, developing capacities to participate, and linking voice to influence. These
can be further analyzed in terms of the synergies and tensions between institutional
strategies and grassroots tactics of participation, and how to maximize the synergies.
Considering the attributes of horizontality, openness, dialogue, and autonomy can help
clarify how and to what extent an initiative is participatory. In this way, the proposed
model can work not only to analyze present configurations of participatory public culture,
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318!
but also to identify possible areas of improvement and gaps in existing initiatives, as a
way to inform future program and policy development.
Of course, like any other, this model is a simplification of a complex reality and is
meant as an analytical tool, not as an exhaustive list of the factors that contribute to or
constrain participatory public culture. There are many other factors that mediate
participation in public life, such as economics and economic wellbeing. Economics could
be added as a fourth area for analysis, and I have touched upon the topic across the
previous chapters. I intentionally subsumed it to the three listed in the model, however, as
a sort of counter-rationality to neoliberal logic, which heavily privileges economic
rationality over any other in public policy. Clearly, economic wellbeing is a factor that
influences citizens’ participation in public life in numerous and complex ways, many of
which were mentioned in the case studies.
Other factors that mediate participation in public life include family life,
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education, the political elite and other government actors, leadership development and
organizational support, the strength of public institutions and public opinion of these, and
the history of community organizing and citizen participation, as well as the dynamics of
violence, something especially important in the case of Medellín. As noted above and in
Chapters 4 and 5, several youth leaders interviewed had received leadership training and
capacity-building in both formal and informal educational settings, and it appeared to be
a significant factor impacting youth organizing. In other words, the civic ecology in
which these youth have grown and are currently participating, and the resources within it,
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See Youniss et al. (2002).

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matter. The model I have proposed aims to encourage ecological thinking across different
societal levels, as well s consideration of the resources or limitations within these.
An important additional consideration that I touched on briefly in Chapter 4 is
that of motivation. The social status, respect, and sense of personal identity gained
through cultural self-expression may be a motivation for joining a youth group like La
Elite or Son Batá; the experience of being part of a publically-engaged collective may
then draw youth into participating in other areas of public life. In the case of Ciudad
Comuna (Chapter 5), some interviewees suggested that having the power to narrate their
realities, and to see themselves and their realities reflected in the resulting media,
motivated their participation in the project and drew them into greater engagement with
public issues.
364
Understanding what motivates youth to participate in public life is
crucial; this is an area that could be further elaborated in future refinement of my
proposed analytical model.
Additionally, I have insisted throughout that, rather than normatively and
teleologically presupposing participatory public culture as the ultimate goal, this model
must be critically situated within its broader discursive and epistemological context. I
therefore began this analysis by borrowing from George Yúdice to think about the
contemporary expediency of participation as a resource that is constructed through
discourse and practice by different actors at different levels of society, and from Foucault
to understand how participation can function as a form of governmentality. Both of these
heuristics prompt explicit consideration of the relations of power at work in discourses
and practices of participation. I noted examples of how discourses of participation can
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This is a common finding in the literatures on community/citizens’/youth media. Refer to Chapter 5.
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easily be appropriated to serve a variety of ideological (and economic) agendas while the
corresponding practices of participation may, in fact, be minimal.
It is vital for those developing relevant programs and policies to maintain a
critical stance, and to think about how to cultivate cultures of participation, not just
impose structures for it. I considered how structures of political participation like
participatory budgeting have the potential to become exploitative in the sense of off-
loading responsibilities of the state onto its citizens, or become “tyrannical” (Cooke &
Kothari, 2001) in the sense of demanding so much time from participants that the costs of
participation outweigh the benefits. Participation can certainly be considered a form of
labor; how much onus should be placed on citizens to participate?
Studies of participatory public culture should also include critical analysis of the
forms of citizenship being produced through discourses and practices of participation.
This line of questioning helped to elucidate the assumptions underlying the constructs of
youth citizenship and digital citizenship in Medellín, and how rhetoric of participation
can obscure ongoing exclusions. Moreover, digital communication should not be
normatively privileged over other forms or platforms for participation; for this, too, can
be its own form of tyranny. This is a point where the literature on participatory
communication could inform more recent work in participatory culture among new media
studies scholars.
While replication of the Medellín case cannot—and should not—be the goal, the
analytical relationships proposed by this model are transferrable, to be redefined in
different contexts. Because of both its exceptionalism and it similarities to other urban
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contexts, the Medellín case offers many important learnings that can inform theory and
practice elsewhere.

Medellín: A More Participatory Public Culture?

The media, the private sector, and government officials have produced and
marketed the idea of Medellín’s transformation, but it has also been experienced as a
lived reality for many in Medellín, including my youth interviewees. However, as my
fieldwork for this study concluded in 2011, Medellín was in a new election cycle. Aníbal
Gaviria, a former governor of the Department of Antioquia and a member of the
Colombian Liberal Party—one of Colombia’s two traditional parties—was elected,
bringing an end to the unique era of an independent administration based on a grassroots
movement. Indeed, this study considered just a slice of public life in Medellín in 2011,
toward the end of a particularly noteworthy period in the city’s history. As outgoing
mayor Alonso Salazar put it, the sustainability of the innovations and accomplishments of
the two Compromiso Ciudadano administrations were precarious, and the changes not yet
“sufficiently mature”; “a mayor could arrive that has no interest in urban projects having
much community participation. . . . [W]e have to work for continuity.”
365
For example,
even though participatory budgeting has been legally mandated, future administrations
could “take on participatory budgeting as an instrument of delivering a few resources to
the community, but not as an instrument of civic or political education.”
366

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365
Interview with former Mayor Alonso Salazar, Medellín, July 11, 2011. Fajardo made the same point at
the end of his term as mayor (Alcaldía de Medellín, 2008a).
366
Interview with former senior municipal government official by Sonya Fierst, Medellín, March 11, 2012.
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There are several factors that continue to limit participation in public life in
Medellín, most notably the ongoing narcotrafficking and neo-paramilitary violence that is
both a local and national concern. While homicide rates fell significantly during the
majority of Fajardo’s time in office, the shortcomings of the reintegration program for
paramilitaries, mandated by the national government, along with the extradition of top
narco-paramilitary commanders to the United States in 2008 and subsequent struggles for
territorial control, escalated the violence once again during Salazar’s mayorship (see
Chapter 2). Central government policies and the national context influence a city’s public
culture, particularly when that national context is so shaped by guerilla, paramilitary, and
state warfare, narcotrafficking, and other organized criminal behavior.
367

There is a factor that is always disrupting the opportunities for the people, which
is narcotrafficking. . . . [I]t is like a disease, that is to say it’s festering like a
cancer. It is a cancer that is very difficult to kill and that metastasizes. So a
community might organize itself, and when you least expect it a gang of narcos
appears and damages the life of the people. . . . I believe it is the great enemy of
this society, of the entire country, and of the world.
368

Mass displacement also continues to weigh heavily on Medellín’s development, as those
fleeing the conflict in the countryside settle in informal neighborhoods and elsewhere
throughout the city, adding to the demand for public services but having limited capacity
to contribute to its urban economy.
Corruption and clientelism also remain significant challenges in the city’s public
culture, although roughly a third of citizens believe that civic participation is changing
that. In 2006, the research firm Ipsos-Napoleón Franco began a citywide survey of public
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367
Interview with former Mayor Alonso Salazar, Medellín, July 11, 2011.
368
Interview with former senior government official, Ministry of Social Development, Medellín, July 12,
2011.
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opinion regarding life in Medellín among those aged 18 and older.
369
In 2011, 3 of every
10 respondents felt that civic participation had helped to reduce clientelism,
politiquería,
370
and corruption. Four in 10 believed that participation offered a way to
influence the decisions of local authorities, and to speak as equals with them. The
proportion of people who actively participate in public life was, as is to be expected,
somewhat lower than the total who perceive its benefits. In 2012, 19% reported having
ever participated in a formal organization or informal group to resolve a problem in their
community, with the number increasing somewhat when the question included resolving
a personal problem (Medellín Cómo Vamos, 2012). Interestingly, only a very small
number (3–4%) reported having used ICTs as part of their civic participation. Forty-one
percent (41%) felt that civic participation had strengthened social organizations, while
47% felt that it had increased the power of local politicians (Medellín Cómo Vamos,
2011, p. 48), again signaling a relationship between participation and governmentality.
This data does not represent the perspectives of youth under the age of 18, nor does it
offer comparative data prior to the Fajardo administration. It does suggest in broad
strokes, however, that efforts to bolster citizen participation in public life to date have had
mixed results, and that the culture of civic participation in the city could still be
significantly improved.
371
Future research could specifically investigate youth
perspectives on and experiences of participation, ideally in a longitudinal form that could
trace changes in youth civic/political engagement in the city over time.
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369
Survey questions about civic participation (participación ciudadana) were only added in 2009.
370
For a definition, see note 98, Chapter 3.
371
In my interview with him on July 21, 2011, Fajardo stated that one of his goals as future governor of the
Department of Antioquia would be to promote a culture of legality and peaceful coexistence, in an effort to
continue to shift public culture toward one of democratic and transparent participation, and away from
corruption.
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Among the youth interviewees who participated in my study, perceptions were
also mixed, but the youth generally expressed a sense that the city had moved toward a
more participatory public culture with greater opportunities for youth empowerment,
though many areas for improvement remain. I will quote one example at length,
articulated by an Afro-Colombian youth member of Son Batá, because it summarizes
sentiments repeated by several of my interviewees:
Undeniably, this city has transformed from the state not reaching the citizens,
from armed groups having control of the comunas [referring to the poorer parts of
the city], from youth in the comunas not having access to higher education, from
not having support if you had an idea to launch a small business, from art and
culture being seen as distant things—now they play a protagonist role in the city
. . . megaprojects like the Medellín metro, the Metrocables (gondolas), the Park
Libraries, the gardens; projects that are arriving directly to the heart of [poorer]
communities, to that corner there, to the periphery, that are generating real impact
in the city. And further, they come from a couple of transparent administrations,
which are constantly telling the city how they are investing their resources . . .
which has given the community the power to decide over part of the resources as
well. . . . Participatory budgeting is a great strategy that they put in the service of
the communities. I believe that, with all of this, today Medellín is a model city,
although there are still things lacking, there are still many things to improve—
many things to improve, many things to do—but that’s because all of the bad of
many decades can’t be resolved in two administrations, in 8 or 9 years, it’s little
by little. But it has begun to be resolved in a transcendental way. In the comunas
there are still hit men, there is still death, there are still kids with arms, but they do
not have control of the comunas. Now the kids of the comunas can go to
university, can go to other parts of the city, there are big Park Libraries, quality
high schools that are changing education, changing how the state is viewed, [and]
the community is influencing their budget. There are many things that are
changing radically in this city . . . because in addition to the state, community
organizations like Son Batá are working for transformation, to take youth away
from the negative things and add them to the positive things. . . . I do believe in
this transformation, because I have seen it and I have lived it. Before, private
business and public administration no llegaba hasta aquí [didn’t arrive here, to
the poorer neighborhoods], but now their plans, their programs, their projects,
their budgets arrive. Education, culture, art arrives. . . . [I]t’s getting much
better.
372

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372
Interview with youth leader and member of Son Batá, Medellín, February 22, 2011.
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Clearly, many challenges to youth participation in public life remain in Medellín. And
while it is still early to be able to fully assess the impacts of the grassroots tactics and
institutional strategies discussed in this study, the city has transformed in notable ways.
Youth participation in its public culture has been both a catalyst and a beneficiary of
these changes. While the future of these changes is uncertain, one small but lasting
outcome can be the analytical advancements offered by studying them, which might
inform research, policy, and practice well beyond Medellín.
The case of Medellín and its particular history of violence may strike some
readers as too exceptional and contextually specific to inform a broader theoretical
framework of participatory public culture. All of my youth interviewees for these cases
had experienced the direct impacts of armed violence and the loss of loved ones; this
certainly factors into their levels of motivation and commitment to cultural and political
engagement. However, gang-related and structural violence, stark socioeconomic
inequality, migration, the delegitimization of government institutions, public concern
about the disengagement of youth in traditional political institutions, and the frustrated
desire of many youth for greater agency—these are all too familiar concerns to societies
worldwide.
Understandings of (youth) citizenship and participation are constantly changing—
and this is particularly true in the digital age. Based on the findings of the previous
chapters, it should go without saying that discourses and practices of participation do not
yield truly participatory public cultures; as a terrain of struggle over relations of power,
participation is always imperfect and contested. Yet participatory public culture is a
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construct that can serve as an orienting goal for those working toward more equitable
societies in the digital age.
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CONCLUSION

This study was prompted in part by the mainstreaming and commercialization of
discourses of participation in the context of Web 2.0. As a scholar and practitioner of
participatory communication for several years prior, I found this both exciting and
troubling; exciting because I believe that participation in and through communication
media can be a force for positive social change, and troubling because, with the
commercialization of discourses of participatory media and culture, the critical valence of
citizen participation was dissipating—and yet remained as important as ever.
I further found that the newer and older discourses of participation seemed, on the
whole, largely disconnected from one another. Geographical, disciplinary, and language
divides were partly to blame. It struck me that there was not enough dialogue between
scholars studying Internet-based participatory culture(s) in the United States and those
who had engaged in participatory communication on and offline in Colombia and other
parts of the global South for decades. This study aims to encourage a more cross-cultural,
interdisciplinary intellectual dialogue, and Medellín offered a case through which to do
so.
Medellín’s “transformation”—from a city known for its drug trafficking and the
world’s highest rates of homicide, to one known for its innovative urban planning, citizen
participation, and growing digital communication technology sector—is gaining
increasing international attention. The independent mayoral administrations responsible
for much of the transformation (those of Sergio Fajardo from 2004–2007 and Alonso
Salazar from 2008–2011) were informed by, among other things, decades of Latin
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328!
American theory and practice of collective action and citizen participation. At the same
time, they launched relatively newer initiatives, such as participatory budgeting, a
practice that has recently been imported from Latin America to cities in the United States,
and digital citizenship/digital city programs that resonate with contemporary global
trends and scholarship in the area of new media studies. Further, youth engagement in
public life was a central concern to actors across various levels of society, ranging from
the grassroots to the government. Medellín therefore presented a rich case for the study of
participatory public culture and youth engagement in the digital age.
While Colombia’s political culture has a reputation for elitism and clientelism,
since the mid-1980s, state actors have also institutionalized various policies and practices
of citizen participation to strengthen local governance, often in collaboration with the
nongovernmental and civil society sectors. In Medellín, youth participation has been a
focus of many of these initiatives, and it is often seen as an indispensable resource for
stabilizing and developing the city. Youth have become important actors in both
grassroots and institutionalized forms of participatory public culture—in several cases
wielding greater influence in the city than adult-led youth programs. It thus made sense
that some of my youth interviewees had direct connections to centers of power in the city
and beyond.
To understand these various dynamics, I had to consider not only youth
participation in politics, culture, and communication, but also the relationships between
these. I used the concept of participatory public culture as a lens through which to do
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this.
373
Despite the definitional slipperiness of each of the terms “participatory,” “public,”
and “culture,” bringing them together in this particular way offered a useful heuristic for
thinking about the intersections of communication, culture, and politics as they relate to
citizen participation. It also provided greater definitional clarity about how we
characterize (youth) citizen engagement as “participatory”, and articulated the promises
of citizen participation in order to inform theory and practice that might bring us closer to
realizing them.
Of course, participation in public life is a political, communicative, and cultural
labor that produces both stability and instability, both governmentality and resistance. It
can be both empowering and burdensome. It can lead to greater accountability and power
sharing in some instances, and can obfuscate structural inequalities in others. As Latin
American scholarship and my own research shows, discourses of participation can serve
both integrative (or palliative) and counter-hegemonic agendas, depending on the context.
Discourses and practices of participation can be a resource for a variety of actors and
agendas; their analysis therefore requires specificity. It is crucial to consider what it is
that (youth) citizens are being called to—or are choosing to—participate in, thinking
critically about different degrees of structural and content-related participation. At the
same time, we should not be overly confined by rigid, normative definitions of what
constitutes communicative, political, or cultural participation, but rather use the study and
discussion of these to understand how the episteme of participation functions to produce
particular meanings. In other words, we should think about the specificities of structural
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373
Participatory public culture is defined on p. 52; this definition is informed by theories of participatory
culture, communication, and politics, and grounded through the previous case studies.
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and content-related participation, and think more broadly about the cultural, social,
political, and economic work that happens through the surrounding discourses.
Further, while these discourses and practices are constituted within different
political economic and social contexts, they are interwoven (and often interdependent)
across societal levels, necessitating multilevel or ecological thinking. In Medellín, some
institutional strategies of participation have been informed by grassroots tactics, and
some of these tactics have been shaped by institutional strategies. Institutionalized
participation differs from non-institutionalized participation, and the two can exist in
tension or synergy. The relationship between them is central to the construction of a
participatory public culture; youth citizenship and participation are defined and contested
at their intersections. The Medellín case convinced me that participatory public cultures
can and should be cultivated through both institutional strategies and grassroots tactics
for participation, but also that none of these will ever be flawless or complete on their
own.
If cultivating a more participatory public culture occurs through a variety of
means, it also occurs at different rates. Researchers of participatory communication and
communication for social change have repeatedly pointed out the incompatibility of such
practices with the short-term agendas and fiscal cycles of the development and state
institutions that often fund them.
374
We saw this illustrated in the case of participatory
budgeting in Chapter 3. And as both Chapters 3 and 4 show, cultural change may occur
much more slowly than structural change, even though the two are in many ways
interdependent. What’s more, the impacts of a youth collective or other participatory
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374
See, for example, Gumucio Dagron (2009).!
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culture are not easily measured and may not become evident until later in the lives of
their participants. Setting short-term, strictly defined measures of evaluation of
participatory practices confines our ability to understand the myriad and nuanced ways in
which individuals and communities may change through these practices, and how this
affects public life in the years and decades following; for example, if a member of a
youth collective goes on to become a community organizer for a civil society
organization and ultimately a government official able to affect changes in public policy
and resource allocation. Evaluative research needs to track how processes of individual
and social change happen over decades rather than years.
In Chapter 5, I concluded that digital communication technologies may enhance
participatory public culture because they can support horizontal, autonomous, open, and
dialogical forms of communication, but this is not guaranteed and is heavily dependent
upon their architecture, management, and the cultures that develop around their use.
More specifically, I found that efforts to use digital communication technologies to
enhance youth engagement are less technologically deterministic and more effective
when they are linked to communicative practices that enable dialogue and recognition
across societal levels; to cultures that value and promote the expression of diverse voices;
and to political or other structures that connect the expression of voice to influence over
decisions that affect offline, material reality.
“Voice” must be understood not just through the lens of communication, but also
through culture (e.g. how reality is constructed and expressed through culture, including
but not limited to cultural performance) and politics (and the discourses, institutions, and
mechanisms through which society is organized and controlled). The power of individual
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or collective voices in public life is dependent upon the relations of power in which they
are embedded, and on having cultures and structures (political, communicative,
economic, etc.) in place that enable the expression of voice to influence decisions of
public concern—in other words, “voice” implies being heard and being able to have an
impact on your community. Horizontality, dialogic communication, openness, and
autonomy can be key attributes of cultures and structures that support this. A decades-
old, but still vital, contribution from Latin American theorists and practitioners like Paulo
Freire is that conscientización—or developing a critical awareness of one’s
social/economic/political/cultural reality and how to shape or transform it—is a crucial
step in developing voice. As Andrea Cornwall puts it, “Voice needs to be nurtured”
(2008, p. 278). The practices described in the case studies of La Elite, Son Batá, and
Ciudad Comuna illustrate some ways in which this is accomplished. More work needs to
be done, however, to critically theorize listening in relation to these dynamics and the
many modalities of expressing voice; to “nurture” practices of listening; and to further
interrogate the social, cultural, political, and economic constraints on marginalized voices
being heard and wielding influence within networks of power.
The model for analyzing participatory public culture that this study ultimately
proposes in Chapter 6 is multilevel and multimodal; it prompts analysis across culture,
communication, and politics; it foregrounds the relationship between institutional and
grassroots modes of participation; and it requires critical consideration of the kinds of
participation being enacted or offered, whether structural or content-related. While
maintaining a distinction between them is crucial, both content-related and structural
participation are considered important components of a participatory public culture.
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Drawing on existing literature and my own findings, I proposed several analytical
dimensions that are attributes of the kinds of cultures and structures that might promote
it, including those that reduce barriers to participation, create spaces of participation,
create cultures of participation, develop capacities to participate, and link voice to
influence.
Medellín is certainly not a perfect exemplar of participatory public culture, and
the analytical approach developed here is by no means a magic bullet proposition; rather,
it is a framework for thinking about (youth) engagement in public life and how to
enhance it. It is a theoretical rather than normative model, informed by theory on
participatory culture, communication, and politics, and grounded by empirical analysis.
By referring to it as “the Medellín model of participatory public culture” I mean to signal
my indebtedness to the cases that informed the model, but not to suggest that the
particularities of the Medellín context should, or could, necessarily be replicated. What I
am suggesting is that, in combination with the theoretical frames elaborated here,
Medellín can inspire critical and actionable analysis of participation in public life in any
number of other contexts. And while the model is based on my research on youth
engagement in particular, it could easily be adapted to think about citizen participation
more broadly. My hope is thus that, as a tool for thinking ecologically and
interdisciplinarily about how to support effective participation, the model might advance
both theory and practice.
The devastating history (and ongoing dynamics) of armed violence in Medellín
makes it an exceptional but also important case for advancing scholarship on youth
participation globally. While I found that Medellín’s dynamics of violence impacted each
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of the cases studied in very significant and particular ways, I also observed parallels with
other urban contexts that render these learnings relevant on a broader scale, and that
future comparative research could elaborate. And while I found it necessary to consider
how armed violence has shaped public life in Medellín in order to understand the ecology
of youth participation during the period studied, by no means does this imply that the
myriad forms of youth organizing in Medellín are solely a product of the violence, or that
they would not exist without it. There are certainly learnings from Medellín that can be
applied to other contexts of youth participation, including those that are less affected by
armed violence.
At the same time, the context of violence makes the case of Medellín distinct
from a lot of the work in participatory communication, which often focuses on increasing
the visibility and amplifying the voices of marginalized groups.
375
In the Medellín
context, youth gang members in some ways became quite visible in public life, and to an
extent in the media (albeit in ways over which they had little to no control), with the
result that a broader swath of youth was stigmatized, including those not involved in the
violence. There are many more unarmed than armed youth, and yet the unarmed youth I
spoke to felt that their own engagement in public life was constrained by the media and
political attention paid to the latter. Groups like Son Batá and La Elite are thus working
to shift these youths’ visibility from a negative stereotype in which they have been
unwillingly inscribed, to a positive visibility that empowers, rather than further
marginalizes them. Some youth have experienced a great deal of a certain kind of
empowerment by joining a gang and wielding a gun, while others, like the youth
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375
I am grateful to Clemencia Rodríguez for raising this point.
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collectives I studied, are trying to forge an alternative path to empowerment through
cultural practice and performance. Future research could investigate the parallels and
important differences between gang and participatory cultures.
Although I did not explicitly frame this study as an exploration of how
participatory practices contribute to peacebuilding, these cases clearly have a lot to
contribute to our understanding of this relationship. The “tactics of participation” used by
La Elite, Son Batá, and Ciudad Comuna also served as tactics of peacebuilding, such as
the reterritorialization of public spaces controlled by their armed counterparts for
performances of non-violence, the acts of negotiation and consensus building through
participatory decision making, and the popular education schools that help children and
youth forge a life path that does not depend on engaging in violence. These tactics
prefigure not just a more participatory public culture, but also a more peaceful one. They
can inform approaches to peacebuilding that focus not only on armed actors but,
crucially, on the unarmed. Future research could further elaborate the ways in which
contexts of violence both produce and constrain unique modes of participation, and,
conversely, how different forms of participation may challenge cultures of violence and
contribute to peacebuilding.
A factor that is crucial to the future of Medellín and several other cities, but was
beyond the scope of this study, is the role that drug-consuming countries play in
perpetuating the narcotrafficking violence that threatens the sustainability of Medellín’s
gains under the Fajardo and Salazar administrations. When imbricated in such global
dynamics of structural violence, there are limits to what local forms of public
participation can accomplish.
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I have inevitably fallen short of accurately describing and interpreting all of the
learnings from these cases in their historical and cultural complexity. My goal was not to
tell the story of Medellín, but to explore what we can learn from it, swimming against the
more dominant flow of knowledge production from the global North to the global South.
In doing so, I am sure I have lost a great deal in translation, despite the generous efforts
of my friends and colleagues in Medellín to help me in this project.
Spending almost a year in and around Medellín offered me a glimpse of
participatory projects that are constantly evolving and changing, particularly as their
strongest leaders, visionaries, and advocates come and go. To my great sadness, a number
of the youth involved in La Elite and Son Batá were killed during or since the time of my
research in 2011. This includes one of the founding members of La Elite, whose murder
by a young gang member shook the network to its core, ultimately contributing to a
change of course: Some members split off to start a different collective, while others
decided their work should be less politically engaged, and therefore less likely to position
them as potential targets (although it continued to be debated whether or not their
political engagement was putting them at risk).
376

While participatory projects are characterized as being relatively horizontal in
their organization, certain participants invariably take on leadership roles
377
, or function
as more influential nodes in a network, and their presence or absence affects a project’s
trajectory and often its sustainability. In its focus on horizontality, scholarship has mostly
overlooked the question of leadership within participatory cultures, and this merits further
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376
Personal correspondence with senior staff member of La Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes-YMCA,
January 8, 2014.
377
The two are not necessarily contradictory; see related discussion on verticality and horizontality in
Chapter 5.
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study (Carpentier in Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013).

Transmitiendo Desde Los Angeles
As others before me have said, participation is—and always will be—a contested
terrain. It has also become a valuable commodity in the globally networked media
landscape of the 21
st
century, particularly since the rise of reality television and Web 2.0.
(And it was a valuable commodity for decades before among neoliberal financial and
other institutions that found it expedient for advancing development agendas.) The ways
in which participation has been taken up by commercial interests and easily sutured with
neoliberal ideology is of concern to those who see participation as a tool for promoting
social justice. Discourses of participation may serve as resources for commerce as well as
for pro-social counter-rationalities; and the two are often, but not always, contradictory.
Well after I had returned from Medellín and was in the process of writing these
chapters, I had an unexpected encounter that exemplified some of these tensions. One
afternoon in January 2012, I noticed a Facebook status update from a member of Son
Batá that read: “transmitiendo desde Los Angeles California. esta [sic] brutal!!!”
(“broadcasting from Los Angeles, California. it’s awesome!!!”). The next day, I met him
and several other members of the group in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
No one was supposed to know yet, but Son Batá had come for the filming of Jennifer
Lopez and Marc Anthony’s reality TV show ¡Q’Viva! The Chosen.
¡Q'Viva! follows the iconic Latino celebrity couple—recently separated—in their
search to cast a live music and performance spectacle in Las Vegas that represents the
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“spirit of Latin American culture.” To do so, Lopez and Anthony selected artists from 21
Latin American countries to come to Los Angeles to compete for a spot in the live show.
Starting in late January 2012, ¡Q’Viva! The Chosen was broadcast in the United
States on Univision and Fox, as well as networks across Latin America and Canada. As
the first bilingual reality TV show to be broadcast on a major U.S. network, it became a
landmark in the mainstreaming of Latin-focused, bilingual entertainment in North
America. In the first episode, Jennifer Lopez celebrated this by exclaiming, rather
narcissistically, “This is like me being able to really, really go: I am Latina, and this is
who we are!”
While Anthony and Lopez did not express an explicitly political agenda, the
premise of the show—to feature performers from across Latin America on national TV
networks in the United States and elsewhere—can certainly be understood as an attempt
to make Latin American culture(s) more visible in the United States (even as Lopez’s
rhetoric homogenized them). The ways in which the show chose to do so were ultimately
highly problematic, as I have written about elsewhere (Brough, 2012). My point here is
that the framing of ¡Q’Viva! suggested that it offered commercial and cultural
empowerment to the Latin American artists who participated, and greater visibility and
appreciation for their cultures more broadly.
When Marc Anthony travelled to the outskirts of Medellín to “discover” Son
Batá, he remarked, “[W]hen you do something artistic to survive, it just comes from a
totally different place. This is what it’s all about . . . we have to come to these barrios to
find talent like Son Batá.”
378
As the cameras rolled, Anthony handed the group airline
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378
¡Q’Viva! The Chosen, episode 4 (episode 2 on Fox, which broadcast two episodes consecutively).
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tickets to Los Angeles. (These imitation tickets were soon to be replaced with real airline
tickets for the smaller number of members whose travel visas were actually approved.
379
)
For most of Son Batá, it was their first time in an airplane and leaving Colombia.
A young musician known as “Bomby” had joined Son Batá at age 10 and was 16
by the time he came to Los Angeles. While quiet and shy offstage, by age 14 he was the
star of the group, playing his clarinet and getting a rise out of audiences in Medellín and
across Colombia. Shortly before Marc Anthony “discovered” them, he and others from
Son Batá had opened for the world-famous rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers in
Bogotá.
In Los Angeles, Bomby became the protagonist of one of Q'Viva's dramatic sub-
plots. In Episode 4, he was offered a place in the Las Vegas show, but the other members
of Son Batá were cut. The obvious tension for Son Batá was that they operate as a
collective, seeing their unified strength as being greater than the sum of their individual
members, and their success as tied to the accomplishments of the group as a whole. Prior
to coming to Los Angeles, they had agreed among themselves to compete in the show as
a collective, not as individual artists. Bomby was thus faced with a difficult choice:
whether or not to trade his identity as part of Son Batá (which he calls “mi familia”) and
the bonds of this participatory culture for the potential fame promised by Marc Anthony
if he went solo. Ironically, this storyline was being exploited within a television genre
that, itself, has been lauded and marketed as a form of participatory culture (Andrejevic,
2004; Jenkins, 2006a; Murray & Ouellette, 2009).
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
379
Visas for Colombians to visit the United States are frequently denied.
!
!
340!
340!
Bomby initially agreed to accept Anthony’s offer. Some of his peers were
disappointed in the decision, while others felt he had made the right choice for both
himself and the collective.
380
Some time later, on camera, Bomby met with Anthony to
explain that he had changed his mind and would not accept. “I am leaving the show
because, [even] if I want to be an artist, I want to be a good person first—that is what I
want to be. I am returning to Colombia to finish becoming [that person].”
381

This clash of cultures (one of individual fame and commercial success, the other
of creative collective action for both individual and social transformation) offered an
unforeseen but apt bookend to my time with Son Batá, one that resonated with some of
the tensions explored in this study. It was yet another illustration of the expediency of
participation—of participation as a resource—for very different actors, in this instance,
commercial television producers, Latino/Latina celebrities in the United States, and Son
Batá. Both ¡Q’Viva! and Son Batá are premised, at least in part, on the offer of cultural
participation as a form of empowerment. Of course, applying the dimensions of analysis
proposed in the Medellín model of participatory public culture to ¡Q’Viva! quickly
illuminates the limits of the participation it offered, particularly in contrast to Son Batá.
Members of Son Batá are certainly interested in commercial success, and rightly
so, given their socioeconomic status. They have worked hard to brand themselves and
provide a source of income to their participants. They continually navigate between
commercial and participatory logics, which at times are contradictory and at other times
overlap—as has become increasingly common in the contemporary moment. It is clear
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
380
Personal correspondence with members of Son Batá, January, 2012.
381
¡Q’Viva! The Chosen, episode 8.
!
!
341!
341!
that “participation” is partly to credit for their commercial successes to date; it is part of
their mission, their origin story, and their social cachet. Yet Son Batá was only briefly
among “The Chosen” in Hollywood, where participation is over-determined by
commercial logics. The group returned to Colombia to help more youth choose a clarinet
instead of a gun, and to forge a more participatory public culture.
!
!
342!
342!
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APPENDIX A: Partial List of Collectives, Organizations, and Government Departments
Interviewed and/or Observed; Partial List of Events Observed

Youth Collectives and Community-Based Organizations

• Articulación Juvenil
• Ciudad Comuna
• Comuna Nueva
• Convergentes
• Convivamos
• Cultura y Libertad
• Female hip hop artists (group interview)
• Full Producciones
• Hiperbarrio
• Nuestra Gente
• Pasolini en Medellín
• Picacho Con Futuro
• Platohedro
• Red de Hip Hop La Elite
• Son Batá
• Villactivos

Non-governmental Organizations

• Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes-YMCA
• Corporación Región
• Educación en Ambientes Virtuales (EAV) Grupo de Investigación, Universidad
Pontificia Bolivariana
• Federación Antioqueña de ONG (FAONG)
• Instituto de Capacitación Popular (IPC)
• Makaia
• Mi Sangre
• Proantioquia
• Proyecto 50, Universidad EAFIT
• Puntos Comun
• Siglo XXI
• Corporación Simón Bolívar

Government Departments/Initiatives/Affiliates

• Former Mayors Sergio Fajardo and Alonso Salazar
• Medellín Digital
• Subsecretaría de Metrojuventud, Secretaría de Cultura Ciudadana
• Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia (Bogotá)
• Ministerio de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones de Colombia
(Bogotá)
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• Ruta N
• Secretaría de Comunicaciones
• Secretaría de Cultura
• Secretaría de Participación Ciudadana
• Secretaría de Desarrollo Social

Events Observed in Medellín

• Altavoz (October, 2011)
• Ciudad Comuna’s Escuela de Comunicación Comunitaria workshop (July 16,
2011)
• Encuentro de Experiencias en Comunicación Popular (2010)
• Escuela Kolacho workshops (various)
• “Estatuto de Ciudadanía Juvenil” Conversatorio
• Festival Revolución Sin Muertos (October 15-16, 2011)
• Foro Retos y Perspectivas de la Participación de los y las Jóvenes en el
Movimiento Communal, Semana de la Juventud (July 8, 2011)
• Hip 4 Festival
• LabSurLab (April, 2011)
• MDE11
• Meetings of the Asamblea de la Red de Hip Hop La Elite (Assembly meetings of
the Elite Hip Hop Network, various)
• Meetings of the committees of the Red de Hip Hop La Elite (various)
• Meetings of the working group on desarrollo económico (economic development)
of the participatory budgeting process in Comuna 13 (July, 2011)
• Meeting of the working group on educación (education) of the participatory
budgeting process in Comuna 13 (July, 2011)
• Meetings of the working group on cultura (culture) of the participatory budgeting
process in Comuna 13 (July, 2011)
• Primer Conversatorio de Medios Comunitarios Corregimientales
• Primer Premio de Periodismo Comunitario
• Rutas de Memoria: Incidencia, Política y Reparación Workshop, Instituto Popular
de Capacitación (March 20-21, 2011)
• Semana de Hip Hop (May, 2011)
• Semana de la Juventud (July, 2011)
• Son Batá performances (various)
• Son Batá organizational meetings (various)
• Hip hop performances (various)
• XI Encuentro Iberamericano de Ciudades Digitales (November 18-19, 2010)

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APPENDIX B: Organizational Structure of the Red de Hip Hop La Elite

La Elite was first prompted to become a network by a staff person at the
Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes (ACJ, a YMCA affiliate). The ACJ has since provided
La Elite with some logistical support (such as meeting spaces, the administration of their
finances, and the negotiation of contracts with the municipal government or other NGOs),
as well as mentoring (e.g., in communication and leadership skills, and organizational
guidance such as how to develop a strategic plan or grant proposal). However, La Elite
maintains their autonomy and full control over the collective’s decision-making process.
ACJ administers La Elite’s finances in part because the network does not have its
own legal status as an organization and therefore cannot directly engage in contracts with
the government or some other donors. ACJ’s support has, in this regard, enabled the
collective to remain relatively uninstitutionalized while still obtaining contracts with state
and nongovernmental institutions. The ACJ staff maintain a dialogue with, but also a
distance from the network, trying to respond to the collective’s self-identified needs
instead of imposing an agenda. Executive Director of the ACJ, Alexandra Castrillón,
emphasized that there is an important distinction between projects developed by youth
and projects developed for youth within “adult logics”; La Elite’s status as a network
organized by youth is seen by Castrillón as paramount.
Another important way in which adult-run institutions like the ACJ have
supported the growth of youth collectives in Medellín, without compromising their
autonomy, is through youth leadership trainings that take place outside of the daily
activities of the collectives. Several of the founding members of La Elite and Son Batá
cite their experiences in such trainings as significant influences on their work in the
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collectives. It is therefore clear that such collectives do not