What the wall screams: graffiti as subaltern expression and epistemic resistance at the National University of Mexico

Arwen Mirierid Aldazaba Degaldillo and Tenoch Vázquez Hernández

SAP Land and Architecture, 2026

Abstract: University apathy is analyzed as a form of political and epistemic resistance manifested in graffiti and murals at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Using an ethnographic and visual approach, focused on the faculties of Sciences and Political and Social Sciences, these interventions are interpreted as discursive practices that express institutional disenchantment and dispute the legitimate meanings of academic space. Far from being conceived as vandalism, graffiti is configured as forms of situated critical knowledge that challenge university epistemic authority. From the decolonial turn (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel), the epistemologies of the South (Santos and Meneses), and the notion of subalternity (Spivak), these expressions articulate an epistemic resistance that highlights the colonial wound and questions the hegemonic canons of knowledge. Collective statements inscribed on university walls symbolically reconfigure the academic territory, revealing valemadrismo not as indifference, but as a strategy of symbolic reappropriation and dispute for the right to speak, think, and create at the university.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cwf:laarti:la2026283

DOI: 10.56294/la2026283

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