‘Yo Te AMLO’: Sentimentalism, threat and affective flows in political campaign song videos in Mexico

Abstract

Campaign song created as part of Mexico’s 2018 national election, usually circulated as part of music videos, produced citizenship as intimate, sentimental, affectionate and partial. In music videos published online, often anonymously, musicians sought to develop affective links with political candidates, negotiating intimate pathways for the construction of democratic subjectivities. Such videos pose difficult questions for the notion of the rational, information-driven voter. In this article I take a partly ethnographic, partly analytical approach to explore the rich set of affordances these videos present for the construction of political coalitions within emerging democracies. Exploring Brian Massumi’s theory of ‘ontopower’, I show how overlaps between threat and love served to heighten political indeterminacy, and demonstrate some of the perverse effects of this affective entanglement on the musicians involved. These videos, I highlight, raise questions about the power relations between political campaigns and audiovisual creativity in an increasingly rich media landscape.