Introduction: Current Trends in Latin American Social Movements

Abstract

For many scholars, the period from the 1980s into the early 1990s was a golden age for the study of Latin American social movements. At that time theory and real-world events converged to create an extremely creative moment for researchers who followed political change. Much of the scholarship during preceding decades focused on the political participation of labor, peasants, and the often clientelist urban politics of the poor (see, for example Cornelius 1975, Perlman 1976; Borja 1975; Rey 1969; Migdal 1974). The 1980s brought struggles as diverse as revolutions, efforts to overthrow dictatorships, urban movements seeking housing and adequate services, as well as the emergence of indigenous movements, women’s movements, and anti-austerity protest across the continent (Jaquette 1989; Jelin 1990; Paige 1997; Walton 1989; Oxhorn 1995; Black 1981; Gay 1994; Stokes 1995; Ramirez Saiz 1986). Despite the disparate constituencies these movements represented, the scholarly community often interpreted them through the lens of New Social Movement (NSM) theory. Developed in a postmodern Europe, NSM theorists responded to the vast array of political and cultural changes by moving away from much of the Marxist-oriented, materialist tools of analysis that had been used to explain much of European mobilization (Touraine 1985; Melucci 1985; Offe 1985; Castells 1983; Slater 1985). The NSM perspective argued that cultural difference, not class, drove mobilization; community, not alienation, supplied much of the motivation; and informal power over communication was often the goal of mobilization, as opposed to gaining formal power over the state. Indeed, much of the new politics, we were told, was not best thought of as political. Many scholars of Latin American movements focused on the novelty of the contention and the subsequent need to use new analytical tools to analyze it. Despite the questionable capability of a post-industrial theory to explain events in a region that was still industrializing, many of the theory’s proponents enjoyed their newfound celebrity, ignored their own initial explicit warnings, and toured Latin America spreading the new gospel. Other social movement analysis continued to be published (Eckstein 1989; Chalmers et. al. 1997; Slater 1994a, 1994b) yet the new model proved tenacious (Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998). Indeed, there is a deep irony in the ascendance of NSM-based analysis and the concurrent damage by neoliberal policies in Latin America. This current special issue, along with other work (Eckstein and Wickham-Crowley 2003; Rothman and Oliver 1999), suggests several changes have occurred in Latin American movements and how they are analyzed. We continue to search for new theoretical tools, as Davis and Rosan’s power of distance model demonstrates, and as Borland’s discussion of