The Study of New Social Movements in Latin America and the Question of Autonomy

Abstract

The study of social movements in Latin America has come of age, with the program of the fifteenth meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in 1989 featuring no fewer that fifteen panels on the subject. Various features of the new movements account for their great appeal to European and North American social scientists as research subjects. The grass-roots organizational activity of the last decade created a context of popular mobilization in which a progressive/reformist breakaway from the official party became a thinkable and, ultimately, workable alternative. The first analytical problem in responding to the questions is to determine how to categorize the link between Mexican social movements and the Cardenista Front. The capacity of new social movements to mobilize dynamic and growing sectors of the population that had either been ignored by political parties or proved resistant to the parties' traditional modes of organization has contributed to the crisis of party politics in Europe as in Latin America.