Latin American Movements Research Articles

Review: Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia, by Anadelia A. Romo, and Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890–1945, by Rafael Cardoso

Review: <i>Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia</i>, by Anadelia A. Romo, and <i>Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890–1945</i>, by Rafael Cardoso

Reclaiming public space as commons: learning from Latin American movements

The text proposes to understand public space as capable of becoming a common space when the rules of its governance challenge those who own the space, not only to appropriate it, but to open it up for everyone's use. This possibility is linked to a reinvention of collaboration and a way of exercising "commoning".

От языковой поэзии до нового конкретизма: эволюция авангарда

The article examines the trajectory of the Western avant-garde in the 20th century, in connection with the group formations characteristic of these movements. Movements such as the Russian avant-garde and European Dadaism are classified according to various criteria, and their rise and fall is traced. After a broad overview of avant-garde movements, the first part of the essay analyzes the cases of the modern avant-garde movement “Language Poetry”. The article then goes on to detail the theoretical principles of the “language movement” founded in the late 1970s, and then explore how this radical movement has developed over the past twenty years. Language poetics, closely associated with French poststructuralist aesthetics and Marxist ideology, was gradually assimilated into the mainstream, and its stylistic features were absorbed into more traditional modes. The movement is now mostly over, but it has produced a number of important poets such as Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian and Steve McCaffery. These poets now associate themselves outside the language movement they used to be part of and are eventually arriving their own styles. In the last part of the article, the author refers to the Latin American movement of concretism as a phenomenon that synthesizes the achievements of the Russian and European avant-garde and the American neo-avant-garde.

The Latin American Movement for Reconceptualisation and radical social work (1960–80): possible similarities

This article deals with the protest movements in Latin American, American and British social work from 1960 to 1980, highlighting the historical and theoretical characteristics of the debate of the radical social work movement and of the Latin American Movement for Reconceptualisation within the context of the Marxist legacy. Within the objective of this article is an analysis of the relationship between the European and American social work protest movements and the Latin American Movement for Reconceptualisation, examining, for the delineated period, the overlaps between the regions involved (the UK, the US and Latin America) in a process of accentuated economic interaction at the global level. In other words, the issue of interest to us in this study is whether there was an actual relationship between the European and American social work protest movements and the Latin American Movement for Reconceptualisation, and on what basis it could be described.

Expanding circles of solidarity: A comparative analysis of Latin American community social justice project narratives

LatinX student enrollments in community colleges in the United States are rapidly growing, yet LatinX student success rates have not matched this growth. There is a need for community college programs that serve LatinX student populations more effectively and incorporate multicultural educational practices. Using Anzaldúa’s Mestiza consciousness theory, this study analyzed community learning testimonios written by Latin American movement leaders and identified common themes applicable to a process of critical consciousness development in critical educational programs. The themes common across the four testimonios were (a) collective motivation for learning; (b) organizational dynamics, practices, and values; (c) critical social consciousness; and (d) transcendent communal awareness of identity.

Review of the Literature on Latin America in Ketab-e-Jom’eh

This paper aims to analyze a weekly magazine called Ketab-e-Jom’eh (Friday’s Book) and the reflection of Latin American’s revolutionary movements in it. Ketab-e-Jom’eh, published from July 26, 1979, to May 22, 1980, was supervised by a number of the most legendary Iranian authors and poets, such as Ahmad Shamloo1 and Gholam Hossein Saedi. I focus on the way a particular perspective on Latin American movements is constructed and perpetuated among Ketab-e-Jom’eh’s lectors. With a symbolic approach, I analyze those texts through their symbolic representation in the Iranian society, which requires me to study those symbols and their concomitant relevance in Iran. Eventually, I will use an interpretative approach to examine this magazine’s ideologically motivated articles in the broader context of the Iranian society with its particular traits. The dialectic relationship between literature and society helps us understand literature as the product of social conditions and influential factors in society. The position that I develop here echoes Louis de Bonald’s belief that “through a careful reading of any nation’s literature ‘one could tell what this people had been’” (as cited in Hall, 1979, p. 13). I employ such an expansive horizon to scrutinize the selection of literature on Latin American guerillas. I shall unfold the magazine’s ideological orientation from the angle of the context in which it is used. I aim to show that the historical context of the Iranian society at the moment gives those articles specific meanings. In pursuit of my goals, I will recontextualize the articles to determine their primary significance in the Iran of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Movements of Working Children and the International Labour Organization. A Lesson on Enforced Silence

Relations between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and grassroots movements of working children are characterised by tensions. Working children's claim to participate in conceptualising child labour policy is increasingly rejected. Most recently, in November 2017, the Latin American Movement of Working Children and Adolescents (MOLACNATs) lodged a complaint with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child over violations of rights enshrined in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This article reconstructs the history of working children's movements and their communication with ILO since the 1990s.

Lessons from Praxis: Autonomy and Spatiality in Contemporary Latin American Social Movements

AbstractIn the course of the 20th century, left‐libertarian thought and praxis never ceased to be present in Latin America, even during the most difficult years of competition with Marxism‐Leninism and of military repression. But it was above all from the 1990s onwards that particularly original kinds of libertarian thought and praxis began to flourish there. Alongside more or less renewed versions of classical anarchism, new forms of praxis and analysis emerged at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century; from Mexican neo‐Zapatism to a part of Argentina's piqueteros to some expressions of Brazil's sem‐teto movement, many new movements and ideas have developed in the last two decades. These new movements are at the same time remarkably libertarian and by no means reducible to the very honourable but somewhat too restrictive label “anarchism”. In fact, many of them are clearly “hybrid”, in the sense that they are products of both left‐libertarian and Marxist influences.Typically, these Latin American movements share a commitment to principles such as horizontality, self‐management and decentralism (which have never been part of Marxism's typical repertoire of practices and principles); moreover, autonomy is a key notion for most of them. Furthermore, spatial practices, territorialisation among them, are proving decisive for many movements and protest actions.The concept of territory is one of those “geographical” concepts that have been intensely subjected, in recent decades, to strong attempts of redefinition and debugging. In this paper, the territory is fundamentally seen (as a first approximation) as a space defined and delimited by and through power relations, and it is important to see that power (both heteronomous and autonomous power) is exerted only with reference to a territory and, very often, by means of a territory. The kind of power exerted by emancipatory social movements does not constitute an exception to this rule.

With or Without Them: Contemporary Student Movements and Parties in the Southern Cone

This paper examines shifts in social movement ties to political parties. It does so by focusing on three important contemporary Latin American movements: the student movements of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Drawing on in-depth interviews with secondary and university activists in each country, the paper addresses two questions: First, why during the 1990s did student activists in all three countries increasingly organize outside and in opposition to parties? Second, why after 2000 did this autonomist trend partially fade in Argentina and Uruguay, but deepen in Chile? For both periods the paper seeks not only to identify key causal variables, but also to elucidate the causal mechanisms linking those variables to trends in movement ties to parties.

The ontology of twerk: from ‘sexy’ Black movement style to Afro-Diasporic sacred dance

The objective of this article is to develop an ontology of twerk that situates it within Black Atlantic choreographic modalities, including those of Afro-Diasporic religions. As a corrective to the pervasive stereotyping and appropriation of twerk, I place its normative performance within the cultural space of contemporary Black New Orleans. I furnish an overview of temporally proximate regional variations in the United States and locate its more remote antecedents in the participatory dances documented on North American plantations. Twerk also shares various morphological and thematic similarities with Caribbean and Latin American movement traditions that have promoted female sexual, economic, and political freedom. Of these, I take into special account Brazilian, Cuban, and Haitian dances sacred to Afro-Diasporic deities venerated for giving life and bearing witness to death. I conclude that twerk should be understood properly as part of a family of Black Atlantic dances that emerged from shared histories of domination.

Policies, politics and the right to child health in South America

South America (figure 1) integrates 14 countries, 10 of which belong to the Latin American region and will be part of this analysis. As it happens with the rest of the region, South America has significant social inequities that are expressed in its demographics, health and educational indicators. This region had a historic relevant role in the development health thinking and its social determinants, even before WHO Commission was established, and expressed through the Latin American movement of Social Medicine.1 Figure 1 The South American region. Between 1990 and 2010, all the countries have reduced their infant mortality rate (IMR) and under 5 mortality rate (U5MR) (table 1). As long as the IMR and U5MR reduction improves, the rank of the main causes of death and disease changes. In those countries with high IMR, perinatal health problems are followed by acute respiratory infections and congenital malformations. In those countries with lower IMR rates, prematurity, congenital malformations and complications during early neonatal period become the main causes. Significant U5MR reductions were achieved by Peru and Brazil as a consequence of the utilisation of measures that impact in life conditions and integrated management of childhood illnesses. Average country reductions mask the existing inequity gaps within countries. For example, the IMR ratio between indigenous and non-indigenous populations ranges from 1.11 in Chile to 2.3 in Ecuador. View this table: Table 1 Overall reduction (%) of infant mortality rate (IMR*) and under 5 mortality rate (U5MR†) in South America (1990–2010) Table 2 shows those health problems related to communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional disorders …

Enter the Alter-Left

Enter the Alter-Left

Matter, politics and the sacred: insurgent ecologies of citizenship

In light of recent explorations into the interface between human agency and the agentic qualities of matter, the article revisits Michele Serres’ notion of a natural contract to explore the relationships between materiality, environmental politics and citizenship. In a break from conventional renderings of environmental citizenship, the article argues that nature enters into politics alongside human subjects, through insurgent socio-ecological assemblages. In a case study of the 2008 Ecuadorian constitution, with its organizing principle of buen vivir and provisions enshrining the rights of nature, the idea of a natural contract proves a useful heuristic device for probing the political intertwining of human and nonhuman. At the same time, it falls short in characterizing the dynamic socionatural insurgencies that transgress dominant orders and perform alternate modes of being, ultimately leading to such things as formal constitutional change. Moreover, the secular contractual language of the Ecuadorian constitution tends to efface the spiritual content of the indigenous cosmovisions that significantly inform its principles. In light of this, the second part of the analysis probes the way human actors attach meaning to their involvement in socionatural insurgence, with an emphasis on the sacred as an important and often overlooked dimension of political-ecological struggle. Taking the Latin American movement for water justice as its empirical referent, the article locates the spiritual dimension as a vital ontological and discursive bridge facilitating human actors’ embodied engagements with their ecological surroundings. In this way the sacred makes key contributions to assembling human and more-than-human elements within the insurgent ecologies of citizenship.

A Gendered Perspective on the Arrival and Settlement of Colombian Refugees in the United Kingdom

Colombia has a long history of political violence which, in recent decades, has been exacerbated by other types of violence related to the illegal drugs trade and growing socio-economic inequalities. As a result, large sectors of the Colombian population have been displaced internally or abroad. Despite this, little is known about Colombian refugees, especially those coming to Europe. This article seeks to partly remedy this by analysing the experiences of Colombian refugees living in London from a gendered perspective, based on qualitative fieldwork carried out between 2003 and 2007. First, it shows that these migration flows are remarkably heterogeneous and include threatened political activists in search of refuge, and asylum-seekers and others escaping insecurity and more-generalised violence, thus differing from more-traditional Latin American refugee movements to Europe. Secondly, it focuses on how gender, contexts of exit and arrival, class, type of refugee migration and life course, combine to frame the migration experiences of refugees in industrialised countries.

The Witness of Dorothy Day and the Future of Liberation Theology

A study around the concepts of “witness” and “testimony,” in the fields of Philosophy and Theology, as exemplified by the life work of Dorothy Day. The impact of her work in the U.S., from early to mid-twentieth century, and with the Catholic Worker Movement, is compared to that of the Latin American movement of Liberation Theology. Examples are provided of Dorothy Day’s observations on the agricultural workers strike and Cesar Chavez, as well as various socio-political movements in Latin American countries. Also detailed and compared, are the early and later efforts under Liberation Theology, for its Church influences and dictates, as well as its popular impact and significance.

Aimé Césaire y Tropiques: comienzos literarios en el Caribe francés

This paper deals with Aime Cesaire’s beginnings in the context of foundation of a literary system in the French Antilles, by especially focusing on his program of a Martinican literature as delineated in his review Tropiques (1941-1945). According to our reading, Cesaire’s intellectual career and the project actually carried out by the review are an example of the concrete possibilities of development of a Martinican literature as well as of the difficulties this faces (even today), resulting from asymmetrical exchanges determined by the logic of colonial circuits. In such context, the action and support offered by metropolitan institutions and intellectuals have been crucial. It was mainly due to the contacts established with the French surrealists that Tropiques started its intercommunication with Antillean and Latin American movements and writers. It was also thanks to key figures such as Sartre and Breton that Cesaire achieved prestige and acknowledgement as a poet and intellectual.

Enlightened publics: Popular education movements in Europe, their legacy and promise

Popular education movements can be dated back to the religious heresies of the Middle Ages but only become well-formed movements following the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In this article I outline the scope and nature of some of the most effective of these movements which have come to inform the concept of the ‘public sphere’ advanced by Jurgen Habermas. It continues with a brief description of contemporary popular education movements dating from the anti-imperialist liberation struggles of the mid-twentieth century and the post-Freirean Latin American movements and asks: what was the legacy of the older popular education movements? It concludes with an assessment of the current direction of higher education made by Slavoj Zizek, as ‘producers of expert knowledge’ and compares it with the ‘Popular Universities’ that have emerged in Venezuela in the last decade.

How Who I am Affects What I See: Reading Mark with Latin American Eyes

This article examines the dynamics of the interpretation of the book of Mark with regard to the social location of the interpreter. On one hand, the original meaning of a text is irremediably unreachable, on the other, the text can only have any meaning through its readers, and it changes with them. These dynamics allow for the infinite translatability of the Gospel, which makes possible for it to be ‘at home’ in different cultures and social contexts. The Latin American movement of biblical popular reading exemplifies the attempt to make such a translation. It seeks to position common people again as themain interpreters of the biblical text, thereby preventing both the danger of developing a pastoral action without biblical foundations as well as the danger of developing biblical exegesis without any pastoral orientation. In relation specifically to Mark, this interpretive practice produces a reading that does not strip the Gospel of Mark from its political contents, that highlights the viewpoint of the victims of the Empire, that fosters a certain identification between the ‘third-world’ contemporary audiences and the content of the Gospel. Two major themes treated in Mark come to the fore: The Kingdom of God and resistance to the Empire, which continue to represent alternative orders.

Leopoldo Zea e o movimento latino-americano de História das idéias

O artigo analisa as etapas de fundação e consolidação de um dos mais importantes movimentos intelectuais da América Latina no século XX - o movimento latino-americano de História das Ideias -, a partir, sobretudo, das ações e escritos de seu principal líder e fundador, o filósofo mexicano Leopoldo Zea Aguilar (1912-2004). Na etapa de fundação, que corresponde à década de 1940, o foco principal é na obra inicial de Zea, bem como em seus primeiros esforços no sentido da articulação e organização institucional do movimento em escala continental. Já na etapa seguinte, que corresponde à década de 1950, é abordado o processo de consolidação orgânica e epistemológica do movimento.

Indigenous MediaSpace and the Production of (Trans)locality on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast

This article draws on notions of networked and multiscalar globalities to explore recent developments around indigenous and Afro-Caribbean media in Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast region, whose inhabitants are reasserting their collective autonomy by reinvigorating and reformulating a centuries-old ideal of cosmopolitanism forged through a long history of intercultural exchange and the indigenization of foreign elements. The authors argue that their activities are advancing the development of convergent cultures associated with counterinscriptions of a grassroots globalization and the expansion of contexts in which new forms of indigenous and Afro-Caribbean cultural citizenship can emerge and become effective. Hence, mediated practices of cultural persistence on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast intensify and broaden the revivification and circulation of relational, nonmodern ontologies whose epistemic force contributes to wider Latin American movements for social transformation and illustrates in new ways the importance and the potential of indigenous media operations and the intercultural global networks within which they are implicated.