Latin American Social Movements Research Articles

Falling short of university admission in Brazil: responses from cursinhos populares social movements

ABSTRACT Cursinhos populares are grassroots experiences organized to overcome the small proportion of marginalized groups in prestigious universities, and an example of activism against inequality in Brazilian higher education. They constitute a critique of hegemonic models promoted by the market as well as from the state and thus can be considered an example of commons education: by their prefigurative politics, they build curricula and activism towards the reshaping of university admission. They contribute to the building of a commons perspective rooted in Latin-American social movements tradition. Drawing from our experience as educators in Rede Emancipa, we discuss the question ‘why does a group of students, mostly Black young people from peripheric territories, fall short of public universities admission in Brazil?’. We review possible answers both from the hegemonic and the alternative point of view. We problematize what is conceived as ‘quality education’ expressed in the standardization of curricular time and teaching material, considering political and pedagogical aspects. Finally, we report two experiences developed within Rede Emancipa - ‘Emancipa circles’ and ‘free time’. These experiences reflect on the use of time in a cursinho popular, exercise the integration of knowledge, and stimulate taking a stand by all the subjects of this movement.

Comic journalism in the context of Latin American social movements and resistance

This paper offers an analytical, conceptual and contextual review of comic journalism in Latin America, mainly focused on those proposals linked to the social movements and resistance struggles. The approach is from the theory of the comic social, mostly comic journalism. Methodologically, the topic of analysis is used, the artistic-journalistic approach of form and substance, and the objectives of comic journalism projects. As a result, it can be seen that comic book-web journalism work linked to Latin American social movements and resistance, is divided into two main areas: recovery of memory-testimony, and work aimed at activism, visibility and documentation of active social struggles in the Latin American region. Violence, disappearance and forced displacement, repression, struggles for land, water, life and feminist movements are some of the approaches that comic journalism have in Latin America.

Steve Ellner, Ronaldo Munck and Kyla Sankey (eds.), Latin American Social Movements and Progressive Governments: Creative Tensions between Resistance and Convergence Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, pp. 336

Steve Ellner, Ronaldo Munck and Kyla Sankey (eds.), Latin American Social Movements and Progressive Governments: Creative Tensions between Resistance and Convergence Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, pp. 336

Emancipatory movements in Latin America: challenges and impetus arising from the historical formation of the region

This article aims to investigate whether the interpretation of the social movements which emerged in the turn of the century as movements defined by their struggles against neoliberalism is applicable for Latin America. With this purpose, the text follows a methodology based on the discussion of some of the main social movements that are currently active in the region, through an analytical scheme, which prioritises the understanding of the historical formation of this subcontinent and its position in the world economy. The hypothesis is that these elements are crucial for a proper appreciation of the material and ideological ground in which these movements carry out their struggles, as well as the huge socioeconomic contradictions, which may create obstacles, but also impetus for contestation. Finally, the text debates the promotion of these movements on regional and international level, taking into consideration the potential of internationalisation related to four axes which were identified in the research—namely livelihood, territory, ethnical identity and sustainability. Through this analysis, the article contributes to the understanding of the raison d’être of these Latin American social movements, but also to the discussions on the emancipatory potential ingrained in their struggles.

Exploring the Relationship Between Social Movement Organizations and the State in Latin America

Under conditions of weak statehood, societal actors are supposed to assume functions usually attributed to the state. Social self-organization is expected to emerge when the state leaves important social problems unattended. Should social self-organization, therefore, be regarded as a reaction to state weakness and as compensation for state failure in the provision of basic services? Does society organize itself on its own in areas where the state is absent or ineffective? By the example of two Latin American social movements, this article aims to show that social self-organization—at least on a larger scale—is not independent of the state, but rather a result of a dynamic interaction with the state. The two examples this article explores are the middle-class Venezuelan neighborhood movement and the Argentine piquetero movement of unemployed workers. Both movements emerged as reactions to the state’s failure and retreat from essential social functions and both developed into extensive and influential social actors. For that reason, they can be regarded as crucial cases for observing the patterns and conditions of social self-organization and autonomous collective action within the specific Latin American context. Despite their different backgrounds and social bases, the two cases reveal remarkable similarities. They show that the emergence and development of self-organized social groups cannot be conceived simply as a reaction to state weakness, but rather should be viewed as a dynamic interaction with the state.

Mending the Divide: Lessons from LGBTQ+ Movements for Latin American Studies

Latin American has made remarkable progress in the last twenty years regarding LGBTQ+ rights. More recently, LGBTQ‐related issues have had major impacts on national and regional politics. However, most of the literature about Latin American social movements still largely ignores LGBTQ+ movements. This article argues that including LGBTQ+ movements in social movements research is essential to further our understanding of LGBTQ+ politics in the region and of Latin American politics and social movements more broadly, as well as to address the enduring lack of academic engagement with gender and sexuality as political topics.

Latin American social movements and progressive governments: creative tensions between resistance and convergence

Latin American social movements and progressive governments: creative tensions between resistance and convergence

Decoloniality as the Only Pathway to the Right to Development in Latin America.

This article seeks to discuss the severe economic and social impacts caused in the region by the development model in place as well as proposals for transformation advanced by different Latin American social movements. This is not a scholarly article, but rather a set of reflections gained from extensive reading and years of political activism carried out in Brazil, in the region, and worldwide. Nor is this article exhaustive; rather it consists of ideas that may contribute to the debate surrounding the right to development.

Extractivist States: Contesting and Negotiating the “Commodities Consensus” in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Across Latin America

Extractivist States: Contesting and Negotiating the “Commodities Consensus” in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Across Latin America

Insurgent Afterlife: Latin America, the Left, and Contemporary U.S. Multiethnic Literature

ABSTRACT This article explores how a range of U.S. writers have generically, representationally, and linguistically engaged with radical left-wing social movements in the Global South. In staging their revolutions in Latin America and in employing insurgencies “from below” as a mode for imagining a political afterlife for the United States, these writers employ a deterritorialized and relational use of the term “Global South” to broadly refer to the kinds of “resistant political imaginaries” shared by persons of color and marginalized communities across the hemisphere and the world. However, this article argues the Global South in these multiethnic works is more than a simple device to connect to a collective memory shared by marginalized communities in the United States and populations who suffered under dictatorial regimes in Latin America. In fact, its deployment mimics the most effective counterinsurgency campaigns launched in the Global South. By taking the Global South as a dynamic framework for analyzing multiethnic U.S. literature, my essay prompts us to read the canon of U.S. multiethnic literature very differently and to see the long afterlife of the limits and failures of coopting Latin American social movements to imagine alternative futures in the United States.

The urban struggle to regain and redefine the public space in Latin America

Since its inception in ancient Greece, public space has played a key role in the politics and democracy of cities. Its role has been degraded in post-modernity, and reached its deepest crisis in the full maturity of the post-Fordist system (from 1990 onwards). This economic and representation depression, as well as institutional legitimacy, that States are experiencing, have promoted the emergence and resurgence of different social movements that flood cities globally. Here is where the concern of the Frente Urbano Amparo Poch y Gascón collective lies, formed by the authors, to recognize and characterize, from a socio-urban logic, these manifestations and the sustained occupation that public spaces have experienced in different Latin American cities during the last decade. This research, framed within the Virtual Latin American Meeting, Utopías Líquidas, is proposed starting from a mixed methodology of collective mapping, recognizing public spaces, and characterizing their occupation exercised by Latin American social movements, in the dispute to redefine them and regain their political character, and thus value the different Latin American social movements and their struggles, in an act that encourages resistance and solidarity.

The Solved Conflict: Pope Francis and Liberation Theology

The battle for meaning and influence between Latin American liberations theologians and the Vatican was one of the most significant conflicts in the global Catholic church of the twentieth century. With the election of the Argentinean Jorge Mario Bergoglio as head of the global church in 2013, the question about the legacy of liberation theology was actualized. The canonization of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the pope’s approximation to the public figure of Gustavo Gutiérrez signaled a new approach to the liberation theology movement in the Vatican. This article argues that Pope Francis shares some of the main theological concerns as pontiff with liberation theology. Although the pope remains an outsider to liberation theology, he has in a sense solved the conflict between the Vatican and the Latin American social movement. Through an analysis of ecclesial documents and theological literature, his can be discerned on three levels. First, Pope Francis’ use of certain theological ideas from liberation theology has been made possible and less controversial by post-cold war contexts. Second, Pope Francis has contributed to the solution of this conflict through significant symbolic gestures rather than through a shift of official positions. Third, as Pope Francis, the Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio has appropriated certain elements that are specific to liberation theology without acknowledging his intellectual debt to it.

Testimonio and Counterstorytelling by Immigrant-Origin Children and Youth: Insights That Amplify Immigrant Subjectivities

This article seeks to amplify our scholarly view of immigrant identity by centering the first-person narratives of immigrant-origin children and youth. Our theoretical and methodological framework centers on testimonio—a narrative practice popularized in Latin American social movements in which an individual recounts a lived experience that is intended to be representative of a collective struggle. Our goal is to foreground first-person narratives of childhood as told by immigrant-origin children and youth in order to gain insight into what they believe we should know about them. We argue for the power of testimonio to communicate both extraordinary hardship and everyday experiences and that—through this storytelling—immigrant-origin children and youth also express imagined futures for themselves and their loved ones. Through our analysis of ethnographic recordings of testimonio shared by Latin American immigrant children and multimedia testimonios created by immigrant-origin adolescents with roots in the Caribbean and West Africa, we gain a fuller understanding of immigrant subjectivities and push the boundaries of “the immigrant experience” still prevalent in mainstream discussions today.

A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia by Mark Goodale

Reviewed by: A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia by Mark Goodale Mareike Winchell Mark Goodale. A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 320 pp. In A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia, Mark Goodale skillfully tracks the political history of President Evo Morales’s legal and political reform project in Bolivia from 2006 to 2015. The book draws from interviews and conversations with Bolivian intellectuals, political leaders, jurists, and indigenous activists, as well as detailed readings of federal legislation and constitutional texts. Goodale argues that the juridification of Bolivian politics during this period became a “mechanism for much more limited, exclusionary, and ambiguous shifts” (241). Through new kinds of legislation, Morales’ government was able to “harness the power of the rule of law” as a principal mechanism for actualizing its revolutionary visions (25). However, this project was complicated by the fact that its central pillar, a proto-nationalist re-fashioning of indigeneity, was not itself the basis of an existing indigenous movement at that time. Rather, this notion of indigeneity was generated as a “socio-juridical concept” that also circulated among social movement actors, and often in ways that departed from Morales party agendas (238). Goodale’s book complicates romantic accounts of Morales to reveal how his agenda was “embedded in an emerging hybrid ideology” based on reworking an older Orientalist imaginary of the Andean into an emergent ideal of lo indígena (7). The book consists of a Preface, Introduction, Conclusion and six substantive chapters. The Preface begins with Che Guevara’s hands or, rather, [End Page 375] their absence. Their severing was crucial to the body’s identification by retired Bolivian military officers in the mid-1990s. Guevara’s bodily remains were displayed to visitors by the Castro government in Havana. Goodale takes this as a point of insight into the “prismatic quality” marking quotidian experiences of revolution and their various afterlives (x). Similarly, he approaches the MAS political era of 2006 to 2015 in terms of “shifting fragments that came together [...] at particular moments in time” (x). In the Introduction, Goodale extends this discussion to outline a “politics of allochrony—the reification of past, present, and future into categories that did certain kinds of public work.” Not all epochs were weighted evenly in this configuration. In particular, Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party government drew from notions of “cosmic time,” or Pachakuti. Following Indianista writer Fausto Reinaga, Pachakuti was understood by some MAS officials as a subterranean force that returns to break down racialized hierarchies and liberate Bolivia’s marginalized indigenous majority (5). Here and in the Conclusion the book offers a refreshing discussion of how ethnographic armatures of authority and certainty broke down (15, 243). Most notably the book recounts interlocutors’ challenges to Goodale and their rejection of the need for white, non-Bolivian scholars to ventriloquize indigenous voices. The book then turns to a detailed institutional history of legal shifts under Morales that will interest scholars of Bolivian politics and Latin American social movements. Additionallly, Goodale offers fascinating meta-commentaries on this reform project itself. He does so through the eyes of people charged with carrying it out as well as by those, like older Leftist Trotskyites, who felt alienated by the government’s increasing alignment with extractivism and its seeming abandonment of class politics (29). Chapter 1 looks at the ways that this juridification occurred through the re-making, rather than displacement, of earlier bureaucratic channels in order to “forge a dominant cadre of public and social actors” in the absence of a well-defined ruling class. Chapter 2 examines “revolution by constitution,” the translation of a revolutionary program into law, and maps the tensions that emerged out of this codification effort. Chapter 3 traces the resistance that faced the MAS project, particularly in the wake of a conflict over a highway to be built through protected indigenous regions in Bolivia’s lowlands. Chapter 4 considers the internal conflicts facing Bolivia’s process of change, which Goodale argues emerged out of a “patchwork state ideology” that provided a...

Latin American Social Movements: Bringing Strategy Back In

This essay reviews the following works: Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America. Edited by Sonia E. Alvarez, Jeffrey W. Rubin, Millie Thayer, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, and Agustin Lao-Montes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi + 386 pages. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822373353. Social Protests in Colombia: A History, 1958–1990: Social Movements in the Americas. By Mauricio Archila Neira. Translated by Camilo Ordonez-Zambrano; foreword by A. Ricardo Lopez-Pedreros. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xx + 375. $120.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781498558877. Estado de malestar y tradiciones de lucha: Genealogia del movimiento piquetero de Tartagal-Mosconi, 1930–2001. By Jose Daniel Benclowitz. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2013. ISBN: 9789876911146. Policing Protest in Argentina and Chile. By Michelle D. Bonner. Boulder, CO: First Forum Press, 2014. Pp. xiv + 249. $75.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781935049869. Where Are the Unions? Workers and Social Movements in Latin America, the Middle East and Europe. Edited by Sian Lazar. London: Zed Books, 2017. Pp. 296. $25.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781783609895. Protest State: The Rise of Everyday Contention in Latin America. By Mason W. Moseley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 241. $78.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780190694005. The Poor’s Struggle for Political Incorporation: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina. By Federico M. Rossi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 341. $31.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781107525986. Indigenous Women’s Movements in Latin America: Gender and Ethnicity in Peru, Mexico, and Bolivia. By Stephanie Rousseau and Anahi Morales Hudon. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 225. ISBN: 9781349950621. Popular Movements in Autocracies: Religion, Repression, and Indigenous Collective Action in Mexico. By Guillermo Trejo. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 339. ISBN: 9780521197724.

Between divine and social justice: emerging climate-justice narratives in Latin American socio-environmental struggles

Abstract. This exploratory study traces the emergence of climate justice claims linked to narratives of Latin American social movements for the defence of life and territory. I argue that in post-colonial settings, religious and historical injustices and socio-cultural factors act as constitutive elements of environmental and climate justice understandings which are grounded in territories immersed in neo-extractivism conflicts. Environmental and climate justice conceptualizations have overlooked the religious fact present in many Latin American socio-environmental movements. As a result, the intertwined notions of divine justice and social justice are unacknowledged. To illustrate this claim, I examine socio-environmental and climate justice claims in a cross-border region between Guatemala and Chiapas. This region has a common ethnic background but divergent historical trajectories across the border. Diverse nuances and intensities adopted by environmental and climate justice practices and narratives on both sides of the border are examined. The case study reveals the importance of religion as a force for collective action and as a channel for the promotion of place-based notions of climate justice. The text calls for the examination of the religious factor, in its multiple expressions, in the theories of climate and environmental justice.

Organizing Twenty-First-Century Activism: From Structure to Strategy in Latin American Social Movements

This article examines how the organizational structure of a social movement affects the tactics it is likely to adopt. Hybrid movements gained prominence at the start of the twenty-first century. Like movements of the past, they protested on the streets; but unlike the movements of the past, they also acted like interest groups by lobbying government over policy. Considered through the lens of traditional scholarship, this phenomenon presents a puzzle. Loose networks of activists are thought to be good at contentious politics but incapable of negotiating with government. By contrast, federations of interest groups are seen to be good at insider lobbying but subject to co-optation. This article theorizes the middle ground between social movements and interest groups by proposing a third structure for social movement organizing, the federative coalition, which incorporates some of the advantages of hierarchy while avoiding some of its pitfalls. The article illustrates this argument through a case study of Brazil’s AIDS movement.

Latin American Social Movements as New Types of Democracy.

Este articulo analiza algunos aspectos relevantes de los movimientos sociales latinoamericanos. Para explicar en que consisten y como resuelven el problema de la organizacion politica se estudia, siguiendo a Zibechi, algunos movimientos de dos paises: Brasil y Bolivia. En el primero, en los anos 80 surgieron unos movimientos sociales rurales muy fuertes que han perdido parte de su papel politico durante los anos del gobierno progresista del Partido de los trabajadores. En el segundo, aparecieron en las mismas fechas movimientos sociales urbanos que transformaron un pais que se habia propuesto realizar desde el gobierno una reforma politico-economica antiliberal.

The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico: Chicana/o Radicalism, Solidarity Politics, and Latin American Social Movements ‐ by Gómez, E. Alan

The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico: Chicana/o Radicalism, Solidarity Politics, and Latin American Social Movements ‐ by Gómez, E. Alan

Foes and allies: the Catholic Church, Acción Cultural Popular (ACPO), and the emergence of the indigenous movement in Cauca, Colombia

ABSTRACTLiterature on Latin American social movements has discussed the contributions of post-Second Vatican Council (SVC) (1963–1965) progressive branches of the Catholic Church in the formation of indigenous movements. However, this literature has largely ignored discussions on the intervention of non-SVC and conservative branches of the Catholic establishment. This article illustrates the role of the modernizing educational program Acción Cultural Popular (ACPO) (1949), a Catholic organization aligned with conservative forces of the Colombian State and developmental agencies from abroad, in the formation of the indigenous movement of the department of Cauca by Misak and Nasa indigenous people, who pioneered the indigenous movement in the country. ACPO provided educational tools and contacts that contributed to the creation of the indigenous movement of Cauca in the 1970s. However, it also promoted problematic technologies that affected indigenous territories and modes of understanding indigenous cultures that belittled the traditions of the Misak and Nasa indigenous people.