Social Movements in the Americas – serie

Social Protests in Colombia: A History, 1958-1990 examines social mobilization in Colombia through a variety of lenses in an interdisciplinary approach. Mauricio Archila-Neira incorporates theories from diverse social sciences including subaltern studies and postcolonial approaches to open up an intergenerational dialogue about political transformation and social change. Archila-Neira approaches this history from an objective viewpoint, offering an analysis from a distance not altered by emotion or hyperbole as he examines the values, traditions, and social collective action of subaltern sectors without external influence or motive. The book argues that academia bears the responsibility to put into play its accumulated symbolic capital to critically understand society, without abandoning the utopic effort to imagine another world is possible. Social Protests in Colombia teaches readers how to inhabit differences—of historical experiences, knowledge, and understandings—and why it is crucial to challenge a world that claims to be homogenous. Scholars of Latin American studies, sociology, political science, and history will find this book especially useful.

In Breaking the Boundaries of the Colombian Socio-Racial Order: Black Middle Classes through an Intersectional Lens, anthropologist and intersectional feminist Mara Viveros-Vigoya examines what it means to be Black and middle class in Colombia and how that meaning has been configured over almost a century of the country’s history. By applying an intersectional perspective, this book introduces two important theoretical shifts. First, it challenges the perception of Afrodescendant ‘communities’ as uniformly impoverished and second, it emphasizes the interconnectedness of class with geographical and historical contexts and with axes of social inequality such as gender, race, and age. Viveros-Vigoya argues that since the inauguration of neoliberal multiculturalism in the 1990s, while Blackness and upward social mobility have become more compatible, it remains to be seen whether we are advancing towards a global agenda of social justice or if we are simply opening some spaces for social and political mobility that serve largely to reproduce the status quo in the name of racial equality.

Through investigation of three case studies in Bolivia, this book offers an innovative perspective to explain the role of collective memories in moments of intense social struggle and political change.Memories and Social Struggles in Contemporary Bolivia: Platforms in Convulsive Times examines social memories as functioning, powerful platforms that structure the experience of activists in convulsive times. The first case analyses how the inhabitants of the province of Omasuyos mobilized the memory of the anti-colonial rebellion of Tupac Katari and Bartolina Sisa during the so-called ‘Gas War’ in 2003. The second case concentrates on how activists in El Alto recalled the War of the Pacific to make sense of the same conflict. Thirdly, this book explores the civic strike in Potosí in 2010 and its relation to the memory of the rise and fall of the Imperial City of Potosí. Sue A. S. Iamamoto argues these memories and narratives have often experienced a path-dependent continuous remembrance through history which is both constitutive and instrumental for the activists claiming it.

A Fervent Crusade for the National Soul examines the implementation of cultural policies in relation to the contested configuration of citizenship in Colombia between 1930 and 1946. At a time when national identities were re-imagined all over the Americas, progressive artists and intellectuals affiliated with the liberal governments that ruled Colombia established an unprecedented bureaucratic apparatus for cultural intervention that celebrated so-called “popular culture” and rendered culture a social right. This book challenges pervasive narratives of state failure in Colombia, attending to the confrontations, negotiations, and entanglements of bureaucrats with everyday citizens that shaped the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Catalina Muñoz argues that while culture became an instrument of inclusion, the liberal definition of popular culture as authentic and static was also a tool for domination that reinforced enduring structures of inequality founded on region, race, and gender. Liberals crafted the state as the paternalistic protector of acquiescent citizens, instead of a warden of political participation. Muñoz suggests that this form of governance allowed the elites to rule without making the structural changes required to craft a more equal society.

Since 2006, Venezuela has witnessed an explosion of different forms of popular power and participatory democracy. Over 47,000 grassroots neighborhood-based communal councils and 3,000 communes have been constructed. In Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis, Anderson Bean offers a critical analysis of these experiments in popular and workers' power and their potential for societal transformation within and beyond Venezuela. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Bean demonstrates how workers and peasants, through networks of popular power, exercise agency over their own development while facing challenges from the capitalist state. Most importantly, this book connects with the far-reaching implications that the communal movement in Venezuela has for building a society responsive more to the needs of ordinary people than to the desires of the elites.

Since 2006, Venezuela has witnessed an explosion of different forms of popular power and participatory democracy. Over 47,000 grassroots neighborhood-based communal councils and 3,000 communes have been constructed. In Communes and the Venezuelan State: The Struggle for Participatory Democracy in a Time of Crisis, Anderson Bean offers a critical analysis of these experiments in popular and workers' power and their potential for societal transformation within and beyond Venezuela. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Bean demonstrates how workers and peasants, through networks of popular power, exercise agency over their own development while facing challenges from the capitalist state. Most importantly, this book connects with the far-reaching implications that the communal movement in Venezuela has for building a society responsive more to the needs of ordinary people than to the desires of the elites.

Battles for Belonging: Women Journalists, Political Culture, and the Paradoxes of Inclusion in Colombia, 1943-1970 examines women journalists who conceived of their publications as political interventions in mid-twentieth-century Colombia. These journalists committed to shaping justice and opportunity for women in society through writing while battling within the publishing realm to also transform and professionalize the practice of journalism in their own terms. By analyzing the contentious narratives of gender and class these women crafted as well as their conflicting efforts to maintain their stature in the printing and public worlds, it reveals the ongoing negotiations involved within their disputes over inclusion and democracy in a country still finding its way to equality, peace, and stability between the 1940s and 1960s. This book challenges oversimplified portrayals of struggles for power that either glorify or vilify these historical processes by erasing the complexity of the political and social actors involved in them. It stresses the importance of women, but not to the expense of a balanced critique of their historical reality, actions, and endeavors. This is a history of paradoxical political manifestations and a redefinition of power struggles as multidirectional, intersectional, non-monolithic historical processes, from the viewpoint of women.