Abstract
Two anthologies published in the 1990s declared a theoretical and empirical watershed by advocating for and applying New Social Movement (NSM) theorizing to studies of Latin American social-movement activism, at the same time declaring older movements and theories passé. We criticize both the novelty and the fruitful applicability of NSM-style theory to Latin America’s social-movement universe of recent decades, and re-advocate the virtues and analytical powers of perspectives rooted in political economy and political sociology. The claims made by advocates of NSM theorizing, that certain social movements—those rooted in economic interests or in material and political deprivations—have been eclipsed in number and importance by culture-and-identity-focused movements are shown to be without merit. We buttress that assertion with reference to a wide array of recent movements among workers, consumers, debtors, racial and ethnic groups, women, and students, among others. We also look closely at two very large, yet rather different movements, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil and Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS).
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Notes
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- 2.
That suggestion mars the otherwise superb entry by Starn in Escobar and Alvarez 1992, p. 95.
- 3.
The National Electoral Court of Bolivia released the results on 28 January 2009; in mid-2010 they were found at: http://www.cne.org.bo/ResultadosRNC2009/wfrmDirimidor.aspx. Across all nine Bolivian departments, the vote results correlated − 0.24 with per capita income, and − 0.41 with the department-specific scores on a variant of the United Nations’ Human Development Index, one which also includes equally weighted elements for literacy and for life expectancy; calculations were made using data from Bolivia-PNUD 2004, pp. 15, 16, 18, 20, 151. For excellent sources on Bolivian events on which we draw here, see also Barr 2005, Crabtree 2005, Domingo 2005, Hylton and Thomson 2007, Olivera and Lewis 2004, and Postero 2010.
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Wright, Wolford, Ondetti, Carter, and Wickham-Crowley all participated in a panel about the MST at the 2004 LASA Congress held in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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New York Times, 21 January 1997, p. 10.
- 7.
Latin American theologians in the 1960s formulated a biblically-inspired social doctrine that called for a “preferential option for the poor.” Subsistence struggles accordingly became one of their foci of concerns.
- 8.
US deportation of undocumented Latin Americans who had affiliated with gangs in the USA, especially in Los Angeles, has fueled a transnationalization of US gangs, especially in El Salvador, from where they have fanned out to other countries in the region (Cruz 2013).
- 9.
For example, Huizer (1972, p. 3, 88–105) notes that there were thousands of indigenous protests in Bolivia alone, during and after the colonial era.
- 10.
And for European movements of the nineteen century, Craig Calhoun (1993) vigorously disputes the NSM theorists’ claims about the presumed novelty of cultural elements and of collective-identity formation.
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- 13.
See the telling PBS Documentary, “Brazil in Black and White” (Wide Angle 2007), which offers video footage of some of those protests, inter alia. The quota was implemented via screening of standardized photos taken of all “quota petitioners,” and its percentage target varied from state to state across Brazil, depending on the size of that state’s Afro-descent population; two typical targets were 20 % (for Brasilia/The Federal District) and 40 % (for Bahia). Often forgotten in the accompanying, often vehement, public debates over race was the second element in the new quota system. It directly targeted socioeconomic disadvantages by also installing a minimum quota of entrants from the nation’s public high schools, since applicants from privately run high schools utterly dominated access to programs such as medicine.
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Wickham-Crowley, T., Eckstein, S. (2015). “There and Back Again”: Latin American Social Movements and Reasserting the Powers of Structural Theories. In: Almeida, P., Cordero Ulate, A. (eds) Handbook of Social Movements across Latin America. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9912-6_3
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