Challenging National Borders from Within: The Political‐Class Formation of Indigenous Peasants in Latin America*

We explore the recent Indian‐peasant mobilization in Latin America. We argue that this mobilization seeks recognition of cultural differences and thus challenges hegemonic definitions of nationhood and neoliberal globalism. Indian struggles include self‐government and collective use of land for the reproduction of indigenous identity, and directly undermine the neoliberal drive towards privatization and individualization. We question both the Marxist views and the new‐social‐movement theories on identity politics. Instead, a theoretical synthesis is proposed where both class and identity serve as constituent parts of political‐class formation.     

The Long Road: Rural Youth,Farming and Agroecological Formación in Central America

Across the globe, the countryside faces the “generation problem”: Who will grow food when the current generation of aging small farmers and peasants disappears? A combination of objective and subjective factors effectively discourages young people from assuming the continuity of peasant and family farming, especially in countries that have experienced significant neoliberal dismantling of rural infrastructure and education. Rural social movements are increasingly building educational processes linked with small-scale, ecological farming in the hopes of reinforcing the development of identities and skills for peasant futures and cadre in the struggle for popular land reform, agroecology, and food sovereignty.     

Mobilizing Memory: Bolivia's Enduring Social Movements

In Bolivia, the most indigenous of South American countries, powerful social movements have drawn on collective memory to build effective coalitions across significant differences in ethnic identity and awareness, class consciousness, generations and regions. We contend that this deployment of memory to strengthen protest identities is reinforced by pervasive indigenous cultural practices. Deeply rooted in oral storytelling, perceptions of time, place and a reverence for ancestors, collective memories help bring the past into the present, and create responsibilities to those who came before. The result is a mutually constituting relationship between memory and activism, where an instrumental construction of collective memories serves to provide shared meanings to divergent movements. We suggest that scholars of social movements could deepen their analysis by interrogating rather than normalizing the cultural backdrops that movements operate within.     

Latino and American Identities as Perceived by Immigrants

In this paper we analyze Latino and American identities as perceived by first and second generation immigrants to the United States. Disposable cameras were handed out to a small set of subjects, who were asked to take pictures of whatever, to them, seemed American and Latino as they went through their daily lives. The resulting set of 115 American images and 134 Latino images suggest that Latin American immigrants see a great contrast in the content of the two identities. Subjects viewed American identity as having to do with bigness and power and they saw Americans as being in constant motion and in a hurry, competitive and commercial, and cold, distant, and impersonal. In contrast, subjects viewed Latino identity as focused on people and composed of intimate social relationships. The building blocks of Latino identity, according to our respondents, appear to be work, home, and Latin American cultural symbols.     

RURALIZING THE CITY: THE GREAT MIGRATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL REHABILITATION IN BALTIMORE,MARYLAND

This article examines the discursive and material presence of the “rural” in the “urban,” relating it to the historical and contemporary production of African American culture and identity. By using the case of the Great Migration, it discusses how African Americans negotiated and shaped their urban surroundings and formed individual and collective identities by drawing on their rural, southern histories. It then suggests the relevance of these broad historical processes to contemporary analyses and interventions in the urban environment of Baltimore, Maryland. This article challenges assumptions that obscure the agency of urban residents in the formation of identity and the establishment of community. It demonstrates ways in which the historical movement from rural South to urban North was accompanied by a range of cultural resources that have been adapted, discarded, or reconstructed.     

Contested communities: the refuge movement and cultural identities in Wales

This paper explores different meanings of community and cultural identity. Women involved in the refuge movement in rural Wales belong to overlapping communities: geographically located rural communities; linguistic and ethnic communities; and the gendered and occupationally based community of Welsh Women's Aid. Language is an important marker of belonging to Welsh rural communities which are under threat from an influx of non-Welsh speakers. Incoming women who are homeless as a result of domestic violence may be perceived as part of this threat. This creates a potential conflict for refuge workers, some of whom are also Welsh speakers, who represent the interests of this group of women but also belong to Welsh-speaking, rural communities. We explore the interrelation between these refuge workers, the various communities to which they belong, and how belonging or not belonging shapes their identities. We conclude that these women, in spite of the conflicting rights and interests of their various communities, negotiate a shared collective identity which owes something to all three.     

Altering Masculinities: The Spanish Conquest and the Evolution of the Latin American Machismo

Machismo, a stereotype that emphasizes hypermasculinity and associated with the Latin American male, was a legacy of the Conquest of the Spanish conquistadores and their interpretation of and reaction to the indigenous two-spirit. It was the product of the rape of indigenous women, the response to indigenous imperial ritual, and the sublimation of indigenous male sexuality. It was a response to social and religious control of the male body. As such, it is not something that is easily eradicated. Through an understanding of the complex roots of this variant of masculinity, however, it may be possible to filter out some of the negative traits and highlight the more positive. This essay examines the interactions between the Spaniards and indigenous peoples of the Americas and the interpretations of indigenous sexualities, genders, and social roles by the Spanish authorities, and how it all participates in the construction of the Latin American machismo.     

Privatisation des télécommunications et relations de travail en Amérique latine

This article deals with the privatization of telecommunications in the three largest Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Labor unions have strongly affected the way telecommunications have been privatized in Latin America and its timing, but they have not been able to keep their traditional influence from waning. Comparing Argentina and Mexico brings to light opposite models of labor relations based, for the one, on the denationalization of management and loss of guaranteed jobs for wage-earners and, for the other, on the maintenance of control over telecommunications by local entrepreneurs and the preservation of guaranteed employment. The more recent privatization implemented in Brazil has fueled debate about the consequences on collective action in an era of open-market telecommunications. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Parenting as Activism: Identity Alignment and Activist Persistence in the White Power Movement

This article addresses the relationship between identity and activism and discusses implications for social movement persistence. We explain how individuals negotiate opportunities as parents to align and extend an activist identity with a movement's collective expectations. Specifically, we focus on how participants in the U.S. white power movement use parenting as a key role to express commitment to the movement, develop correspondence among competing and potentially conflicting identities, and ultimately sustain their activism. We suggest that parenting may provide unique opportunities for activists in many movements to align personal, social, and collective movement identities and simultaneously affirm their identities as parents and persist as social movement activists.     

‘A ondi queras’: Ranchero identity construction by U.S. born Mexicans on Facebook

This study describes how transnational second‐generation Mexican bilinguals use a stigmatized variety of Mexican Spanish to communicate on Facebook and construct an identity. The stereotyped features of this variety index a ranchero identity. Historically, ranchero is an ambivalent identity for Mexican society in general. On the one hand, ranchero culture is a positive reminiscence of Mexico's agrarian past, while on the other, rancheros, along with indigenous Mexicans, are at the bottom of the hierarchy in Mexican society. A discourse‐centered, ethnographic analysis of digitally mediated conversations demonstrates how language use allows participants to reminisce about their collective past, maintain Mexican identities tied to their ancestors, fit their identities to contemporary U.S. Mexican culture, and distance themselves from the stigma associated with the ranchero background.     

MARGINALITY,ADVOCACY, AND THE AMBIGUITIES OF MULTICULTURALISM: NOTES ON ROMANI ACTIVISM IN CENTRAL EUROPE

Activists who take up the cause of marginalized and discriminated cultural groups often find themselves in an ambiguous position in relation to the very people whose interests they seek to represent. Inspired by the ideas of multiculturalism, minority advocates turn the cultural identity of marginalized and discriminated minorities into the central focus of a political struggle for recognition. By so doing, however, they construct a particular sectional minority identity that not only fails to give full expression to individual identities, but is usually also “stigmatized” in the sense that it is popularly associated with standard stereotypical images and negative characteristics. This article identifies this ambiguity in contemporary projects of minority rights advocacy aimed at redressing the social and economic grievances of the Roma in Central Europe. It shows how activists in the articulation of their claims rely on essentialist assumptions of Romani identity. While these minority rights claims resonate well in international forums, they also run the risk of reifying cultural boundaries, stimulating thinking in ethnic collectives, reinforcing stereotypes, and hampering collective action. By reviewing some of the recent literature on multiculturalism in social and political theory, this article explores ways of dealing with this ambiguity. It concludes that minority advocacy for the Roma can avoid the tacit reproduction of essential identities by contesting the essentializing categorization schemes that lie at the heart of categorized oppression and by foregrounding the structural inequality that drives political mobilization.     

Indigenous Immigrants from Latin America (IILA): Racial/Ethnic Identity in the U.S.

In recent decades, migration from all corners of the world has created one of the most racially/ethnically diverse immigrant populations in the history of the United States. While today migratory flows are predominantly from Asia, immigrants from Latin America continue to make up the largest immigrant group in the United States. The influx of this group reflects the heterogeneity of the Latin American region, including Latin American immigrants who identify as indigenous in their countries of origin. Through a brief overview of how indigeneity, race, and ethnicity have been historically framed in Latin America, I discuss how Indigenous Immigrants from Latin American (IILA) position their indigeneity within their racial/ethnic identity in the United States. I consider how migration shapes indigenous identity and propose the use of Social Identity Theory (SIT) to explore how IILA negotiate a racial/ethnic identity while maintaining their indigeneity in a U.S. context.     

Telling the Collective Story? Moroccan-Dutch Young Adults’ Negotiation of a Collective Identity through Storytelling

Researchers taking a social constructionist perspective on identity agree that identities are constructed and negotiated in interaction. However, empirical studies in this field are often based on interviewer–interviewee interaction or focus on interactions with members of a socially dominant out-group. How identities are negotiated in interaction with in-group members remains understudied. In this article we use a narrative approach to study identity negotiation among Moroccan-Dutch young adults, who constitute both an ethnic and a religious (Muslim) minority in the Netherlands. Our analysis focuses on the topics that appear in focus group participants’ stories and on participants’ responses to each other’s stories. We find that Moroccan-Dutch young adults collectively narrate their experiences in Dutch society in terms of discrimination and injustice. Firmly grounded in media discourse and popular wisdom, a collective narrative of a disadvantaged minority identity emerges. However, we also find that this identity is not uncontested. We use the concept of second stories to explain how participants negotiate their collective identity by alternating stories in which the collective experience of deprivation is reaffirmed with stories in which challenging or new evaluations of the collective experience are offered. In particular, participants narrate their personal experiences to challenge recurring evaluations of discrimination and injustice. A new collective narrative emerges from this work of joint storytelling.     

Television and identities: analysis of the consumption of ‘telenovelas’ by the Latin American community in Spain

This article analyses the consumption of ‘telenovelas’ by Latin American residents in Spain. Our hypothesis is that ‘telenovelas’ are a way of constructing identities especially in communities that have emigrated to other countries and which can be seen in their specific viewing preferences for fiction. We have carried out a survey following the methodology applied in these kinds of studies. The survey was applied to 219 Latin American subjects who reside in Spain. We demonstrate that the main factors influencing the consumption of ‘telenovelas’ by the Latin American community residing in Spain are related to the cultural identities of the countries of production and which are represented in the context of the different storylines, such as natural locations, costumes and language. The results show that further research in this field is needed in order to identify the derivations of perceptions by the immigrant collectives through successful products such as ‘telenovelas’.     

Planning Other Families: Negotiating Population and Identity Politics in the Peruvian Amazon

This article examines the ways in which globally driven population policies are experienced by rural, indigenous women in Amazonian communities on the periphery of formal, political power. As with other global development processes, population programs are actively resisted, accepted, and modified by the women who are their intended "targets." Through a nuanced exploration of the interface of indigenous identity with the discourse of empowerment and reproductive rights, this article traces the impact of internationally funded population and development programs on local identity politics in the Peruvian Amazon.     

Changing Indigeneity Politics in Indonesia: From Revival to Projects

Through the discourse of indigeneity, rural communities around the world are joining a global network of rural justice seekers. By articulating grievances collectively, they demand state recognition while seeking support from NGOs and international development organisations. In Indonesia, the manifestation of indigenous ‘adat’ politics is no longer confined to the national struggle for the recognition of land rights, but instead, has proliferated into many localised short term ‘adat projects’. This introduction to the TAPJA special issue on adat demonstrates that both the rural poor and local elites can be the initiators or recipients of these adat projects but, at the current juncture, the latter are better positioned to benefit from such projects. The special issue shows that in Indonesia, where adat is often firmly entrenched in the state, the promotion of indigeneity claims can work in contradictory ways. Findings from across the special issue show that adat projects tend to reinforce the power of the state, rather than challenging it.     

Contesting Formosa: Tragic Remembrance,Urban Space,and National Identity in Taipak

Throughout the world, national identities are inscribed on communities through the construction of social space. Although the identity of Taiwan-as Chinese versus Formosan-has been contested for the past fifty years, the struggles over space and memory have become increasingly visible since the lifting of martial law in 1987. This article, a product of five years of field research in Taiwan, is an attempt to read some ways in which so-called Native Taiwanese have begun to inscribe a non-Chinese identity on social space in Taipak and beyond. In particular, I focus on how struggles for control over social memory have played out in the transformation of Taipak's New Park into a memorial for the Massacre of February 28. Although it is only one social field on which the struggle for Taiwanese identity is fought, New Park has become one of the major points of contention between ethnic groups on the island.     

Emancipatory engagement: An urban womanist social work pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Standing on the hope of the initial social work course from 1914 at Morgan College, this article provides insight into the significant learning outcomes of contemporary students in advanced social work practice with urban African American families. This research introduces the conceptual framework of urban womanist social work pedagogy as an inclusive practice-informed knowledge produced through the rituals, traditions, values, culture, and resilience of historically disenfranchised communities. Urban womanist social work teaching methods honor truth telling from the ones who have lived there. Urban womanist social work affirms transformative-centered research, teaching, and scholarship produced through institutions such as historically black colleges and universities (HBCU’s). The students’ reflective narratives reveal a process of transformation, centered in the freedom standpoint, which includes recognizing the location and context of their individual and collective identity as African Americans in the profession of social work. Urban womanist social work pedagogy cumulatively equips our students with intergenerational knowledge that inform their assessment of critical issues in Baltimore’s African American communities.     

Neoliberal discourses and ethnonormative regime in post-recognition Peru: redefining hierarchies and identities

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of ‘recognition’ of cultural and ethnic diversity in Peru. It proposes that the rise of a new global ‘ethnonormativity’ – a regime to define and administrate cultural and identity differences, to establish boundaries between those who ‘are’ ethnic and those who are not, and to set rights and duties derived from identities – has had meagre effects in Peru. While the past decades have witnessed the emergence of Latin American political actors who regard indigenousness as their basic political identity, there has been no ‘emergence of indigenous movements’ in Peru. The discourses that highlight the importance of diversity have gained terrain – unsettling, to a certain extent, the narratives of assimilation through ‘development’ and mestizaje – and the Peruvian state has officially embraced ‘recognition’, including it in its official rhetoric and creating institutions to design policies to guarantee the rights of the indigenous and Afroperuvian ‘peoples’ (itself a label part of the language of multiculturalism). The state has also crafted a definition of ‘indigenous peoples’ and introduced ethnic variables in censuses and official statistics, thus being active in the production and regulation of subjects. Some civil society actors have also incorporated ethnic labels into their rhetoric to adapt to the global turn to identity politics. Peru remains, however, a fertile terrain for neoliberal policies and discourses of a different kind. A discourse that exalts ‘emprendedurismo’ (entrepreneurship) and states that success depends entirely on personal effort has become a new common sense, obscuring the structural inequality that has historically affected indigenous and Afroperuvian people. Extractivism continues to damage the environment and the rights of indigenous people, while the expansion of agribusiness in the coastal valleys of Peru keeps people – regardless of their ‘ethnic’ self-identification – in poverty and without basic labour and social rights. The article suggests that the ambiguities of the ethnonormative regime in Peru may serve as a diversion from structural issues in a context of neoliberalism and may re-elaborate racial hierarchies, racism and the narratives of mestizaje it allegedly opposes.