Panel session E

E1 How did Latin America change Norden? Comparative Analysis on Regional Human Rights Policies

Chair: Jussi Pakkasvirta, University of Helsinki.

Andrés Rivarola Puntigliano, Stockholm University, Benedicte Bull, University of Oslo, Mogens Pedersen, former ambassador to Bolivia and Colombia and former senior analyst at Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) and Jussi Pakkasvirta.

This panel in form of a round table discussion analyses the impact and development of the human rights policies in the Nordic countries. The main “hypothesis” is that the changes in Latin American political history had a surprisingly important role in the Norden. At least the opposition to Latin America dictatorships since 1970s played an important role in change of Nordic international politics when the traditional kind of nationalist welfare states were moving towards something that is nowadays known as modern Nordic welfare democracy, with emphasis on global human rights and social equity.

E2 Critically understanding violence and organized crime in Latin America and the Nordic region

Chairs: Noé Mendoza, Oswaldo Zavala

Repeating cartels, forever drug wars, and global reterritorializations of the narconarrative

Oswaldo Zavala, City University of New York.

The US-led national security narrative of the ‘war on drugs’ permeates numerous cultural products and media representations in countries far away from – and seemingly unrelated to – conflict zones historically linked to Latin American drug trafficking organizations, in particular the US-Mexico border and the Colombian city of Medellín. This paper examines the emergence of the concept of the ‘cartel’ and the continuity of the ‘drug war’ in countries with unexpected sociopolitical conditions for such phenomena, like the Argentinean city of Rosario and the Swedish city of Eskilstuna, among others. Drawing from an interdisciplinary approach analyzing recurrent expressions of the US national security paradigm through the ideas of Achille Mbembe, Gilles Deleuze, and Ernesto Laclau, I study the significance of the reterritorialization of what I term the ‘narconarrative’ —the hegemonic explanation of superior ‘cartel’ violence over weakened and corrupt state structures— sustaining transnational antidrug policies. I ultimately argue that global reterritorializations of the narconarrative legitimize public consensus in favor of a more militaristic approach to policing, the criminalization of racialized and precarious youth, war profiteering, and the overall erasure of state-sponsored violence.

Towards a culturally sensitive life-course criminology of Latin America

Sveinung Sandberg, Oslo University.

Crime levels in Latin America have risen sharply over the past two decades. The reason is the growth and brutalization of drug trafficking, gangs, corruption, poverty, and loss of trust in the authorities that fail to control territories and provide basic welfare benefits. Politically the response to increased crime has been a wave of penal populism that has led to overcrowded and underfunded prisons. Simultaneously, resilience and resistance towards both criminal organizations and oppressive penitentiary systems emerge from a multitude of places in Latin American societies, including in incarcerated populations and communities. The CRIMLA (Crime in Latin America) project is rooted in both life-course criminology and narrative criminology and combines a focus on life-courses with an interest in how these are conveyed and contribute to creating identities through individual life stories. Prison conditions as well as social life in prison are also important in the project. Combining criminological theory, with socio-economic, institutional, and cultural conditions, the objective is to do research and theorize from the Global South, culminating in the development of a culturally sensitive life-course criminology. We have conducted extensive, repeat interviews with over 400 people in prison, half of them are women. All participants are interviewed three times equaling about 1200 interviews. More than 20 researchers are involved in doing interviews, coding, and writing from the data. In this talk observations and experiences from the CRIMLA project will be combined with Sandberg’s 20 years of experiences from doing similar research in Scandinavia, pointing out similarities and differences between crime and incarcerated populations in these regions.

Constructing gangs and stigmatizing immigrant youth in marginalized neighborhoods in Sweden

Camila Salazar Atías, Fryshuset.

Youths in marginalized areas in Stockholm are labeled and stigmatized by politicians, media, and authorities as part of criminal gangs even though a general definition of the latter doesn’t exist or is established. Youngsters are given a name, hence an identity, and are seen as a menace to society at large. Many of them feel criminalized by association and are being labeled as such just because they live and grow up in marginalized neighborhoods depicted as ‘crime infected’ by police authority. Youths testify that they are harassed on a weekly basis for being young, male, immigrant, and inhabiting the wrong neighborhood. They must find strategies when they move outside and within their neighborhoods affecting and restricting their movements and freedom. Dissonances are commonly found between the way State authorities and media characterize ‘gangs’ vis-à-vis the perceptions of young people who have been or are part of those ‘gangs’. Sweden is experiencing a rise in gang criminality, with high levels of violence as a result. Politicians have not been able to diminish the violence, instead they are prompting a competition regarding who hits the hardest on crime. Gangs are targeted as the problem and lately, immigrants are singled out as a group who, by seemingly not wanting to adapt or to integrate to the Swedish customs and system, is responsible for the rise of gang criminality. This scenario creates a problematic polarization that stigmatizes and potentially criminalizes all immigrants in Sweden.

If cartels don’t exist, what does? A research programme critical development studies

Noé Manuel Mendoza Fuente, Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

In this presentation I articulate a framework and a research programme to understand the incremental violence emerging at the interface of drug-trafficking and agendas of national security in Latin America and the Nordic region. I rely on the work of scholars that critically deconstruct narconarratives (Zavala, 2022). I review the evidence suggesting that the growing securitization of Latin American policy can be characterized as a ‘state of exception’ (Schmitt, 2008). I discuss the latter as a state-making process that allows authorities and powerful actors to depoliticize democratic demands and to avoid structural state reform. I explain how the ‘state of exception’ re-defines the ontic frontiers of national societies and how it constructs antagonistic Others on whose shoulders the burden of violence and other social maladies can rest. I will reflect on whether the current rise in ‘gang’ and drug-trafficking related violence in Sweeden suggests analogical state-making rationales with Latin American cases. How is the political economy of the antagonistic ‘Others’ affected by, and interlocked with, the processes of the state of exception? What are the main flaws of the most recent and highly publicized quantitative accounts estimating the size and power of ‘gangs’ and ‘cartels? I suggest that a qualitative and critical enquiry on the local institutions and livelihoods molding the everyday life of marginalized subjects can reveal the unfair distributions of power and resources that are hidden and depoliticized by the narratives of the state of exception. I indicate possible cases and methods to address these questions. References: Schmitt C (2008) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. University of Chicago Press ed. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. http://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/toc/9780226738895.pdf (accessed 26 October 2023). Zavala O (2022) Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture (tran. W Savinar). Critical Mexican studies. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press.

E3 Contested spaces: Infrastructure, Megaprojects, and competing imaginaries of Development

Chair: Hamid Abud

Entrenched mobility: Megaprojects, inadequate public transport, and the fight for equal mobility in the Yucatan Peninsula

Hamid Alberto Abud Russell, University Heidelberg.

The Yucatan Peninsula is a space of unequal mobility. To address this, the Mexican government’s Tren Maya megaproject promises growth in a region which has for decades languished in obscurity. Under the banner of improving the quality of life and promoting economic development, the megaproject seeks to exploit one of Mexico’s last untapped spaces of labor and natural resources. This train, which was promoted as a solution to regional travel, will accelerate the flow of capital between urban areas without addressing the shortcomings of intra urban mobility. The trend of service privatization, which began in the 1980s, has seen local governments cut social spending and allow for private ownership of public transportation. These policies, justified as austerity, favored an individualized regime of automobility and provided the infrastructure it demanded. The imposition of such infrastructure curtailed the ability of locals to travel freely by commodifying mobility through the privatization of the urban commons. The use of market dynamics to dictate access to homes, jobs, and means of transportation conditioned the journey of individuals who would be forced to limit themselves to set patterns of travel which would, in turn, restrict their overall ability to consume the city. This regime of unequal motion, which I term entrenched mobility, is inextricably linked to the racism, sexism, and classism born out of Mexico’s colonial past, which has been maintained and reinforced over the last decades. The Tren Maya megaproject, with its focus on development, will create the conditions for capital mobility, at the expense of local travel and the right to the city.

En busca de “fronteras mentales”: entre desarrollo y propuestas alternativas. Centroamérica como estudio de caso

Katarzyna Dembicz, University of Warsaw and Ewelina Biczyńska, University of Warsaw.

La ponencia deriva de los resultados investigativos realizados en el marco del Proyecto cientifico “Discursos y dilemas de desarollo de las sociedades locales de America Central” (https://dissonance.wn.uw.edu.pl/). Uno de los ejes del proyecto era interpreter las visiones individuales y colectivas sobre el desarrollo en las comunidades impactadas por los megaproyectos en Centroamérica. Hemos detectado divisiones, diversidad de opiniones y dilemas referentes a las vías de desarollo por escoger, en un futuro próximo. Nuestras conclusiones nos dirigen a suponer que existen barreras mentales, podríamos llamarlas “fronteras”, a superar para lograr una buena vida, en un contexto de crisis ambiental y socio-económico por venir. Hemos logrado reunir 80 entrevistas profundizadas gracias a trabajos de campo en: Panamá, Costa Rica, Nicaragua y Honduras, en zonas aledañas a los siguientes megaproyectos: Hidroeléctrica Barro Blanco, en Panamá, Hidroeléctrica Reventazón, en Costa Rica, Mina La India, en Nicaragua, Mina La Libertad, en Nicaragua, Parque turístico de Guanacaste, en Costa Rica, Proyecto turístico en Bahía de Tela, en Honduras. Principalmente la metodología se basa en el analisis cualitativo utilizando: memos, estrategias de categorización y comunicación, propuestas por Maxwell (2013). El estudio se nutre del pensamiento crítico en torno al concepto de frontera y aporta al pensamiento desarrollista desde las Epistemologías del Sur. La diversidad de sectores económicos (energético, minero y turístico) escogidos para el análisis, la cantidad de entrevistas y trabajos de campo realizados son una buena muestra que permite contribuir a los estudios sobre el desarollo. Reference: Maxwell, J.A. (2013), Qualitative Research Design. An Interactive Approach, Sage.

Infraestructura Social, Productiva y Sostenible en Colombia, Potencia de la Vida

Samuel Zuluaga Calle, Agencia Nacional de Infraestructura (ANI) / Universidad Católica de Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.

El gobierno de Colombia a través de la Agencia Nacional de infraestructura ANI, construye y rehabilita vías para conectar de forma eficiente y rápida diferentes regiones del país. La ANI tiene como función; administrar y evaluar proyectos de concesiones y otras formas de Asociación Público Privada - APP, en modos férreo, aeroportuario y carretero (Agencia Nacional de Infraestructura ANI, 2022). La orientación actual de Gobierno es implementar el desarrollo de infraestructura social, productiva y sostenible, (Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, 2022), que permita la participación de las comunidades por medio de sus instituciones representativas a través de consultas previas, con el fin de preservar la integridad étnica y cultural de los pueblos étnicos de Colombia (Organización de Naciones Unidas ONU, 2022), (Agencia Nacional de Infraestructura ANI, 2022). Este paper plantea la necesidad de que los proyectos de infraestructura sean estructurados y gestionados desde la articulación entre las ciencias de la ingeniera y las ciencias sociales, pues existe un reto implícito en todo proyecto de infraestructura para gestionar, involucrar y trabajar de la mano con las comunidades y el capital social de su área de influencia preservando, a su vez, los recursos naturales. Las ciencias sociales deben orientar, acompañar y gestionar la estructuración, mantenimiento y operación de los proyectos de infraestructura, en un ejercicio de política pública que plantea un nuevo paradigma que evidencia la necesidad de acompañar desde un ejercicio social y cultural la gestión de estas obras; entendiendo que las mismas pueden contribuir al crecimiento socioeconómico, apoyo a las actividades productivas locales y al fortalecimiento de las economías comunitarias a través del turismo como estrategia de desarrollo económico local (Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, 2022). Es así como surge el planteamiento de que las ciencias sociales en países como Colombia son fundamentales para asesorar, gestionar y proyectar la riqueza y evolución de los territorios, así mismo, la comunicación cumple un rol protagónico en la visibilización y promoción de la riqueza social, cultural y ambiental de los escenarios de obras generando grandes aportes para la estabilidad y éxito social, ambiental y productivo de los proyectos. Esto resulta importante en países que buscan ser potencia del turismo como Colombia, en un esfuerzo que pretende contribuir a la Paz reemplazando economías ilícitas como el narcotráfico por proyectos productivos que mejoren la calidad de vida de la población rural y urbana de Colombia (Plan Nacional de Desarrollo, 2022). Referencias: Agencia Nacional de Infraestructura ANI. (2022). Rendición de cuentas. Plan Nacional de Desarrollo. (2022). COLOMBIA POTENCIA DE LA VIDA. ONU. (2022). Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible.

E4 Space, governance, and colonial remains in Latin America

Chairs: Claudia Fonseca Alfaro, Camila Freitas de Souza, Adriana de la Peña Espinosa

Racial capitalism and planning innocence: White privilege and Black dispossession in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Luana Xavier Pinto Coelho, Independent researcher and Lorena Melgaço, Lund University.

The post-redemocratization period in Brazil centred the city and planning in addressing lingering social inequalities. For the first time, the then newly promulgated constitution (1989) instituted the social function of the city and urban land, later regulated by the City Statute (2001), a worldwide reference in planning. During the following years, a series of progressive legislation were implemented throughout the country. Despite the progressive urban instruments focusing on social inclusion, the racial logics of property ownership, legal protection, and wealth accumulation it entails - inherited from colonial and racial enslaved regimes - remained invisible and unchallenged. Class-based efforts that do not account for the logics of racial capitalism in producing unequal racially divided spaces have proven insufficient to tackle its reproduction - the formation of value (and devaluation) of places and people.

With a historical gaze to the development of Belo Horizonte, the first planned city in Brazil, we discuss how planning has allowed for furthered racial capital accumulation “as a dialectical process of Black dispossession and the protection of White property in the postcolony” (Melgaço and Coelho, 2022). Self-inscribing as technical and neutral, and producing universal policies according to the field’s rationale, urban planning remains colorblind, drawing on what we call “planning innocence”. However, while concealing its racist foundations, color-blindness means the denial of confronting the historical regimes that racially divided city, planned for White quality of live and Black precarity and dispossession.

Given the central role that both the city and property play in the maintenance of racial capitalism, in this paper we attempt to further the concept of “planning innocence” and its implications for (progressive) urban planning practices in the postcolony, having Belo Horizonte as a case study.

Spatializing Grassroots Women’s Voices: Varied Agendas in a Stratified Brazil

Camila Freitas de Souza, Lund University.

Since the Brazilian second wave of feminism during the military dictatorship era (1964 – 1985), a once-hidden divide within women’s social movements has come to light. This division places black women on the periphery of feminist discourse while elevating the claims of white women to the center. Gonzalez (1982) argues that this partition occurred because women’s movements of the 1970s and 1980s denied the existence of racial divisions within their grassroots groups, thereby exposing the complicity of white women in the racial domination of Brazilian society.

However, black women’s political activism played a crucial role in the democratic transition and continues to be essential in developing a gendered and intersectional critique of Brazilian racism. This critique addresses how segregation practices from colonial times persist in perpetuating contemporary social inequalities. Furthermore, black women’s grassroots efforts are fundamental in exposing how such practices hinder the full realization of democracy and citizenship for all Brazilians.

This paper is based on an (n)ethnographic mapping of social media profiles of grassroots women's groups in Brazil, complemented by semi-structured Zoom interviews with women representatives from selected grassroots groups. The study provides insights into class and racial distinctions manifested through the activists' positionality, both in their respective territories and political contexts. It sheds light on the differences between peripheral and centered movements in terms of their targets and claims. Lastly, the argument posits that the acceptance, understanding, and incorporation of black women’s agendas into all women's grassroots groups would ultimately contribute to transforming Brazil into a just and egalitarian country, where all forms of discrimination could be potentially eradicated.

From smart city to real estate venture: The case of Ciudad Creativa Digital in Guadalajara, Mexico

Claudia Fonseca Alfaro, Malmö University and Adriana de la Peña Espinosa, Malmö University.

The city of Guadalajara, known as Mexico’s Silicon Valley, won in 2012 a competition launched by the federal government to host the country’s first “creative digital city.” The project, Ciudad Creativa Digital (CCD), was described as an ecosystem that would “activate” and “regenerate” 42 hectares in the city’s historic center affected by prostitution, drug abuse, homelessness, and dereliction. A combination of dwelling places and office space for creative industries was envisioned, promising to house 10,000 people and create 45,000 jobs by 2027. At the time of its launch, CCD was hailed as a new model of urban and economic development, promising to become a blueprint for future smart projects in Mexico and Latin America. Met with discontent from residents, and as the political landscape changed in the city, the project soon faced delays, critique, and lack of funding—despite the initial momentum. More than ten years later, the project exists but in an altered form from its original conception, resembling more a real estate venture with “smart” undertones. In this paper, we draw on urban policy mobilities research and critical smart urbanism interventions to analyze the landing, materializing, and reframing of CCD in local government against a background of colonial remains. With this, our aim is twofold: a) unpack the interplay between urban space, policy mobility and governance practices, and b) shed light on the context-specific realities and processes in the making of the smart city in Latin America.

Social justice, raciality, and changing perceptions of development in contemporary Cuba

Geydis Fundora Nevot, FLACSO-Cuba and Eija Ranta, University of Helsinki.

The Cuban Revolution is well known for its promotion of economic and social development based on the ideals of equality and justice. It was thought that economic equality and better education and healthcare would automatically eliminate racism. However, since the 1990s, Cuba has been struggling amidst growing economic challenges caused by changing global and geopolitical conditions. In particular, recent economic reforms have raised serious questions about deepening inequalities and intensifying migration. The changes have had profound effects, especially on the economic opportunities, livelihoods, and well-being of the Afro-descendant population. At the same time, the Cuban government launched its first program in 2019 aimed specifically at reducing and eventually abolishing racism. In this article, we examine, from the perspective of its Afro-descendant population, the relationship between struggles for social justice and revolutionary conceptualizations of development in contemporary Cuba, which is experiencing a multidimensional crisis. Through examination of political discourses, policy analysis, and interviews, we investigate how race, racism, and development are conceptualized and how their complex relationships are discussed. The article presents initial ideas for collaborative research on the topic between Fundora Nevot from FLACSO-Cuba and Ranta from Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki.

Race, inequality, and political trust in Latin America

Castellar Granados, University of Salamanca.

During the last decades, political distrust has seemingly become a common trend across Latin American democracies, however, differences in the levels of confidence among groups have also been identified. This article considers the potential effects of ethno-racial structures and their interactions with other forms of socioeconomic inequalities on political trust. Building on data from four waves of the Latinobarometer project, we analyze these relations and find that both socioeconomic and ethno-racial inequalities deteriorate levels of political trust across Latin America. Furthermore, in particular it is found that inequalities shape political trust differently depending on the particular ethno-racial identification and this fosters different types of relations with the political system. These findings contribute to the understanding of ethnicity and race and its associations with other structural inequalities in shaping mass political culture.

E5 “Se virar”: Desigualdades e (sobre)vivências no Brasil durante e após a pandemia de Covid-19

Chairs: Marie Kolling, Thaïs Machado-Borges

“Mulher da vida sempre se vira”: a gestão da informalidade na plataformização do trabalho sexual

Cristiane Vilma de Melo, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brasil.

Nos últimos anos termos como “viração” e autogerenciamento subordinado (ABILIO, 2021) vem sendo mobilizados na literatura para contrapor o discurso do “empreendedorismo de si”. Esses termos procuram chamar a atenção para uma tendência de trabalhos sob demanda somados aos processos de informalização que permeiam o mundo do trabalho de forma global, tornando-se uma tendência que engloba a mediação tecnológica, trabalho e vida pessoal somados a ausência de regulamentações formais. Tendo em vista a expressão brasileira “se virar”, essa proposta objetiva discutir o termo a luz do trabalho sexual. Ainda que reconhecido enquanto uma ocupação (Rodrigues, 2009), o trabalho sexual não é regulamentado no Brasil, e historicamente sua natureza perdura enquanto uma maneira de “se virar” e “fazer a vida”, fato que acompanha a denominação utilizada para se referir as trabalhadoras sexuais enquanto “mulheres da vida”. Durante a pandemia de COVID 19 as trabalhadoras sexuais foram diretamente atingidas devido a restrições de circulação (Martins et al, 2023) o que fez com que trabalhadoras presenciais passassem a oferecer serviços online e que uma parcela de jovens sem experiencia nesse mercado passassem a integrá-lo em busca de “fazer dinheiro”. Por meio de etnografia digital e entrevistas com trabalhadoras sexuais, procurarei demonstrar que pelo estatuo legal que o trabalho sexual ocupa na sociedade brasileira a mediação digital nesse mercado parece revitalizar e atualizar alguns preceitos de informalidade que são característicos a esse mercado ao mesmo tempo em que remodela um ideal de “empreendedorismo de si” que historicamente acompanha a profissão. Ainda, com os envolvimentos de mulheres jovens e escolarizadas nesse mercado os conceitos de “liberdade”, “flexibilidade” e trabalho “por diversão” são mobilizados por meio da abertura subjetiva de um “sujeito- empresa” (Bregantin, 2021), fazendo com que pautas de interesse coletivo se apresentem de forma individualizada em uma esfera pública tecno-midiatizada (Miskolci, 2021).

Endividado com dinheiro nunca gasto: se virando depois de passar pelo golpe financeiro no Brasil

Marie Kolling, Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) and Thaise Sá Santos, Universidade Federal da Bahia/DIIS.

Os golpes financeiros em que pessoas são vítimas de esquemas fraudulentos cresceram significativamente no Brasil pós-pandemia, tanto no tipo de golpes cometidos quanto em números, chegando a 1.819.409 estelionatos registrados em 2022 (FBSP 2023). Enquanto pessoas diariamente se tornam vítimas de golpes, o medo do golpe gera muita discussão na população, pela imprensa e no setor financeiro, porém o problema tem recebido pouca atenção acadêmica no Brasil. Fora do Brasil, estudos têm focado nas perspectivas dos golpistas (Burrell 2011; Tudor 2018) ou pessoas no risco de passar pelo golpe nas redes sociais (Chonka 2023). Dívidas contraídas pelos golpes parecem não ter recebido atenção alguma. Seguindo uma abordagem etnográfica, o paper analisa dois casos diferentes de fraude em que o crédito oferecido por uma instituição financeira foi interceptado. O crédito transformou-se em dívida, a partir do momento em que ele foi retirado pelo golpista sem o conhecimento da vítima. Estas dívidas, por sua vez, surgem a partir de práticas ilícitas e são repassadas à vítima, à medida que as instituições financeiras se recusam a assumir responsabilidades. O paper segue a vida dessa dívida contraída pelo dinheiro-nunca-recebido, e acompanha as tentativas dos endividados de se livrarem dela. Utilizando o método de ‘seguir o dinheiro’ (Marcus 1999, Feltran 2022), a análise segue a ‘dívida fraudulenta’, pois acumula taxas de juros na instituição financeira onde o crédito originalmente foi concedido e interceptado, a venda da dívida inadimplente a terceirizados que exercem cobrança agressiva, e a dívida que se torna um caso de disputa judicial. Este trabalho tem como objetivo contribuir para a compreensão da complexa dinâmica das fraudes financeiras que na prática funcionam como lavagem de dinheiro obtido através de atividades criminosas dentro de instituições financeiras.

Navegar é preciso: o transporte de cocaína como oportunidade de trabalho no Brasil

Isabela Vianna Pinho, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brasil.

Na última década, o Brasil tornou-se protagonista na circulação transnacional de cocaína, posicionando-se entre os países produtores e consumidores, sobretudo europeus. Essa é considerada a segunda maior rota internacional do tráfico que, nos últimos anos, presencia um crescimento expressivo, da produção, distribuição, até o consumo. Se o Brasil não produz cocaína, por que é central no tráfico para outros continentes? O vasto sistema logístico brasileiro integrado às infraestruturas confere vantagem sobre os países produtores. Tal sistema não funciona sozinho, mas com planejamento e operacionalização realizados por redes de pessoas e informações que dão “vida” ao que é material. O Brasil apresenta uma infraestrutura criminal especializada, com experiência e redes de proteção que a sustentam. Assim, há uma notável atuação de facções criminais, em especial o PCC, nos pontos centrais da cadeia, como as fronteiras e portos – locais de importação e exportação da droga. Com abordagem etnográfica, a pesquisa se baseia em trabalhos de campo nas fronteiras terrestres do Brasil com a Bolívia e, sobretudo, no porto de Santos – o maior da América do Sul, que concentra mais da metade das apreensões de cocaína em todo o país. Ao “seguir o objeto” da cocaína, faço uma reflexão sobre como o transporte, a distribuição e a venda da droga são atividades rentáveis, desiguais e oportunidades de trabalho no Brasil, sendo formas navegáveis de “se virar”. Também analiso os impactos do Covid-19 na circulação da cocaína e na mobilidade de dois transportadores. Por fim, discuto as noções de “tacking” (Amit; Knowles, 2017) e “navegação social” (Vigh, 2010), que ajudam a compreender o modo como os atores experienciam e antecipam o movimento, em contextos incertos e instáveis. Diante das barreiras e problemas, os transportadores improvisam no cotidiano e navegam com inventividade para lidar com o inesperado, ao enfrentar um mundo que pode mudar rapidamente.

Eles não se viram sem mim. Trabalho doméstico, cuidado, gênero, classe e interdependências no Brasil

Thaïs Machado-Borges, Universidade de Estocolmo.

Esta apresentação visa discutir o termo “se virar” a partir de relacionamentos de trabalho dentro da intimidade doméstica. Partindo da interseção entre trabalho, gênero, cuidado e classe, esta apresentação foca em relacionamentos assimétricos onde trabalho, cuidado e afeto se mesclam num emaranhado de interdependências. Reflexo de fraturas sociais consolidadas ao longo da história do país, o termo “se virar” refere à capacidade de agência em circunstâncias de vulnerabilidade. Baseada em entrevistas semiestruturadas, relatos de vida, conversas informais e diversas técnicas de observação participante feitas ao longo de mais de duas décadas de pesquisa no Brasil, a análise tem início da história de vida de Carol. Trabalhadora doméstica, diarista em casas de classe média-alta, suas reflexões sobre trabalho e vida mostra que em épocas de crise econômicas afetando diferentes classes sociais, a balança regulando quem depende de quem pode ser invertida mesmo que as estruturas sociais dentro das quais tais relacionamentos ocorrem permaneçam aparentemente intactas.

E6 Representaciones cinematográficas y literarias de la memoria colectiva y sus aspectos interculturales

Chair: Lars Troels Møller, University of Copenhagen.

Literaturas de Resistencia: memorias de la dictadura a medio siglo del golpe en Chile

Daniel Noemi Voionmaa, Northeastern University, Boston, US.

El medio siglo del Golpe en Chile provocó una notable y abundante producción cultural, tanto desde circuitos tradicionales y oficiales como de otros que pueden denominarse alternativos. En literatura, la reflexión sobre esta fecha, por la naturaleza misma del medio, tendió hacia un ejercicio de la memoria que profundizó y, en ocasiones, subvirtió, líneas de pensamiento que se habían instalado en las últimas tres décadas. ¿Qué decir del Golpe y de la dictadura que no haya sido dicho? ¿Qué sucede con la distancia temporal e ideológica que se establece? En los textos que discuto, analizo el lenguaje y la escritura como espacios y tiempos de reflexión y de (im)posible resistencia al legado y persistencia de la dictadura. Con énfasis en la breve novela autobiográfica de Lina Meruane, Señales de nosotros (2023), advierto el complejo posicionamiento del sujeto ante la transformación histórica y sitúo esa trayectoria en retrospectiva con la novela de Diamela Eltit Vaca sagrada (1991, justo después del fin de la dictadura), Formas de volver a casa de Alejandro Zambra (2011) y Space Invaders (2013) de Nona Fernández. ¿De qué modo estas escrituras se instalan en los intersticios de las lógicas hegemónicas y, desde ahí, buscan resistirlas y, tal vez, subvertirlas?

El destierro y lo inconsciente en el film Sentimientos. Mirta, de Liniers a Estambul (1987)

Martín Sorbille, University of Florida.

Sentimientos. Mirta, de Liniers a Estambul (en adelante Sentimientos), dirigida por Jorge Coscia y Gillermo Saura, trata el exilio de perseguidos políticos argentinos en Suecia, como consecuencia de la dictadura militar argentina (1976-1983). Específicamente, relata la historia de un universitario argentino que evade su captura en Buenos Aires y se va a Estocolmo. Meses después llega su esposa y juntos empiezan a transitar los “sentimientos” de vivir el destierro. Sentimientos es un largometraje excepcional por tres razones: 1) es el único que une y compara la vida en Buenos Aires durante la dictadura con la vida en una ciudad escandinava; 2) trata el tema del exilio como “destierro”, por lo cual el foco está puesto en los afectos generados por la pérdida de identidad asociada a una tierra y cultura; 3) registra las emociones disímiles que produce el destierro en el afectado. Sentimientos muestra la política del estado de bienestar de los países nórdicos para los exiliados políticos latinoamericanos durante los años 70. Por eso el destierro tiene un tinte único para ambos protagonistas, ya que ellos pelearon justamente para implementar dicha política para la Argentina. Puede decirse que aquello tan deseado se hizo realidad. Y sin embargo, sus respectivas reacciones son muy distintas. Mi ponencia aborda dos aspectos interconectados: a) desde la teoría psicoanalítica de Jacques Lacan, analizo qué es el destierro y cuál es su relación con la estructura de lo inconsciente; b) cómo ciertos aspectos de la vida en Estocolmo en el film, activan la subjetividad inconsciente latente y singular en cada protagonista. Es decir, cómo las formaciones fantasmáticas inconscientes que ya existían antes de arribar a Suecia, se externalizan como destierro en Suecia. Por tanto, cómo el destierro refleja el conflicto entre fantasma inconsciente y la consciente imagen anhelada.

Una visita clandestina de Corpus Barga a Pablo Neruda en 1948 en Chile

Margarita Ibáñez Tarín, Universidad de Valencia.

Corpus Barga (Madrid 1887-Lima 1975) fue siempre un viajero incansable y cosmopolita, que en su labor de periodista entrevistó a Lenin, Trotski, Mussolini, Hitler, Pio XI y otras personalidades políticas de su tiempo. Fue un hombre de acción y amante de empresas arriesgadas, que representa por su vida, su obra y su personalidad la figura del “hombre-puente” entre Latinoamérica y Europa. En 1939, tras la derrota republicana en la guerra civil española, se exilió, primero en Francia, y desde 1948 en Perú, donde fue profesor de la Escuela de Periodismo de la Universidad mayor de San Marcos. Desde allí continuó viajando por toda Latinoamérica y fue uno de los pocos periodistas extranjeros que pudieron acceder a entrevistar a Pablo Neruda en el refugio en el que vivía en la clandestinidad, después de que el 6 de enero de 1948 pronunciara en el senado chileno un discurso de denuncia de la corrupción y connivencia con los nazis del presidente González Videla, en la época en la que fue embajador de Chile en París, Corpus Barga tenía buenos contactos en Chile por su labor de corresponsal en Europa para La Nación de Buenos Aires y otras cabeceras de países latinoamericanos y gracias a ellos consiguió tener acceso al escondite de Neruda. Conocía al poeta y diplomático desde la guerra civil en España, pero sobre todo había tenido ocasión de intimar con él en 1939 y 1940, durante el tiempo en que Pablo Neruda estuvo destinado en la Embajada de Chile en París. En esta comunicación nos proponemos investigar la relación que mantuvieron ambos escritores a partir de la entrevista publicada en agosto de 1948 en Les lettres Françaises.

E7 Argentina's Middle Class: Crisis, Identity and Discourse

Chair: Sara Kauko

“If you’re born Argentine, you’re born resilient”: Resilience, middle-classness, and economic crisis in Argentina

Sara Kauko, Lund University.

This paper discusses the intersections between social imaginaries of (social) resilience and middle-classness in Argentina. It argues that in the case of Argentina, shared ideas of what resilience means are also tightly linked to shared meanings of middle-classness. Once famous for its vast and relatively stable middle sectors, today the country stands out as one plagued by a severe economic crisis with a poverty rate at 40% (November 2023). However, despite people’s numerically measurable and in practice, observable impoverishment, wide-spread understandings of middle-classness as a common social status and identity stubbornly persist. This provides an interesting backdrop to an anthropological inquiry into the attitudes, behaviors, and practices people identify with resilience, and how these reflect the historically contingent and culturally deeply rooted meanings of ‘being middle-class’. The paper approaches social resilience as a dynamic process rooted in action. Thus, rather than asking what makes a collectivity resilient or how it can build resilience, I ask, how does a collectivity conceptualize resilience and what is it that it does while aiming to act in a resilient way. Thus, the paper analyses the relationship between social imaginaries of resilience and terms/concepts such as ‘pilotear’ and ‘seguir remando’. Ethnographic illustrations show what kinds of narratives and practices these terms translate into, and how in that process of translation, socially shared imaginaries of resilience reveal strong class connotations.

Medical cannabis: Social movements and knowledge dissemination

Lucia Amaranta Thompson, Lund University.

This presentation will focus on the role that a mothers movement in Argentina, ‘Mama Cultiva’, has had in the development of political and social constructions of cannabis in their fight for the legalisation of medical cannabis. The current wave of the Cannabis movement in Argentina began in the mid 2010s and has from its very outset worked by exchanging information between themselves and then raising the awareness of the public about its use. In 2015 a mothers movement Mama Cultiva was formed which changed the face of the cannabis movement. Mothers’ movements in Argentina have a history in Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo who used social constructions of motherhood and femininity to be able to garner public and international support in their search for their disappeared children. Therefore, the mother’s cannabis movements has harnessed national memories of motherhood and activism. The ways in which mothers were able to access the social sphere led to their participation in the creation of legislation and regulation. The movement was also able to take advantage of the diversity of the movements which gave them access to different professional spheres to further influence spheres of power. The fieldwork carried out for this research has highlighted the ways in which the cannabis movement has been able to communicate with various spheres of society. The forms of knowledge dissemination are markedly community oriented with notions of care and health, both physical and mental, which involve a significant amount of emotional labour. The mother’s movement (which extends beyond Mama Cultiva) has also taken on feminist thinking around care, health and motherhood to further be able to inform and influence policy. This presentation will delve further into these networks of knowledge and examine how care, emotions and histories in the medical marijuana movement have been used to overcome social and institutional boundaries.

The middle classes, the state, and the market: lessons from two qualitative surveys in Argentina

Matthieu Clement, University of Bordeaux, Eric Rougier, University of Bordeaux, Sébastien Carrere, University of Bordeaux, François Combarnous, University of Bordeaux, Gabriel Kessler, CONICET / Universidad Nacional de La Plata and Ariel Wilkis, IDAES, Universidad Nacional de San Martin.

This paper aims to explore the political positioning of Argentina’s middle class, examine its aspirations, expectations, and priorities (i.e., the “demand” side of public policy and private-sector strategies), and identify how stakeholders and institutions integrate these demands into the design of public policies and market strategies (i.e., the “supply” side of public policies and private-sector strategies). To do so, we adopt an original approach combining two qualitative surveys: a qualitative survey of 40 households reflecting the diversity of Argentina’s middle class and a qualitative survey of 12 representatives of public and private institutions involved in sectors that are crucial in relation to middle-class aspirations. Our empirical investigations provide interesting insights. First, although the Argentinean middle class is socioeconomically and politically fragmented, we highlight shared aspirations in relation to consumption, education, health, housing and security. Such commonalities could contribute to forming a collective identity within the middle class, or at the very least mitigate its fragmentation. Second, despite slight nuances in the comments recorded, middle-class respondents are unanimous in condemning corruption, criticizing the failings of public services, and feeling abandoned by redistribution policies. Third, on the supply side of public policy, our institutional interviews highlight the absence of large-scale public policies specifically targeted at the middle classes, supporting the feeling of abandonment among members of the middle class. For the private sector, however, the middle class appears to be strategic, as the market is seen as a key element in the symbolic construction of class identity. Moreover, while most of the market strategies tend to focus on the upper and middle segments of the middle class, we also identify a recent refocusing of market strategies toward the more vulnerable segments of the middle class.

Romani in contact with Argentinean Spanish (1850-1930)

Guro Nore Fløgstad, University of South-Eastern Norway.

What impact did Romani, the language of Roma immigrants to Argentina, have on the majority language, Spanish? As a minority language, Romani stands out: it is not associated with one specific territory, has no common written standard and no process of top-down revitalization. Its 10 million global speakers are almost always bilingual. In Argentina, Romani has been maintained as a community language within its heterogeneous Roma community; in the capital, Buenos Aires, alone, approx. 90 000 Roma people live. Argentinean Romani suffers from an almost complete lack of studies; “little attention has been devoted to sociolinguistic (…) aspects of contact in Romani” (Matras & Adamou 2020: 1). Faced with this research gap, I turn to the earliest sources available, in what constitutes the first description of Romani in Argentina’s peak immigration between 1850-1930. I study a corpus of three types of historical documents (reports by criminologists; newspapers; linguistic descriptions) from text-internal and text-external perspectives. The text-internal analyses indicate some lexical impact on Spanish. Despite this restricted impact, the text-external analyses show that the linguistic practices of Roma (explicitly associated with Spanish Romani variety caló) were perceived as instrumental in the genesis of the contact varieties cocoliche and lunfardo, in turn associated with criminal jargons, labeled el caló de los ladrones. This finding is discussed considering perceptions of criminal jargons, the current marginalization of Roma communities in Argentina (Galletti 2021) and the transmission between generations (Matras & Adamou 2020). References: Galletti, P. (2021). Lo romaní-gitano en la órbita antropológica. Etnografías Contemporáneas, 7(12), 80-92. Matras, Y. & E. Adamou. (2020). Romani and contact linguistics. In Y. Matras & A. Tenser (eds.), Handbook of Romani Language and Linguistics, 329-352. Palgrave Macmillan.