Alternautas is a multi-disciplinary journal devoted to counter-balancing mainstream understandings of development in/from Latin America – Abya Yala. Alternautas emerges from a desire to bridge language barriers by bringing Latin American critical development thinking to broader English-speaking audiences. The journal covers a broad range of development issues across regular and special issues. The journal was launched in 2014 and is fully open access, with no fees for readers or authors. 32 Days avg. from Submission to First Editorial Decision (2024); Acceptance Rate: 64% (2024)
The cultural-political utopia of Amefricanity
This paper is a reflection on the cultural-political category of Amefricanity, created by Brazilian intellectual and activism Lélia Gonzalez in the 1980s. Considering that Latin America is one of the most important cultural categories in the US today, this reflection stems from the question: what is the political potential of this cultural category? In an attempt to answer this question, the paper revisit Gonzalez’s theorization to arrive at a redefinition of Amefricanity as a cultural-political utopia, which has the potential to mobilize imagined communities capable to picture collective actions of resistance to authoritarian Western narratives.
Copyright (c) 2024 Carolina Freitas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Introduction: Interrogating the Resurgence of Latin American Dependency Theory
As 2025 draws to a close, we are witnessing a fundamental transformation of the global economy and political order established in the 1970s and '80s. The rise of China to become by some measures the largest economy in the world, and the formation of the BRICS as an influential grouping of non-Western states, shows a profound shift in the geography of capital accumulation since the 1980s. But the growing significance of China, India, and the constellation of other high-growth economies, has not led to the worldwide convergence promised by advocates of neoliberal globalization. Rather, the emerging world order once again raises the prospect of transformation without convergence that is fundamental to Dependency Theory. Viewed from Latin America, the parallels between the current era and the original formative period of Dependency Theory are striking. Latin America faces de-industrialization, a return to 'extractivism' based on natural resource exports, combined with persistent poverty and rising inequality, mirroring its position in the early to mid-20th century. The political, social, and economic transformations outlined above have coincided with a renewed interest in Latin American Dependency Theory, both within the continent and beyond. This Special Issue of Alternautas explores the ongoing significance of this 'view from the periphery' in terms of its historical roots and its novel contemporary transformations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Philip Roberts https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Feeling, acting and connecting rivers: the experience of the San Pedro River Rescue Collective in Ecuador
The San Pedro River Rescue Collective was born in 2021 as a citizen group whose goal is to restore the San Pedro River and its banks, which flow from the Illiniza volcano through Quito and its valleys towards the Pacific Ocean. One of the main dreams of its members is to bathe again in the river, as the past generation of their fathers and mothers did thirty years ago. The San Pedro River is facing multiple sources of contamination, from intensive cattle production at its watershed to wastewater and trash discharges in the city of Quito and Los Chillos valley, a densely populated area. From a political ecology perspective, this article examines the river imaginaries, knowledge co-creation and justice mobilized by the San Pedro River Rescue Collective as a river movement. The analysis is based on feminist epistemologies and ecologies of care mobilizing qualitative data gathered between January to April 2025. We explore how the San Pedro River Rescue Collective not only strives to revitalize a river, but to transform the relationship between society and nature at the very heart of the city. As a main result of this study, we conclude on the power of feelings and emotions to enact citizen action for the protection of urban rivers.
Copyright (c) 2025 Raquel Andrade, Anahi Machado, Valentina Troya, Emilie Dupuits https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Tracing the Past, Shaping the Future: Latin American Constitutionalism and Its Discontents - Interview With Professor César Landa
Professor César Landa, a renowned constitutional law scholar and distinguished public servant in Peru, is one of the unique figures who successfully bridges the worlds of academia and political practice. In addition to his academic position as a professor of constitutional law, he has held several key state offices, including President of the Peruvian Constitutional Court, ad hoc judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Deputy Minister of Justice, and Minister of Foreign Affairs. Drawing on this unique combination of experience, Professor Landa offers a rich and informed perspective on the democratic challenges facing Peru and Latin America more broadly. At a time when democratic erosion and the crisis of representative institutions have become global phenomena, his reflections on institutional fragility, constitutional resilience, and the potential for democratic renewal have both scholarly and practical significance. This interview aims to contribute to the broader conversation on constitutionalism in the region and to bring Professor Landa’s deep insights into the academic literature.
Copyright (c) 2024 Muhammet Derviş Mete https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Recovering Historical Memory and Collective Knowledge: Strengthening Resilience in Ecuador’s Chota Valley in Response to Water Scarcity Challenges
This study examines the historical transitions, struggles, practices, and political participation related to irrigation water governance in Afro-Ecuadorian communities and their impact on redefining hydrosocial territories in the dry Chota Valley of the Ecuadorian Mira River Basin. In recent years, the shift in the region’s productive matrix has brought significant transformations to these territories. Using a case study approach, this research aims to recover historical memory about water access conditions through ancestral knowledge and collective rights. This effort presents a critical opportunity to protect the collective values of the Chota River and to recognize the intangible national heritage of this region in the face of water scarcity. The case study combines semi-structured interviews with community members and questions addressing the fairness and effectiveness of the current water governance system. Findings from community experiences across the Chota Valley suggest advocating changes to address inequalities and improving services for the local population, particularly during drought scenarios. The research employs qualitative methods, including bibliographic review, ethnographic data collection, and results validation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sandra Megens, Dr. Jeroen Warner https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Transdisciplinarity from Below: Weaving a New Tapestry of Knowledge through Art and Collective Resistance
Decolonising research methodologies has expanded opportunities for a more pluriversal world, yet knowledge production still remains controlled by a privileged minority. This piece examines how vivencias (lived experiences) can shift attention and privilege away from dominant forms of knowledge. I offer three examples of transdisciplinary collaborations rooted in grassroots movements, led by Afro-descendant women affected by the armed conflict in Colombia. Despite widespread fears, these women chose to speak out, using art and art-making as means to (re)signify and (re)construct collective memory amid violence. They do not work alone; academics and social actors join these women’s struggles, co-creating knowledge and resistance. These stories show how vivencias expressed through art become tools for weaving alternative knowledges from below and for developing situated, collective knowledge that fosters critical awareness and social change through peaceful resistance. This approach (re)invents research practices rooted in struggles for collective liberation, valuing diverse ways of knowing and being to challenge the dominance of traditional knowledge production and pursue epistemic justice.
Copyright (c) 2024 Adriana Moreno Cely https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Universal Basic Income from the ‘Buen Vivir’ Decolonial Perspective
This article interrogates the relationship between Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a policy tool and Buen Vivir as a conceptual framework, interpreting their significance within the domains of sustainable development and socio-environmental justice. Through a critical examination of conventional development paradigms from a decolonial perspective, we identify a substantial lacuna in the extant literature: the imperative to incorporate epistemologies from the Global South into social policy formulation. Employing non-systematic literature review methodologies, we reflect on how Buen Vivir principles might inform UBI implementations. Our reflections emphasise the necessity of reconceptualising social policies through a lens that not only critiques prevailing economic structures but also valorises and recuperates indigenous and local knowledge systems. Our central objective is to propose the notion of decolonizing Universal Basic Income (UBI), understood as the process of reimagining UBI through Southern epistemologies that challenge Eurocentric assumptions about well-being, development, and human-nature relationships. In doing so, it aims to contribute to scholarship on social and environmental development within the context of post-development thought.
Copyright (c) 2025 Leticia Diniz Nogueira, Gibrán Cruz- Martínez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Unequal Exchange with Differential Ground Rent: The Originality of Uruguayan Dependency Theory
Historiography on Latin American dependency theory highlights its importance between the sixties and eighties, primarily focusing on Chilean and Brazilian perspectives. This focus overshadows the diverse dependentistas works in other Latin American countries, such as Uruguay. Studying dependency theory in Uruguay enriches our understanding of Latin American social sciences and the theory itself, revealing an original interpretation involving unequal exchange and differential ground rent in international trade. This work outlines the main tenets of a Uruguayan interpretation of dependency theory that emphasizes on the importance of the theory of differential ground rent and its interpretation of underdevelopment and dependency. A theoretical comparison with Ruy Mauro Marini, Ernesto Laclau, André Gunder Frank, Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto shows Uruguayan theory’s distinctive dimensions. It offers a unique definition of dependency, nuanced compared to Marini’s, incorporates Laclau’s rent differential while emphasizing exogenous factors, and aligns partially with Cardoso and Faletto’s views, differing notably from Gunder Frank’s perspective.
Copyright (c) 2025 Pablo Messina https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Book Review: Levy, Helton. Globalized Queerness: Identities and Commodities in Queer Popular Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.
Globalized Queerness takes a critical look at the global media landscape to examine whether queer and trans representations become homogenized or flattened as they seek to reach a wide, transnational audience. Levy defines “globalized queerness” as a series of media strategies emerging mostly from Western and Anglophone metropoles, which “have capitalized on queer life to sell products and homogenize ideas of queerness” (197). This mass commodification of queer representation emerges at the expense of racially minoritized, impoverished queer communities, particularly those from the Global South, as their localized experiences of doing LGBTQIA+ art and politics are erased from the media landscape. The book is careful, however, not to portray globalized queerness as an all-encompassing media landscape, as it tracks the frequent ruptures of local politics into global narratives, particularly in the hands of more critical queer and trans media producers.
Copyright (c) 2024 Carmen Alvaro Jarrin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Black LGBTQIA+ Political Subjectivities in the Roma Negra: On Black LGBTQIA+ Political Resistance in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
This article examines the politics of Black LGBTQIA+ political resistance against multiform violence in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Nicknamed the Roma Negra (Black Rome) due to having the second largest Black population in the world, Salvador, the capital city of the northeastern state of Bahia, has disproportionate rates of LGBTQIA+ violence. This article offers various case studies on how Black LGBTQIA+ activists and civil society and non-governmental organizations in Salvador politically organize, negotiate, and transform space, and combat non-citizenship and subordination since Brazil’s redemocratization.
Copyright (c) 2024 Jaimee Swift https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Critical reflections on the super-exploitation of labour power, reproductive labour and the theory of value
<p class="s6" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 2.4; text-align: justify; caret-color: #000000; color: #000000; font-family: -webkit-standard; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Marxist dependency theory puts the category of super-exploitation of labour power as the “essence of dependency”. However, this category is presented in most debates as fundamentally linked to so-called productive labour, carried out by a working class that appears to be male and white. The work of reproduction and care, essential in the (re)production of the labour force, carried out essentially by women and feminised and racialised bodies, is hidden in the analysis. In this article we propose to develop a critical reflection on this relevant category, recovering the debates coming from the field of feminism and in particular from Marxist feminism. We seek to explore this debate in the light of key discussions in the theory of value that allow us to fruitfully articulate productive labour with the so-called reproductive and care work.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mariano Féliz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Subordinate financialisation in Argentina and Brazil. Different patterns of dependence
This article contributes to the literature on dependency theory and subordinate financialisation in peripheral economies by examining the cases of Argentina and Brazil. Building upon the subordinate financialisation framework (Kaltenbrunner, Alami) and dependency theory (Marini), we analyse these nations' distinct experiences of international subordinate financialisation. Drawing on original evidence from constructed datasets of national and international accounts, we demonstrate that Brazil exhibits conventional drivers of subordinate financialisation—including household indebtedness, financialisation of non-financial corporations, and a developed banking system reliant on high interest rates to attract foreign capital. Conversely, Argentina manifests financial subordination through structural foreign currency illiquidity (at both national and international levels), dollarisation of savings, cyclical external indebtedness shaping real business cycles, and persistent capital flight.
Copyright (c) 2025 Leandro Bona, Andrés Wainer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Towards a new dialectics of dependency theory
Dependency theory is arguably the most important theoretical tradition to emerge from Latin America. Functioning as a vital source of counter-representation and contestation, it challenged the prevailing developmental orthodoxies of the time. During its heyday in the 1960s and early 1970s it served simultaneously to critique prevailing power relations within the global political economy and as a political programme for domestic and regional transformation, defined in terms of self-determination and political autonomy. However, with the broader crisis of developmentalism in the 1970s, a counter-movement to the radicalism of dependency analysis emerged: authoritarian populism. The victory of authoritarian populism helped contribute to the death of Third Worldism as a political project and with it, dependency theory fell into decline. In the current conjuncture, this paper calls for a new dialectics of dependency theory. A reinvigorated dependency critique is needed to address the prevailing developmentalism of the left in Latin America that has remained in thrall to extractivism and thus continues the region’s peripheral role as a commodity exporter to the Global North, built on the foundations of cheap nature and cheap labour. Furthermore, a dependency-informed analysis is required to challenge contemporary modes of authoritarian populism and statism that are being celebrated geopolitically through the BRICS grouping. To do so, I make the case for considering dependency theory as a radical contribution to the literature on the production of space. A renewed dependency theory can thus challenge the state-centrism present in its original formulation and its lack of ecological concern.
Copyright (c) 2024 Chris Hesketh https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Coherence through critique: how Cueva’s attack on Marini’s Dialectics of Dependency contributed to strengthening Marxist Dependency Theory
The paper presents the sequential interaction between the works of three thinkers, Ruy Mauro Marini, Agustin Cueva and Vânia Bambirra, published in the 1970s. It argues that Cueva’s critique of the methodological approach of dependency theory in general, including its most radical strand based on Marxism, played an important role in strengthening and giving cohesion to the group which would later be known as the creators of the Marxist Dependency Theory. The importance of critique is highlighted, in order to show that debate and disagreement are inherently constructive when the participants of the controversy recognize their interlocutors as equals in terms of having the capacity to use Marx’s works in a creative and original way.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rafael Athayde, Tiago Camarinha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Ruy Mauro Marini’s thought and neodevelopmentalism in Brazil (2003-2016): Subimperialism, autonomy and renewed dependency
Marxist Dependency Theory is currently experiencing a revival as a pivotal framework of analysis for the study of global economy from a peripheral perspective. In particular, Ruy Mauro Marini’s thought still holds a prominent place both in Marxist theory and in Latin American critical social sciences as an irreplaceable tool and method for analysis and agency. As this paper will show, his original and situated approach to the theory of imperialism offers a key grounding to the study of the capitalist State in Brazil in the context of a new stage of South America’s subordinate international insertion into the global economy. Marini’s subimperialism comes in play when assessing the foreign policy of “neodevelopmentalism” (2003-2016) as a “hybrid” international politics between renovated efforts at independence and autonomy and recharged subaltern imperialism. Also, his contributions around the concept of semiperiphery, are paramount to apprehend the progress of processes such as the “mundialization” and the “deconcentrated centralization” of capital and their effect on Brazil’s enhanced dependent international insertion. As such, Marxist Dependency Theory analytical tools, and Marini’s “method” of complementing thorough class analysis with a Political Economy perspective on a country’s mode of insertion in the world market, prove once again to be key to any effort at understanding the contemporary transformation of the centre-periphery nexus worldwide and Brazil’ subordinate role in it.
Copyright (c) 2025 Dario Clemente https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Book Review: Mariya P. Ivancheva, The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela, Stanford University Press, 2023, 216pp.
Among the pantheon of left-wing Latin American governments that swept the continent in the early 21st century, arguably the most radical, most beguiling, most contradictory, and most tragic, is the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. Given its unique (though not necessarily ‘special’) place within this political conjuncture, no shortage of ink has been spilled on the deep-seated transformations carried out in the name of the Venezuelan people, as well as the domestic and international conflicts that followed in their wake (see, most recently, Marino 2018; Samet 2019; Cooper 2019; Wilde 2023; Lubbock 2024). Among the many themes examined by scholars, activists and other observers is the role of higher education reform within the Bolivarian Republic, and the ways in which Hugo Chávez Frias, the charismatic leader of the ‘Bolivarian turn’, sought to build a new society by cultivating new knowledge among the people.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rowan Lubbock https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Introduction to Solidarity Politics: the (Re)activation of European-Latin American Solidarities
Our proposal for this special issue was inspired by the breadth of commemorations we were witnessing in the lead-up to September 11th, 2023, the 50th anniversary of the military coup that has cast a shadow over Chileans until today. Seeking to avoid repeating the question of where, how, and between whom European-Latin American solidarity takes and has taken place from its inception, we intended this special issue to go beyond the question of chronological memory and historiography to rethink the cyclical and reiterative nature of these solidarities rooted in the Cold War. From the unique vantage point of living with the third generation of Chile’s exile diaspora, we wanted to revisit the current-day vernaculars and practices of European-Latin American relations through concepts of translocal and transgenerational solidarity. Similarly, at a time when older categories of internationalism and anti-imperialism have taken on entirely new meanings for protest movements and social justice activism, adapted definitions of the vocabulary surrounding human rights, solidarity, and democracy play an increasingly central role in activism narratives and need to be more thoroughly scrutinised.
Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Grimaldi, Samira Marty https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Spanish people can detect my Mexican accent as soon as I open my mouth, and it’s interesting to see their reactions during my travels through that country. Most Spaniards are kind and curious. But I do remember a taxi driver who convivially told me that, to be sure, Spain had done horrible things to Mexico, but that I should still think of Spain like a father — a drunk and abusive father, in his words, but a father nonetheless. One can take such remarks about colonialism in stride and with good humor when they come from a taxi driver. But it is difficult to swallow similar arguments when they come from historians like Fernando Cervantes, author of Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ulises Mejias https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“Equality, freedom, solidarity – the issues on which I was raised”
As part of this special issue, we received this reflective piece from Viena Chilena 73 | 23, a project initiated to record and articulate the history and memory of Chilean exile in Austria and Austrian-Chilean solidarity during the 50 years since the 1973 military coup in Chile. This contribution pieces together elements of the project website, extracts of their archival work and reflections from the project collective.
Copyright (c) 2024 Bethold Molden, Rayen Cornejo Torres, Marcela Torres-Heredia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
In this short reflection piece, we hear from Neil West, who recently co-organised a project between artists in La Boca in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Stockport, near Manchester in the UK. The piece brings together anecdotes and personal photographs as documentation of collective, cultural political practice.
Copyright (c) 2024 Neil West https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Political Caricature to Mobilize Solidarity Through Humor
As part of our special issue, we invited artist Pedro X. Molina to choose a selection of his works to dialogue with our central themes of past and present European-Latin American solidarities, and the role of artifacts therein. Molina has chosen three caricatures for our special issue, which we include over the coming pages. Reflecting on current socio-political affairs such as Nicaraguan authoritarianism, migration to the US, and memories of violence, his work manages to address these issues with sharpness and rigour.
Copyright (c) 2024 Pedro X. Molina https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The following piece was written by Elisa Martinez Relano in 2023. Inspired by a student-led project exploring past and present solidarities with Latin America, Elisa, now completing an MA in the History of Art and Social History at the University of Leeds, wrote the following text. Her reflection on archival research around Chilean exile in the 1970s takes place in 2023, fifty years after the infamous coup, and is guided by a simple question: how and why would Leeds engage in solidarity activism with a place as seemingly distant as Chile?
Copyright (c) 2024 Elisa Martinez Relano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The cultural-political category of Amefricanity
In this original contribution published in 1988, Brazilian Black intellectual Lélia Gonzalez develops the concept of Amefricanity (amefricanidade) as a politically and culturally relevant category to address the material, historical, and symbolic realities of Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
Copyright (c) 2024 Livia de Souza Lima https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
While the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état against the government of Salvador Allende in Chile invites to reflect on past and current experiences of solidarity between Latin America and Europe, the present contribution seeks to foreground the rather overlooked international solidarity efforts of and with the indigenous Mapuche. As a result of their forced exile to Europe after 1973, Mapuche activists began to organise themselves as a diasporic community in Europe and to form a transnational advocacy network in support of their people. This contribution aims to showcase how international solidarity of and with the Mapuche in Europe evolved over time, how they relate to non-indigenous, Chilean solidarity networks, and which underlying Mapuche notions of solidarity they reactivate in order to weave their transnational advocacy network.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sebastian Garbe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
We investigate the idea of translocal bridge building – a concept related to ideas of network and alliance building – between environmental and social justice struggles. We examine the potentials and challenges of connecting place-based struggles against extractive industries. Moving beyond normative-idealized ideas of movement alliances, we theoretically root the paper in non-romanticizing accounts of justice networks. We empirically draw on the lead author’s research with groups struggling against extractive industries across Germany, the Netherlands, and Guatemala. Our argument is threefold. First, it highlights the potentials of bridging while at the same time raising issues of unequal power and difference, space, and scale among the actors in translocal and multi-scalar justice struggles. Second, the focus on bridge building and our role as bridge building researchers contributes to an understanding of the political and ethical possibilities and dilemmas of research that blurs the boundaries between research and activism. Third, we discuss how bridging may help generate counter-power but also risks perpetuating power imbalances. We suggest that our insights highlight the potentials and challenges for multi-scalar, multi-actor, translocal and cross-cultural alliances, and encourage researchers and social movements alike to explore the difficult yet insightful tensions of bridging spaces.
Copyright (c) 2024 Hannah Porada, Rutgerd Boelens, Jeroen Vos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“This Is Not America”: Restagings of the Cold War through Embodied Memory
This paper explores resonances of Cold War resistance to dictatorship in Latin America in the work of Puerto Rican activist and artist, Residente. By analysing a music video, This Is Not America, released in early 2022, I explore the ways in which political projects of the Cold War are brought to life through embodied performances of memory. In the video, bodies reinforce a shared political subjectivity by choreographing and performing social struggles from across the continent since its invasion and colonisation in the 16th century, with a particular focus on the Cold War period. The video’s conceptualisation of the Latin American struggle is defined through shared historical experiences of oppression, regional heroes and martyrs, and decolonial Latin American and Global South-driven visions for the future. In bringing certain bodies of the past to life and into dialogue (or not) with the present, the video positions the prefigurative political visions of more recent Latin American social movements within a longer history and genealogy.
Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Grimaldi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This essay is a review of and retrospective on 'Metal and Melancholy', a 1994 documentary on taxi drivers in Lima, Peru, which effectively captures the aftermath of social, political and economic collapse. I argue the film is a window into and a warning against a possible planetary future where human beings endure through ingenuity and entrepeneurship but without the transformative tools of collective action. It also speaks to the current political crisis in Peru, which can be directly traced to the 1990s.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rafael Shimabukuro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Semiotics of Solidarity: Reinterpreting Artefacts of Latin American Resistance in Contemporary Leeds
This paper examines reinterpretations of solidarity with Latin America through a student-led project at the University of Leeds. The project, ‘Thinking Inside the Box: 1973’ (hereafter, TITB), was a collaboration between the University of London – specifically, King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London, and the London School of Economics – and the Universities of Leeds and Liverpool in 2023. The broader framework of TITB seeks to generate liberatory and transformative learning by approaching the educative process with students as co-creators and co-curators of knowledge. The approach draws from decolonial theory by seeking to challenge the hierarchical practices of mainstream education in which the teacher imposes knowledge on the student. In dialogue with Freirian concepts of collective interpretation and ‘conscientisation’ (Freire, 1968), scholars and students involved in the project used archives to run a series of events and public engagements. It connects students to each other and to a range of archival materials, broadly themed around 20th century Latin America, to inspire them in designing, developing and delivering an output of significant impact by engaging with local communities; in this case, the Chilean diaspora of the dictatorship. The project promotes the co-curation of knowledge, teaching and learning, and supports students to practice autonomy in their journeys of content and skills acquisition (Grimaldi, Carvalho and Natale, 2022; Grimaldi and Rofe, 2023).
Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Grimaldi, Richard Smith https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Solidarity, Worldmaking and Inter-Connected Geographies of Authoritarianism: Trade Unions and the Multiple Trajectories of Chile Solidarity
This paper intervenes in debates around the relationship between solidarity and worldmaking in the context of decolonisation and the Cold War. While work on worldmaking has drawn attention to key aspects of solidarity formation in this context (e.g. Getachew, 2019; Kelley, 2019), to date it has offered a limited engagement with the role of labour in the articulation of such solidarities. Here, we demonstrate how such a focus on worldmaking can help to highlight the multiple political trajectories that have been shaped through articulations between Chile solidarity and labour internationalism. Drawing on recent work on the Chilean Left, which stresses such multiple trajectories (eg Schlotterbeck, 2017), we provide three engagements with the opposition to authoritarian politics in different geographical contexts, foregrounding the role of exiled trade unionists involved in the Committee of the Exterior of the Central Única de Trabajadores de Chile (CEXCUT). These cases are the contestation of links between the Pinochet regime and Eric Gairy’s dictatorship in Grenada by Caribbean left activists in the Oilfield Workers Trade Union in Trinidad and Caribbean Labour Solidarity (CLS) in Britain; the role of Luis Figueroa of the CEXCUT and other Chilean exiles in shaping links between opposition to Pinochet and struggles for democratisation in the immediate post-junta period in Greece; and the role of maritime workers in British port cities such as Liverpool in contesting trade with Chile. We argue that through examining the relations between different trajectories of solidarity and interconnected geographies of authoritarianism, an engagement with worldmaking practices can help move beyond narrowly statist and methodologically nationalist frameworks.
Copyright (c) 2024 David Featherstone, Ben Gowland, Lazaras Karaliotas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Changing the Picture and Music for Hope: Cultural Expressions of Solidarity in the UK with El Salvador at the End of the Cold War
This paper focuses on UK-based cultural expressions of international solidarity with El Salvador either side of the end of the Cold War and El Salvador’s civil war. The article centres on a mural titled Changing the Picture, painted in Greenwich from 1985, which depicts a message of hope for overcoming state repression sponsored by multinational capital and Western powers; and Music for Hope, an ongoing musical education programme beginning in 1996-7 based in the Bajo Lempa, a coastal region of El Salvador, but set up and supported by a British solidarity network. After exploring the political meanings and initiatives of solidarity in the UK during the Salvadoran civil war, we analyse Changing the Picture’s central message of anti-imperialism, the depiction of collective popular struggle and the artwork’s place within the cultural politics of London in the mid-1980s. The paper then examines how the communitarian message of popular democracy present in the mural has been articulated in new cultural forms by Music for Hope, particularly through the latter’s pedagogical, horizontal and prefigurative practice of teaching music to children and adolescents and encouraging the formation of musical groups. As such, this paper foregrounds cultural and artistic practice as a central but underexplored dimension of international solidarity. Highlighting the literature on the shift in political culture, produced by the culmination of the Cold War, from a frame foregrounding revolutionary or political struggle to one centred on trauma, we explore how Changing the Picture and Music for Hope reflect different historical conditions. If the solidarity depicted in Changing the Picture reflected the final years of a period in which the revolutionary horizon was considered possible, Music for Hope emerged at a time that forced the initiative to confront the traumatic legacies of the civil war years. Despite these differences, the article argues that there is far more that connects the two examples, especially their emphasis on community agency. In doing so, we show that artistic expression can not only represent a powerful medium through which solidarity politics are communicated, condensing both local and international contexts in a radical vision of hope, but that cultural action can also structure the participatory practice frequently at the heart of international solidarity politics.
Copyright (c) 2024 Pablo Bradbury, Andrew Redden, Emily McIndoe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0