Human rights politics and scaled performances of memory: conflicts among the <i>Madres de Plaza de Mayo</i> in Argentina

Abstract

Abstract This paper builds on the geographies of commemoration literature extending the scope of inquiry to consider the scaled performances through which the politics of memory unfold. I focus on an analysis of conflicts over the creation of memorial landscapes that emerge from the intricate ways in which representations of the past and the everyday politics of social movements intersect. The paper analyses the competing politics of memory of two groups of Madres de Plaza de Mayo (mothers of people who 'disappeared' during Argentina's Dirty War). Their strategies underscore geographic dimensions of the politics of memory as the Madres clash over how to appropriately place memory in the landscape. While one group emphasizes making visible the events of the past to promote transmission of memory and to remember those who disappeared, the other group focuses on re‐interpreting symbols about the past in an attempt to encourage future activism. Such conflicting strategies manifest spatially in a variety of ways, ranging from the creation of physical markers in the built environment to the performance of collective rituals that centre on activists' bodies as sites for either commemoration of the past or future activism. The Madres' conflicts highlight how different spatialities contribute to validate or condemn competing politics of commemoration. Keywords: memorysocial movementsperformancescale Notes Data about the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo are based on ethnographic and archival research in Argentina conducted between 1999 and 2000. Latin American scholars in particular have been inspired by the social movements that have sprung up in the region in the past decades as a response to human rights violations. These movements have used memory as a strategy to keep activism alive. In places such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala, El Salvador and Peru, torture and disappearances that took place in past decades are still part of the present because activists such as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo continue their search for truth and justice despite government efforts to place these past conflicts in the past. For work on the intersection of memory and human rights in Latin America, see Acuña et al. (Citation1995), Burt (Citation1998), Huggins (Citation2000), Jelin (Citation2003) and Ogle (Citation1998). This approach to understanding public political activism as performance differs significantly from current understandings of performativity that draw from Judith Butler's non‐foundationalist theory of identity (Butler Citation1990). To date, several geographers have applied Butler's performance framework to their work (e.g. Bell, Binnie, Cream and Valentine Citation1994; McDowell and Court Citation1994) to analyse the fluid geographies of identities. Yet, others have criticized this move because Butler's theory assumes a subject abstracted and detached from lived experience and from historical and geographical embeddedness (Nelson Citation1999). Specifically, it has been argued that Butler's theory of performativity severely hinders the conceptualization of the relations between identities, social change and spatially embedded, intentional human practice (Nelson Citation1999: 331). Even though Butler's theory and the anthropological work on performance share a similar vocabulary, the implications for research on social processes differ considerably. Whereas the anthropological approach to performance is fundamentally about social relations, Butler's performativity is about individual identity and is rooted in psychoanalysis. My predilection in this article is for a more contextualized and socially and relationally oriented approach rather than a more psychoanalytic (and decontextualized) approach. On this point, see Dagnino's (Citation1998) discussion of the relation between Latin American social movements and the emergence of new concepts and practices of citizenship. During the first constitutional government after the dictatorship, the Argentine government passed the 'Law of Economic Reparation to the Disappeared' that specified that relatives of disappeared people were entitled to an economic reparation from the government. This was done following the advice of the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights, which at the time encouraged Latin American government to recognize and accept responsibility for the crimes committed by their militaries in the recent past. Despite the criticism of the Asociación Madres, the members of Madres‐Línea Fundadora have not accepted the economic reparation themselves. However, the Línea Fundadora has not condemned the scheme (as the Asociación has done); instead they claim that its acceptance is a matter of personal choice and an individual right. However, Taylor (Citation1997) argues that the Madres draw on existing myths and narratives of motherhood and therefore do not challenge the dominant patriarchal rules of Argentine society. Taylor also recognizes that the power of the Madres' performances is that, by being out in the Plaza de Mayo, they bring motherhood out of the 'domestic closet' and open new spaces of representation for Argentine women (Taylor Citation1997: 185).