Researching social representations in collective action: an experience with urban social movements in Latin America

Abstract

The last decades in Latin America have witnessed the emergence of local social movements, which presented new ways of making demands, supported mostly in speeches related to human rights and citizenship rights. Although the Estate remains in the centre of their complaints, these experiences show innovative protest repertoires, and hold a strong local bond while presenting a large degree of cross-border interaction with peers. These pages tell about a research experience in Latin American housing social movements, from Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico. Since 2006, I followed the question about the existence of a representation of Latin America, shared by members of social movementes in the region. The importance of this study is that the idea of Latin America could be the basis of a regional identity, which would then operate as framework for collective action. The theoretical value of these research objectives is to question the understanding of nation and nationalism as purely bourgeois initiatives, which would be then absorbed by poor sectors. Asking about the possibility of the coexistence of different ideas about the nation and the region, we propose to look for diverse versions of representations and identity categories.