In all societies-but especially those that have endured political violence-the past is a shifting and contested terrain, never fixed and always intertwined with present-day cultural and political circumstances. Organized around the Argentine experience since the 1970s within the broader context of the Southern Cone and international developments, The Struggle for the Past undertakes an innovative exploration of memory's dynamic social character. In addition to its analysis of how human rights movements have inflected public memory and democratization, it gives an illuminating account of the emergence and development of Memory Studies as a field of inquiry, lucidly recounting the author's own intellectual and personal journey during these decades.

This book analyzes the impact of past human rights violations on consolidation of new democracies. It focuses on the emergence of an international network of human rights organizations and on the strategic responses of Latin American militaries to international pressures to respect human rights.

In this pathbreaking contribution to debates about human rights, democracy, and society, distinguished social scientists from Latin America and the United States move beyond questions of state terror, violence, and similar abuses to embrace broader concepts of human rights: citizenship, identity, civil society, racism, gender discrimination, and po

Opening the newspapers in South America at the beginning of the 21st century can feel like being caught in static time: so many of the contemporary news stories point to the persistence of a past which is definitely not "over". The attempts to try Pinochet, the continuing searches for the disappeared, or a child of murdered parents' struggle to discover their real identity, the Truth Commission in Peru - across the continent, societies continue to come to terms with the past. This book provides an introduction to the complexity of ideas and approaches which have been brought to bear on memory and its importance for understanding social and political realities. Elizabeth Jelin draws on European and North American debates and theories to explore the ways in which conflicts over memory shape individual and collective identities, as well social and political cleavages. The book exposes the enduring consequences of repression and enriches our understanding of the conflicted and contingent nature of memory.

This book presents studies from across Latin America to take up the challenge of exploring the plurality of social inequalities from a global perspective. Accordingly, it identifies the structural forces of social inequalities on a world scale as they shape asymmetries observed in a wide array of phenomena, such as racial and gender inequality, urbanization, migration, commodity production, indigenous mobilization, ecological conflicts, and the "new middle class". A rich contribution to the study of the interconnections between the global social structure and multiple local and national hierarchies, Global Entangled Inequalities brings consistently together a variety of conceptual approaches, ranging from ethnographies to legal genealogies, and will therefore appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social theory, power analysis, intersectionality studies, urban studies, and global social and environmental justice.

This book presents studies from across Latin America to take up the challenge of exploring the plurality of social inequalities from a global perspective. Accordingly, it identifies the structural forces of social inequalities on a world scale as they shape asymmetries observed in a wide array of phenomena, such as racial and gender inequality, urbanization, migration, commodity production, indigenous mobilization, ecological conflicts, and the "new middle class". A rich contribution to the study of the interconnections between the global social structure and multiple local and national hierarchies, Global Entangled Inequalities brings consistently together a variety of conceptual approaches, ranging from ethnographies to legal genealogies, and will therefore appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social theory, power analysis, intersectionality studies, urban studies, and global social and environmental justice.

Hearing the news from South America at the turn of the millennium can be like traveling in time: here are the trials of Pinochet, the searches for "the disappeared" in Argentina, the investigation of the death of former president Goulart in Brazil, the Peace Commission in Uruguay, the Archive of Terror in Paraguay, a Truth Commission in Peru. As societies struggle to come to terms with the past and with the vexing questions posed by ineradicable memories, this wise book offers guidance. Combining a concrete sense of present urgency and a theoretical understanding of social, political, and historical realities, State Repression and the Labors of Memory fashions tools for thinking about and analyzing the presences, silences, and meanings of the past. With unflappable good judgment and fairness, Elizabeth Jelin clarifies the often muddled debates about the nature of memory, the politics of struggles over memories of historical injustice, the relation of historiography to memory, the issue of truth in testimony and traumatic remembrance, the role of women in Latin American attempts to cope with the legacies of military dictatorships, and problems of second-generation memory and its transmission and appropriation. Jelin's work engages European and North American theory in its exploration of the various ways in which conflicts over memory shape individual and collective identities, as well as social and political cleavages. In doing so, her book exposes the enduring consequences of repression for social processes in Latin America, and at the same time enriches our general understanding of the fundamentally conflicted and contingent nature of memory. A timely exploration of the nature ofmemory and its political uses.

The central objective of Men in a Developing Society is to show, as concretely as possible, how men experience a period of rapid economic development, particularly in the areas of migration, occupational mobility, and status attainment. It is based mainly on a sample of 1,640 men in Monterrey, Mexico, a large and rapidly growing manufacturing metropolis in northern Mexico with much in-migration, and a sample of 380 men in Cedral, San Luis Potosi, a small, economically depressed community with high rates of out-migration, much of it to Monterrey. The study of men in Monterrey is perhaps the most thorough one yet conducted of geographic and social mobility in a Latin American city. In part, this was possible because of the innovation of collecting complete life histories that record what each man was doing for any given year in the lay areas of residence, education, family formation, and work. These data permit the effective use of the concepts of life cycle and cohort analysis in the interpretation of the men's geographic and occupational mobility. The experience of the Monterrey men in adapting to the varied changes required by their mobility was not found to be as difficult as is often indicated in the social science literature on the consequences of economic development. In part this may be because Monterrey, in comparison with most other Latin American cities, has been unusually successful in its economic growth. The impact of migration also was lessened because most of the men had visited the city prior to moving there and many had friends or relatives in the city. The age of the migrants upon arrival in Monterrey made a significant difference in subsequent occupational mobility; those of nonfarm background who arrived before age 25 fared better than natives of the city. Although it appears that status inheritance in Monterrey is somewhat higher than in industrialized countries, a considerable proportion of men do move up the occupational ladder. And perhaps as important, the Monterrey men, whether or not they themselves are moving up, perceive the society as an open one. The very success of Monterrey's development created conditions that would bring about changes in the educational, economic, and cultural expectations of its inhabitants. Thus, paradoxically, the general satisfaction and the lack of group and class conflict in Monterrey over the previous decades may well have given rise to future dissatisfaction and conflict.