The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights' Activism: Embeddedness, Emotions, and Social Movements

Abstract

The Madres de Plaza de Mayo is a community of mothers and human rights activists in Argentina that has remained active for almost three decades. Based on a qualitative analysis of archival and ethnographic data assembled through fieldwork, this article examines the crucial role emotions play in maintaining the Madres' embeddedness in territorially dispersed social networks. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo perform emotional labor within their movement to sustain their activism. The Madres' emotional geographies emerge through their individual and collective practices in key places, which are themselves layered with emotions. Over the years, such practices have allowed the Madres to create widespread networks of activists and to sustain a social movement community that extends all across Argentina. The Madres' emotional labor and their sustained activism over time demonstrate that an open sense of place (place understood as a network of social relations that flow across space) is more important than the local (as a bounded geographic scale) in explaining how embeddedness, cohesion in social networks, and activism are maintained. This account of the embeddedness of actors in social networks is consistent with current relational views of spatiality in human geography.

Key Words:

• embeddedness
• emotions
• networks
• social movements

Acknowledgments

This article is based on research supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-9906763, by a E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Fellowship from the Department of Geography at Ohio State University, and by travel grants from the Office of International Education and the Center for Latin American Studies, both at Ohio State University. This article in its final form would not have been possible without the insights and assistance of numerous people over a period of several years, including Nancy Ettlinger, Tyler Hower, Mei-Po Kwan, Eugene McCann, Paul Robbins, and Verta Taylor. Three anonymous referees provided extensive comments that helped refine the argument, and Audrey Kobayashi offered comments and extensive editorial assistance. I also want to thank Harry Johnson from the Center for Earth Systems Analysis Research in the Geography Department at San Diego State University for producing the final maps. Finally, I want to thank all the Madres de Playa de Mayo in Argentina who opened their hearts and memories to me and in the process taught me the meaning of real activism.

Notes

1. I define the Madres de Plaza de Mayo as a “social movement community” ( 23 Buechler 1990 ) because their composition is not limited to the existence of formal, bureaucratic, and centralized organizations that are known in the social movement literature as social movement organizations (SMOs). Throughout this article, I show that even though most Madres are affiliated with either one of two large formal organizations, some women do not claim any organizational affiliation but rather see themselves as a more informally organized network of mothers of disappeared people. This includes smaller groups of Madres who in recent years have spun off the formal organizations to continue their activists' commitment on their own. The definition of social movement community is also useful because previous studies of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo have had the tendency to homogenize the group, masking internal differences among women and among different groups of Madres.

2. I do recognize that the Madres' differences and conflicts are important in understanding the major political differences between the two groups, but my focus in this paper is on the binding affective dimensions that have contributed throughout the years to the sustainability of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo as a whole. Much could be said about the role of personal differences and animosity in driving negative emotional states among members of the two groups (such as anger and disappointment toward leaders and other activists in the struggle for human rights). This topic is complex enough to demand a separate examination, and a detailed treatment of the nature and geographic dimensions of conflicts among the Madres appears in 20 Bosco (2004) .

3. This is consistent with current understanding of social movements as networks ( 2 b31 Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Diani and McAdam 2003 ).

4. The insights that emerge from the archival research are based on documentation that belongs to the different groups of Madres, including the archives of the two largest Madres organizations (Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Madres de Plaza de Mayo–Línea Fundadora) in their offices in Buenos Aires, and the archives of one of the local chapters of Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo in the city of La Plata. Activists from a small and informal group of Madres in two other cities (Lomas de Zamora and Rosario) opened their personal collections for this research, an extremely valuable addition to complement the information from the largest archives. The Buenos Aires archives of the two Madres organizations contain almost all of the existing documents of the beginning years of the Madres. Many of these documents are unique, unavailable elsewhere, and contain a wealth of information that was critical for tracing the historical geographies of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. The Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo retains all of the earliest documents about the organization of the group. These include organizational newsletters produced by the Madres and illegally distributed among members, friends, and activists during the military government (1976–1983), the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo newspaper for the period 1985 to 2000 (of limited but legal circulation), organizational and personal correspondence, and scrapbooks dating back to 1976. The archives of Madres de Plaza de Mayo–Línea Fundadora contain additional documentation, in particular records concerning the activities of this group of mothers of the disappeared that took place after the organizational division that affected the movement in the 1980s.

5. I conducted twenty interviews with women from the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, seventeen interviews with women from Madres de Plaza de Mayo–Línea Fundadora, and three interviews with women from independent Madres de Plaza de Mayo groups. The women were from six different cities in Argentina. Almost all had been active Madres de Plaza de Mayo for more than twenty years, indicating that they have been activists since the beginnings of the group—some were among the original and founding members of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Only two of the women I interviewed identified themselves as Madres de Plaza de Mayo for a shorter time span (fifteen years); these two women joined the groups after Argentina returned to a democratically elected government in 1983. All interviews were conducted and analyzed in Spanish and then translated to English.

6. See, for example, discussions among psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, and many others in edited collections by 41 b18 Forgas (2000), Barbalet (2002) , and 57 Manstead, Frijda, and Fischer (2004) .

7. Reacting to issues such as the rigid conceptualization of network connections and network structures, there have been calls for more explicit attention to cultural issues in network analysis ( 32 b34 b8 DiMaggio 1992; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Ansell 1997 ). The argument from the cultural critique is that if network analysis is to provide a better account of macro- and microlinkages of social action, it needs to account for actors' orientations toward one another and the world ( 32 DiMaggio 1992 , 118). This requires more attention to subjective issues (e.g., relations based on cognitive, emotional, and moral bonds) that preclude the regular quantitative methodologies of network analysis.

8. For example, it has been argued recently that the concept of embeddedness has come to be part of geography's conceptual vocabulary without a proper examination of its definition or theoretical significance ( 58 Martin and Sunley 2001 ). Similarly, the analysis of the embeddedness thesis in connection with social movement studies is appropriate and needed, since much research in this subfield is concerned with issues of cohesion and solidarity among collective actors.

9. The assumptions that underlie discussions of embeddedness rely on the premise that patterns of linkages can be used to account for aspects of the behavior of those involved in a network ( 54 Knoke 1990 ). This is one of the premises at the core of social network analysis, which is often concerned with examinations of the consequences of the changing patterns of interactions among actors embedded in one or more social networks ( 55 b54 b82 b69 b34 Knoke and Kuklinski 1982; Knoke 1990; Scott 1991; Nohria and Eccles 1992; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994 ).

10. In his article on the strength of weak ties, Granovetter further stated that the “discussion of operational measures of and weights attaching to each of the four elements is postponed to future empirical studies” ( 45 Granovetter 1973 , 1361).

11. For example, 48 Hanson and Pratt's (1995) research on gender-based occupational segregation relies on analysis of the relations between locality and embeddedness to show how different structures of employment opportunity were constructed in a specific urban setting through the enabling or constraining characteristics of social networks. Similarly, other geographers such as 4 Amin and Thrift (1994) and 86 Storper (1997) focus on the territorial embeddedness of firms and markets in social and cultural networks of relations by placing emphasis on localities or regions.

12. Initially, much of the Argentine popular press (e.g., daily newspapers and newsmagazines) was aligned with, or heavily censored by, the military government and did not offer much in terms of coverage of the Madres' struggle. When their activities were reported, it was often in a derogatory manner. In fact, the Madres were often talked about as the “mad” or “crazy” women of the Plaza de Mayo. For a comprehensive account of the narrative strategies employed by the media and the military regarding the Madres and other human rights activists, see 87 D. Taylor (1997).

13. For analysis of women's self-help group as social movements, see V. 89 Taylor (1996) .

14. As social movements scholars have already demonstrated, the development of a collective identity is a necessary condition in the mobilization of social movements ( 62 Melucci 1996 ). The process of collective identity formation not only is transformative in its own right but is also “a prelude to changing institutions and challenging societal inequalities responsible for an undesirable situation” (V. 89 Taylor 1996 , 151).

15. I thank one anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I develop this line of thought.

16. There have been twenty annual events so far (although since the organizational division in 1986, the two Madres' organizations based in Buenos Aires sometimes have held separate events in the Plaza and thus the number of annual events to date is closer to thirty).