Digital Contention in Latin America

Abstract

In this article I revisit the ways in which contemporary theorizations in performance studies have incorporated digital activism in their models of interpretation by maintaining a disciplinary perspective, focusing primarily on the theoretical developments in the Americas. Through a case study of the digital contention sparked by the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa, I propose a model to address political participation in the online sphere. I do so by developing an infrastructuralist approach in a twofold sense. The first aspect is a focus on the material infrastructures that underscore digital protest, as a way to better understand their specific performative nature. I then turn my attention towards the affective infrastructures that emerge in the digital and their capacity to sustain collective action and protest, within the digital and beyond.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The research on which this article is based has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union 's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme ('Digital Memories', Grant agreement no.677955) based at KU Leuven, Belgi urn. Complete name of the project: '"We Are All Ayotzinapa": The Role of Digital Media in the Formation of Transnational Memories on Disappearances' (digitalmemories.be).

Notes

1 This is not the case for other contexts, for example in Argentina, in which alike the strong feminist movement arising on Twitter for the legalization of abortion, an anti-abortion – namely ‘pro-life’– online movement also inundated social media. The pro-life movement had, arguably, more online presence, which if considered can completely change Fuente’s optimistic view of the role of ‘Performance Constellations’ in uplifting the visibility of the bodies scarred by capitalism.

2 This massacre occurred on 2 October 1968, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Square of the Three Cultures) in Mexico City. The Mexican Armed Forces fired at thousands of unarmed students who were demonstrating against police repression, for the release of political prisoners and, more generally, against the PRI government. Even today there are no definite figures for the casualties, but it is estimated that between 150 to 200 people were murdered and 1,345 people were arrested.

3 On 28 June 1995, in Coyuca de Benítez in the state of Guerrero near the town of Aguas Blancas, seventeen peasants were killed and twenty-one were wounded by members of the state’s motorized and judicial police to prevent them from participating in a demonstration. The Acteal massacre was a paramilitary raid in the town of Acteal, located in the Los Altos region of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico, on 22 December 1997. The attack left forty-five dead with the whole community forcibly displaced in its aftermath. While the Mexican government described the massacre as an ethnic conflict between communities, opposition parties and human rights groups saw it as part of a government strategy to dismantle the social base of the town of Acteal, which had close ties with the Zapatist uprising in nearby towns. According to a report by the National Human Rights Commission (22 May 2006), at the 2005 Atenco riots 207 people were victims of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, 145 were arbitrarily arrested, 26 women suffered sexual assault and 5 foreigners were illegally expelled from the country. The case is now in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The Tlatlaya massacre was a massacre in which twenty-two civilians were killed in San Pedro Limón, municipality of Tlatlaya, State of Mexico, on 30 June 2014 at the hands of the military.