Social movements and political-emotional communities: an approach from the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity in Mexico

ABSTRACT

How are social ties formed in the contentious campaigns led by relatives of victims of criminal and political violence? Drawing on the work of Latin American social anthropologists such as Myriam Jimeno, Morna Macleod and Natalia De Marinis, I argue that the contentious campaigns of a victim-led social movement provide the physical and symbolic spaces where the participants form a political-emotional community by sharing testimonios (testimonial narratives) and developing a victim-centered ethos. To substantiate my claim, I discuss the case of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad) in Mexico drawing on twelve in-depth interviews and a documentary review. This article opens a dialogue between the literature on political-emotional communities and the scholarship on social movements offering a new perspective to analyze the development of social ties. In other words, future research projects can make use of the introduced theoretical proposal to understand victim-led activism more in-depth. The approach of this article can be of interest, for example, for scholars dedicated to the study of contention by survivors of genocide, mobilizations against racial violence, and protests in contexts of armed conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Political-emotional communities
• contentious repertoires
• victims of violence
• community-building
• violence

Introduction

Felipe Calderón became president of Mexico in December 2006 and, upon taking office, declared a ‘war’ against organized crime by deploying the armed forces in several regions of the country. The results were disastrous – more than 121,600 people were murdered and around 28,200 disappeared during his six-year term (CNB, 2022; INEGI, 2022). However, Calderón constantly dismissed the relevance of the situation arguing that most of these crimes were committed amongst delinquents. In other words, Mexican people were being – and still are – victimized by drug cartels and government forces in various ways. After the murder of his son Juan Francisco on 28 March 2011 in the state of Morelos, the poet Javier Sicilia started leading the actions of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD, Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad), a contentious collective actor that fractured the official narrative of criminalization of victims bringing together relatives of victims, activists and organizations from all over the country (López Leyva, 2019).¹ Since then, countless relatives of victims have organized groups that, through several forms of contention, demand a halt to the war (Iliná, 2020; Martos & Jaloma, 2017; Robledo-Silvestre, 2019).

Given the increase in violence and in social mobilizations led by the relatives of the victims, Mexico offers an occasion to understand the relational dynamics that take place in this form of activism. Thus, this article asks the following research question: How are social ties formed in the contentious campaigns led by relatives of victims of criminal and political violence? Building on the work of a cluster of Latin-American researchers (Jimeno, 2010; Macleod & De Marinis, 2018), my main argument is that the MPJD contentious campaigns provided the physical and symbolic spaces where the participants formed a political-emotional community by sharing testimonios (testimonial narratives) and developing a victim-centered ethos.

The text is divided into five sections. First, I introduce a theoretical outline to understand how contentious performances work for community building and the origin of the concept of political-emotional communities. Second, I explain my research methods and discuss the ethical considerations of this research. Third, I provide a general description of the four main MPJD campaigns, including a four-days-long march and three caravans. Fourth, I analyze the dynamic formation of a political-emotional community based on two key elements that constitute it: the sharing of testimonios – which has an inclusive component – and the development of a victim-centered ethos – which can carry a restrictive approach excluding victims of other types of violence.² Finally, I present my conclusions highlighting how future research projects can take advantage of this theoretical proposal to study victim-led activism.

Campaigns, repertoires, and community-building

Repertoires of contention are the distinctive arrays of performances that are known and accessible to a collective actor to make claims to its targets (Tilly, 1978). As summarized by Staggenborg and Lecomte (2009, p. 164) campaigns are ‘temporally bounded and strategically linked series of events and interactions directed at common goals.’ In other words, performances can be, for example, marches, sit-ins, rallies, and road blockades. Then, the linkage of a series of performances directed towards a concrete goal involves a campaign. In a nutshell, the repertoire of a given movement includes all the performances – whether they are used in one campaign or another – that are staged by its participants. Thus, repertoires are forums of contestation in which symbols, bodies, actions, and discourses are used to pursue or prevent social change and develop solidarity as well as an oppositional consciousness amongst participants (V. Taylor & Van Dyke, 2004). Therefore, repertories involve rational projects for meaning-making and political action (Nelson & King, 2020) as well as dramatic representations loaded with emotions (Eyerman, 2005).

The relationships between actor and action, along with their performative and symbolic elements, are key to understanding the complex meanings of contentious events and the movement-building processes (Doherty & Hayes, 2019). Some studies have found that continuous participation in protest campaigns enhances solidarity because it brings people together towards a shared purpose (Berezin, 2001). Therefore, the analysis of how people participate in contentious performances – or, more generally, how they take part in contentious repertoires – offers a chance to observe how a sense of collectivity is formed within a movement.

The classic volume edited by Goodwin and colleagues (2001) contains evidence from multiple contexts to show the link between emotional bonds and political participation. As argued by some contributors, political rituals communicate and articulate ideas, feelings and symbols that unify actors by focusing their attention on a shared experience, thus binding people and enhancing solidarity because of the new social relationships they create (Barker, 2001). Likewise, the public expression of emotions can animate political activism (Gould, 2001) because mass gatherings provide people with a chance to experience not only a sum of personal grievances but collective solidarity, hope and courage (Goodwin & Pfaff, 2001). Thus, although focused on political identities linked to ethnicity and nationalism, authors like Berezin (2001, p. 93) have introduced the concept of ‘communities of feeling’ to portray temporary arenas created through the experience of emotions in political rituals that fuse ‘self and other.’ Beyond the sense oriented to political identities, what matters are the underlying dynamics between performances, emotional experiences, and social ties, which have shaped contentious fields with distinctive characteristics – for example, the activism on transnational migration and asylum seek (Rosenberger & Winkler, 2014; Russo, 2014).

Thus, it is agreed that participation fosters an active network with emotionally involved activists who share ties of trust and solidarity (de Volo, 2006; Santos, 2020). These emotional dimensions of social relations nurture continued involvement (Gundelach & Toubøl, 2019; Jasper & Owens, 2014). However, as argued by Russo (2014), more research is needed to explore how allies, in contrast to those directly aggrieved by a given protest issue, engage in forging a sense of community with the groups they work for. Led by Myriam Jimeno, a group of Latin American social anthropologists working with groups of victims of different types of extreme violence proposed the concept of ‘emotional community’ to understand the links created between victims and the non-directly aggrieved public through the narration of an individual or collective lived suffering (Jimeno, 2010; Macleod & De Marinis, 2018). The fundamental feature of this type of community is that the pain of the victims does not remain enclosed in them but spreads to other audiences who are moved by the narrative. This is followed not only by a compassionate moment but by the progressive construction of a political bond that leads people to organize and mobilize to demand justice (De Marinis & Macleod, 2018; Jimeno et al., 2015).

Testimonio plays a relevant role in the construction of this type of social bonds because it promotes, through its emotional elements, a shared version of violent events and establishes links that lead to the collective claim for justice and reparation (Jimeno, 2010) taking personal struggles into the socio-political arena (Macleod & Bastián, 2019). Testimonios are narrations of events that marked the biography of someone who lived them or witnessed them and are intended to be shared in the public sphere (Beverley, 2008). In contrast to other discursive exercises, testimonios are usually focused on the suffering of injustices (Valencia, 2017) and present a claim appealing for recognition, empathy, or justice (Jolly, 2014). It must be noted that testimonio is a form of verbal and performative narrative that demands a degree of engagement from the listeners with whom the speakers establish a relationship (De Marinis, 2018; Lira, 2020). Narrativity is a part of social epistemology and ontology because it helps people to make sense of the world through knowledge and moral meanings (Polletta & Gardner, 2015; Sommers, 1994). Therefore, testimonios have had a relevant political role in several countries to denounce acts of extreme violence and repression (De Marinis & Macleod, 2018).

Although Jimeno and collaborators (2018) have chosen to use the term ‘emotional community,’ they first proposed the concept as political-affective communities (Jimeno, 2007), which is still used by De Marinis (2018) and Pearce (2018). Yet, following Stephen’s (2018) lead, I consider it best to use the term political-emotional community since it highlights the political dimension of the social ties that are created through the emotional content of performances led by victims of violence. The concept of political-emotional community can benefit from the social movement literature, and, in turn, social movement studies can benefit from the concept of political-emotional community. In the first case, the concept can be refined using previous findings on social movements. In the second, it is possible to acquire a broader understanding of the dynamics that take place in contentious collective actors to analyze not only how victims’ relatives make social bonds amongst them but also how those that not are not directly aggrieved develop a community with the victims. Thus, this article links Jimeno’s (2007, 2018) conceptual proposal with social movement studies by arguing that the campaigns of the contentious repertoire of the MPJD provided the settings where the participants formed a political-emotional community by sharing testimonios and developing a victim-centered ethos.

Methods and ethical considerations

I understand the MPJD as a case belonging to the universe of social movement actors led by relatives of victims of war or war-like violence (Berry, 2015; de Volo, 2006). Several scholars (Cadena-Roa, 2019; López Leyva, 2019; Tirado, 2019) acknowledge the transcendence of the MPJD in Mexico. Thus, I consider this contentious actor a critical case, meaning that it provides an opportunity to assess a series of relevant empirical and theorized principles (Snow & Trom, 2002). Case studies seek to achieve detailed, thick, and holistic understandings of instances or variants of a delimited social phenomenon (Snow & Trom, 2002). Building on Vennesson’s (2008) categorization, this research comprises an interpretive case study because it is supported on theoretical guidelines to find explanations but also aims to perform a subsequent theoretical refinement. Therefore, I follow other researchers’ (Della Porta & Keating, 2008; Klandermans et al., 2002) call to aim for medium-range explanations that allow the involvement in theory-driven empirical studies that elaborate elucidations within particular contexts, while also looking to shed some light on broader processes of contention.

This article is a product of a broader research whose fieldwork consisted of conducting in-depth interviews with people who have participated in the actions of the MPJD (Gordillo-García, 2022a). Sampling for interviews with social movement participants typically involves a deliberate selection in which people are sought out for their experiences (Blee & Taylor, 2002). Thus, based on a purposeful sampling strategy (Patton, 2015), I selected cases rich in information that could help to understand the dynamics of contentious politics led by relatives of victims of violence in Mexico. Interviews lasted between one and four hours and were recorded with the verbal consent of the participants. Given my involvement in several campaigns and projects with relatives of victims, a certain degree of previously developed trust played a relevant role in obtaining this consent. However, several interviewees expressed their interest in participating so that their cases could be exposed to a broader public. Based on the participants’ interest, I use their real names.

The interviews were conducted in Spanish during 2020 and comprise seven relatives of victims – Javier Sicilia, father of a murdered young man and leader of the MPJD; Araceli Rodríguez, mother of a disappeared police officer; Tere Carmona, mother of a murdered youngster; Letty Hidalgo, mother of a disappeared young man; Lupita Aguilar, mother of a disappeared man; Teresa Vera, sister of a disappeared woman; María Coronado, wife of a disappeared man – and five activists who have organized and participated in the campaigns – Magdiel Sánchez, Roberto Villanueva, Gerardo Gómez, Norma Garduño and Juanfra García. Besides, this article involved a documentary review of six books (Centro de Estudios Ecuménicos, Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia Dignidad & Iglesias por la Paz, 2013; Osorno, 2014; Rocato, 2011, 2012; Sicilia & Vázquez, 2016; Suaste, 2017) that include the accounts of several MPJD participants. These volumes contain dozens of chapters with emotionally loaded, valuable and useful material for the study of the MPJD.

After gathering the data, I focused on identifying the answers or passages in which the participants narrated their experiences during the MPJD caravans. Then, based on the theoretical contributions of the literature on political-emotional communities (Macleod & De Marinis, 2018), I systematized the information into four categories: the importance of the testimonios, the development of ethical senses, the variations in the involvement in the mobilizations, and the costs and risks of this type of contention. I merged the second and third categories into one, and then excluded the costs and risks category because it exceeded the scope of this article.

The ethical considerations of social research are always contextualized in the position of the researchers and their relationship with the participants (Gillan & Pickerill, 2012). Thus, it is essential to recognize how our ideas influence our work. One of the usual consequences of social movements is the formation of people willing to dedicate their lives to transforming society (Neveu, 2019). From my involvement with the MPJD, I consider this is the case of countless victims’ relatives and activists, who have my appreciation and esteem. Therefore, the objectives of this article are not only aimed at contributing to the study of social movements – I also seek to show my solidarity with the families of the victims in their search for justice and memory.

MPJD’s repertoire of contention

In consideration of the definitions discussed previously, from now on I use, first, the concept of performances for the public events of the MPJD (for example, its rallies with the participation of victims’ relatives); second, the concept of campaigns for performances that are temporarily linked to a specific goal (for example, a caravan); and, third, the concept of repertoire to refer, in a more general way, to the array of performances and campaigns that the MPJD has used. Presenting a detailed description of the MPJD’s full repertoire would be too ambitious a goal. Therefore, this section presents a general overview so that the reader can become familiar, at least in a cursory manner, with the campaigns that the MPJD carried out. Before describing the main campaigns, though, it is essential to point out that the first performances in the capital of Morelos after the murder of Juan Sicilia were organized by friends of his father who wanted to prevent the criminalization of the youngster. In other words, there was a previous network in which many of the MPJD organizers were immersed. This article, however, does not focus on the networks that existed previously, but rather on those that were formed in contention. The relatives of the victims who joined the MPJD had no ties to the organizers; nonetheless, they shared experiences of pain, injustice, and dissimulation from the authorities. Thus, after learning about the MPJD due to press reports, several relatives of victims sought out the organizers to talk about their cases and began to participate.

Therefore, the MPJD gathered a base of participants to carry out the ‘March for Peace,’ whose objective was to mobilize the ‘moral reserve of the country’ and to ‘break the siege’ of the local context taking the protests to the capital (Ameglio, 2011, p. 23). About 300 people departed from Morelos on 5 May 2011 behind a black banner that stated ‘¡Estamos hasta la madre! [we are fucking fed up!] Stop the war! Peace with justice and dignity.’ There were attendants and media from various regions and countries, but the presence of dozens of people carrying photographs stood out: ‘murdered sons, kidnapped relatives, burned infants, dead brothers, disappeared people […]. Everyone carries pain and indignation,’ a participant expressed (Vázquez, 2016, p. 57).

After three days of walking in silence to show the indescribable pain of violently losing a loved one, the MPJD arrived in Mexico City, where thousands of people received them. On 8 May, the final day of the march, the local government estimated that 80,000 people participated, but the organizers argued that there were at least 200,000 (Pérez, 2011). The main square of Mexico City was crowded with people that listened to dozens of relatives of victims and poets who participated in the final rally, where the MPJD introduced the content of the ‘Pact for Peace’ – a document that proposed actions around six demands: truth and justice, ending the war, fighting corruption, combating criminals’ economic assets, policies for the youth, and participatory democracy. To sign the Pact with other groups and organizations, the poet announced a visit to Juárez, Chihuahua, a city internationally known for its high rates of criminal violence. Several organizations pressed the MPJD organizers to broaden the scope of the Pact to include demands around labor issues, class struggles, anti-imperialism, and public health, amongst many others (COMECOM, 2011). However, Javier and other leaders refused and declared that the MPJD agenda was focused only on the six points.

Social movements usually carry out actions that are familiar to their participants. Since several organizers were linked to the Zapatistas – an anticapitalist movement led by indigenous peoples in Mexico that has made long trips through the country during their campaigns (for more on the Zapatistas, see Inclán, 2018) – they used that inspiration to propose doing caravans (Ameglio, 2013).³ The rationale was that in a ‘warlike context, a caravan does not only represent a mass nonviolent action but is a civil and peaceful column that breaks the siege […] of violence […], bringing solidarity’ to those suffering, one of the organizers explained (Ameglio, 2013, pp. 20–24). Thus, the MPJD performed its first caravan, the ‘Caravan of Consolation,’ from 4 to 10 June 2011 with around 500 people transported in 14 buses and 30 cars (Suaste, 2017).

Departing from Mexico City, the caravan travelled towards the north of the country and visited cities in eight of the most violent states. In every stop, activists and relatives of victims did marches and rallies to denounce the constant shootings, disappearances, femicides, murders, rapes, discoveries of clandestine pits, and attacks on indigenous communities. Although the victims who spoke in the demonstrations had very different profiles, their testimonios were marked with a recurrent pattern: the government offices were negligent to the judicial complaints and the families were responsible for conducting the investigations on their own (Suaste, 2017).

Once in Juárez, the participants dedicated four hours to discuss the content of the Pact with local organizations. As mentioned, several groups wanted to broaden the scope of the Pact and pressed to include as an irreducible demand the immediate return of the military to the barracks. Given the lack of consensus, the report of the discussions included 72 demands and measures to be adopted, including a political trial against all government officials, the creation of a community radio station, a national campaign to unionize workers and an investigation on biopiracy in the country (Comité Cerezo, 2011). Although hundreds of individuals signed the document, the MPJD leaders disavowed its content the next day due to the contrast with the six points of the original proposal.

The ‘Caravan to the South’ repeated the ‘essential elements’ of the Caravan of Consolation: the open space for the victims, the public meetings featuring images of lost beings, and the testimonios of cases without justice (Suaste, 2017, p. 126). The MPJD left Mexico City on 9 September 2011 with 15 buses and 10 cars carrying over 600 people. Contentious performances were carried out in 25 different locations in eight states and had the participation of political organizations, unions, groups for the defense of the indigenous territories, peasant communities, religious congregations that host migrants on their way through Mexico, and community police corporations (Suaste, 2017).

A year later, between August and September 2012, 100 participants of the MPJD – mostly relatives of victims but also representatives of indigenous communities and activists – toured 26 cities in 14 USA states, from California to Washington DC, during 30 days in the ‘Caravan for Peace’. The MPJD organized this third caravan based upon the understanding that the ‘war on drugs’ started in the USA, the weapons that both the army and the cartels use were produced there, and the money of the criminal groups was laundered there (Sicilia, 2016, p. 48). The campaign’s performances consisted of dialogues with local and national authorities – from a sheriff famous for his overtly anti-immigrant stances (Joe Arpaio) to a House representative who collaborated with Martin Luther King Jr. (John Lewis) – exchange of organizational experiences, press conferences, ecumenical events, and non-violent direct actions – including marches, destruction of weapons, performances next to military facilities and protests in the offices of banks that laundered money from the cartels (Osorno, 2014).

In addition to these campaigns, the MPJD held public dialogues with the President and with members of Congress. The relevance of these events has been analyzed at another time due to its significance for a political outcome of the MPJD: the enactment in 2013 of a law to protect the victims’ rights (Gordillo-García, 2020). After obtaining the law, the MPJD demobilized. However, several relatives of victims who had their first experience of activism in the caravans have organized their own groups, known as colectivos (collectives), which have adopted new contentious campaigns, such as independent brigades to search for the disappeared. I will not discuss the mobilization dynamics of these groups, but some analyzes can be found in Iliná (2020), Martos and Jaloma (2017), and Robledo-Silvestre (2019).

The formation of a political-emotional community

This section is divided into two. First, I analyze how the constant sharing of testimonios provides a basis for the development of new social ties. Then, I discuss how people build a common ethical sense around the victims.

The sharing of testimonios

The formation of a political-emotional community starts with the process of a person or a group narrating their experiences of suffering to others, who in turn respond with compassion and engage with them for organization purposes (Stephen, 2018). The MPJD repertoire provided the physical and symbolic spaces to establish emotional ties between the relatives of victims and other participants through the constant public presentation of testimonios in long journeys across various geographies. Given that political-emotional communities have the victims at their center, the main focus of the following analysis might seem to be on the bonds created by victims’ relatives that were previously isolated in their grief. However, the MPJD campaigns would not have been possible without the participation of experienced activists who organized them. For this reason, a relevant part of the text highlights how these non-victim allies were involved in the formation of the community.

During the Caravan of Consolation, one of the testimonios that stood out for the press and the participants was the one of María Herrera. Doña Mary, as she is known, suffered the disappearance of two sons in 2008 and two more in 2010. She told her testimonio publicly for the first time at an MPJD event in Michoacán, where she was born (Suaste, 2017, p. 86). When she finished telling the story, many people surrounded Doña Mary, embraced her, and offered help to publicize the case. The woman then decided to travel to Juárez. ‘I have felt a certain peace and hope of having my children in my arms again […]. I feel that through the networks of this caravan I will find something […], some kind of help […],’ she told the press (Herrero, 2011, p. 31). Testimonios do not only portray the documentation of events but bring past violence and injustices to the present as well as their attached emotions (Stephen, 2013). The case of Doña Mary shows their role in community-building: the emotional dimensions of testimonios facilitate the construction of a shared version of violent events to link subjective experiences to a broader social context and articulate actions around solidarity (Jimeno, 2010).

Political-emotional communities are formed in moments and spaces where the emotional and the political coalesce victims and people in solidarity in the struggle for justice and reparation (De Marinis & Macleod, 2018). Throughout the caravans, dozens of victims’ relatives shared their testimonios at the MPJD events, spurring a collective solidarity response in different parts of the country. For example, Letty spoke about her case for the first time in public at the MPJD event in Nuevo León during the Caravan of Consolation. When she got there, she ‘was speechless, shocked’ to see the people who congregated in the square. ‘I had heard and seen [about demonstrations] and such, but being there, in that environment… Seeing people arriving… I still did not know they were victims or anything. There were people playing music, people reading poetry, protesting,’ she recalls. She took the microphone ‘with great fear, great terror. I started talking without naming Roy [her disappeared son] and without saying who I was […]. I was afraid that someone was watching us and that someone would want to hurt us again,’ she argues. Then, several journalists and participants approached to ask her name and one asked if she was with a group or if someone was accompanying her. When she said she was alone, that person gave her the phone number of a local organization allied with the MPJD and asked her to call the next day. From there, Letty started knowing other relatives of disappeared people and activists. Similar responses during the caravans reiterate that the public expression of the pain caused by an experience of extreme violence is the starting point for the formation of political-emotional communities (De Marinis & Macleod, 2018) since testimonio links personal harm to the social sphere through its emotional content (Jimeno et al., 2015).

The interactive dynamics around testimonios facilitated emotional ties between participants, leading members of the audience not only to feel sympathy but to establish links that took personal grief to political goals for directing collective action towards justice demands. A participant of the MPJD considered that after listening the testimonios, ‘we are left with the obligation to remember them and work for them [the murdered and disappeared], so that they have justice’ (Rocato, 2012b, p. 3). Likewise, Roberto, comments that listening and documenting the cases was ‘a very powerful approach to pain […]. Although you might have been hurt by something, it is not even remotely close to what those people are experiencing.’ Thus, ‘you cannot stand still. You have to do everything in your power so that this does not happen to anyone else,’ he adds.

Denunciations of injustice were also presented in other forms that raised emotional responses from the public, not only through spoken word. For example, another participant considered that the night in the state of Durango during the Caravan of Consolation was the ‘saddest one’ because the first person she saw was carrying a banner that stated: ‘Sicilia, my dad would be here supporting you, but he was killed on Saturday’. In response, she ‘could not stop crying throughout all the demonstration’ (Gómez, 2011, p. 35). Likewise, one of the visual elements that stood out the most during the MPJD caravans was the extensive exhibition of photographs of murdered and disappeared people. ‘We carry them hanging from sticks, printed on T-shirts, on blankets, in pictures that we hug to our chests. We do not abandon them for an instant […]. They are a sign of our pain and our love,’ Javier wrote (Sicilia, 2012, p. 5).

During contention, individuals redefine their social world, their locations in it, their structure of meanings and their self-perceptions, all of which assist the process of identity-building and strengthen political consciousness towards a protest topic (Passy, 2003). Moreover, in the interactive and participatory act mediated by a testimonio, the listener becomes a participant and, in a way, co-owner of the memory of the traumatic event building a sense of ‘we’ (D. Taylor, 2003; De Marinis, 2018). Likewise, contentious performances based on the logic of bearing witness from strategic dramaturgy usually have an accentuated capacity to transmit an emotional message and, in turn, heighten the emotional intensity of participation invoking basic moral principles (Cadena-Roa, 2002; Della Porta & Diani, 2006). As Magdiel points out, ‘when you stopped to listen [to the victims’ relatives], you would break completely. That was over and over again.’ Gerardo coincides in how crushing the journeys were. ‘Hearing the horror, the terror, the sadness, the depression, was very, very strong […]. The victims would get on stage, you would start to hear the stories and it was, geez [uf]! Very strong,’ he recalls. Likewise, Juanfra remembers that, in every city ‘it was a sea of tears. We would cry while hearing the tragedy, always with a description of the horror […]. Those were terrible sensations […]. If something triggers it, I burst into tears again,’ he comments.

Although the ties established through the narration of testimonios may involve several dimensions, their center is in the formation of a network from a shared emotion (Stephen, 2018) that departs from the subjective experience to become a social and political phenomenon of moral repudiation against those responsible for the violence (Jimeno et al., 2015). In that regard, Tere comments that she formed a ‘new family’ with ‘great intimacy, closeness and trust.’ Then, she illustrates her idea with an anecdote: ‘Rubbing the feet of a woman from another social class, or having her rub my feet, whom I had never seen in my life, but whose son was killed the same day as Joaquín [her son]. How can I explain that to you?’ she asks. ‘We were a family. We came from the same painful birth of loss, of not understanding anything […] of knowing that justice does not exist,’ Tere adds.

Emotions and the social ties formed through them are crucial for the sustained activity of a movement (Jasper, 1997). After her participation in the Caravan of Consolation, Letty was invited to the journey in the USA. She travelled with her son Ricardo. ‘Ricardo and I went with that hole in our hearts, but they [other MPJD participants] began to fill it up,’ she comments as tears run from her eyes. Her son gave his testimonio at one event. ‘Many people approached and hugged him […]. He received all the love […]. He knew that through him they knew Roy, and that they loved Roy too […]. That was something extraordinary,’ she recalls. Likewise, Lupita highlights the community-building process during the month of that caravan. ‘Imagine what a bus with 40 women who have their relatives disappeared is. For me, that was very important. We were true warriors […]. We promised ourselves that we would each organize a collective in our states.’ Thus, the continued involvement in the contentious repertoire of the MPJD brought relational dynamics that impacted the people’s sense of belonging, forming ties through the emotional and political dimensions of testimonios.

The development of a victim-centered ethos

The affective bonds formed in the social spaces that have the testimonios about extreme violence in the center underpin an ethic of recognition of the victims and the commitment to doing them justice (Jimeno et al., 2015; Jimeno, 2010). Thus, I maintain that the goals of the MPJD contentious repertoire influenced the rejection of attempts by organizations that sought to place their demands on the agenda of the caravans.

Despite the requests from political groups, the organizers of the Caravan of Consolation refused to grant them time using the stages (Suaste, 2017). Given that victimhood brought people together, the MPJD participants insisted that the victims needed to be the core of the repertoire above all other topics. However, this caused issues in the last stop of the tour, when the MPJD set workshops to discuss the content of the Pact with other organizations. The main debate was whether the military was required to return to the barracks or not. Considering the major human rights violations by the armed forces, several organizations asked for this as an irreducible demand. However, some other inhabitants from places that had only recently started to face the presence of cartels did want the army. It was agreed to conclude that there was no consensus on the matter, but the public minutes stated as an MPJD demand that the military had to be withdrawn.

Gerardo considered the episode as a ‘sabotage’ led by militant individuals from the ‘radical left’ who dedicated themselves to “blowing up the meeting.’ However, Norma points out that there were two faces in Juárez: one with a ‘very violent political stance […] in the sense of intolerance, of not listening’ and another made up of ‘the people who had organized to receive us: the victims.’ Thus, this episode shows that, in political-emotional communities, the essence of ethics is based on the figure of the victims and the need to work collectively to recognize them and do justice to them, thus rejecting discourses and agendas that, although somehow related to the issue, do not necessarily prioritize the victims. Furthermore, even ‘failed’ efforts might consolidate a sense community through the construction of a common story about how a group overcame difficulties (Flesher Fominaya, 2010). As Javier argues, despite the ‘political failure’ in Juárez, the Caravan of Consolation ‘had a humanitarian triumph’ because ‘the victims shocked people – they were no longer figures, they were no longer statistics: we were beings of flesh and blood who had a story and a pain to tell. It was very important.’ In other words, the ethos of victim recognition runs through the evaluation that participants make of their contentious campaigns.

However, the victim-centered ethics in political-emotional communities brings the risk of denying the relevance of certain types of violence that might not be the same that was suffered by most of the participants. Norma and Gerardo proposed to organize an internal group to work with native peoples that supported the MPJD, but the idea was initially rejected. ‘The discussion was not easy at all because we told them […]: For you, the victims that matter are only those who have a murdered or a disappeared relative’ but people from indigenous communities ‘have been victims long before this crisis,’ he comments. After discussing the issue in a broad meeting with more participants, it was agreed to create the group. ‘Javier was angry at us for a long time,’ Gerardo says while laughing. “Javier […] said that our work could not be that of the National Indigenous Congress […]. He did not want conflicts or making it look like we were upstarts,’ he explains.

Although the concept of ‘community’ might be inaccurately perceived as an unchanging phenomenon when it is rather permanently in process (Gould, 2001), researchers need to analyze when people take part in the community, when they take distance, and when they join again due to their ethical commitment. In that regard, some of the participants in the first caravan considered not attending the second one, but their emotional ties and mobilization-formed ethos led them to join. Juanfra initially refused the invitation to the Caravan to the South. ‘I told them I was not going, because I was very emotionally touched,’ but ‘one night before the departure, I decided that I was going because it was part of my conviction […]. I was a supportive companion moved by great compassion, not pity, who was doing what I had to do: work with them [the relatives of the victims],’ he says.

Furthermore, some of the participants who devoted more time and effort to the MPJD during the first two caravans did not endorse the one in the USA for political reasons regarding their perception of what they identify as colonialist features of politics in that country. Magdiel, for example, ‘took a pause, without breaking with the movement.’ Likewise, for ‘political conviction,’ Norma and Gerardo were against going, but they helped to organize the participation of some inhabitants of native populations. Thus, as pointed out by other scholars, political ideology is a relevant element to understand ethical commitments and the type of campaigns that seasoned activists decide to join (Corrigall-Brown, 2019). Likewise, ideological differences have been identified as one of the reasons that some members of political organizations had to withdraw from participating in the MPJD (Gordillo-García, 2022b). On the other end, however, some people who had only participated in local performances and meetings in Mexico City joined the Caravan for Peace for a full month. María, for example, could not attend the caravans in Mexico due to the health of her son, who has cancer. However, ‘I spoke with my sister and asked her to help me […]. I asked her to be with him at the hospital so I could go to the caravan’ in the USA and expose the case of her disappeared husband, she recalls. Likewise, Teresa Vera had participated in all the actions in Mexico City, but not in the caravans for personal reasons. ‘Going to the US was quite an experience. It was sad to leave the country and see that other people wanted to help us while our authorities were not able to stop the violence,’ she says.

The Caravan for Peace shows that an ethical commitment does not imply the automatic acceptance of all movement actions. Individuals’ ideological positions and personal circumstances influence the evaluation of the social spaces in which they decide to participate. However, it must be noted that despite having contrasting impressions of the caravan in the USA, these people have continued to join the MPJD’s subsequent campaigns also bringing new participants in. This reiterates previous findings of how individuals with strong socialization and identification around a given protest issue often become more committed to a social movement (Passy, 2003).

It would be wrong, though, to portray the ethical commitment to a political-emotional community as a tension-free phenomenon. Araceli mentions that during the Caravan for Peace there were ‘conflicts’ between participants because some people wanted to speak at all the events. It was ‘very tiring,’ because ‘I had to face rudeness from people who were angry that they [the organizers] invited me to certain meetings,’ she comments in reference to some individuals who seek a leading role in protest events to give broader media exposure to their cases. Besides, another source of tension in the MPJD’s caravans came from personal circumstances. As Tere recalls, some people made the USA caravan ‘dreadful’ for her. ‘Later I learned of the circumstances that these people faced right before going and I understood,’ she explains. ‘Who am I to judge them? […]. Today we greet each other with affection, but it was very complicated […]. Those people cried with me, I know they also love my son and say he should not have died,’ Tere argues. Although they seem anecdotal, these interpersonal conflicts reiterate that the ethos developed in political-emotional communities has the experiences of victims of extreme violence as pivotal elements – even those who did not have a good relationship demanded, and continue to demand, justice for each other’s cases.

Conclusion

Javier sums up that ‘the spirit of the caravans was to go to meet these people [the victims] and give them space, give them a voice, give them a face.’ Thus, the MPJD contentious repertoire ‘had a deeper purpose than the pure political goal of transforming a State policy. The political transformation of the State had to be made from them – from those denied faces, those silenced voices, those humiliated beings reduced to figures,’ he adds. As such, the contentious repertoire of the MPJD focused on putting victims at the center of the public sphere. From the sustained pronouncement and listening of testimonios of extreme violence during the caravans, a group of people kept mobilizing to bring private and personal pain to the collective arena, turning the demand for justice into a socio-political issue.

Movement campaigns and protests are eventful – they usually have significant cognitive, affective, and relational impacts that foster and strengthen the formation of communities (Della Porta, 2008). The emotional and political dimensions of the MPJD repertoire were deeply intertwined and constituted one another. The performances were not only political mobilizations but forums to construct new bonds and ethics by bringing together victims and allied activists. This article shows that political-emotional communities are dynamic processes. There is a tension between the two elements that I analyzed here: the sharing of testimonios has an inclusive aspect to movement participation while the victim-centered ethos is a restrictive approach. These two ends – inclusion and exclusion – help to explain conflict within the movement. Thus, the specificity of the concept of political-emotional community is helpful in distinguishing the bonds formed in contentious campaigns led by victims’ relatives in contrast with other social movements that use a different array of strategies and alliances, or that form social ties through other means.

While acknowledging the spatial and temporal boundaries of case studies (Snow & Trom, 2002), my discussion of the role of the testimonios and the victim-centered ethos can help to understand the dynamics of other contentious actors. This article opens a dialogue between the literature on political-emotional communities and the scholarship on social movements offering a new perspective to analyze social ties. In other words, future research projects can make use of this theoretical proposal to understand victim-led activism more in-depth. The approach of this article can be useful, for instance, for scholars who analyze contention by survivors of genocide, mobilizations against racial violence, and protests in contexts of armed conflict.

Acknowledgements

This research was possible thanks to funding from the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT). I want to thank Hugo Gorringe, Jonathan Hearn, Tod Van Gunten, and Nick Crossley for their comments on previous versions of this article. I am also grateful for the suggestions and criticisms of the anonymous reviewers, which greatly improved this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Mexican National Council of Science and Technology) [No Number].

Notes on contributors

Johan Gordillo-García

Johan Gordillo-García holds a PhD in Sociology from The University of Edinburgh. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Social Research in the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Notes

1. Although direct victims who survived various types of violence have also participated in the repertoire of the MPJD, in this text I only refer to the relatives of the victims.

2. I am indebted to one of the reviewers for pointing out this idea.

3. Although not explicitly stated by the organizers, the performances of the repertoire of the MPJD were also influenced by other relevant Latin American social movements. For example, the use of photographs and testimonios has a strong link to the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the activism of relatives of the victims of the Dirty War period in Mexico, and the protests in reaction to the civil wars in Central America during the twentieth century (see De Vecchi, 2018; de Volo, 2006; Iturriaga, 2019; Lira, 2020).