3.18. Activism, social movements, counterhegemonic memories II

This research examines how mothers of victims of police violence in Brazil transform personal grief into collective memory work and knowledge production that challenges institutional narratives about state violence. Since the 1990 Acari massacre—the first massacre of Brazil's "new democracy"—mothers' movements have emerged across the country in response to police killings that claim over 6,000 lives annually, disproportionately affecting young Black men from marginalized communities. The study investigates how these mothers engage in three interconnected epistemic processes: memory work that resists forgetting through public mourning and memorialization; counter-narrative construction that challenges official accounts portraying victims as criminals; and knowledge co-production with academia and the judiciary that repositions mothers from research subjects to researchers. Employing a multi-method approach, the research combines multi-sited ethnography across protests, academic seminars, and judicial hearings; in-depth semi-structured interviews with mothers who are “epistemic activists”; documentary analysis of books, reports, and digital materials produced by the mothers. Preliminary findings reveal that memory becomes simultaneously a site of personal healing, political resistance, and epistemic challenge. Mothers create alternative archives that make "non-grievable" bodies visible while demanding institutional accountability. Their insistence that "the memory of my son will continue not just for me, but for people who read the book" demonstrates how private grief transforms into public knowledge that disrupts unequal distributions of mourning and challenges hegemonic narratives about state violence.

Following the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902), Colombia lacked a coherent system of pensions to compensate combatants from either side. This article argues that Liberal funeral practices were not merely commemorative rituals but rather acts of collective memory that created political pressure on the state. By publicly remembering unpensioned veterans between 1904 and 1929, Liberal communities transformed individual mourning into collective political demands, forcing the question: who owed what to those who died in war? These funerals operated as spaces of genuine community mourning and calculated political interventions rooted in remembrance. Through commemorative gatherings, eulogies narrating sacrifice, and strategic communication with authorities, Liberals articulated a vision of state responsibility toward veterans that had not previously existed in Colombia. In publicly insisting the dead be remembered, they transformed funerary practice into a technology of state accountability and reparative justice. Remembrance itself became an act of resistance. By refusing to let unpensioned veterans be forgotten, Liberal communities exposed state abandonment and demanded material redress. These memory practices: (1) created public remembrance of unpensioned veterans; (2) used commemoration to moralize state obligation; (3) forced state recognition through mnemonic pressure; and (4) institutionalized collective memory as both political demands and emerging state policy. The study reveals that Colombia's first systematic reparation of armed conflict victims emerged not from enlightened policy, but from below—from communities' collective refusal to forget. Death and memory became intertwined technologies of democratic accountability; the state could not ignore what communities refused to let fade from public consciousness. Funeral practices constitute foundational political acts where remembrance generates state obligations that are negotiated, demanded, and gradually institutionalized, even under authoritarianism.

This work investigates the role of collective memories during social mobilisations in Bolivia, how they helped social activists to make sense of their struggle and build a sense of cohesion around it. The first case study presented investigates how the inhabitants of the province of Omasuyos mobilized the memory of the anti-colonial rebellion of Tupac Katari (1781) during the ‘Gas War’ in October 2003. The second case concentrates on social activists of the city of El Alto and how they recalled the War of the Pacific (1879) to make sense of the same conflict. Finally, it explores the civic strike in Potosí in 2010 and its relation to the memory of the colonial silver economic cycles. Drawing on Rothberg (2009, p. 3), I understand that the social memories depicted in this study served as “platforms” to express the demands of contemporary social struggles and were particularly powerful because they combined certain elements. First, they presented a simplified prototypical story of imbalance, with just and unjust characters, which could be easily projected into familiar spaces and displayed corporal metaphors reproducing the effect of trauma. Second, this narrative has often resulted from a path-dependent continuous remembering through history and turned out to be both constitutive and instrumental for the activists claiming it. Finally, to understand memory as a platform also means to conceive it as part of a movement, in which social actors use its grounding to gain their impulse to move forward in an uncertain environment. Memory operates as a structured device containing a temporal narrative order that, by projecting the struggle into the past, assists the projection of desired futures. For this work, I interviewed 70 local activists, researched archives and newspapers, and conducted participant observation in demonstrations, marches, assemblies, workshops, ceremonies and rites.