1.1. Remembering Resistance: Monuments, Museums, and Living Memory [ES/EN]

The public demand for memory has not been the exclusive task of the states in Latin America. On the contrary, or in parallel, memorialization initiatives in the territories have been promoted by victims' organizations, affected communities, and social movements, which has led to the construction of local memory museums. This conference paper proposes a comparative analysis of two unofficial memory experiences in Peru and Colombia on armed conflicts: “Para que no se repita” (So it will not be repeated), by Anfasep in Ayacucho, and the “Casa de Memoria de Tumaco” (House of Memory of Tumaco) in Nariño. Through a review of documentary sources, interviews with founders, and permanent exhibitions, this study seeks to show how these initiatives reaffirm the formation of genuine and territorialized memories. It is argued that the political dimension of these sites lies in their capacity to recover local histories and practices of resistance, challenging the representation of violence in the face of culturally hegemonic and global discourses.

More than an anti-government protest demanding the resignation of president Daniel Ortega, the April Insurrection of 2018 in Nicaragua embodies the accumulation of a long history of conflict, violence, and trauma. The uprising opened the “Pandora’s box that had superficially buried all the resentment, anger, and memories of an immediate past.” This paper asks how Nicaraguan exiles in Costa Rica remember and make sense of this unresolved past, and how new forms of political subjectivity in displacement emerge through reconfigured experiences of belonging and memory. Based on long-term ethnographic and participatory research (2022–2025) with Nicaraguan exiles in San José, the study employs collaborative methods such as photovoice, photo elicitation, and community mapping to explore how belonging and memory operate within exilic life. These approaches reveal that while exile often reproduces Nicaragua’s historical divisions and hierarchies, it also generates openings for reflection, solidarity, and alternative imaginaries of community. Faced with the burden of an unresolved past, participants seek to move beyond narratives of heroism or martyrdom by foregrounding practices of healing and care. This shift echoes the 2018 rallying cry “Patria libre para vivir”, which re-signified the Sandinista credo “Patria libre o morir”—a call to imagine freedom as the possibility to live, rather than to die, for the nation. In the absence of meaningful transitional justice or reconciliation following both the revolutionary and Contra wars, deep political antagonisms continue to mark exile communities decades later. The paper finds that decentralized, community-based memory practices enable exiles to resist both the dominance of state-centered narratives and the neglect of deeper structural causes of displacement, offering new insights into the entanglement of memory, belonging, and political subjectivity in contexts of forced migration.

Led by a multiclass coalition, the 1986 Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) Revolution, also known as the People Power Revolution, signalled the non-violent end of the twenty-year Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. The reconstructionist Philippine Republic then utilized the memory of the EDSA Revolution to endorse and establish the rule of law and the protection of human rights, primarily under the promise of ‘never again’ (nunca más) to authoritarian rule. However, in 2016, under the orders of former President Rodrigo Duterte, the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos Emmanuel E. Marcos Sr., was buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery), and, in 2022, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the son of the former dictator, was elected, with nearly fifty-nine percent of the votes. Within this context, the memory of the EDSA Revolution and its promise of ‘never again’ appears to have waned in the collective imagination of Filipinos. Despite constant opposition from victims and the national reverence afforded to the EDSA Revolution, marked by annual celebrations and public commemorations, how did the Marcoses return to the Presidential Office? Did the memory of the EDSA Revolution fail to remind Filipinos of the human rights abuses experienced under the Marcos dictatorship? Can memory fail to keep its promise of an imagined future? Through an actor-oriented analysis, this paper investigates the struggle to remember the dictatorship and the EDSA Revolution during the reconstructionist period in the Philippines and how memory entrepreneurs, like Corey Aquino (the assassinated Ninoy Aquino’s wife) and Imelda Marcos (Marcos Sr.’s wife), navigated the changing memory landscape as they promoted competing narratives and interpretations of the past.

In Chile, the social uprising (Estallido social) of October 2019 interrupted our everyday trajectory. Suddenly, the present exploded. After decades of dictatorship and post-dictatorship, the popular revolt shook and strained our social and individual existence, and problematized our frames of reference in every sphere, enabling other vital and collective meanings. The present was exploding, the future was opening, and the past of our peoples was being reactivated. More than 50 years after the coups d’état in Uruguay and Chile, 6 years after the social uprising, and almost 50 years after the coup in Argentina, this text proposes an analysis of that social, political, and cultural process that took place in Chile—specifically, of the articulation of historical and political temporalities that burst forth and were reconfigured as something new—based on a possible intersection between recent political history and social memories. More precisely, it draws on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “time of the now” (Jetztzeit) (2005), on Enzo Traverso’s idea of the “potentialities of the past” (2019), which make future possibilities thinkable, and on Diana Taylor’s concept of “embodied memory” (2016), in order to examine the articulation among present, past, and future that collapsed and was reconfigured in that process. Starting from this proposed intersection, the invitation is to analyze this phenomenon in our history through an exploration in which we aim to set forth certain analytical intuitions and theoretical-conceptual reflections, which we share here in essay form, from the process of working through this very recent event in the history of Chile and of the Southern Cone.

Since the 2020 resurgence of the BLM movement catalysed waves of demonumentalisation across the globe, conflicts over how the past is commemorated through monuments and statues in urban space have received renewed attention within the field of memory studies (Gensburger and Wüstenberg 2023; Rigney 2022; Palacios González and Durán Medraño, forthcoming). In these recent studies, the focus has primarily been on the interaction between grassroots actors and the traditional monumental landscape – whether through acts of dismantlement, alteration, or restoration. This paper takes a different approach by focusing on how grassroots actors create their own participatory monuments in times of insurrection. It centres on two grassroots monumental practices that emerged during the 2019 mass mobilisation in Chile, the so-called estallido social: the Matapacos statue intervention and the guerrilla gardening project Jardín de la Resistencia. The analysis examines the participatory dimension of these practices in relation to the creation and maintenance of a collective insurrectional identity within the Chilean mass movement, and how this was tied to the particular memory dynamics that characterised these occupations of urban space. Special emphasis is placed on the central role that the notion of resistance played in the narratives evoked by these grassroots memory sites, and on their productive entanglement within a multidirectional nexus (Rothberg 2009). Finally, the paper enters into dialogue with existing scholarship on counter-monuments (Young 1992) and anti-monuments (Perez-Manjarrez 2025), proposing the concept of “the organic monument” – a vulnerable and ephemeral monumental form that embraces a pluriversal approach to memory and foregrounds agency and autonomy. This conceptualisation bridges the gap between current frameworks for categorising alternative monumental practices and offers a more comprehensive conceptual approach to understanding the grassroots monuments generated by a new generation of heterogenous, leaderless mass movements.