The Bicentennial commemorations held across Latin America between 2009 and 2025 offer a privileged lens for examining the relationships between memory, politics, and national identity in the twenty-first century. From Mexico to the Southern Cone, governments and societies articulated—through rituals, monuments, exhibitions, parades, performances, speeches, and audiovisual productions—diverse ways of reactivating their nations’ foundational pasts. This panel proposes to interpret these celebrations not as simple “reflections” of political realities but as symbolic devices—in J. Davallon’s sense—that shape spaces of belief and produce meanings about nationhood, sovereignty, and the future.
Political rituals, as C. Geertz and G. Balandier showed, are not ornaments to “real” politics but constitutive elements of its symbolic power. Through commemorations, the state presents itself as guarantor of historical continuity, reorganizes collective memory, and legitimizes specific political projects. National festivities—“festivals of sovereignty,” in Alain Corbin’s words—reveal how narratives of independence, citizenship, and progress are inscribed in time, while exposing the exclusions and silences they entail. As political acts of the present, these rituals become arenas of contestation among diverse actors, even within official commissions and state institutions.
The panel gathers four papers on the Bicentenaries of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, and Uruguay, each addressing the questions and sources these events provoke. It examines how the nation is defined and staged; how tensions between past, present, and future emerge; and how governments employ commemorations to seek legitimacy or rebuild ties with citizens. It also considers which actors—state agencies, civic associations, ethnic and racialized groups, media, and artistic collectives—participate in these narratives, how diversity is represented, and what forms of dissent or counter-celebration arise.
A central comparative axis explores how different political orientations shape the uses of the past and the temporalities mobilized in these rituals. Bicentennial commemorations under left-wing populist governments framed independence as an unfinished revolution and a promise of social inclusion; liberal right-wing governments emphasized modernization and republican continuity; while far-right administrations reinterpreted the past through moral and nationalist lenses seeking to erase internal conflict. Comparing these regimes reveals both shared strategies—such as the sacralization of the nation—and divergent temporal imaginaries linking memory, identity, and power.
Methodologically, the panel highlights the variety of sources that broaden traditional archives: official documents, audiovisual records, visual and performative materials, personal testimonies, and artistic or museographic productions. By treating commemorations as sources in themselves—performative acts generating images, emotions, and hierarchies of meaning—it contributes to a comparative agenda on the symbolic and political uses of the past in Latin America and to a methodological discussion bridging cultural history, political anthropology, and memory studies.
Camila Perochena
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
Bicentennial Commemorations in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil: The Uses of the Past by the Populist Left, the Liberal Right, and the Far Right
This paper examines the bicentennial commemorations of independence in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil as moments when governments of different political orientations—left-populist, liberal-right, and far-right—translated their projects into narratives of time and history. Far from neutral rituals, these celebrations reveal how power enacts temporal regimes that legitimate authority and define belonging.
The comparison includes Argentina’s Bicentennial (2010–2016) under Kirchner and Macri; Mexico’s Bicentennial and Revolution Centennial (2010) under Calderón and Independence Bicentennial (2021) under López Obrador; and Brazil’s 2022 Bicentennial under Bolsonaro. Drawing on audiovisual materials, press coverage, official speeches, and interviews, the paper explores how each government mobilized aesthetic languages—allegory, simulacrum, or appropriation—to embody its political vision of the past.
Left-populist governments (Kirchnerism and López Obrador) used simulacra to stage history as an unfinished project, creating affective continuity between past struggles and present politics. Liberal-right administrations (Calderón and Macri) favored allegory, emphasizing reconciliation and a linear, modernizing temporality, presenting history as something to be overcome. In far-right Brazil, Bolsonaro recoded national symbols and religious imagery into an exclusionary, militarized vision, enacting a restorative temporality aimed at returning to an imagined moral past.
Comparing these cases shows that bicentennial rituals are key sites where Latin American governments materialize temporal imaginaries. Through their aesthetics, they not only narrate the past but choreograph desired futures, revealing how the politics of time shapes democracy and its symbolic life in twenty-first-century Latin America.
Pablo Ortemberg
CONICET-IIP Universidad Nacional de San Martín; Professor - Researcher; Argentina
Bicentennial celebrations in the 2010s and 2020s: research paths in an open agenda (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico)
In this presentation, I propose, first of all, some guidelines for methodological reflection in light of the questions raised in my own research and that of my colleagues on the phenomenon of bicentennial commemorations in the region in its two waves, around 2010 and those carried out since 2020, which are still ongoing. Next, based on my own research on the bicentennials in Argentina (2010, 2016, 2020—Belgrano's bicentennial during the pandemic—; Brazil (2022), and Mexico (2010 and 2021), I will present some conclusions and open debates on the question of the inclusion-exclusion of ethnic, racialized, and gender diversities in the commemorations: the communicating vessels between particular/universal dates and national dates; the counter-celebrations; and the heterogeneity of forms and political meanings of representation. Finally, I will return to the relevance of the comparative approach—diachronic and synchronic—and the possibilities of addressing the connections and circulations of global technological knowledge and international delegations among national celebrations.
Ignacio Telesca
Universidad Nacional de Formosa - CONICET; Professor - Researcher; Argentina
History, Memory, and Politics in Paraguay: Revisiting the Bicentennial Celebration
More than two decades after the bicentennial celebration of Paraguay's independence (2011), we can revisit the event no longer focusing on what was celebrated or not, or on who the protagonists of the celebration were, but rather on the constructed memory and its reception. The year after the bicentennial celebration, a parliamentary coup was carried out against President Fernando Lugo, and the new historiographical narratives were sidelined in favor of resorting to the old discursive apparatus of the War of the Triple Alliance, justifying the non-intervention of the Mercosur countries. Concepts like "legionario" resurfaced on social media and in the press. The attempt at historiographical renewal and the creation of a new memory was cut by the political events in Paraguay.
Laura Aylén Enrique
CONICET-IDES-EH-Universidad Nacional de San Martín; Professor - Researcher; Argentina
Bicentennials in Rio de la Plata region: marginalized groups in the official celebrations of Argentina and Uruguay
The bicentennial celebrations of Argentina (2010) and Uruguay (2011) were part of the inaugural stage of large-scale public events surrounding the independence processes in the Southern Cone. We propose a comparative analysis of the ways in which indigenous and Afro-descendant groups, historically marginalized in the founding narratives of these countries, were spatially inscribed in the territory during the official celebrations. We understand that the selection of aspects chosen to commemorate these subalternized groups and the territorial anchors in which these memories were embodied conditioned the commemorative events, which reproduce certain historical meanings but can also challenge them. One of the greatest methodological challenges faced was to study these transitory and ephemeral territorial events through a multiplicity of heterogeneous written and audiovisual sources (government websites, national and international press, and “alternative” media) that crystallize their spatiality and the memories of subalternized groups. For our analysis, we looked at the selection of actors and events that the organizing committees of the official events chose to remember, the characteristics of the representations of these groups, the way in which the commemorations were arranged in space, and the location of the activities in relation to the center/periphery of each urban area. We argue that the official staging increased the fragmentary and limited visibility of indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in urban centers, temporarily removing them from their historical marginalization, although their recognition was hindered. This selectivity of memories materialized in two different spatial patterns in the cities that were the epicenters of the commemorations in Argentina and Uruguay.
20260729T173020260729T1900America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires4.2. Bicentennial Commemorations in Latin America: Questions and Sources [ES]SV201MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
