Antiracist Movements in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Latin American and Caribbean antiracist movements are part of a broader interweave advocating for social equity. Social movements in the region have a strong tradition and have been pivotal in carving out the acknowledgement of fundamental and collective-based rights for underrepresented populations, mostly Black and Indigenous peoples. The continuum of colonial violence, alongside the struggles and achievements of social movements, marks the history of Latin American countries and delineates the intricacies of the region's current challenges. As the constitutive foundation of the Latin American nation-states, the legacies of colonialism still operate in manifold ways. The hierarchies and related relational matrix created by the mestizo racialised social order hinge on its pervasiveness in shaping people’s lives. Racism is one of the interconnected power axes contributing to devising a deeply unequal system for distributing resources among social groups. The impacts of such inequality are noticeable today — in general, the region has striking levels of social inequality, violence, democratic ruptures and institutional weaknesses, human rights violations, and insecurity. Therefore, there is a linkage between the challenges the region faces today and the legacies of a racialised social order. Those challenges range from environmental conflicts arising from an extractivist development model fuelling climate change, restricted social mobility, LGTBQ+ population and women’s rights being threatened, democratic decaying, organised crime and gang violence, the rise of far-right wing parties promoting anti-migration discourses amid a profound security crisis. All these problems have a tight grip on a racialised dimension, which can, thus, be analysed under the antiracist lens. In the age of post-raciality, addressing racism and its severe impacts on Black and Indigenous populations is an urgent global matter. The responses emerging from antiracist movements, grassroots organisations, and collectives across the region are worth being widely discussed to draw lessons from them in comparative politics. For this year’s ECPR, the panel "Antiracist Movements in Latin America and the Caribbean" is part of the "Global Challenges, Regional Responses: Latin American Politics in Comparative Perspective" section. The panel aims to engage in discussions that expand our common knowledge of the strategies fashioned by antiracist movements to expose and tackle racism in its micro, mezzo, and macro dimensions, as well as the commonalities and divergences in local and regional responses from antiracist Black and Indigenous movements. We welcome papers that use race as an analytical category for examining the role of racism in the region’s overlapping problems. We value works unpacking antiracist strategies on the connection between territory and environmental struggles and climate change, indigenous knowledge and epistemic diversity, the role of antiracist movements in representative democracy, legislative and policy answers to racism, etc. Finally, the panel embraces papers exploring questions dealing with how the legacies of colonialism operate in the re(production) of racism in contemporary societies in Latin America and the Caribbean, embodied antiracist resistance, everyday strategies, and their intersections with gender, class, age, etc., and the connections between multiculturalism, racial democracy and post-racial discourses and practices. We encourage researchers from diverse backgrounds to join the dialogue.

Title	Details
Struggle for Freedom, Racism, and Legacies of Enslavement in the Colombian Insular Caribbean	View Paper Details
Life within the Margins: Combatting the Archival Erasure of Cuban and Puerto Rican Women of African Descent in the Wake of "Racially Democratic" Nation-Building Projects (1815-1897)	View Paper Details