Abstract:This article unveils the gendered, racialized, and silent sexual dimensions at play in the criminalization of Milagro Sala, the charismatic and controversial female indigenous leader of the Organización Barrial Tupac Amaru in Argentina. It argues this organization was able to contest narrow definitions of women's welfare used in local state bureaucracies in terms of certain redistribution and recognition, while fostering complex and controversial state-movement relations in terms of transparency and accountability. In important ways, Tupac Amaru politicized the “undeserving (...) poor.” Women who did not conform to the moral prescriptions that patrol the conduct of poor women were the backbone and the leadership of the organization. Drawing on interviews, fieldwork materials, and documents gathered between 2009 and 2017, this paper shows that the main problems created by the criminalization of the organization were not only the arbitrary detention of Sala. Equally significant, the criminalization also brought about sudden negative changes in poor women and LGBT popular sectors' living conditions, employment opportunities, and access to health care, alongside the overall erosion of minimal gains in social and economic rights. It ultimately undermined the legitimacy of rights-based demands of popular and indigenous sectors in a multi-ethnic society. (shrink)

This article looks at the ways in which Spanish American women exploited the political and social turmoil of the late 18th and early 19th centuries to move beyond their traditional sphere of influence in the home. Women directly participated in the Túpac Amaru Rebellion (1780–1781) and in the Wars of Independence (1810–1825) providing funding, food supplies, infrastructure and reinforcements for the troops, and nursing the wounded. Others contributed by taking part in the physical fighting (both openly and disguised as (...) men) and a few led troops into battle. This article looks at some of the individuals behind the statistics and reveals their determination to participate despite the punishments imposed on women found guilty of disloyalty to the Spanish crown. Spanish colonial law had to be amended to ensure that women dissidents were given as equally harsh sentences as men. In the immediate post-independence period, rather than be seen as misfits or a threat to the patriarchal system, several of these women were given national awards. (shrink)

In this papper, we will do a travel to the history about Movimiento 19 de Abril, a Colombian guerrilla, and one of their units: the Batallón América. This army was conformed for four groups: M-19 and Movimiento Armado Quintín Lame, Alfaro Vive Carajo, and Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru. This battalion was a perfect example about the relation of M-19 with national and international guerrillas, and the Socialist International. Across this paper, we will show a primal idea about the internationalism (...) in the Latin American guerrillas, its effects in the posterior history from these guerrillas, the important paper from the Batallón América in their strategy about the cooperation between guerrillas in Colombia and the creation of a transnational revolutionary army in the Latin American continent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface In this issue, one cluster of articles presents scholarly and creative work focused on Latin American queer politics. Each article reveals queer challenges—theoretical, aesthetic, political, ideological, libidinal, corporeal—to prevailing logics of heteronormativity and neoliberalism, and to asymmetrical processes of knowledge production and circulation. Rafael de la Dehesa examines how political responses to AIDS in Brazil enabled surprising alliances between NGOs, activists, and the state, which produced radical social (...) change and, at times, engendered exclusion and vulnerability. Christine Keating and Amy Lind’s essay explores indigenous and transfeminist efforts to transform the Ecuadorian constitution, producing new conceptions of both state and family. Constanza Tabbush and Melina Gaona trace the rise and fall of a neighborhood organization in Argentina called Tupac Amaru, which provided a space of encounter for lesbian, non-gender normative, and marginalized women. In a review of recent work on Latin American sexualities, Juan Camilo Galeano Sánchez finds LGBT people across Latin America and the diaspora deploying “queer revolutionary gestures” as a form of resistance to social, political, and economic marginalization. María Amelia Viteri’s commentary examines the intellectual trajectories of a network of queer scholars from across the Americas. The art essay by Tara Daly engages Iquitos artist Christian Bendayán’s visual efforts to queer prevailing conceptions of the Amazon, and tatiana de la tierra’s* poems offer a deep celebration of female eroticism. * We have spelled tatiana de la tierra’s name in lower case in accordance with the wishes of her literary executors. 256Preface Another cluster of essays highlights reproductive rights and race in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez and Lynn M. Morgan study the tactics that right-wing, US-based organizations deploy against sexual and reproductive rights in Mexico and Central America. Jennifer L. Shoaff examines the Dominican cultural construction of the Haitian mother as “beggar-mother,” which shores up ideas of pathological black maternity. Ana-Maurine Lara’s article considers the gendered and sexual logics of anti-blackness, and anti-Haitianism, in the Dominican Republic. The provocation for our cluster on representations of queer identities and politics in Latin America came, broadly, from developments in Latin America in recent decades: the wave of LGBT organizing around issues from same-sex marriage to transgender rights, alongside the continued, if not escalated, violence against trans, travestis, and other queer people in countries throughout the region. More immediately, it came from a symposium on Latin American/Latin@ queer and sexuality studies, cosponsored by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS) and the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), Amherst, in March 2013. Several of the papers published here were initially presented at that event and have been complemented and extended by other analytical essays and creative material on similar questions. Based on their familiarity with the debates, Sonia Alvarez, UMass CLACLS Director and professor of political science, and Amy Lind, head of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, offered invaluable input for this issue, and we thank them for their intellectual generosity and collaborative spirit. Three of the articles in the cluster take us inside the complex relations between queer movements and neoliberal institutions, illustrating the distinctive ways these dynamics play out in different national contexts and political configurations. In “NGOs, Governmentality, and the Brazilian Response to AIDS: A Multistranded Genealogy of the Current Crisis,” Rafael de la Dehesa argues that the AIDS crisis served as a “doorway to the state” for marginalized actors, such as sex workers and LGBT activists. These groups pushed for and won a national AIDS program that dramatically reduced rates of mortality and new infections in Brazil in the 1990s through universal access to treatment and a nonstigmatizing approach to prevention. Its success was based, in part, on World Bank Preface 257 loans and, in part, on a participatory model of public-private partnerships characteristic of neoliberal government. De la Dehesa argues that, “Far from encapsulating activism in a seamless web of biopolitical management... nodes of articulation between officials and activists became sites of conflict and productive tension.” However, while the alliances between NGOs... (shrink)

This paper focusses on the negotiations in which many subaltern peoples engage within contexts of unequal power relations in colonial settings like eighteenth-century Peru. The trial and ‘confession’ of Micaela Bastidas, an indigenous mestizo and wife of the Inca rebel Túpac Amaru II, allows for an analysis of the complexity of her subjectivity and agency, both as products of colonial impositions and Andean notions of gender complementarity and power. As a woman, wife of a noble curaca and member of (...) a conquered indigenous population, she defied rigidly bipolar colonial ethnic and gender norms. Skilfully engaging in ‘rituals of subordination’ through the manipulation of discriminatory colonial expectations, Micaela refused to share what was expected of her, subverting colonial gender and power hierarchies, albeit momentarily. (shrink)

This paper is about the represcussion that Túpac Amaru's rebellions had in the Government of the Tucumán. Here the intervention of the «bajo pueblo» took forms and very different ways to the Peruvians and altoperuvians, since they was incorporated in the «milicias» to the repression. The population of the Tucumán had a social composition diflerent to the Andean one, with a proportion a lot smaller than indigenous and with another organization leuel. The «milicianos» rebelled and disobeyed their leaders for (...) own causes. They was disorganized forms of protest in front of a cracked colonial system of authority and out. (shrink)