Politics And The Pink Tide

How can we create a model of politics that reaches beyond the nation-state, and beyond settler-colonialism, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism? In Beyond the Pink Tide, Macarena Gómez-Barris explores the alternatives of recent sonic, artistic, activist, visual, and embodied cultural production. By focusing on radical spaces of potential, including queer, youth, trans-feminist, Indigenous, and anticapitalist movements and artistic praxis, Gómez-Barris offers a timely call for a decolonial, transnational American Studies. She reveals the broad possibilities that emerge by refusing national borders in the Americas and by seeing and thinking beyond the frame of state-centered politics. Concrete social justice and transformation begin at the level of artistic, affective, and submerged political imaginaries—in Latin America and the United States, across South-South solidarities, and beyond.

Seeking Rights from the Left offers a unique comparative assessment of left-leaning Latin American governments by examining their engagement with feminist, women's, and LGBT movements and issues. Focusing on the “Pink Tide” in eight national cases—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela—the contributors evaluate how the Left addressed gender- and sexuality-based rights through the state. Most of these governments improved the basic conditions of poor women and their families. Many significantly advanced women's representation in national legislatures. Some legalized same-sex relationships and enabled their citizens to claim their own gender identity. They also opened opportunities for feminist and LGBT movements to press forward their demands. But at the same time, these governments have largely relied on heteropatriarchal relations of power, ignoring or rejecting the more challenging elements of a social agenda and engaging in strategic trade-offs among gender and sexual rights. Moreover, the comparative examination of such rights arenas reveals that the Left's more general political and economic projects have been profoundly, if at times unintentionally, informed by traditional understandings of gender and sexuality. Contributors: Sonia E. Alvarez, María Constanza Diaz, Rachel Elfenbein, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Niki Johnson, Victoria Keller, Edurne Larracoechea Bohigas, Amy Lind, Marlise Matos, Shawnna Mullenax, Ana Laura Rodríguez Gustá, Diego Sempol, Constanza Tabbush, Gwynn Thomas, Catalina Trebisacce, Annie Wilkinson

Following events such as the Cochabamba Water War in Bolivia and the election of Hugo Chavez to the presidency in Venezuela, Latin American politics over the past two decades have been radicalized, their governments populated with former activists and trade union leaders. Yet, in the past few years, Latin America's left have suffered many setbacks and reactionary challenges, leading many to wonder whether the "Pink Tide" is now on the wane. In this book, renowned Latin Americanist Mike Gonzalez explores the rocky course of the left in Latin American politics. Although the left-wing developments of the past twenty years have been widely celebrated by activists, Gonzalez cautions us to consider the problems and conflicts that have arisen during their tenure as well. Through critical examination of the failings of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela, Gonzalez is able to identify both weaknesses and strengths, and to suggest possible future pathways for the renewal of the left in nations across Latin America. Providing a critical but sympathetic analysis of the records of the left governments across the continent, Gonzalez offers a refreshing reflection on the prospects and future of Latin American politics.

Throughout the 2000s Latin America transformed itself into the leading edge of anti-neoliberal resistance in the world. What is left of the Pink Tide today? What is their relationship to the explosive social movements that propelled them to power? As China's demand slackens for Latin American commodities, will governments continue to rely on natural resource extraction? In an accessible and penetrating volume, Jeffery Webber examines the most important questions facing the Latin American left today.

The left-wing Pink Tide movement that swept across Latin America seems now to be overturned, as a new wave of free-market thinkers emerge across the continent. This book analyses the emergence of corporate power within Latin America and the response of egalitarian movements across the continent trying to break open the constraints of the state. Through an ethnographically grounded and localized anthropological perspective, this book argues that at a time when the regular structures of political participation have been ruptured, the Latin American context reveals multiple expressions of egalitarian movements that strive (and sometimes momentarily manage) to break through the state’s apparatus.

Politics and the Pink Tide reveals how economic policy choices and the reach of political parties in civil society informed the types of protest that leftist governments in Latin America confronted during the Pink Tide.

This volume examines the ways in which the socio-economic elites of the region have transformed and expanded the material bases of their power from the inception of neo-liberal policies in the 1970s through to the so-called progressive ‘pink tide’ governments of the past two decades. The six case study chapters—on Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala—variously explore how state policies and even United Nations peace-keeping missions have enhanced elite control of land and agricultural exports, banks and insurance companies, wholesale and import commerce, industrial activities, and alliances with foreign capital. Chapters also pay attention to the ways in which violence has been deployed to maintain elite power, and how international forces feed into sustaining historic and contemporary configurations of power.

This book evaluates the record of the Left in Brazil and Venezuela, two key cases of the “pink tide” wave. The wave of Left governments that emerged across Latin America in the early 2000s – a process dubbed the “pink tide” – has been on the wane in recent years. The Left regimes that, at one point, seemed unbeatable have either been defeated at the ballot, ousted through coups or have had to contend with increasing economic and political conflicts which have nullified many of their achievements. This book argues – like many voices on the Left today – that the waning of the “pink tide” in the region must be viewed in the context of the Left’s inability to initiate radical structural changes in its constituencies. At the same time, however, the book makes the case for a more nuanced and balanced evaluation of the development record of the Left than is often done. In doing so, it seeks to go beyond the reform–revolution binary that has blinkered recent assessments and intends to highlight alternative paths that the Left could have taken.