Struggles For Social Rights In Latin America

This is a collection of original essays focusing on social rights in Latin America, covering four areas in particular: subsistence, labor, gender, and race/ethnicity within the original framework of human rights. Topics covered include the environment, AIDS, workers' rights, tourism, and many more.

This is a collection of original essays focusing on social rights in Latin America, covering four areas in particular: subsistence, labor, gender, and race/ethnicity within the original framework of human rights. Topics covered include the environment, AIDS, workers' rights, tourism, and many more.

Despite constitutions that enshrine equality, until recently every state in Latin America permitted longer working hours (in some cases more than double the hours) and lower benefits for domestic workers than other workers. This has, in effect, subsidized a cheap labor force for middle- and upper-class families and enabled well-to-do women to enter professional labor markets without having to negotiate household and care work with their male partners. While elite resistance to reform has been widespread, during the past fifteen years a handful of countries have instituted equal rights. In Care Work and Class, Merike Blofield examines how domestic workers’ mobilization, strategic alliances, and political windows of opportunity, mostly linked to left-wing executive and legislative allies, can lead to improved rights even in a region as unequal as Latin America. Blofield also examines the conditions that lead to better enforcement of rights.

The "Indian question" has come to the forefront of political agendas in contemporary Latin America. In the process, indigenous movements have emerged as important social actors, raising a variety of demands on behalf of native peoples. Regardless of the situation of Indian groups as small minorities or significant sectors, many Latin American states have been forced to consider whether they should have the same status of all citizens or whether they should be granted special citizenship rights as Indians. This book examines the struggle for indigenous rights in eight Latin American countries. Initial studies of indigenous movements celebrated the return of the Indians as relevant political actors, often approaching their struggles as expressions of a common, generic agenda. This collection moves the debate forward by acknowledging the extraordinary diversity among the movements' composition, goals, and strategies. By focusing on the factors that shape this diversity, the authors offer a basis for understanding the specificities of converging and diverging patterns across different countries. The case studies examine the ways in which the Indian question arises in each country, with reference to the protagonism of indigenous movements in the context of the threats and opportunities posed by neo-liberal policies. The complexities posed by the varying demographic weight of indigenous populations, the interrelation of class and ethnicity, and the interplay between indigenous and popular struggles are discussed. The volume concludes that the Indian struggles are having a direct impact on the character of democracy, and in the process contribute to the redefinition of Latin American societies as multicultural.

This book examines the struggles that unfolded in Latin America over the memory of the pasts of political violence experienced by the countries of the continent in the second half of the twentieth century: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the United States, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.

R. Aída Hernández Castillo synthesizes twenty-four years of research and activism among indigenous women's organizations in Latin America, offering a critical new contribution to the field of activist anthropology and for anyone interested in social justice.

This book is an interdisciplinary study of struggles for indigenous self-determination and the recognition of indigenous’ territorial rights in Latin America. Studies of indigenous peoples’ opposition to extractive industries have tended to focus on its economic, political or social aspects, as if these were discrete dimensions of the conflict. In contrast, this book offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of the tensions between indigenous peoples’ territorial rights and the governance of extractive industries and related state developmental policies. Analysing the contentious process pushed by indigenous peoples for implementing pluri-nationality against extractive projects and pro-extractive policies, the book compares the struggle for territorial rights in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Centrally, it argues that indigenous territorial defenses against the extractive industries articulate a politics of self-determination that challenges coloniality as the foundation of the nation-state. The resource governance of the nation-state assumes that indigenous peoples must be integrated or assimilated within multicultural arrangements as ethnic minorities with proprietary entitlements, so they can participate in the benefits of development. As the struggle for indigenous self-determination in Latin America maintains that indigenous peoples must not be considered as ethnic communities with property rights, but as nations with territorial rights, this book argues that it offers a radical re-imagination of politics, development, and constitutional arrangements. Drawing on detailed case studies, this book’s multidisciplinary account of indigenous movements in Latin America will appeal to those with relevant interests in politics, law, sociology and development studies.

This book explores the legacy of the Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health (LASM-CH) movements and other key approaches—including human rights activism and popular opposition to neoliberal governance—that have each distinguished the struggle for collective health in Latin America during the twentieth and now into the twnety-first century. At a time when global health has been pushed to adopt increasingly conservative agendas in the wake of global financial crisis and amidst the rise of radical-right populist politics, attention to the legacies of Latin America’s epistemological innovations and social movement action are especially warranted. This collection addresses three crosscutting themes: First, how LASM-CH perspectives have taken root as an element of international cooperation and solidarity in the health arena in the region and beyond, into the twenty-firstcentury. Second, how LASM-CH perspectives have been incorporated and restyled into major contemporary health system reforms in the region. Third, how elements of the LASM-CH legacy mark contemporary health social movements in the region, alongside additional key influences on collective action for health at present. Working at the nexus of activism, policy, and health equity, this multidisciplinary collection offers new perspective on struggles for justice in twenty-first-century Latin America. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Global Public Health.