The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights' Activism: Embeddedness, Emotions, and Social Movements

Abstract

The Madres de Plaza de Mayo is a community of mothers and human rights activists in Argentina that has remained active for almost three decades. Based on a qualitative analysis of archival and ethnographic data assembled through fieldwork, this article examines the crucial role emotions play in maintaining the Madres' embeddedness in territorially dispersed social networks. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo perform emotional labor within their movement to sustain their activism. The Madres' emotional geographies emerge through their individual and collective practices in key places, which are themselves layered with emotions. Over the years, such practices have allowed the Madres to create widespread networks of activists and to sustain a social movement community that extends all across Argentina. The Madres' emotional labor and their sustained activism over time demonstrate that an open sense of place (place understood as a network of social relations that flow across space) is more important than the local (as a bounded geographic scale) in explaining how embeddedness, cohesion in social networks, and activism are maintained. This account of the embeddedness of actors in social networks is consistent with current relational views of spatiality in human geography.

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