MADRES DE PLAZA DE MAYO: NARRATIVE AND SPATIAL STRATEGIES

Abstract

In 2021, Madres de Plaza de Mayo, one of the most resilient and relevant social movements in Latin America, completes 44 years of existence. Their struggle for human rights runs through the history of the city of Buenos Aires and creates a paradigm for the relationship between social movements and the production of Latin American cities. The purpose of this article is to make a spatial investigation of the movement's trajectory and understand the relationship between the territorialities produced by the Madres’ actions and the construction of the narratives that permeate the group and its members. Based on the concepts of spaces of appearance, by Hannah Arendt, and territory, by Rogerio Haesbaert, we intend to map the journey of the Madres from the house to the square and, later, to other territories. The research method involves the analysis of poems and prose from the book El Corazón en la Escritura and the mapping of the key spaces for the struggle, locating the trajectories and spatializing the group's narratives. The article concludes that the public-private and maternal-political binaries, common in the analysis of social movements headed by women, do not account for the territorial and narrative complexities of the Madres and do not do justice to the movement's contribution to another production of space and to the confrontation against issues commonly related to Latin American nations.