Convenors
María Ximena Dávila, University of Texas at Austin
mxdavila@utexas.edu (corresponding scholar)
Daniela Sánchez-López, University of Texas at Austin
danielasanchez@utexas.edu.
In numerous marginalized urban and rural contexts across Latin America, grassroots organizations are actively engaged in efforts to enhance the quality of everyday life by reducing precarity, improving affordability, mitigating violence, and promoting health and well-being. They do so against a backdrop of overlapping and entrenched economic, spatial, racial, and gender-based inequalities that are deeply rooted and structurally reinforced. Yet, amid this durable inequality, Latin America has also been a stage for powerful contention (Reygadas & Gootenberg, 2010). The region’s history is rich with massive protest and grassroots activism: Indigenous, peasant, and labor movements in countries like Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Bolivia have pushed back against marginalization, while student and feminist groups in Chile and Argentina have led some of the most dynamic social mobilizations in recent years (Rice 2021; Bidegain & von Bülow 2021; Rossi 2021; García Serrano 2021; Wolford 2010). This makes Latin America a prime space to investigate grassroots initiatives.
Classic social movement scholarship tends to concentrate on disruptive, extraordinary episodes of mass protest (Tilly, 1978; McAdam, 1989; Rossi, 2021). The aftermath of transgressive mobilization and its transformation into enduring initiatives that sustain everyday social reproduction remains substantially underexplored. Further, sociology’s disciplinary preoccupation with domination has left the analysis of effective struggle against oppression less attended. While understanding social domination remains fundamental, for this panel, we call for interdisciplinary efforts that make visible the everyday efforts of communities to make life more livable and worthy in contexts marked by inequality and violence. Building on emergent scholarship on persistence strategies (Lang & Auyero, 2024; Auyero, Lang, & Servián, 2025), we welcome papers that use ethnography to analyze what makes collective action successful, highlighting the gender, class, and race dimensions of these mechanisms, and bringing insights that bridge currently discrete literatures.
With this in mind, this panel invites presentations that explore how ethnography can illuminate the strategies grassroots organizations use to address common problems and persist over time. We welcome scholarship that addresses the following questions: How do extraordinary collective actions
evolve into enduring community initiatives? How do such organizations navigate stark economic and political changes in the region? How do they build relationships with broader communities, the state, and other organizations? The panel seeks to put ethnographic research projects in conversation to identify common strategies employed by grassroots organizations, as well as analyzing differences between empirical cases.
Keywords
collective action, persistence, social movements, Latin America, grassroots organizing.
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
political sociology, social movement theory, environmental sociology, the sociology of gender, ethnographic research.
References
Auyero J., Lang A., Servián S. 2025. “A Thing that Works: A Case Study of Success at the Urban Margins.” Journal of Latin American Studies. Online First:1-25. doi:10.1017/S0022216X25101193
Bidegain, G. and M. von Bülow. 2021. “Student Movements in Latin America.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America, X. Bada and L. Rivera-Sánchez. Oxford University Press.
García Serrano, F. 2021. Del Sueño a La Pesadilla: El Movimiento Indígena En Ecuador. FLASCO Ecuador.
Lang, A. and J. Auyero. 2024. “What Works: Lessons on Fighting Oppression and Building Power from Across the Globe.” Public Books. Accessed June 26, 2025. https://www.publicbooks.org/what-works-lessons-on-fighting-oppression-and-building-power-from-across-the-globe/
McAdam, D. 1989. Freedom Summer. Oxford University Press.
Reygadas, L. & P. Gootenberg, eds. 2010. Indelible Inequalities in Latin America: Insights from History, Politics, and Culture. Duke University Press.
Rice, R. 2021. “Indigenous Movements in Latin America: Tensions, Contradictions, Possibilities.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America, X. Bada and L. Rivera-Sánchez. 373-389. Oxford University Press.
Rossi, F. M. 2021. “Labor Movements in Latin America.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America, X. Bada and L. Rivera-Sánchez, eds. 325-338. Oxford University Press.
Tilly, C. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Longman.
Wolford, W. 2010. This Land is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil. Duke University Press.