The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human ......Human Rights' Activism: Embeddedness, Emotions, and Social Movements Fernando J. Bosco Department of Geography, San Diego

The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights' Activism: Embeddedness,Emotions, and Social MovementsAuthor(s): Fernando J. BoscoSource: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp.342-365Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of American GeographersStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3694051 .

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

and Social Movements Fernando J. Bosco

Department of Geography, San Diego State University

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. Key Words: embeddedness, emotions, networks, social movements.

he Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) is a long-established and well- known group of human rights activists formed by

mothers of people "disappeared" (illegally detained, kidnapped, tortured, and killed) as a result of state- sponsored terrorism in Argentina from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The group's origins can be traced to the gathering in Buenos Aires in 1977 of a small group of middle-aged women who were demanding the return of their disappeared sons and daughters through innovative public displays of civil disobedience. Over the years, the Madres' mobilization expanded beyond their demands for truth and justice regarding the disappearances of their sons and daughters. Today, the Madres are involved in the struggle for human, civil, and political rights in Argentina, Latin America, and beyond. Among the distinguishing, well-known features of this social movement community are the weekly silent walks and marches in plazas around the country that they continue performing after almost thirty years of activism. Such place-based collective rituals seem less dramatic today in the context of democratization in Argentina, but they still play an important role in mobilizing activists' affective bonds and creating a sense of continuity and currency for the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and the human rights movement in general (Bosco 2001, 2004).

The regular mobilization of affective bonds among members of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo highlights the crucial relation between social networks, emotions, and geography. After several decades of work on the dynamics of collective action, social movement scholars have developed a stock of knowledge on the crucial role that social networks play in the recruitment and mobilization of activists (Snow, Zurcher, and Ekland-Olson 1980; Rosenthal et al. 1997; Diani and McAdam 2003). Extensive research on a variety of social movements across historical and geographic contexts has demonstrated that the social networks that bond people together are often responsible for their transformation into activists and political actors (V. Taylor and Whittier 1992). Geographers have theorized and documented the geographic constitution of social movements and other resistance efforts (Routledge 1993; Pile and Keith 1997; Miller 2000) and have shown that the development of networks of activists is often accompanied by their mo- bility and simultaneous material and symbolic territorialization across space (Pile 1997; Routledge 2000; Bosco 2001). Inspired by recent work on the emotional dimensions of collective action, other scholars also have begun analyzing how emotional bonds relate to the construction of activist networks (Jasper and Poulsen 1995; V. Taylor 1995; Jasper 1998; Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001). As V. Taylor and Rupp (2002, 142) have

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 96(2), 2006, pp. 342-365 ? 2006 by Association of American Geographers Initial submission, February 2004; revised submission, November 2004; final acceptance, July 2005

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.



The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human Rights' Activism 345

that is as much about the struggle for human rights as it is about shared affection and friendship.

I enjoyed an unexpected advantage. Several women opened up to me easily because my appearance, my interests, my background, and even my age reminded them of their disappeared sons. Many of the women adopted a maternal attitude toward me, asking me about my personal life and giving me advice on a wide variety of subjects. Many of them cried when we talked about their disappeared sons and daughters and we shared moments filled with strong emotions that I had never anticipated. These short reflections and personal impressions of the fieldwork experience are crucial to understanding the final text of this article. My research on the geographies of the Madres has been molded and shaped by my experiences in the field, by the questions I asked (and the way I asked them), by the answers I received, and by my perceptions of the Madres and by their perceptions of me. As Kondo (1990) explains, all stories are partial and located and screened through the narrator's eye/I, and all theories are embedded in the practice of the ethnographic inquiry. This article is no exception.

Throughout this account, I ground abstract theoretical concepts such as embeddedness by means of analysis of the narratives, historical documents, photographs, and field notes. Like previous qualitative analyses of embeddedness that relied on ethnographic methods and historical analysis (Uzzi 1996), the research approach involved moving back and forth between the data and the theoretical framework. Data from archives and interviews were organized using QSR NUD*IST Vivo, a qualitative data analysis software that facilitates browsing, searching, linking, and coding diverse qualitative data documents in a single platform. The software was used to link and code data from the different sources into both broad and specific analytical categories; these categories emerged out of the intersection of the framework that guides this study and the observations, narratives, and historical data obtained during the fieldwork. The analysis pays close attention to the ways in which these activists first mobilized through the development of interpersonal networks of grieving mothers, then shows how the Madres' emotional work has been crucial to their sustained embeddedness for almost three decades in a territorially widespread network of activists.

Networks, Social Movements, and Emotional Geographies: Positioning and Developing the Argument

Scholars have recently "rediscovered" emotions in the study of social movements (e.g., Jasper 1997, 1998;

Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2000, 2001; V. Taylor and Rupp 2002). It is not as if emotions did not have a place in the study of collective action before but, as Aminzade and McAdam (2002) explain, the treatment of emotions was riddled with problematic assumptions-such as equating emotions with irrationality. Even in the study of '"new social movements" that characterized a great deal of the field in the 1980s and early 1990s, emotions were either absent or research tended to subsume emotions into cognitive processes (such as "identity" and "culture"; see Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2000). Scholars today examine in more detail how emotions "give ideas, ideologies, identities, and even interests their power to motivate" (Jasper 1998, 420) and how the strategic mobilization of emotions allows for new forms of activism and new organizational styles. For example, Jasper's (1998) account of the role of emotions in protest and social movements distinguishes between affective (posi- tive or negative affects such as loyalties to or fears of individuals, groups, places, symbols) and reactive (tran- sitory responses to external events and information) emotions. This is symptomatic of a more detailed treatment in which scholars offer explanations of how different emotions are related to different outcomes of collective action.

Such new theoretical developments must be situated in the context of an increased attention to the role of emotions in the social sciences (Barbalet 1998, 2002; Widdowfield 2000). The influence of feminist scholarship in the social sciences has helped scholars rethink the relations between emotions, knowledge, and reason, and, as Jaggar (1997, 193) argues, has contributed to the construction of "conceptual models that demonstrate the mutually constitutive rather than oppositional relation between reason and emotion." Human geography witnessed increased attention to emotions in the feminist and cultural corners of the discipline (Nash 1998; Widdowfield 2000; Aitken and Marchant 2003; David- son and Bondi 2004) as scholars began seeing emotions as cultural products often reproduced as embodied experiences (Metha and Bondi 1999). Currently, there are calls for developing a broader geographical agenda that is sensitive to the emotional and affective dimensions of everyday practices and social processes (K. Anderson and Smith 2001). From this perspective, the goal is to recognize and interrogate the role of emotions in the constitution of the spatiality of social relations in all dimensions and practices of human experience.

One of the challenges in moving ahead with such a project is the unsettled debate over the nature of emotions and the definition of affect, not just in geography but across disciplines.6 While a fully-fledged geographic



346 Bosco

approach to the emotional is still in the works, some geographers have begun to offer insightful comments. For example, in a paper that traces the different ways in which the emotional figures in research in different disciplines, Thrift (2004) argues for thinking spatially and politically about affect. His argument is complex because he attempts to capture different "translations" of affect and at the same time recognize that there is no stable definition of it. What I find compelling in Thrift's ideas about affect is his description of affect as a form of embodied knowledge and practice, or, as he puts it, as a "different kind of intelligence about the world" (Thrift 2004, 60). To a large extent he sees the affective as a nonrepresentational and context-dependent phenome- non. This approach is consistent with the work of ge- ographer Nancy Ettlinger (2004), who also recently argued for a nonessentialist treatment of emotions and explained the ways in which emotions can be seen as continuous phenomena that move with individuals across contexts and over space-time.

Recent sociological and constructivist understanding of emotions sees emotions as collectively shaped complexes and shared meanings that arise out of sets of relations among humans and nonhumans in specific contexts. In a manner that builds on some of Thrift's and Ettlinger's recent ideas, Burkitt (2002, 153) argues for a relational understanding of emotions:

Emotions have meaning only in the context of relations, involving active bodily states or feelings and the speech genres through which we attempt to articulate those feelings. Emotions are complexes because they are products of both the body and discourse yet are reducible to neither... emotion is composed of both the material and the ideal, of both matter and meaning within the context of cultural relations. Because of this, body and mind, emotions and consciousness must also be seen as interrelated phenomena, the one contained within the other.

A focus on emotions as complexes and as a relational achievement is an opportunity to think further about the constitution of collective action and about different geographies. Some of the explicit attention to emotions and activism in geography (e.g., Pulido 2003) is beginning to overlap with another well-established area of research in collective action, the analysis of social movement networks. Social networks are credited with binding activists together and with playing crucial roles in the mobilization of activists. But at the analytical level, the research on social movement networks has focused almost exclusively on network patterns (e.g., see Rosenthal et al. 1985, 1997; Diani 1995; Caniglia 2001) and on analysis of structural forms (Knoke 1990; Burt

1992). For many years this literature has been silent on how the construction of such networks contributes to the maintenance of collective action and, specifically, to the internal cohesion of either formal social movement organizations or more informal groups of activists.7

Some research has begun to pay more attention to subjective dimensions of social networks, such as to the ways individuals and groups imagine and feel their connection to certain networks. For example, many have taken B. Anderson's (1991) notion of "imagined community" to make such points. Recent research on transnational women's organizations from the late nineteenth century through World War II has also demonstrated that feelings of sisterhood and love were crucial in the creation of transnational networks and that such networks were not constrained by affiliation and national rivalries (V. Taylor and Rupp 2002). Such findings confirm that activists often connect with others by means of shared imaginings of communities and networks based on emotion cultures and shared affection-even if actual physical interactions are minimal. The importance of the affective and the emotional needs to be further developed from a geographic perspective. For example, by thinking about emotions in the relational terms outlined above, it is possible to examine the relations between the emotions of activism and the networks they help create to uncover geographies that may not be readily discernible otherwise. In other words, if, as Burkitt (2002) argues, emotions are complexes of discourses and practices that acquire meaning in the context of relations, such relational complexes certainly must create their own geographies.

Connecting Emotions with Embeddedness from a Geographic Perspective

Explicitly acknowledging that emotions help create specific network geographies is a necessary move because the connections between emotions and geographic discussions of key network concepts such as embeddedness remain tenuous and in need of further elaboration.8 In his seminal article on economic action and social structure, sociologist Mark Granovetter (1985) offers an account of human action that avoids both undersocial- ized (e.g., extreme rational choice) and oversocialized (e.g., cultural determinism) views by defining social relations structurally and arguing that all human behavior is embedded in networks of interpersonal relations. Granovetter's work has received wide attention and its applicability and implications have expanded across the social sciences, including economic sociology and or-




recently argued, much of the process of social movement mobilization is performed by activists as "emotional labor" that often involves "channeling, transforming, legitimating and managing one's own and others' emotions and expressions of emotions in order to cultivate and nurture the social networks that are the building blocks of social movements."

Despite recent attention to the relation between emotions and geography, there is a need for research that specifies the processes through which emotional geographies emerge. In the case of social movements, specific attention to emotions is critical to explain how activists maintain their embeddedness in social networks that extend across space and over time. By bringing emotions into the picture, it is possible to unlock the concept of embeddedness from its implicit association with the local and cast its spatiality in wider terms. My argument in this article is that the emotional dimensions of social networks-social relations built around reciprocal affection, for example-are crucial for the emergence, sustainability, and cohesion of activists in social movements. Moreover, when the emotional is incorporated into an understanding of embeddedness, the spatiality of social cohesion becomes more dynamic. Embeddedness does not necessarily remain dependent on relations of physical geographic proximity or on a locality, as it is typically assumed but, rather, evolves into a geographically flexible process that embraces a relational understanding of place. However, place still matters in a relational understanding of embededdness. Places are themselves often layered with emotional content and can thus further the embeddedness of actors in networks by contributing to cement affective bonds.

The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and the Continuity of Activism

The Madres' activism has already received the attention of several scholars (e.g., see Navarro 1989; Jelin 1990; Bouvard 1994; D. Taylor 1997) in the context of an extensive literature on contemporary social movements in Latin America (Eckstein 1989; Escobar and Alvarez 1992; Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998).

A subsection of the literature on Latin American social movements is concerned with specifying how women's activism is shaped by specific constructions of gender, political identities, and everyday practices (e.g., Radcliffe and Westwood 1993), and the Madres' activism has served as an ideal case study for research on this topic. Diana Taylor (1997) analyzed the public activities of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo as a performance where

motherhood has occupied a central role, arguing that even though the Madres are an example of successful women's mobilization in Latin America, the movement drew on existing myths and narratives of motherhood and therefore did not challenge the dominant patriar- chal rules of Argentine society. She notes however that the power of the Madres' performance is that, by being out in the Plaza de Mayo, they brought motherhood out of the domestic closet, showed that motherhood is also a social construct, and opened new spaces of representa- tion for Argentine women (D. Taylor 1997, 185). Ge- ographers have also highlighted the significance of the social and physical spaces occupied by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo relative to the prevailing status and image of women in Argentina (Scarpaci and Frazier 1993) and have similarly analyzed the limitations of the Madres' activities for an effective feminist politics of resistance (Radcliffe 1993).

My analysis of the Madres acknowledges the existing research on the group and on Latin American social movements in general, and takes these literatures as entry points for examining the emotional dimensions of the Madres' activism that have allowed them to become deeply embedded in interpersonal networks, contributing to their sustained activism over time. Indeed, one of the puzzling dimensions of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo that has yet to be explicitly analyzed is the duration of their activism. Therefore, my concern in this article is also with the effectiveness of the Madres, not in terms of their ability to create explicit feminist politics of resistance but, rather, in terms of their capacity to sustain collective action and mobilization over a long period of time-one of the challenges that social movements typically face.

The duration of the Madres' activism is interesting because of the trajectory that the Madres have followed for more than two decades. After their initial gatherings in the Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires, the Madres expanded geographically, recruiting more members and becoming a social movement community with its own practices of territorialization and cohesion over a period of almost thirty years.' Some have pointed out that, in spite of the initial mobilizing effectiveness of the Madres, the group has been riddled with internal conflicts resulting from disagreements over both leadership and the goals of their activism (Bouvard 1994). Such disagreements led to an organizational division in 1986, when a group of mothers of the disappeared formed a separate organization named Madres de Plaza de Mayo- Linea Fundadora and another group remained united under the name Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo.2

In spite of diverse organizational affiliations and disagreements regarding tactical issues in their struggle for



344 Bosco

human rights in Argentina, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo remain active today. Their members are scattered in more than twenty cities in Argentina and Madres de Plaza de Mayo "support groups" are spread out across Europe and North America, forming a network of activists that spans from the local to the global. From the perspective of the organizational geographies of social movements, one of the most interesting features about the Madres today is that these groups of women constitute a network of activists where multiple allegiances give place to a complex web of interactions among individual members and formal organizational structures.3 Interestingly, at the more personal and experiential levels of activism, the network of Madres remains unified and cohesive irrespective of organizational differences and affiliations. Despite their diverse organizational affiliations, they identify themselves first as Madres de Plaza de Mayo, emphasizing their common experiences and collective identities as "mothers of the disappeared."

This subjective and personal dimension of their network is what I am interested in analyzing, with the goal of elucidating the processes through which the Madres developed embedded ties that have allowed them to sustain a cohesive network of activists of wide territorial scope. Specifically, I ask the following questions: How have the Madres maintained their embeddedness in networks that have expanded geographically, even in the face of formal organizational divisions? What role have the affective and the emotional played in the maintenance of unity in a network that is geographically widespread and organi- zationally fragmented? By answering these questions, I seek to explain how the initial participation of the Madres in a loose network of grieving mothers became stronger over time and remains strong today. I also ask: what is the relation between embeddedness, emotions, and place in the case of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo? Is the Madres' performance of "emotional labor" (V Taylor and Rupp 2002) tied to certain practices and embedded in specific places? What can an analysis of the layering of emotional practices in particular places tell us about the broader relation between emotions, embeddedness, and the sustainability of collective action? In the end, I suggest that answers to these questions can broaden our understanding of the geographic dimensions of embeddedness and social cohesion.

Reconstructing the Madres' Emotional Networks: Research Approach

Answering the questions posed above requires developing a conceptual framework that weaves together the

themes of network cohesion, spatiality, and emotions. My account of the emotional networks of the Madres is based on a qualitative analysis of data obtained during fieldwork in Argentina during 1999 and 2000. The data consist of a wealth of archival records (spanning more than two decades) from the majority of the Madres' groups in Argen- tina, a set of in-depth interviews with members of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and observations and reflections on my experiences of being with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in different settings, not as a passive observer but as an active participant in some of their activist routines. Combining analysis of archival data,4 photographs, interviews, and field notes with reflections on my participant observations in the field was crucial to this research. As Burkitt (2002) has explained, emotions are largely nonrepresentational and are not found in discourse alone; there is always an expressive element behind words and thoughts. Data from several sources bring to the surface the personal and emotional experiences of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, focusing particularly on the affective bonds that they developed toward each other over the years.

During the fieldwork, I was interested in the Madres as activists and as people. My goal was to understand, as much as I could, the dynamics of the interpersonal relationships among the women who identify as Madres de Plaza de Mayo. I wanted to provide an account of the emotional geographies of the Madres centered on personal relations and on the Madres' expression and practice of emotions. I was interested in following Pratt's (1998, 431) advice to "conceive social formations as constituted by (rather than in spite of) heterogeneity and to re-conceive social bonding as constituted by (rather than in spite of) difference." I conducted forty open- ended individual and group interviews with members of different Madres groups.5 All of the women interviewed shared experiences, solidarities, and strategic actions that bound them together as Madres de Plaza de Mayo and legitimated their participation in collective action (V. Taylor and Whittier 1992). What sometimes began as formal interviews often morphed in the time that I spent with different women, sometimes on plazas, sometimes walking in the street, sometimes in their offices, and sometimes in casual encounters at their events and even on the subway. Because I wanted to understand how the Madres managed to sustain their community of activists, I attempted to bring to the surface the kinds of personal relations and individual and collective practices that have contributed to the duration of their activism over time. This sometimes required getting to know individual activists at a more personal level, attempting to avoid thinking about them as merely members of the collective. I wanted them to share with me details of a history




ganizational theory (Uzzi 1996, 1999; Gulati and Gar- giulo 1999), comparative politics (Evans 1995; Ansell 2000), governance and democracy studies (Putnam 1993), and geography (Amin and Thrift 1994; Hanson and Pratt 1995; Storper 1997; Ettlinger 2003).

In the wider field of social network (or structural) analysis, the concept of embeddedness has been mostly interpreted in terms of analyses of structural forms of social networks (Knoke 1990; Burt 1992).9 An unfor- tunate legacy of the structural approach is the rigid conceptualization and depiction of relations and connections in the analysis of networks that does not take into account intangible and nonrepresentational dimensions, such as affect. Specifically, a large portion of research on social networks relies on distinctions between "strong" and "weak" ties (see Granovetter 1973). In other words, difference in strength of ties gives rise to differentiated relations in a network. Whereas strong ties (characterized, e.g., by higher reciprocation between two people) create more cohesive bonds, weak ties allow for wider transmission of ideas because they are nonredun- dant and form a unique path between two people. A particular problem within this view is that distinction between the strength of ties is often measured only in terms of frequency of contacts, ignoring the other important dimensions that are part of Granovetter's original formulation, such as emotional content. In effect, Granovetter defines the strength of a tie as a "linear combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding) and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie" (Granovetter 1973, 1361, emphasis added). He is silent, however, about how to operationalize the continuum of strength of ties in actual research.'0

One of the areas that suffers from this limitation is the social movement literature, which is peppered with research that links embeddedness and strong ties to explain the recruitment and mobilization strategies of social movements (McAdam 1988; McAdam and Paul- sen 1993). It is commonly assumed that social movements emerge out of preexisting networks of social relations because individuals are embedded in such networks. Such integration is thought of as being produced and sustained by strong ties, often measured in terms of frequency of contacts or interaction. Embed- dedness and ties based on continued or frequent interaction, however, are not necessarily tied together. Embeddedness is a process that must be seen as operating in a continuum and whose intensity depends on the degree to which relations among actors range from arm's length ties at one end to fully integrated or embedded ties at the other (Uzzi 1996). Therefore, although social

movements are often born out of preexisting networks of social relations, such networks are not necessarily always characterized by embedded or strong ties, if by embedded ties we understand relations built on interpersonal trust, reciprocity, and shared cultural meanings and emotional intensity (Uzzi 1996; V. Taylor and Rupp 2002). A network of activists that over time might develop into one or more formal social movement organizations or social movement communities characterized by a high degree of embedded ties might be born out of the initial grievances and shared emotions affecting a particular group of people who did not know each other previously but who were loosely participating in a variety of overlapping social networks (Ettlinger 2001) based on shared experiences of similar conditions (as in connections forged as a result of a diaspora of ethnic minorities in particular localities). This indicates that embeddedness should be considered as a process that develops and intensifies over time, and that its assessment should give attention to the shared emotional attachments that bind people together in social networks, rather than simply to the frequency of interactions.

Existing discussions of embeddedness also suffer from a limited geographic interpretation. Even though Granovetter's original formulation does not have any explicit geographic aspects, most discussions of the geographic dimensions of embeddedness stress the root- edness of social phenomena in localities and specific settings. Geographers have mostly taken embeddedness to mean what the sociologist Ansell (2003) explicitly defines as territorial embeddedness-that is, embeddedness in reference to the local character of associations." As Ansell (2003, 127) explains, the territorial view assumes that "the more local the territorial scope of an association, the more it may have face to face relations on the basis of territorial residence and proximity." In effect, as Ettlinger (2003) argues, there is an almost explicit association between embeddedness and locality in the geography literature that deals with networks. This association assumes that embeddedness necessarily depends on the interplay between network relations and relations of proximity. The opposite side of this association is the belief that less embeddedness occurs as (geographic) distance increases among members of a network.

This geographic view is incomplete because it reduces our understanding of geographic processes to a single preoccupation with locality or proximity. Even though such a relationship is important to theorize and docu- ment, a more in-depth examination of the geographic characteristics of network relations can result in a richer understanding of the geographic dimensions of embed-



348 Bosco

dedness. Specifically, the relations between embeddedness, social networks, and geography require further analysis because social networks can be either closed or open and can develop either in a setting or a locality (as in a neighborhood) or across space (e.g., a non-place- based association of firms; a cyber community of shared interests). At issue is analyzing how fluid relations in a single network can result in changing spatial manifestations for that same network (Ettlinger 2003; Ettlinger and Bosco 2004).

Studying the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, whose network has been sustained by emotional ties over the years and extends across Argentina and even abroad, my in- terest is to reconnect embeddedness with network dynamics from a relational geographic perspective to show how strong integration in social networks may be created and maintained in places and across space. The questions I ask are: Does embeddedness require territorial association or dependence on a locality? Is geography important to processes of embeddedness only when associations rely on relations of proximity? I am specifically interested in exploring how the processes of embeddedness in a specific social network play out when such a network no longer operates in a "fixed" setting. Throughout the analysis of the Madres' development of a network of activists across Argentina, I ask: How do actors in a network attempt to maintain network embeddedness if (or when) their network becomes geographically extensive and its territorial scope expands? I argue that answering such questions requires consider- ation of the emotional dimensions that are constitutive of, and inseparable from, actors' integration in social networks.

The Organizational Geographies of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo: Emotions, Networks, and Embedded Ties

The origin of the Madres as a group of human rights activists has been narrated by a few scholars (Simpson and Bennett 1985; Bousquet 1994; Bouvard 1994) and by the Madres themselves (Arrosagary 1997; Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1997). The Madres first en- countered each other as they were looking for their sons and daughters in the "offices and security buildings of the security forces, in the courts and the police com- missioners, in hospitals and prisons" (Calvera 1990, 62; quoted in Radcliffe 1993, 107). Accordingly, a "female community of resistance . . . developed within the specific geographical sites in which the military regime was active in exerting physical control and maintaining

ideological hegemony" (Radcliffe 1993, 107). Soon after, the Madres decided to meet weekly in the Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires to exchange the meager information they had been collecting in police stations and military facilities. The Madres' first meetings were not meant to be public demonstrations but they began functioning as such once the police threatened the women with arrests for loitering. This forced the Madres to begin walking, many times on the perimeter of the square to avoid being arrested. Such was the origin of the Madres' weekly marches that were to become their sig- nature public display of activism and mobilization.

Lesser known is the fact that as the first group of Madres met in Buenos Aires, other women started to mobilize in cities across the country. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, numerous groups of mothers of the disappeared emerged and each developed its own public displays of activism, confronting the police and accusing government authorities and officials over the disappearance of their sons and daughters. By 1984, there were twenty-one groups of mothers of the disappeared across Argentina (in addition to those in Buenos Aires) who identified as Madres de Plaza de Mayo, including chapters in the cities of Mendoza, La Rioja, Catamarca, Ledesma, Calilegua, Salta, Concordia, Rio Cuarto, Mar del Plata, Zairate, Quilmes, Punta Alta, Bahia Blanca, Gualeguyachu, La Plata, Tucumin, Ayacucho, Quilmes, Junin, Lomas de Zamora, and San Juan (Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1984a, 13-14; Figure 1). What prompted the emergence of similar groups across Ar- gentina? How did a small group of women in Buenos Aires evolve into a national network of human rights activists?

In remembering their beginning, the Madres are quick to point out that the majority of them had not met each other before their children were kidnapped. Although the women did not know one another, it was their participation in different kinds of neighborhood, family, friendship, political, ethnic, and workplace networks that allowed them access to information about other women in the same situation. Even those women who lived in the relative isolation of rural areas were able to meet other women like themselves through networks of acquaintances. Some of the Madres became activists even before their sons and daughters were disappeared by the military. A member of the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who first met the Madres in 1977, explained:

I used to come and meet the Madres before they took my children, and maybe that is the reason why the military disappeared them. I actually first got in touch with the




* Localities with Chapters Provincial Boundaries

0 200 400 Ledesma

Kilometers

Salta

TucumAen

Catamarca La Rioja Concordia San Juan

Gualeguaychti Zarate Buenos Aires B Pt Al

a Plata

SntJunini

Rio Cuartohia msar Qulmes

anca Punta Alta Mar del Plata P Argentina

Figure 1. The location of groups and chapters of Madres de Plaza de Mayo across Argentina by 1984.

Madres because of my daughter. It was she who urged me to join them. She used to tell me: "Mom, go walk with the Madres in the plaza, those women need the support of people like you." And I paid attention to her, and then, those bastards [the military] kidnapped her.

-(interview with a Madre de Plaza de Mayo, November 1999)

In other cases, how and why the Madres met was a result of their residential location and their participation in neighborhood networks. Several Madres recall that they were recruited in their neighborhoods by a previously unknown woman who inquired door-to-door about whether there were other households in the neighborhood that had experienced the disappearance of a family member. Participation in preexisting networks and

overlapping ties allowed many Madres to access information about each other. The development of these initial ties, however, does not explain how women who had unexpectedly become human rights activists were able to become and sustain a group of activists called Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Something else needs to be considered to explain how the initial participation of the Madres in a loose network of grieving mothers became stronger, and how the Madres developed embedded ties capable of sustaining a network of increasing territorial scope over time. The emotional dimensions of the Ma- dres' activism need to be considered in more detail.

Meeting through different kinds of preexisting and overlapping networks, women from various neighborhoods started to realize they were not alone in their search for their missing sons and daughters. This hap-



350 Bosco

pened first in Buenos Aires and immediately after in other cities throughout the country. A collective identification as grieving mothers, who nevertheless had the strength to confront the government in their search for answers, began to develop among the women of Ar- gentina. As argued elsewhere, the initial meetings of women in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires were crucial for the formation of a large network of activist mothers (Radcliffe 1993; Bosco 2001). Even women who had not been recruited or who had no other prior contact with the Madres came to the Plaza spontaneously to meet others in their same situation. Such was also the case for some women who were coming to Buenos Aires from the provinces in the interior of the country with the hope that in the capital they would find the answers that nobody was willing to give them in their own towns and cities. The Plaza de Mayo became a central gathering place that allowed for the formation of a more stable network in which women became strongly embedded as they developed affective bonds. One of the Madres re- calls: "When I joined [the] Madres I realized I was not the only one. It was beautiful because I began to share, and there is nothing better than that. Alone one cannot accomplish anything; one has to get together to share joy and pain" (interview, September 1999).

This narrative has much in common with those of many other women who identify as Madres de Plaza de Mayo across Argentina, filled with references to issues of overcoming geographic distance, of meeting distant others who at the same time felt "close" and "connected." Many Madres today recall meeting women who had traveled many hours-even days-by bus and train, from distant places in Argentina, just to be in the Plaza de Mayo to meet similar women, to find answers, and, most important, to find comfort and support. Soon after they arrived in Buenos Aires, many women realized they were not going to get any immediate answers from the government about their missing children. Some of the women who had traveled long distances soon felt the need to return to their hometowns to take care of their families. Many others did not have money for more than a few weeks' stay in the city. Other mothers of the disappeared were not able to travel to Buenos Aires and to the plaza at all, and thus remained distant from the fe- rvor of the initial days of the Madres' activism.

These circumstances could have been sufficient to force the dissolution of the fragile newly formed network in which activists were developing embedded ties. The only contacts most of these women had with one another occurred during their few encounters in the Plaza de Mayo under the watchful eye of the police and at some secret meetings at churches and cafes. These few

initial encounters were nonetheless sufficient for the development of a network of embedded ties where affection played a primary role. Much of what sustained the network during times of government repression must be understood in terms of emotional ties-the development of a feeling of belonging to a larger network of women who shared the same grievances. A member of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora explained this process by simply saying: "We stayed together because we were desperate and we were the only ones who understood what was happening to us . .. a desperate mother can do anything for her children" (interview, August 2000).

These emotional bonds became embedded in a new and spatially disparate network, and these embedded ties sustained the network when it was extremely loose and uncoordinated due to the absence of officially organized chapters across the country. For example, according to archival records from both the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora, the majority of the Madres' chapters across the country were "founded" or "officially organized" from the early to the mid-1980s, although Madres de Plaza de Mayo existed across Argentina beginning in 1977, at least three years prior to the inception indicated in the official archival records. In the coastal city of Mar del Plata, south of Buenos Aires, women already identified themselves as Madres de Plaza de Mayo in meetings held in the city's cathedral during 1977, even though the foundational act for this chapter is dated October 1984. Mothers of the disappeared in the city of Mendoza in western Argentina first met in 1978, when they immediately felt a connection to and began iden- tifying with the women in Buenos Aires. They did not become an official chapter of the Madres' organization, though, until 1982 (Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1986, 18). In the northern city of Tucumain, women officially became Madres in 1981 even though they had been meeting since 1980 (Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1997, 13).

Especially significant about the development of this network of women activists is the scarce contact and interaction among most participants (except for a few leaders and very active members) during the crucial periods of the network formation. In many of the provinces outside Buenos Aires and during the early stages of the movement, some women identified as Madres de Plaza de Mayo or as Madres de Desaparecidos (mothers of the disappeared) only on the basis of information they obtained from very short newspaper reports or from accounts they heard from relatives and friends.12 "Stronger" ties (measured as they usually are in the




network literature, in terms of frequency of contacts) did not develop until much later, when the Madres formed an actual social movement organization and leaders in the organization based in Buenos Aires began making conscious efforts to unite members from all over the country. The efforts to organize Madres groups across Argentina were more focused on trying to force a formal organizational structure over a network of emotional ties than on trying to sustain the network because of fear of its dissolution. Such organizational efforts were obviously very important for strategic reasons regarding the effectiveness of the movement overall, but the Madres' network was already self-sustaining because women shared both the pain of having lost their children and the joy and strength that arose as the result of finding others like themselves. It was actually the emotional bonds among women that permitted the expansion of the network and the addition of new members in the first place.

For women who met the Madres for the first time, the developing network of grieving mothers acted as a sort of support group where they found comfort and understanding. By being able to share their experiences about the kidnappings of their sons and daughters with other women in similar situations, grieving mothers who previously had been isolated, often misunderstood by their families, and often demonized by society at large found a place where they felt comfortable. For one woman in the city of La Plata, becoming a Madre de Plaza de Mayo was a life-changing experience:

[with the Madres] I have formed a new family. You could not even imagine how much we love each other. I became a Madre after being institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital for two years, where I was constantly medicated because of my depression. I was a mess because my daughter and my son-in-law were disappeared. All I had left were two grandchildren, a little 3-year-old boy and a baby girl, just 34 days old, who then were also taken away from me.

-(interview, October 1999)

As women shared their experiences, they also felt empowered, and such empowerment became the basis for activism. What began as spontaneous groups of grieving mothers and what (at first) looked like informal self-help groups soon turned into a hotbed of activism and resistance, and later into a large social movement community within the Argentine human rights movement.13 The Madres felt empowered by realizing they were not alone and that together they were able to act in ways they had never acted before. Besides their now- famous displays of activism in public places and the courage of their collective actions, from the beginning, the Madres were doing a significant amount of emotional

labor (V. Taylor and Rupp 2002) internal to their movement that would later become crucial to sustaining their activism. For example, many of the Madres found comfort in writing poems to describe their experiences as Madres of disappeared people. The poems provided an outlet for the Madres' emotions, as exemplified by the poems "El dolor" (Pain), "Tiempo de angustia" (A time of anguish), and "Dolor de madre" (A mother's pain), all written between 1977 and 1979. As time went by and their movement began taking shape, the Madres also began writing about their affection for each other, as reflected in several poems written by the Madres in the early 1980s, such as "A las Madres de Plaza de Mayo y a todas las madres" (To the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and to all mothers), "Plegaria" (Prayer), and "Azucena, mi hermana" (Azucena, my sister). The poems were then compiled, culminating in a small series of mime- ographed books that the Madres shared with other human rights activists and with their supporters in the mid- 1980s. The collection of poems is a testimony of the importance of the emotional to the foundations of the Madres' activism (Figure 2).

By sharing their sadness, anger, and frustration, and talking about ways in which they could collectively

cantos

no Edici no 1 2' Edicidn Figure 2. Photo of the cover of the first book of poems compiled and published by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in 1984. The title of the book, Songs of Life, Love and Liberty, reflects the strong emotional content of all the poems in the book. (Source: Author's collection.)



352 Bosco

confront the problem, the mothers of the disappeared developed a collective identity: women who identified as mothers of the disappeared and who have met in the Plaza de Mayo or women who have heard about the mothers meeting in the plaza in Buenos Aires and started to refer to themselves in such terms."4 Some women who first met in the Plaza de Mayo subsequently took the friendships and solidarities they had developed back to their hometowns. There they met other women who, despite distance and in spite of not having traveled to Buenos Aires, already identified with the nascent movement:

The chapters in the interior of the country, they kind of just happened. Some of us came to Buenos Aires, and asked, "where are you from," and then maybe some of us found out that we did not live that far away from each other. That is how it happened. The groups in the interior developed because many women could not come here often. It was not an organized effort ... it was friendship I guess.

-(interview with a member of the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, September 1999)

The most active women in the Madres group in Buenos Aires sought to take advantage of the strong emotional bonds that developed among women as the result of a process of collective identity formation. In an attempt to make women's activism on behalf of human rights more visible and institutionalized, the Madres in Buenos Aires tried to create an organizational identity based on the shared definition of "mothers of the disappeared" that was developing across the country. In fact, the efforts of a group of Madres in Buenos Aires to officially name and create chapters of Madres across Argentina must be understood as attempts to capitalize on the existence of a geographically extensive network of embedded ties sustained by affective bonds. Some of the Madres in Buenos Aires attempted to create a centralized network with more visibility and more face-to-face interaction. This led to large mobilizations on top of a preexisting, territorially expansive network where occasional contacts occurred mostly at a more local level among Madres who lived in the same area.

By the mid-1980s, the Madres in Buenos Aires were adamant in their efforts to incorporate local groups into their formal organization. For example, it was in 1984 that groups of women in the cities of San Juan and Santa F6 were asked to decide finally whether they would join the organization (Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1984b). Not joining would have effectively meant that women in these cities could not refer to themselves "officially" as Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Similarly, whereas women in Buenos Aires claimed that the in-

corporation of groups of Madres in the interior would not threaten the independence of such local groups, the control of the network was actually becoming increas- ingly centralized in Buenos Aires. For example, the groups of Madres incorporated into the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo were required to communicate or work with other human rights groups only according to the decisions of a commission of Madres based in Buenos Aires (Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1984a).

These efforts became crucial by 1986, when the original organization split in two and the two current formal organizations of Madres came into existence: the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo and the Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora (Figure 3). Most Ma- dres in the interior of the country did not understand the division (and many remain unclear about it to the present day) because their identities as Madres were independent of formal organizational structures. Rather, their collective identities were embedded in a network of shared affection. According to a currently active member of the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, this feeling is shared among many of the women:

I think it is really a shame that there are two lines of Madres now. Because we are the same .. . women from both sides, we don't feel any difference. We have been friends forever. It is the leaders. But I do not care. If any of the groups mobilizes, organizes a demonstration or other public ac- tivity, I always go. I do not care [what organization they are from] because we all share the same problem. We all started together... and by the time the division happened we had been together for so many years that I would never have a problem with the other women. It was the commission and leaders that separated, not us.

-(interview, October 1999)

Despite the existence of formal organizational structures, the Madres' network across Argentina (especially outside Buenos Aires) has rarely been constrained by organizational boundaries or the geographic location of formal chapters of Madres of either of the two organizations. Today it is even possible to find women who refer to themselves as Madres de Plaza de Mayo but who do not belong to either of the two organizations and are not recognized by the organizations as "official" Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Figure 3; see also Table 1). The reciprocal emotional bonds among the Madres fostered cohesion in their network and contributed to its sustainability for almost thirty years. Even now, as death and health problems among the Madres have reduced their numbers, the remaining active members draw much of their energy and commitment to the organiza-




* Asociacidn Madres de Plaza de Mayo * Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora

Independent + Both Asociaci6n and Independent

Ledesma * Both Asociaci6n and Linea Fundadora Provincial Boundaries

0 200 400

Kilometers

Tucumgn

La Rioja

Concordia San Juan

Santa F6 Villaguay Rosario Gualeguaychu Mendoza LujBn

Buenos Aires

La Plata Lomas de ZamoraSUT

Ayacucho Atlantic

~Neuqun Mar del Plata Ocean

. .

Argentina

Figure 3. The location and organizational affiliation of groups and chapters of Madres de Plaza de Mayo across Argentina by 2000.

tions from the belief that they represent and belong to a large network that operates at the national level and is united by shared affections that developed over the years.

Sustaining Embeddedness in Places: The Madres' Practice of Emotional Geographies

Emotional bonds among the Madres were not only important in the original constitution of their network, but continue to connect today. This became evident to me during my interactions with the Madres in Argenti- na. Most striking in my encounters with different groups of Madres was the nature of their personal relationships and interactions with one another. Every time the Ma-

dres greeted one another, they kissed and hugged warmly. I often saw them walking hand in hand on their way to the Plaza de Mayo, chatting, some talking politics, many others talking about their plans for dinner or the weekend. I was also fortunate enough to be part of some of the meetings at their offices and to share afternoons with them when they were planning activities. On all these occasions I saw that the way the Madres talked and interacted with one another was surprisingly famil- iar. One particular afternoon, I was at the offices of the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires when I heard many of the Madres scream with joy, laugh, and cry. One of the oldest members of the group, who had been very sick and had not been able to come and work with the rest of the group, had stopped by the office unannounced, surprising every-



354 Bosco

Table 1. The location of groups of Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, year 2000 Year Formally

Location of Group Organizational Affiliation Established

Buenos Aires Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1979 Buenos Aires Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora 1986 La Plata Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1979 La Plata Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora 1996 Lomas de Zamora Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1979 Lujin Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1984 Mar del Plata Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1984 Mar del Plata Independent 1996 Ayacucho Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1984 San Juan Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1984 La Rioja Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1983 Mendoza Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1984 Tucumin Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1983 Tucumain Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora 1999 Ledesma - Jujuy Independent 1980 Neuquen Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1982 Santa Fe Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1987 Concordia Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1979 Gualeguaych6 Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1979 Rosario Independent 1996 Villaguay Madres de Plaza de Mayo Linea Fundadora 1999

body. She was feeling better and was ready to resume work. In a ritual of high emotional intensity, all of the Madres hugged and kissed her, welcoming her back.

There are multiple dimensions to their Madres' activism, always including a strong emotional content. In the past, some of these emotional dimensions had been mobilized strategically. For example, in the 1970s, much of the Argentine media and the military government portrayed the Madres as mad women in an attempt to discredit the validity of their claims. According to the military, their madness was represented by the Madres' emotional public demonstrations in the Plaza de Mayo, where women cried in front of international television cameras, pleading for the lives of their sons and daughters. Even today, most people in Argentina still describe the Madres by emphasizing the passion of their activism. To their detractors, the Madres are sad and hopeless women who refuse to let go of the past and so are unable to live happier lives. Those who admire them characterize them as tough and strong women who display heroic qualities; the relations between the Madres and their supporters are often described in terms of bonds of affection and love, paralleling representations of the relation between mothers and their biological sons and daughters.

These competing public impressions about the Ma- dres are always loaded with emotional undertones, and certainly there has been an emotional side to the Ma-

dres' activism that has been used strategically to attract media and government attention. For the Madres, however, the role of the emotional in their activism goes beyond strategy. For example, today, the Madres rarely cry in public. According to the leader of the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, public displays of pain and sorrow were strategic actions of the past that no longer fit the aims of the movement:

We are no longer crying mothers, we don't want people to feel pity for us, we don't use public suffering ... that was played too much . .. we have broken away from that, you know. We don't feel that what we do is a sacrifice, we do what we do because we like it, I am happy because I do what I do.

--(Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 2002)

For the Madres, the emotional is not and was never just a strategic fagade (though the Madres do recognize that they took advantage of this in the past) but rather it runs deep into the core of the interpersonal relations among the Madres themselves and defines the nature of their activism.

One important dimension that needs to be considered in explaining the continued cohesion of the Madres' network across Argentina today has to do with their remembering past emotions and their translation and mobilization of past and present emotions as a way to reinforce their social bonds. The Madres' active re-




Table 2. Estimated number of active Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, year 2000

Location Estimated members

Buenos Aires (2 groups) 140/40 La Plata (2 groups) 65/1 Lomas de Zamora 6 Lujan 5 Mar del Plata (2 groups) 15/10 Ayacucho 6 San Juan 2 La Rioja 3 Mendoza 4 Tucumin (2 groups) 5/5 Ledesma (Jujuy) 1 Neuquen 8 Santa Fi 8 Concordia 4 Gualeguaychti 8 Rosario 12 Villaguay 5

membering of emotions is crucial in explaining how it is possible at present for the two Madres organizations to sustain chapters in different localities with only a handful of active members (Table 2), and still make a significant impact in terms of visibility and political pressure in local communities.

The case of a small group of Madres de Plaza de Mayo in the city of Lomas de Zamora is instructive here. At the time of my fieldwork in Argentina, this group of Madres de Plaza de Mayo met every Sunday afternoon at the street market in their city's central plaza. Each week, just two or three women set up a small table and booth with some literature and pamphlets about their activism and human rights in Argentina (Figure 4). I visited the Madres at this location on two occasions. At first it was difficult to find them among the much bigger, brighter, and louder booths selling everything from fresh produce to local crafts. In fact, the Madres were almost lost in a sea of running children, teenagers cruising around, and people shopping and listening to live music. It seemed odd to me that the Madres would choose this location as a strategic place from which to disseminate their political messages regarding the struggle for human rights in Argentina, since most people ignored their presence. But as I sat with them in their booth and began listening to their conversation and further questioned them about the nature and history of their activism, I realized that their weekly gathering in this market was in fact a strategic action that could be conceived as emotional labor that the Madres were doing for themselves and, consequently, for their whole organization.

........

AW-

Figure 4. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo gather in the Sunday market in the city of Lomas de Zamora, Argentina. (Photo by the author.)

The weekly gathering at the market was an occasion that women used to remember their past and actively to translate these memories into a renewed passion for the continued activism. Their conversations centered on remembering the empowerment they felt during their energetic and daring acts of public activism and civil disobedience in the early years of the movement. Such memories produced laughter and energetic responses and prompted the women to encourage each other to continue with their activism despite their age and the time that had passed. Their conversations also remembered their friends and fellow activists who were no longer alive. The Madres cried and held hands as they recalled other Madres de Plaza de Mayo or when they talked about their disappeared sons and daughters. When later that week I saw the Madres again in the Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires, I asked them about their intimate and seemingly apolitical gathering in the market on Sundays. Why were they there every weekend? One of then explained it to me that it was a matter of "survival," and said that in order for them to continue with the struggle for truth and justice regarding human rights in Argentina: "We must link our pain and our suffering with the memories of happier times, when we were together with our sons and daughters ... [and then] transform that into a moral and political com- promise with the future" (interview, November 1999).

The weekly Sunday meetings of this small group of Madres are an example of the way the interplay between temporality, memory, and emotion contributes to sustain bonds among activists. Similar processes are observed among Madres de Plaza de Mayo across the country. For example, the chapter of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo- Linea Fundadora in the city of Ledesma (in Jujuy prov-



356 Bosco

i"

r..?.'

: .. .

:?ll a-"

U..?~3n ~

Figure 5. The only remaining member of the city of La Plata chapter of the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo poses for the camera in front of memorabilia from her earlier days of activism. For this woman, strong feelings of sisterhood and love toward other Madres across the country and their shared pain of having lost their sons and daughters augment her feeling of belonging to a large community of Madres de Plaza de Mayo and contributes to her sustained activism. (Photo by the author.)

ince in northern Argentina) is represented by just one woman who has walked alone in the central square in this town every Thursday for almost a decade. Even though she is alone, her activism is in part driven by her active remembering of the passion and emotions of past activism, which prompts her to come back to that particular place every Thursday (as do other Madres in plazas across the country). Similarly, in the year 2000 there was only one woman sustaining the chapter of the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo in the city of La Plata. Despite being the only member of her group in this city, she told me that she felt extremely connected to other Madres who belong to the Asociaci6n across the country. She relies on her shared past experiences and her emotional attachment to her "sisters" in other cities to sustain her activism locally (Figure 5). The occasional trip to Buenos Aires or visit from a supporter gives her an additional boost to remain active. During her conversation with me, she spoke with admiration of her leader in Buenos Aires: "I love her and admire her" she said repeatedly. She also made reference to the founder of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo movement, a woman named Azucena Villaflor who was disappeared by the military during the early days of her activism. Remembering and honoring the memory of Azucena, she said, is what has helped Madres like her stay together despite the soli- tude: "Azucena helped us in the beginning. She was an activist full of love and affection, and it was contagious. She loved us all. And we stayed together because that is

what she would have wanted us to do" (interview, No- vember 1999).

Understanding the relation between emotions and embeddedness depends on a relational understanding of place. For the Madres, some places, such as the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and the many plazas where the Madres gather on a weekly basis across the country, are layered with emotions (past and present, remembered and practiced) that contribute to their continued embeddedness in their networks and to the cohesion of their movement. Plazas in cities, towns, and villages are key places where women met, shared feelings, developed friendships, designed strategies for future mobilization, and rendered the network visible to the general public. The history of the Madres is literally layered and grounded in the plazas. For example, the Madres in Buenos Aires have placed on an existing monument in the Plaza de Mayo a small plaque to remember and honor the founder of their movement, Azucena Villaflor. The Madres often visit the site during their weekly gatherings on the plaza to reflect on their past and present struggles. The vivid memories of Azucena Vil- laflor and the affection the Madres felt for her have been put in place, and such places link past emotions to current struggles and contribute to their continued activism.

Perhaps an even more compelling example of the layering of memories and emotions in places was re- vealed on a Thursday afternoon during one of my regular visits to the Plaza de Mayo. At that time, I saw a group of Madres gathered around the monument in the center of the Plaza. They were silent; some of them were crying but others were clapping. One of the women began scattering on the ground the ashes of a Madre who had recently passed away. Her surviving husband was there, the only man participating in this ritual. As I talked to the women about this emotional event I had just witnessed, I learned that several of the Madres had decided before they died that they wanted to remain in the Plaza with their hermanas (sisters) and requested that their ashes be placed around the monument in the center of the plaza during one of the weekly gatherings. One of the Madres further explained the meaning of this emotional ritual as it relates to the death of members of the group:

They are still here . . . we may not physically share with them our meetings on Mondays, for example, but [they are with us here], they share our struggle, they laugh and cry with us. Some Madres have chosen to have their ashes scattered right here in the center of the Plaza, as a way to keep walking every Thursday afternoon, as a way not to leave us alone. Even when our bodies leave the earth we




are still together, sharing our love and the love for our missing children.

-(interview, November 1999)

Plazas as places also foster feelings of cohesion for women who were isolated and so became sites where the Madres (individually and/or collectively) could place their emotions. Consider the following reflections of a currently active Madre de Plaza de Mayo regarding the connections between her feelings, her activism, and her periodic visit to plazas far away from her rural home- town:

I still suffer a lot because of the disappearance of my son [she cries, and pauses for a few seconds] . .. so I come to this plaza to feel better. I feel very good and relaxed when I come here. I used to hitchhike from my town to get here. Sometimes I go to Buenos Aires, some other times to the plaza in La Plata.

-(interview, November 1999)

Similarly, a member of the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo from the province of Santa Fe who was visiting Buenos Aires one day during the winter of the year 2000 explained that: "For Madres de Plaza de Mayo like me, for those of us who live in the interior of the country, the emotions double when I can be here. I feel joy because I am in this plaza. Being here is something that fills us all with emotions" (interview, May 2000).

It is not only that the plazas became sites where the Madres could place their individual emotions and where privately suffered grief could be collectively expressed, the plazas have also been key to the sustainability of the movement over time because they became sites of collective gathering that have contributed to generate individually experienced joy (Figure 6).'5 A collection of narratives by Madres de Plaza de Mayo, collected by a member of the movement, includes this example of the significance of the plaza:

I always thought of it [the Plaza] as a foolish place and to me it still seems so; but not when I find myself there together with the Mothers. ... I came to imagine it a small liberated zone separated from the rest of the country. Then I began to discover that it has beautiful trees, and I started to look for some beauty in its two or three standing mon- uments. ... On Thursdays when we are there I feel as if I were in a very intimate place . . . the Plaza is a throbbing heart.

-(Testimony of a Madre de Plaza de Mayo, quoted in Mellibovsky 1997, xiii-xiv)

The annual March of Resistance is a collective practice that is deeply connected to the plazas and that fills

' ju

.. . . .

Figure 6. The placement of an emotional network: Madres de Plaza de Mayo walking together and holding each other in a gathering at the central plaza in the city of La Plata, December 1999. (Photo by the author.)

the Madres with joy. It takes place every year in De- cember in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Hundreds of women across Argentina travel to the Plaza for the event, which first took place in 1981 and has continued uninterrupted ever since.16 The Madres walk continuously for twenty-four hours around the monument in the center of the Plaza de Mayo, the exact place where the Madres from Buenos Aires walk every Thursday. They take turns to battle exhaustion, but they do not stop. As the hours go by, the significance that this event has for the Madres becomes even more apparent. To become physically exhausted and to give as much of their energy as they possibly can is an embodied emotional practice that stirs images of success, effort, and accomplishment and energizes their activism and their commitment to each other. One of the Madres describes such embodied emotional practice by recalling the first march in 1981 in the following way:

We formed a tight circle of heartbeats and longings which started to spread out with a slow rhythm ... expanded during the evening hours, and finally became tighter.., during the hours of the night. .... The March continued without in- terruption. Those Mothers who became exhausted would leave while others replaced them. . . we saw the dawn from that circle ... it became smaller during the early hours of the morning when we started to feel cold.

-(Testimony quoted in Mellibovsky 1997, 128)

In 1999, I participated in the annual March of Re- sistance in the Plaza de Mayo, and walked in circles several hours with many of the women. The Plaza became almost empty at about three in the morning as



358 Bosco

most supporters went home to rest. The Madres, however, were still walking, sometimes alone, sometimes holding arms and talking to each other, and the image of the Madres in the Plaza was surprisingly similar to the narrative about the first March of Resistance. I remember leaving the event at five in the morning, after being in the Plaza for twelve hours and when the event still had twelve more hours to go. When I returned later that morning, the Madres were still there, still walking (Fig- ure 7). Even though they were obviously exhausted and they were taking turns to sit down much more frequently than they had ten hours before, none of them thought of leaving the Plaza yet.

The embodied emotional practices represented by the annual March of Resistance in Buenos Aires are also re- created in plazas across the country where small groups of Madres meet every week. In the city of La Plata, for example, in the month of November the Madres of the Asociaci6n hold an annual event like the one in Buenos Aires. Similarly, when Madres de Plaza de Mayo travel abroad, many of them select a plaza where they are visiting, adjust for the time difference, then walk in the

.... ES.. k, ,

A p E

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An

Figure 7. A Madre from the Linea Fundadora group walks in circles in the center of the Plaza de Mayo during the annual March of Resistance in 1999. When this picture was taken, she had been walking for more than fifteen hours. (Photo by the author.)

plaza (even if they are alone) to feel connected to the Madres who are doing the same thing at exactly the same time in plazas across Argentina. What is significant about the Madres' weekly marches in plazas and their annual events is the fact that they no longer have the strategic function that they once did, when the occu- pation of a public place openly challenged the military regime that forbade public demonstrations. In the past the weekly gatherings in the plazas were closely associ- ated with the more explicit or instrumental goals of the Madres (finding out what happened to their disappeared sons and daughters); at present they are more related to issues of group solidarity, survival, and remembering. In my interaction with different groups of Madres, I witnessed how, through the weekly gatherings and silent marches in different plazas, women renewed their commitment to the groups, reasserted their shared identities as Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and showed their love for their fellow activists and friends. By recreating spaces of emotional intensity through weekly gatherings in plazas across the country, the Madres have been able to maintain a feeling of proximity despite physical distance and in spite of the wide territorial spread of their network. Embedded emotional bonds among the Madres are thus further reinforced through collective gatherings in places of symbolic importance to their cause, replicating the movement across Argentina and even abroad.

Emotions and Relational Embeddedness

The plazas and other key places such as markets where the Madres have met for decades can be seen as places where women gather to do emotional work that is crucial to the sustainability of the movement. Plazas and other public spaces are the places where women manage to express individually and collectively both reactive and reciprocal emotions (Jasper 1998) that define large parts of their activism. Through these processes, such places themselves become active agents in bringing forth emotions, further reinforcing the importance of the relations between emotions and the experience of place. The network in which the Madres remain embedded today indeed acts as a place that is not constrained by geographic scales or territorial boundaries (i.e., not a locality), but rather as an open and meaningful place filled with emotions that materialize in designated sites in different localities across the country every week. Even though the Madres' embeddedness has not always been dependent on relations of proximity among members or on their association in one particular locality, place stills plays a very important role in this process. The integration of the Madres in a network of large




territorial scope has been aided by their periodic "placement of practices" (Amin 2000) in different plazas across Argentina that together, symbolically and strategically, act as one place.

Drawing from existing analysis of the activism of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, one could easily conclude that a possible explanation for the sustainability of the Ma- dres' activism is the embeddedness of their network in a particular locality. For example, much of the history of the Madres has been written with reference to their activities in Buenos Aires, consistent with the available historical documentation. This emphasis is the result of the importance of the Plaza de Mayo, which, from the first days of the Madres' activities, became a place that provided them not only with a name but also with certain advantages in terms of public appeal and visibility.

Connections among members sustained as a result of shared affection are not easily accounted for in archival records. When the emotional dimensions of the network are considered, it is clear that embedded ties among Madres members were not necessarily dependent on a locality or on geographic proximity. The Madres have always been part of a network that extends beyond those localities in which the two formal Madres' organizations had official chapters. The Plaza de Mayo and other squares have been important for the Madres because they have always been specific "places for representa- tion" (Mitchell 1996) for a much larger submerged network of activists who operated across the country. However, even though plazas are layered with emotions and have been places of importance for the sustainability of the Madres and the visibility of their movement, the mobilization of Madres in plazas across Argentina does not represent the actual geographical extent of the network in which women remain embedded today. There have been several locations where gatherings in plazas never became a weekly practice (mostly because of a harsh local political climate), despite the efforts of Madres in Buenos Aires to organize such activities. For the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, "locality" has not been as important as "place" for the formation and sustainability of their network.

Embeddedness for the Madres has always been a geographically flexible process because the territorial scope of their network has varied over time, often materializing or becoming more visible in particular places where emotions could be expressed and affective bonds reinforced, but always depending on the existence of embedded affective ties that operate across space. In other words, the Madres' network evolved both as a social movement and as an imagined community (B. Anderson 1991) of embedded ties with a flexible geography inti-

mately tied to emotional experiences in key places such as the plazas but still tenuously related to a circum- scribed territory. For the Madres, the problem of making their network visible, of finding a geographic expression for a network that did not necessarily depend on any one particular locality, has always been important strategically. In reality, it has been a task that has occupied the minds of leaders and more involved members of both Madres organizations over the years. After the division of the original group into two separate organizations, much of the Madres' effort has consisted of trying to make visible in places a network of embedded ties that operates mostly at the emotional level. This is why leaders among the Madres were so adamant in promot- ing the practice of weekly marches in squares across the country once a formal organization of Madres de Plaza de Mayo was created. Archival information provides substantial evidence of such efforts. For example, the min- utes of a meeting in Buenos Aires in 1985 of leaders of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo indicate that one of the organizational goals of the movement during that time was to "work hard to promote weekly marches in plazas in all those places around the country where such activities are currently not taking place" (Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo 1986, 15). These efforts have paid off because weekly marches in the squares reinforce a feeling of proximity among women, re-creating spaces of emotional intensity in many places across the country and helping to sustain their network and their movement over the years. The case of the only remaining active Madre de Plaza de Mayo in Jujuy who walks alone in the plaza every week is indicative of this process. Similarly, the higher levels of visibility that the As- ociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo enjoys over Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora today may very well be the result of the former group's greater success in making its emotional network visible and locating it in specific settings-another example of the importance of actively re-creating places of emotional intensity as a strategy to sustain the movement.

The cohesion that the Madres have achieved by continuously meeting in plazas across the country sug- gests that their sustained embeddedness has to a large extent been dependent on a place, though such place is not bounded but rather emotional, open, and networked. That particular networked sense of place has been achieved through emotional bonds and the layering of emotions in specific settings. Returning to the argument about embeddedness that I developed earlier in the article, the experiences of the Madres' demonstrate that the relation between embeddedness and place is more relevant than the connection between embed-



360 Bosco

dedness and locality typically found in geographic discussions of integration in social networks. The spatial dispersion of a network does not necessarily come at the expense of the importance of place if place is understood in an open fashion and in relation to the subjective and the emotional, or, as Amin (2000) puts it, as the spat- iotemporalization of associational networks. This difference in the conceptualization of place is relevant if one is to understand critically the geographic dimensions of embeddedness.

Conclusion: Emotional Geographies and the Significance of the Madres' Activism

The case of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo illustrates that embeddedness is not necessarily a process dependent on relations of physical geographic proximity and that embedded ties in a network can operate across space. Most network analyses to date have focused on analysis of the measurable dimensions of networks (such as frequency of interaction or "strong ties" among actors in a network). As a result, geographers (and less explicitly, sociologists, political scientists, and other scholars interested in networks) have had a tendency to associate embeddedness with the local or locality-specific manifestations of network relations. Limiting our research efforts to an examination of the more measurable dimensions of network interactions at the local level can misconstrue the way network processes such as embeddedness operate because critical but less tangible network relations (such as intimacy) are ignored. At- tention to these less tangible dimensions of network relations can provide revealing insights about the geography of embeddedness. The case of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo reveals that integration in social networks can be sustained through embedded ties driven by the emotional and the affective. The development of embedded ties based on shared experiences of pain and other grievances, on mutual friendships, and on a collective identification of members as mothers of victims of state terrorism became the basis for the organization of a visible network of women/human rights activists of wide territorial scope. Such a network has been geographically dynamic. Place does play a crucial role in sustaining embeddedness, although the main issue is emotional intensity together with a relational understanding of place.

Moving beyond the case of the Madres, this line of thinking also points to interesting ways in which one can think about the geography of social networks. An analysis of the emotional dimensions of network processes

shows that actors' (individuals, groups, organizations) perceptions of belonging to, and of participating in, social networks do not always match their actual participation in the social networks of their daily life. Different relational dimensions operate simultaneously through social networks at all times (e.g., actual interactions among members, emotional ties, symbolic ties) and give rise to complex network geographies.

Emotional ties are not necessarily bounded by geographic distances or locked in localities because they operate at the level of meanings and feelings. Different kinds of relations operate simultaneously through social networks but their geographic dimensions do not necessarily overlap and their geographies cannot always be mapped onto each other. I have documented the extent of the Madres' network by reconstructing their extent over time from historical records. Although useful to illustrate the extent and evolution of their network, the accounts I have presented are perhaps incomplete, despite my best efforts. The exact extent of the Madres' emotional networks cannot be accurately represented because such networks are and always have been fluid. I have been able to show that emotional bonds have existed among the Madres from the beginning, producing their own network geographies, creating a relational sense of place, and actually maintaining and sustaining the Madres' network over time. Failing to acknowledge the existence of such ties would misconstrue the explanation of the different processes that have contributed to the sustainability of the Madres' interpersonal network for more than two decades.

One nevertheless must acknowledge that the existence of territorially demarcated units at different scales (such as the "nation," the "neighborhood," or "the household") can enable or constrain the way in which emotional ties are perceived and produced. For example, neighborhood activism and the creation of a place-based collective identity that accompanies it is often attached to a sense of place that stems from the recognition of established geographic boundaries and the use of neighborhood names (Miller 2000). In other words, network processes are affected by, and cannot be di- vorced from, the conditions governing the contexts in which they are produced and in which they operate. This indicates the need for further analyses of the ways in which material conditions can change perceptions and meanings and thus affect network processes that are driven by the emotional and affective.

The history of the organizational geographies of the Madres demonstrates how these activists become and remained embedded in a network of activists that extends across a large territory. Friendships based on shared




affection permitted the development of the network in the first place. Through the strategic efforts of leaders and very involved members to promote collective gatherings of Madres in plazas and other public spaces during their formative years, the visibility of a network born out of grievances and sustained through the emotional work of activists increased significantly. The gatherings in plazas gave their network a symbolic homeplace. Emo- tional dimensions of activism became embedded in the plazas themselves, rendering those places even more meaningful to the Madres' movement. Collective gatherings in places layered with emotions gave activists substantial visibility and allowed women to locate physically their emotional network. Visibility and a location allowed more women to meet each other, facilitated recruitment, and permitted the struggle for human rights to reach remote corners of Argentina where the social and political realities were not conducive to the development of human rights activism. Simultaneously, the gatherings in the plazas and other key places became activities that further cemented the emotional bonds among women and their embeddedness in a growing network of mothers of the disappeared. The Madres' actual/imagined community became dependent on an open and flexible conceptualization of network/place that allowed women to be visible, to have a place in which to locate their emotions, to overcome distance, and to remain connected to each other, all at the same time.

The Madres' maintenance of their community of activists for almost thirty years in the face of internal organizational conflicts is instructive regarding the importance of the spatiality of emotions and embeddedness relative to the long-term mobilization outcomes of collective action. But to claim that the perseverance of the Madres' activism is an important outcome of collective action is somewhat unusual. Discussions of outcomes of social movements and of the effectiveness of collective action have traditionally been limited to as- sessments of the political gains obtained by social movements (e.g., Gamson 1975; Burstein, Einwohner, and Hollander 1995), with a focus on the relation between social movements and the broader formal political process. In general, success or effectiveness has been measured in relation to tangible gains. But such analyses are shortsighted. Regarding the character of contemporary social movements, Melucci (1997, 269) argues that the meaning of collective action "has to be found in the action itself more than in the pursued goals [because] movements are not qualified by what they do but by what they are." Collective action can also be a goal itself. For the Madres, becoming activists and remaining together as activists through the construction of emotional

networks has been inseparable from their more explicit goals regarding the struggle for human rights in Argen- tina. The trajectory of the Madres is consistent with the call by feminist researchers of collective action to analyze the effectiveness of social movements in broader terms, going beyond the measurement of gains achieved through the political process, and taking into account how cultural, symbolic, and emotional dimensions of activism can help or hinder the accomplishment of social movements' broader agendas (V. Taylor 1995; Whittier 1995).

I have not elaborated in detail the political gains that the Madres have generated for the human rights movement in Argentina or Latin America; that was not my goal. Instead, I have focused on analyzing the sustainability of the Madres and their organizational survival as a mobilization outcome. Mobilization outcomes are crucial in assessing the effectiveness of social movements because they speak to their capacity to achieve organizational success and to their ability to carry out and maintain collective action (Staggenborg 1995, 341). Thus, my analysis of the Madres' activism is a foundation on which to build conceptual insights about the role of spatiality in the analysis of the outcomes of collective action. The case of the Madres allows us to establish future empirical parallels to the experiences of other social movements and, further, to make compari- sons and general statements about how mobilization outcomes relate to spatialities of collective action. This research shows that assessing mobilization outcomes requires attention to the personal and the emotional, all part of the microscale dimensions of activism. The effectiveness of the Madres in remaining together for almost thirty years has a lot to do with these women's capacity, through emotional labor, to stop seeing themselves as victims and as passive mothers of the disappeared and to transform themselves into Madres de Plaza de Mayo. They demonstrate how the failure of activists to mobilize others effectively on their behalf might very well be the result of a failure to constitute a cohesive collective or to transform members into collective actors in the first place.

In conclusion, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo are im- pressive in that almost three decades after their formation they continue to be among the most recognizable players in the international human rights movement. Their emotional labor, coupled with their weekly collective gatherings in plazas and other collective practices in places that are layered with emotions, has contributed to their duration and perseverance and has made them stand out as one of the most enduring communities of activists in Latin America and beyond.



362 Bosco

Acknowledgments This article is based on research supported by the

National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS- 9906763, by a E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Fellowship from the Department of Geography at Ohio State Uni- versity, and by travel grants from the Office of Interna- tional Education and the Center for Latin American Studies, both at Ohio State University. This article in its final form would not have been possible without the insights and assistance of numerous people over a period of several years, including Nancy Ettlinger, Tyler Hower, Mei-Po Kwan, Eugene McCann, Paul Robbins, and Verta Taylor. Three anonymous referees provided extensive comments that helped refine the argument, and Audrey Kobayashi offered comments and extensive editorial assistance. I also want to thank Harry Johnson from the Center for Earth Systems Analysis Research in the Geography Department at San Diego State Uni- versity for producing the final maps. Finally, I want to thank all the Madres de Playa de Mayo in Argentina who opened their hearts and memories to me and in the process taught me the meaning of real activism.

Notes 1. I define the Madres de Plaza de Mayo as a "social movement

community" (Buechler 1990) because their composition is not limited to the existence of formal, bureaucratic, and centralized organizations that are known in the social movement literature as social movement organizations (SMOs). Throughout this article, I show that even though most Madres are affiliated with either one of two large formal organizations, some women do not claim any organizational affiliation but rather see themselves as a more informally organized network of mothers of disappeared people. This includes smaller groups of Madres who in recent years have spun off the formal organizations to continue their activists' commitment on their own. The definition of social movement community is also useful because previous studies of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo have had the tendency to homogenize the group, masking internal differences among women and among different groups of Madres.

2. I do recognize that the Madres' differences and conflicts are important in understanding the major political differences between the two groups, but my focus in this paper is on the binding affective dimensions that have contributed throughout the years to the sustainability of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo as a whole. Much could be said about the role of personal differences and animosity in driving negative emotional states among members of the two groups (such as anger and disappointment toward leaders and other activists in the struggle for human rights). This topic is complex enough to demand a separate examination, and a detailed treatment of the nature and geographic dimen-

sions of conflicts among the Madres appears in Bosco (2004).

3. This is consistent with current understanding of social movements as networks (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998; Diani and McAdam 2003).

4. The insights that emerge from the archival research are based on documentation that belongs to the different groups of Madres, including the archives of the two largest Madres organizations (Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora) in their offices in Buenos Aires, and the archives of one of the local chapters of Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo in the city of La Plata. Activists from a small and informal group of Madres in two other cities (Lomas de Zamora and Rosario) opened their personal collections for this research, an extremely valuable addition to complement the information from the largest archives. The Buenos Aires archives of the two Madres organizations contain almost all of the existing documents of the beginning years of the Madres. Many of these documents are unique, unavailable elsewhere, and contain a wealth of information that was critical for tracing the historical geographies of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. The Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo retains all of the earliest documents about the organization of the group. These include organizational newsletters produced by the Madres and illegally distributed among members, friends, and activists during the military government (1976-1983), the Asociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo newspaper for the period 1985 to 2000 (of limited but legal circulation), organizational and personal correspondence, and scrapbooks dating back to 1976. The archives of Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fundadora contain additional documentation, in particular records concerning the activities of this group of mothers of the disappeared that took place after the organizational division that affected the movement in the 1980s.

5. I conducted twenty interviews with women from the As- ociaci6n Madres de Plaza de Mayo, seventeen interviews with women from Madres de Plaza de Mayo-Linea Fund- adora, and three interviews with women from independent Madres de Plaza de Mayo groups. The women were from six different cities in Argentina. Almost all had been active Madres de Plaza de Mayo for more than twenty years, in- dicating that they have been activists since the beginnings of the group-some were among the original and founding members of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Only two of the women I interviewed identified themselves as Madres de Plaza de Mayo for a shorter time span (fifteen years); these two women joined the groups after Argentina returned to a democratically elected government in 1983. All interviews were conducted and analyzed in Spanish and then trans- lated to English.

6. See, for example, discussions among psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, and many others in edited collections by Forgas (2000), Barbalet (2002), and Manstead, Frijda, and Fischer (2004).

7. Reacting to issues such as the rigid conceptualization of network connections and network structures, there have been calls for more explicit attention to cultural issues in network analysis (DiMaggio 1992; Emirbayer and Good- win 1994; Ansell 1997). The argument from the cultural critique is that if network analysis is to provide a better




account of macro- and microlinkages of social action, it needs to account for actors' orientations toward one another and the world (DiMaggio 1992, 118). This requires more attention to subjective issues (e.g., relations based on cognitive, emotional, and moral bonds) that preclude the regular quantitative methodologies of network analysis.

8. For example, it has been argued recently that the concept of embeddedness has come to be part of geography's conceptual vocabulary without a proper examination of its definition or theoretical significance (Martin and Sunley 2001). Similarly, the analysis of the embeddedness thesis in connection with social movement studies is appropriate and needed, since much research in this subfield is concerned with issues of cohesion and solidarity among collective actors.

9. The assumptions that underlie discussions of embeddedness rely on the premise that patterns of linkages can be used to account for aspects of the behavior of those involved in a network (Knoke 1990). This is one of the premises at the core of social network analysis, which is often concerned with examinations of the consequences of the changing patterns of interactions among actors embedded in one or more social networks (Knoke and Kuklinski 1982; Knoke 1990; Scott 1991; Nohria and Eccles 1992; Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994).

10. In his article on the strength of weak ties, Granovetter further stated that the "discussion of operational measures of and weights attaching to each of the four elements is postponed to future empirical studies" (Granovetter 1973, 1361).

11. For example, Hanson and Pratt's (1995) research on gender-based occupational segregation relies on analysis of the relations between locality and embeddedness to show how different structures of employment opportunity were con- structed in a specific urban setting through the enabling or constraining characteristics of social networks. Similarly, other geographers such as Amin and Thrift (1994) and Storper (1997) focus on the territorial embeddedness of firms and markets in social and cultural networks of relations by placing emphasis on localities or regions.

12. Initially, much of the Argentine popular press (e.g., daily newspapers and newsmagazines) was aligned with, or heavily censored by, the military government and did not offer much in terms of coverage of the Madres' struggle. When their activities were reported, it was often in a de- rogatory manner. In fact, the Madres were often talked about as the "mad" or "crazy" women of the Plaza de Mayo. For a comprehensive account of the narrative strategies employed by the media and the military regarding the Madres and other human rights activists, see D. Taylor (1997).

13. For analysis of women's self-help group as social movements, see V. Taylor (1996).

14. As social movements scholars have already demonstrated, the development of a collective identity is a necessary condition in the mobilization of social movements (Melucci 1996). The process of collective identity formation not only is trans- formative in its own right but is also "a prelude to changing institutions and challenging societal inequalities responsible for an undesirable situation" (V. Taylor 1996, 151).

15. I thank one anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I develop this line of thought.

16. There have been twenty annual events so far (although since the organizational division in 1986, the two Madres' organizations based in Buenos Aires sometimes have held separate events in the Plaza and thus the number of annual events to date is closer to thirty).

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Correspondence: Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182-4493, e-mail: [email protected].



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The Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Three Decades of Human ......Human Rights' Activism: Embeddedness, Emotions, and Social Movements Fernando J. Bosco Department of Geography, San Diego