This chapter analyzes the ideological roots of social medicine in Latin America, its diffusion through institutional and interpersonal networks, and how they translated into social policy. It argues that Latin American social medicine was a movement with two distinct waves, bridged by a mid-century hiatus. First-wave social medicine – whose protagonists included figures such as Salvador Allende of Chile and Ramón Carrillo in Argentina – had its roots in the scientific hygiene movement, gained strength in the interwar period, and left its imprint on Latin American welfare states by the 1940s. Second-wave social medicine, marked by more explicitly Marxist analytical frameworks, took shape in the early 1970s amidst authoritarian pressures and crystallized institutionally in Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES) (regionally) and Brazilian Association of Collective Health (in Brazil, ABRASCO). A dialectical process links these two waves into a single story: early social medicine demands, once institutionalized in welfare states and the international health-and-development apparatus, led to ineffective bureaucratic routines, which in turn sparked critical reflection, agitation for change, and a new wave of social medicine activism.

This chapter considers access to courts for victims of grand corruption, especially in Latin America. It explains the origins and meaning of victim compensation in the UNCAC, how “victim” is defined in human rights law, and uses the Honduran Gualcarque River case to introduce how courts are beginning to apply concepts from human rights law to cases involving victims of grand corruption. It divides these cases into “direct harm” suffered by individual or group victims, and cases involving broad or diffuse harm where victims as a class are represented by civil society organizations. It looks briefly at which civil society organizations should be able to represent victims in proceedings.

Chapter 2 gives a history of Black resistance from the 1980s until the emergence of the social movement’s umbrella organization, the Comisión 8 N, in 2013. Scholars have documented that late nineteenth-century Afro-Argentine resistance occurred through a strong Black press and mutual aid societies. The literature lacks an empirical analysis of contemporary issues, which I take up in this chapter. I trace the current movement to civil society organizations founded primarily by Black women in the mid 1980s after the country’s return to democracy. I unpack an oft-repeated phrase of my interlocutors, “poner el cuerpo,” – to put one’s whole being into an effort, but also a radical act of taking up space – to contextualize the social movement’s emergence. Moreover, I argue that the radical act of taking up space in visible locations marked as “White spaces” is central to the politics of visibility that led to some of the movement’s successes. While the human rights movement and the Kirchner administrations provided a political opportunity for cultural and ethnoracial activism, Black activists’ continued resistance, despite setbacks, led to the traction and birth of the movement.

In the conclusion, I return to two central arguments: the importance of studying Black organizing in spaces of Black invisibility and that we cannot understand social movement mobilization, solidarity, and outcomes from a solely macro- or solely micro-level analysis. Pain into Purpose shows that by putting international, national, local, and interpersonal histories in conversation we can come to understand how even in a country where the disenfranchised group includes a small minority that is largely invisible, a social movement can indeed emerge, gain traction, and achieve some of its goals. Finally, the conclusion explores new directions that the Movimiento Negro and research on the movement may take given its increasing visibility and representation amid the simultaneous persistence and widespread denial of racism.

This chapter introduces Argentina’s Black movement and situates it within discussions of Black movements in Latin America and social movements theory more broadly. I introduce evidence that the movement has made progress in combating historical erasure and racism and show that despite societal denial, activists mobilize collective emotions to raise awareness, increase participation, and access state resources. The book argues that emotions, both at the societal and interpersonal levels, play a crucial role in the efficacy of transnational Black social movements in spaces of invisibility. Focusing on Argentina’s understudied Black movement, I employ critical race theory and Black feminist perspectives to examine racialization processes, challenge myths of homogeneous Whiteness, and highlight Afrodescendants’ marginalization in Argentina. Additionally, I show that this study contributes to understanding emotions in social movements by analyzing emotional opportunity structures and the role of emotions in mobilization, particularly within the context of Black feminist activism.

Chapter 4 introduces the concept of a Black feminist toolkit to show that at the microlevel, Black women succeed at growing movement participation and solidarity by utilizing transnational Black feminist politics to convert experiences of pain into purpose. Here, I examine the processes through which affective and emotional bonds serve as political devices for mobilization in race-based social movements, utilizing and expanding the concept of collective emotional energy levels. Furthermore, I engage with Vilma Piedade’s concept of dororidade, a combination of the Portuguese words for pain, solidarity, and sisterhood, to illuminate why and how affective processes of mobilization are critical to Black women’s participation in Argentina’s feminist and Black social movements. I argue that Black women activists and artist-activists equip their constituency with what I name a Black feminist toolkit, which gives them a collectivized knowledge, language, and confidence to process the otherwise crippling forms of quotidian and institutional racism that they experience.

In Chapter 3, I illustrate the macro-level role of a society’s emotional history, defined as the collective emotional response to historical events, in galvanizing state support. I argue that by leveraging the opportunities offered by the Kirchner moment and the bicentennial, with its opening toward new histories of women, people of color, and other marginalized communities, Black activists successfully employed discursive and emotional repertoires of the human rights movements in interactions with the state. For example, societal shame and haunting tied to the concept of “the disappeared” provided the political currency to achieve state-level recognition by calling on the government to address the historically attempted genocide of Afro-Argentines as a human rights issue. This strategic activism resulted in Law 26.852, the National Day of Afro-Argentines and Black Culture, as well as other Movimiento Negro successes at the state level.

Chapter 5 addresses new challenges that emerged for the Movimiento Negro during the COVID−19 pandemic. During the crisis, many Afrodescendants saw their precarious and sometimes informal housing and employment situations worsen. Additionally, the international media attention of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder invigorated the Movimiento Negro’s efforts to address police brutality and criminal (in)justice, as witnessed in numerous newspaper articles and virtual discussions on the theme, “Police Brutality Exists Here [Argentina] Too!” Here, I engage with Christina Sharpe’s concept of “wake work” as a disruptor of the immanence and imminence of Black death to analyze two pandemic-era campaigns that were about sustaining Black life: a mutual aid campaign to secure food, medicine, and housing for vulnerable African and Afrodescendent populations and a series of web events and projects to continue discussions about racism in Argentina at the community, national, and international level. The data suggests that despite fractures in the movement that emerged because of the pandemic, the movement is still gaining traction in institutional spaces.

Chapter 1 provides an empirical analysis of one of the principal grievances of Argentina’s Black social movement – anti-Black racism – with an analysis of the mechanisms of racialization in the country. While erasure and denial, racial formation processes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are still present, amid growing activism and an increasingly visible transnational Black community, the primary contemporary method of racialization is through foreignization. While Miriam Gomes provides the concept, I document with empirical examples how “foreignization,” the assumption that Black people and culture are never from Argentina, hence never Argentine, functions as a racialized mechanism that reproduces the pervasive myth of Argentina’s homogeneous Whiteness. I illustrate this mechanism by analyzing four racialized practices that were salient throughout my fieldwork: afrophilia, afrophobia, curiosity, and insecure Whiteness. By showing how both Blackness and Whiteness are constructed in racialized encounters, I demonstrate how racial hierarchies are reproduced by illuminating the symbolic capital invoked through such exchanges.

This chapter analyzes recent conservative efforts to build parties in Latin America. Its main case study is Argentina’s Republican Proposal (PRO) party, one of the most important examples of conservative party-building in Latin America. This chapter explains the success of right-wing parties born in nonauthoritarian contexts through the strategic decisions of leaders about whether to invest in high-cost resources (ideational and organizational) that will allow parties to take root in inhospitable contexts. This chapter demonstrates that the competitiveness of right-wing parties has been driven by three factors: programmatic innovation by personalistic leaders; organizational mobilization of both core and noncore constituencies; and an elite fear of the "Venezuela model."