Identity in Latin American Social Movements

This chapter reconstructs the origins of identity as a key concept in socio-political analysis and illustrates the role it has played both in making sense of social and political transformations as well as in influencing the very processes of collective mobilization in Latin America. It begins by analysing the shift from class to identity in the narrative on social struggle since the 1980s and the main feature that distinguish identity movements compared to other social movements. The second part of the chapter focuses on some of the main Latin American identity movements, namely: Indigenous, feminist, and LGBT movements. In the conclusions, I provide some ideas around the limitations as well as potential developments of identity-based theories of social mobilization.