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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2242-7534
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Political Science
Year Degree Awarded
2021
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Sonia Alvarez
Second Advisor
Regine Spector
Third Advisor
Millie Thayer
Subject Categories
Community-Based Research | Comparative Politics | Latin American Studies | Migration Studies | Politics and Social Change | Social and Cultural Anthropology | Social Justice
Abstract
Moving beyond studies of social movements and NGOs, this dissertation examines how grassroots groups in Guatemala use transnational flows of goods, ideas, and people to create new organizational forms and types of political action. This case study of an organization of returned migrants, former combatants, and indigenous youth demonstrates how marginalized groups create platforms that facilitate connections between disparate actors across nation-state and identity borders. Drawing on field research in Guatemala’s Western Highlands, I explore how these platforms emerged, threats to them, their effects, and what they can teach us about political organizing in crisis. I begin by tracing the genesis of this organization from transnational migrant and fair-trade groups in the 2000s, showing how it built on and superseded these network(ed) movements. While platforms are often studied in the context of capitalist firms, my nine months of field research shows that they are present within civil society in the Global South and that they are shaped by particular violent contexts, in this case interpersonal violence and crime, racism, the legacy of civil war, migration, and free trade policies. By linking the interpersonal and structural, they challenge hegemonic representations of violence to multiple audiences. I also focus on the effects of these platforms through their facilitation of desires for development between Guatemalans and North American tourists, volunteers, and activists, including translating between multiple worldviews. This has had a profound effect especially in changing the position of women in several of the communities studied. While imbricated in the “third sector” of NGOs, my case study is an example of what I term entangled autonomy—the concrete practices by which radical organizations both use and refuse legibility and professionalization vis-à-vis the state, IGOs, and NGOs. The experience of civil society platforms challenges the vertical/horizontal dichotomy prevalent in social movement literature through its reconfiguration of inter and intraorganizational power dynamics. Marginalized actors use of these platforms to challenge structural issues demonstrate new modalities of transnational resistance in contemporary Central America.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/23731214
Recommended Citation
Sippert, Eric, "Platforms and Power: Transnational Guatemala" (2021). Doctoral Dissertations. 2358.
https://doi.org/10.7275/23731214
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2358
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Included in
Community-Based Research Commons, Comparative Politics Commons, Latin American Studies Commons, Migration Studies Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Social Justice Commons