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Abstract
This project examines variation in ethnic minority mobilizations for cultural rights and asks: how, why, and under what conditions do violence-affected ethnic minority communities mobilize for increased cultural rights? Related to this, how do memories of violence interact with patterns of state (non)accommodation to affect the ways minorities claim their cultural, and more specifically, linguistic rights? This project has three goals: 1) to account for how democratization shapes citizen experiences of interest representation; 2) to explain how resources like collective memory interact with state institutions and practices in social movements; and 3) to understand differences between communities and states that indicate trajectories of cultural continuity or assimilation.
Despite many common characteristics—such as democratizing political regimes and legacies of state and paramilitary persecution—Tzotzil and Triqui communities in Mexico, Alevi Kurds and Armenians in Turkey, and Nahua and Lenca people in El Salvador make cultural rights demands in very different ways. This project argues that highly mobilized communities, those that visibly and vocally demand state recognition and funding for minority cultural projects, generally use narratives about historic violence to instrumentally press their cases, and experience less political, economic, and cultural accommodation by their states. As a result, these communities often use more visible extra-institutional rather than institutional claim-making tactics.
Tzotzil people from Acteal, Chiapas, are in this high mobilization category, as are Alevi Kurds from Turkey's southeast. By contrast, less mobilized communities produce less potent narratives about past violence, enjoy higher degrees of state accommodation, and tend to use institutional channels for claim-making. This project documents this pattern among Lenca people in El Salvador and Armenians in Turkey. Still other people like Triquis from San Juan Copala, Oaxaca, Mexico, and Nahuas in Izalco, El Salvador mobilize to a medium degree but without the broadly appealing narratives of highly mobilized cases or the assimilation and institutional capture of least mobilized cases. In sum, the interaction between narratives of violence and state accommodation--the way people practice shaming their states to claim their rights--shapes mobilization patterns.
