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Abstract

After the Mexican ex-president Felipe Calderón declared a ‘war’ against criminal organisations, the number of murders and people reported as disappeared increased steadily in the country. However, the authorities constantly ensured that these crimes occurred exclusively among criminals. This narrative was fractured when, after the murder of his son in 2011, the poet Javier Sicilia started leading the protests of activists, relatives of victims and social organisations from virtually all of Mexico. After some mobilisations, they adopted the name Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD). Following a ‘players and arenas’ understanding of social movements, I analyse the formation of the MPJD as a self-identified compound player. First, I explore the structural and agency elements in the participants’ backgrounds. Then, I discuss how the emotional content of the interactions in public demonstrations influenced their relationships developing a sense of community that fostered their identification as part of the MPJD. Overall, this study advances a micro-level perspective to understand the dynamics of collective action.

Keywords

Social movements players and arenas strategic interactionism victims of violence emotions Mexico

Introduction

Amid accusations of electoral fraud and repeated clashes between police and criminal cartels, then Mexican president Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) announced that he would deploy the armed forces to start a ‘war’ against criminal organisations as soon as he took office (Pereyra, 2012). Things did not go as he possibly expected. Official sources (CNB, 2022; INEGI, 2022) state that during his term there were more than 121,000 murders and about 28,200 people were disappeared. In the official discourse, however, the victims were either criminals who did not deserve the protection of the law or collateral damage (Atuesta and Madrazo Lajous, 2019; Madrazo Lajous, 2016). Although some victims’ relatives began to organise to demand justice and some groups of activists promoted actions against militarisation, these actions had only a local reach. However, the government started facing a country-wide challenge after the 24-year-old son of the poet and political analyst Javier Sicilia was murdered on 28 March 2011 in the state of Morelos. Javier was out of the country when the tragedy occurred, so a group of people close to him mounted an ofrenda as a protest outside the Government Palace of the state and convened a series of marches. A couple of days later, Javier arrived and called to participate in public demonstrations to express a cry of outrage against violence, to make visible the faces of the victims, and to show that they were not just statistics (Sicilia, 2011). Relatives of victims from all the regions of the country joined the actions and, in a few weeks, they adopted the name Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD, Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad).

The organisers of the first protests were seasoned activists close to Javier, but most of the relatives of the victims had never been involved in activism and did not know each other. Thus, how did the MPJD come to be a self-identified player? In this article, I follow recent work on ‘players and arenas’ (Jasper, 2021) to analyse the formation of the MPJD as a self-identified collectivity. I argue that the structural characteristics that influence agency motivations can lead a single player to participate in a mobilisation, but it is the emotional content of the interactions in public demonstrations that foster the self-identification of a compound player.

In the following section, I present a cursory overview of the MPJD's formation and campaigns. Then, I discuss the ‘players and arenas’ analytical perspective. After explaining my methods, I analyse the structural and agency elements in the backgrounds of two sets of participants that have been involved in the MPJD, as well as the emotionally loaded interactions that led to the self-identification of the compound player. Finally, I share the conclusions of this work.

MPJD overview

The murder of Juan Sicilia, known as Juanelo, and six of his friends on 28 March 2011 fostered social mobilisations in virtually all Mexico. After a week of protests next to the Government Palace of Morelos – where the governor works – Javier led a protest attended by 40,000 people in Cuernavaca, the capital of the state, on 6 April 2011; this march had solidarity events in at least 20 other cities (La Jornada, 2011). Later, a four-day mobilisation called March for Peace departed from Morelos with around 500 participants and ended in Mexico City with around 200,000 attendees (Pérez, 2011). Adopting the name MPJD, the contentious actor conducted three caravans: the Caravan of Consolation in June 2011, a week-long tour across various northern states in which hundreds of victims’ relatives shared in public, many for the first time, their testimonios (testimonial narratives) of grief and injustice; the Caravan to the South in September of the same year, a 10-day mobilisation that travelled through various states in the south to meet with other types of victims: indigenous peoples and migrant communities; and the Caravan for Peace in the USA, in which, for a month, the MPJD met with various organisations to carry out actions to demand better policies around gun trafficking (Sicilia and Vázquez, 2016; Tirado, 2019).

Likewise, the MPJD held two public dialogues with Calderón, where several victims’ relatives demanded justice and changes in the security strategy, and one with members of Congress, who were required to assume their responsibility in the war (Monsiváis Carrillo et al., 2014). In April 2012, the MPJD obtained the approval of a law to protect victims’ rights, but Calderón used his presidential powers to stop its official enactment, so it was not implemented until 2013 by Enrique Peña, the following president (Gordillo-García, 2020). The MPJD demobilised after this, but dozens of colectivos (collectives) led by relatives of disappeared people – many of them organised by former MPJD participants – were formed during Peña's term to perform independent and citizen-led brigades to search for bodies in clandestine pits (Cepeda and Leetoy, 2020; Iliná, 2020; Robledo-Silvestre, 2015). Then, in 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the subsequent presidential election and promised to adopt transitional justice programs but, once in office, ignored the victims’ demands. The trend of violence continued to rise, and the MPJD made a new call to protest to demand the president fulfil his promises carrying out another four-day long march in January 2020 along with dozens of the colectivos.

Analytical perspective

Arguing for a ‘strategic interactionism’ analytical framework, a group of scholars has recently called to observe the dynamics of social movements using a vocabulary based on ‘players and arenas’ (Accornero, 2022; Duyvendak and Jasper, 2015; Elliott-Negri et al., 2021; Jabola-Carolus et al., 2020; Jämte and Pitti, 2019; Jasper, 2006, 2021; Jasper and Duyvendak, 2015; Jasper and King, 2020; Jasper et al., 2018, 2022; Verhoeven and Duyvendak, 2017). Such a proposal comes from the difficulty that structuralist and agency-based theories have faced in integrating elements of both macro and micro analyses (Accornero, 2022; Jasper, 2015). To bridge the gap, these authors propose to synthesise considerations of both ends to advance our understanding of contentious politics (McGarry et al., 2016). As they argue, this can provide a solid basis for the micro-analysis of protest that does not ignore environmental factors but also avoids considering the structural as overly deterministic.

Hence, strategic interactionists invite researchers to adopt a vocabulary that equally accounts for the agency of the players and the constraints they face in the arenas where they mobilise (Jasper, 2021). Broadly, players are those that engage in strategic action with some goal in mind and some shared identity, while arenas are the concrete and symbolic settings where players interact to make decisions and produce outcomes (Duyvendak and Fillieule, 2015; Jasper, 2015, 2021). Players can be individuals or groups – thus, they can include sets of subplayers that interact in internal arenas that are also linked to other arenas (Mische, 2015). Compound players – that is, collective players composed of several other players – also become arenas when they debate, plan strategies, or make decisions (Jasper et al., 2022). It is important to point out that the arenas do not always exist before a problem is first noted – frequently, the mobilised players influence the contours of the arenas (Duyvendak and Fillieule, 2015).

The relationships between players are captured in the concept of space and the ones between arenas are conceptualised as a field (Jasper et al., 2022). However, the intricacy of interrelationships and overlapping among spaces and fields responds to the complexity of social realities. Thus, for analytical purposes, scholars need to define which players and arenas are observed based on given research interests. Inspired by Jasper's question (2021: 250), in this text I contribute to the study of social movements by building on a vocabulary of players and arenas through the analysis of how a compound player comes to be self-identified. As strategic interactionists argue, single players have a complex biography, but compound ones can be formed ‘from scratch’ (McGarry et al., 2016: 639), although they are not organised overnight (Duyvendak and Fillieule, 2015). Henceforth, it is fundamental to understand how the backgrounds of single players account for the mobilisation of a compound player (Duyvendak and Fillieule, 2015).

The study of the initial involvement in protest has changed from using a primarily structural approach to a more agency-oriented one over time. Currently, scholars recognise the importance of considering both structural and motivational factors (Van Laer, 2017). The players and arenas perspective advances in this direction. The biographies of single players reflect structural influences that shape and, in a way, restrict or influence their actions (Duyvendak and Fillieule, 2015; Jasper, 2021; Jasper et al., 2022). In other words, strategic interactionist analyses must consider the experiences, emotions, and convictions that players’ have developed in their socialisation processes to better understand how the stability of their dispositions mediate their understandings of the world (Duyvendak and Fillieule, 2015).

Although social movement literature ignored Bourdieu's work for a long time – perhaps precisely because he did not pay attention to social movements as players capable of producing social change (see Girling, 2004) – over the last two decades, there has been a relevant discussion of its usefulness and significance (Crossley, 2002a, 2002b; Gorringe and Rafanell, 2007; Haluza-DeLay, 2008; Ho, 2020; Husu, 2013; Ibrahim, 2015; Kirby, 2017; Krinsky, 2021; Landy, 2015). In this context, some authors (Crossley, 2002a; Haluza-DeLay, 2008; Kirby, 2017) point out that, in the sociological debate between structure and agency, Bourdieu's theory of practice offers a midpoint through the concept of habitus, essentially defined as open systems of structured and structuring dispositions that generate practices and representations (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992).

Building on Bourdieu's work, Crossley (2002b, 2003) coined the term radical habitus to capture a particular style of reasoning and acting shared by activists when they make choices about collective action. The players who have developed this internalised set of dispositions through a longstanding involvement in radical politics might bring their competence and abilities into new socio-political struggles (Crossley, 2002b). The notion of habitus is useful to strategic interactionism because it reflects the adoption of cultural elements that are reproduced within a field – that is, a set of interrelated arenas – through socialisation (Flesher Fominaya, 2014). However, Gorringe and Rafanell (2007) maintain that if Bourdieu's approach to habitus is followed in a strict manner, the dispositions that frame people's activity are rather static. In that sense, Gorringe and Rafanell point out that Crossley's work and that of other authors inspired by Bourdieu invariably amend his original claims. I agree. Nonetheless, I follow Crossley (2002a) in considering that the concept of habitus is a key element in the relationship between structure and agency. Although the habitus remains internalised in the body and in the players’ feeling-thinking processes, it expresses people's projects and histories of socialisation (Kirby, 2017). In that regard, the strategic interactionism approach acknowledges that participants develop a form of know-how that shapes their competencies, capacities, moral evaluations, and goals (Jasper, 2006).

Single players who lack activism experience and ties to contentious compound players, however, have often been ignored by the literature (Fisher and McInerney, 2012). Before engaging in protests, people become sensitised to a given topic (Klandermans, 1997). This can happen through life changes and experiences that modify the players’ feeling-thinking processes (Corrigall-Brown, 2012; Passy and Monsch, 2014). In other words, involvement in certain arenas can lead some players to develop knowledge, opinions or emotions that they did not have before because they were unaware of the dynamics within those arenas. This is important because emotions are at the core of rationality shaping goals and choices, delimiting what is worth fighting for and the reasons to engage in action with others (Jasper, 2006, 2015).

Besides understanding the participants’ backgrounds, the analysis of the self-identification of a compound player needs an account of the role of emotions in the players’ interactions. Getting involved in a compound player implies taking part in regular interactions within a particular world of meaning (Fillieule, 2010). Moreover, social movements articulate moral visions and group adherences through several types of shared and reciprocal emotional processes (Jasper, 2018). Thus, the relationships between players and action, as well as their performative and symbolic elements, are key to understanding the complex meanings of contentious events and the player self-identification processes (Barker, 2001; Doherty and Hayes, 2019). Studies have found that participating in public demonstrations enhances spaces of solidarity because it brings players together towards a shared purpose (Barker, 2001; Berezin, 2001). In Latin American contexts of widespread criminal and political violence, researchers have found that people tend to develop strong ties with the victims after listening to their testimonios (Jimeno, 2010; Macleod and De Marinis, 2018). The fundamental characteristic of this type of ties is that the pain of the victims does not remain enclosed in them but spreads to other audiences who are moved by the narrative – this is followed not only by a compassionate moment but by the construction of a political ideal that leads people to organise and mobilise to demand justice (De Marinis and Macleod, 2018; Jimeno et al., 2015). Testimonios play a key role in this space because they promote, through their emotional elements, a shared version of violent events and establish links that lead to the collective claim for justice and reparation taking personal struggles into public arenas (Jimeno, 2010; Macleod and Bastián, 2019).¹

Therefore, I study the formation of the MPJD as a self-identified compound player exploring the background of two sets of subplayers and analysing the emotional content of their interactions in the arenas of public demonstrations. Thus, I maintain, first, that the initial involvement of these players must be understood from the structural and agency conditions observed in the participants’ biographies. Second, I argue that the emotionally loaded relationships forged in contention led the participants to achieve a sense of community that fostered their identification as part of a compound player, the MPJD.

Methods

The strategic interactionism perspective encourages ‘descriptions close to the ground, focusing on things that can be seen and described’, incorporating culture, emotions, and structural constraints (Jasper, 2021: 244). Decision-making and emotions are critical in these descriptions because feeling-thinking processes ‘hold compound players together or tear them apart’ (Jasper et al., 2022: 48). Thus, to explain why individual players cooperate, researchers need to identify who takes part in the interactions and what they want to achieve based on their socialisation and dispositions but also acknowledging historical and cultural dimensions (Duyvendak and Fillieule, 2015).

Taking this into account, this article is based on in-depth and semi-structured interviews with six men and seven women who have participated – although in different degrees and ways – in the MPJD. These interviews are a subset of a broader research project (Gordillo-García, 2022b). Following a life-trajectory approach, I conducted the interviews in Spanish in 2020. I designed a purposeful sampling strategy that involved the selection of information-rich cases that served to understand several areas of the mobilisation dynamics of this contentious player (Patton, 2015). Given my involvement in victim-led mobilisations and projects, I was familiar with the interviewees, which benefitted my research in terms of rapport and trust. Besides, several interviewees declared their interest in participating because the project would expose their cases to a broader public. Based on this interest, I use their real names. Unless stated otherwise, all direct quotes come from the interviews.

As researchers, we cannot demarcate the sites where interactions take place in advance (Duyvendak and Fillieule, 2015). Therefore, the interviews helped not only to understand why people took part in the MPJD but also to identify the importance of the arenas in which they got engaged. This was useful to understand the emotional dynamics of public demonstrations of the MPJD.

Strategic interactionism aims to highlight the importance of all players in a given interplay (Jämte and Pitti, 2019), which entails an obstacle since scholars do not have access to all the players and arenas (Jasper et al., 2022). In the case of this project, I did not have access to government players. However, what the government players thought, felt, or strategically planned was not important for my research – what is relevant is what the president and the prosecutors had done in terms of justice and, above all, how the activists and the victims’ relatives interpreted the government's actions and discourses.

Structural and agency elements in the subplayers’ backgrounds²

The single players who started the protests of the MPJD had been involved in several forms of political participation. Furthermore, as has been observed in other movements (Downton and Wehr, 1998), most of them had adopted a lifestyle that reflected their commitment to social struggles. The radical habitus is shared and developed within communities (Crossley, 2002b), so its structural component is linked to spaces and fields in which the players are immersed. As such, it is relevant that the organisers of the protests were not only players who had developed a radical habitus but were also related to each other through the figure of Javier or his son, so the tragedy had a certain degree of closeness.

Javier Sicilia was trained in Catholicism and the Gandhian non-violence since he was a child. After studying French Literature, he joined a group of Gandhism promoters in the 80s, including Pietro Ameglio (introduced below), who became one of his most trusted friends – ‘I began to link with political-action groups, activism groups. It was there when I entered activism’, Javier recalls. Later, inspired by his experience in France in the Community of the Ark, a commune of non-violent life, the poet started one in Mexico, but the project failed. However, he became a contributor in several national journals and magazines of political analysis. In 2001, Javier got involved in the ‘Casino de la Selva’ (Jungle's Casino) campaign in defence of the historical and environmental heritage in Morelos, meeting other activists such as Ignacio Suárez³ and Magdiel Sánchez (introduced below). Likewise, he used his literature to support several social movements. For his part, Pietro Ameglio became involved in solidarity campaigns with Central America during his youth. He then got closer to Gandhism and started living and working with homeless people, while also starting several human rights-related organisations and projects nationally and internationally. In the early 90s, Pietro did peace activism in zones of armed conflict and became close to the Zapatistas in Mexico. Likewise, he got involved in the ‘Casino de la Selva’ campaign, which landed him in prison due to his civil resistance actions. Furthermore, teaching at several universities, Pietro conducted projects from the non-violence philosophy and inspired by Jean Piaget's epistemology. ‘The Zapatista culture, the Piagetian culture, the Gandhian culture, and the culture of the poorest marked’ him, he argues.

Magdiel Sánchez joined political participation from a young age in a context of training around ‘liberation theology, some important social struggles in Morelos’ and ‘the impact that the Zapatistas had on the state and […] the communities’. While studying Philosophy, he also became involved in the Casino de la Selva campaign, meeting Javier. Later, because of his personal relationships – including Ignacio Suárez – Magdiel participated in the land defence campaigns in the community of Atenco (see Stone, 2019). From there, he kept participating and organising several projects linked to native communities. Likewise, Gerardo Gómez and Norma Garduño had also been involved – individually and as a couple – for decades in several forms of activism around Zapatista campaigns and land protection struggles in many states of the country. Moreover, they both had been teachers of Juanelo, Javier's son.

Three other organisers were Denisse Buendía, Juanfra García and Roberto Villanueva. Denisse was trained in feminism from a young age, had participated in several projects against femicide and was friends with Javier. Juanfra was formed in left-wing politics, used to work and do activism with Ignacio Suárez, and was linked to Javier because he was a cultural promoter. Finally, Roberto was formally trained in human rights defence and had experience in student activism. Furthermore, Pietro was his teacher when the murder happened, and he had friends in common with Juanelo.

Through a radical habitus, the players’ actions and choices are structurally influenced by their respective histories, and, in turn, the agency of their choices and actions influences their readings of the world (Crossley, 2002a). In other words, the habitus carries a form of know-how that outlines agency, which helps in understanding the choices that players make (Crossley, 2002b, 2003). Considering that the subplayers that I identify as organisers of the MPJD had participated in several campaigns through the years, I argue that their structural background influenced their decision to protest in response to a violent crime. Moreover, some of these players had experience in organising against violence. For example, ‘I was already working with groups […] on the issue of the increasing violence […]. I had the concern to build actions of non-violence in the face of the size of the violence’, Pietro recalls. Likewise, the crisis had led Magdiel to seek social experiences from other countries that could be adapted to Mexico. ‘Since the end of 2008, I was with a group of close people thinking how to […] make visible the violence’, he comments. Thus, he participated in organising the Mexican chapter of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal.

Norma and Gerardo knew about Juanelo's murder because other people close to Javier – including Pietro – informed them of the crime by phone. ‘We all proposed that we had to go to the city centre to set up candles and protest because it was beginning to be said [in local media] that they were linked to drug trafficking’, Gerardo recalls. ‘No one believed it to be true. Besides, they were accusing him of being involved in drug trafficking. We could not allow that’, Denisse comments as well. As these players’ words suggest, rather than structurally ‘conditioning’ their actions, the radical habitus informed the decision to protest in the face of possible slander towards Juanelo and Javier. That is, the MPJD organisers had learned from their involvement in previous campaigns in several arenas and with various compound players, so their agency considered that protesting was a way to protect the youngsters’ dignity. The immediate goal of these people was to prevent the criminalisation of Juanelo. Different players might have tried to do this in different ways – some people might have targeted, for example, the arenas of the judiciary – but this group resorted to protesting because of the influence of their radical habitus. Since players ‘embody a certain continuity’ and build on their history to give meaning to the present (Duyvendak and Fillieule, 2015: 308), the micro-universe of knowledge, valuations and practices shared by these subplayers guided their actions because events around violence – as well as other socially relevant topics – are signified differently amongst the ‘politically innocent’ and the ‘seasoned activists’ who understand the world through diverse perspectives (Crossley, 2002b: 55).

The first local protests of the MPJD did not involve relatives of victims. However, after the 6 April march, families of murdered and disappeared people from different regions of the country began to approach the group that organised the mobilisations. Although, these players lacked experience in activism and were not linked to politicised spaces, they had suffered the negligence of the authorities. This means that both the extremely violent crime and their knowledge of the inefficacy of the institutional arenas impacted their agency through a relevant change in their feeling-thinking processes.

I cannot provide a full account of all the issues that these players had faced within the justice arenas, so I will only provide illustrative examples. Araceli Rodríguez – mother of Luis León, a police officer that was disappeared in 2009 in Michoacán – was told that his son was not taking phone calls because he was surely drunk. Besides, the authorities initially refused to file the judicial complaint about the disappearance and, later, assured her that Luis had been murdered and his body charred – subsequent DNA tests proved this to be false. Thus, Araceli lived ‘very shocking and very painful moments due to the wrongdoing of the authorities’. When María Coronado filed a complaint about the disappearance of her husband Mauricio Aguilar in 2011 in Veracruz, she noted that the prosecutor's office staff suggested that Mauricio ‘was involved in something’ and that she was linked to the crime. Moreover, despite the passing of the months, the authorities did not make any progress in the investigation. A similar case was faced by Teresa Carmona, mother of Joaquín García-Jurado, a youngster murdered in 2010 in Mexico City – for months, the authorities did not provide any information about her son's case. ‘It was very difficult. At first, I did not even want to leave my room’, she comments.

Two other relatives of disappeared people who joined the MPJD's actions were Leticia Hidalgo and Guadalupe Aguilar. Facing the unwillingness of the authorities, they had to look for their sons on their own. Leticia's son, Roy Rivera, was disappeared in 2011 in Nuevo León. Daily, she would ask the authorities to look for Roy, but they were never responsive. ‘That road was very tortuous, very frustrating […]. They did not pay us the attention we thought we deserved […]. Virtually no one was doing anything’, Leticia recalls. Likewise, after her son José Arana was disappeared in 2011 in Jalisco, Guadalupe started asking for help to search for him in all types of government offices. Given the lack of response, she started investigating by herself. After several months of insisting, the state's prosecutor met with her only to assure her that José was on an ‘unlawful path’.

The individual experiences that these players shared provided them with common understandings around violence and impunity, which sensitised their feeling-thinking processes. As explained by Passy and Monsch (2014), players’ feeling-thinking maps can be enriched throughout their life experiences by self-interactions and external processes – the former involve a personal pursuit of knowledge of the world or the context in which one is embedded, while the latter include events that do not necessarily convey social interactions. These two forms of life experiences might develop and alter individuals’ feeling-thinking processes and make people prone to join contentious politics (Passy and Monsch, 2014) because they offer a source of attitudinal support to a social movement (Klandermans and Oegema, 1987). Henceforth, these subplayers’ knowledge and emotions regarding impunity and disdain in the justice field as well as their assessments of the lack of attention from the authorities sensitised them to respond calls against violence and injustice. In other words, despite the lack of structural influences in the form of a radical habitus or links to contentious compound players, the changes in the life conditions of these single players impacted their feeling-thinking processes and, in turn, their influenced their agency to make them prone to social mobilisation.

The victims’ relatives that I interviewed pointed out that they became aware of the demonstrations through press reports. This is relevant because, after becoming sensitised to themes around violent crimes, the media took part in their engagement since it provided them with information about the MPJD's protests. ‘I saw that [Javier] was making a public call and I wanted to join’, Araceli comments. Then, she attended the March for Peace and, after a while, she was invited by Ignacio Suárez to participate in the first dialogue with Calderón. From there, she has been involved in the MPJD. Likewise, Teresa knew through the press that there was going to be a solidarity march in Cancun – where she lived – on 6 April so she attended carrying Joaquín's photography ‘because someone killed him, and nobody [had] explained anything’ to her. Besides, she recalls that she wanted to show solidarity with the Sicilia family. ‘I was not thinking about the poet but the mother and the siblings, because I knew what they were going through’, she recalls. A couple of weeks later, Teresa travelled to Cuernavaca to join the March for Peace and has been participating in the MPJD since then. On her behalf, María saw on television the call for the Caravan of Consolation. ‘I wanted to go, meet Javier and belong to that movement […]. I knew that we would be able to understand each other because I was living the same thing’, she comments. Thus, she went to one of the MPJD meetings and was convinced that working collectively, as opposed to doing it alone, could help in achieving something.

Leticia also heard on television about the local demonstration of the Caravan of Consolation. ‘We decided to go because we wanted to denounce. Even though we were very scared, we wanted to tell someone’. Likewise, in July 2011, some MPJD participants visited Jalisco and led a public demonstration due to the disappearance of a student. ‘Every time I saw something that looked like what had happened to my son, I would run there’, Guadalupe comments, so she joined the demonstration. Months later, both Leticia and Guadalupe joined the MPJD for the Caravan in the USA.

Press coverage is not always a positive phenomenon (Rosie and Gorringe, 2009), but the media has played a part in getting people involved in contentious compound players since it can raise general awareness of certain problems or events (Andrews and Biggs, 2006; Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). Thus, once sensitised because of the changes in their feeling-thinking processes, the subplayers that were victims’ relatives became aware of the protests thanks to the structural relevance of the media arena. Javier's call to mobilise – whose messages have been analysed elsewhere (Gordillo-García, 2022a; Tirado, 2019) – presented a range of grievances that the victims’ relatives could understand from their own life experiences. His grief was that of others because it transcended the personal case and reflected the pain and helplessness that thousands had lived. Then, joining the poet and the rest of the organisers was a chance to express personal grievances and emotions in a broader arena.

Emotional arenas and the sense of community

Social movements do not only rely upon pre-existing networks – participants tend to form new ties and solidarities between themselves, supporters, the general public, and even elites (Diani, 1997). Players can develop such networks in public demonstrations and street protests because these are arenas of interaction (Stoddart et al., 2020) where people learn, make decisions, foster feelings of belonging and experience and express emotions (Jasper et al., 2022). Furthermore, for collective action to be sustained, there must be a ‘shared sense of purpose and reciprocal identification and mutual recognition’ among participants in a compound player (Flesher Fominaya, 2019: 430). This sense of community can depart from the process of a person or a group narrating their experiences of suffering to others, who in turn respond with compassion and engage with them for collective action (Stephen, 2018). Thus, I maintain that the MPJD's public demonstrations became arenas where victims’ relatives and activists began to establish affective links through the presentation of testimonios. Then, the interactions in these arenas led to the development of a sense of community.⁴

Going through strongly emotional experiences together with others increases solidarity and willingness to participate (Flesher Fominaya, 2019) because collective performances tend to amplify and transform individual emotions into collective ones through the awareness of a shared focus of attention (Collins, 2001). In that regard, the interviewees recall an atmosphere of sadness and outrage in the arenas of the demonstrations. Separately, Norma and Denisse talk about ‘chaotic’ and ‘very painful days’. The organisers recall feeling overtaken because many attendees were suffering, crying, talking about their cases, and trying to give them their files looking for help. As Norma remembers, it ‘started to be emotionally complicated’ because they ‘saw many comrades going into crisis […]. I very much remember one of them saying: All the bad news I have seen on television are in front of me today. It was extremely painful’.

In 2011, Javier argued that while listening to the testimonios, ‘the body shudders, the throat closes, and the eyes fill with tears’, so ‘one feels an infinite desire to hug the person and cry […]. People are in great need of someone to listen to them […]; when there is someone who understands them, they join, they give you […] mementoes’ of their relatives (Torres, 2011: 63). María Herrera, who suffered the disappearance of two sons in 2008 and two more in 2010, told her testimonio publicly for the first time at an MPJD event in Michoacán. When she finished telling the story, many people surrounded her, embraced her, and offered help to make her case public. The woman then decided to join the Caravan of Consolation. ‘I have felt a certain peace and hope of having my children in my arms again […]. I feel that through the networks of this caravan I will find something […], some kind of help […]’, she said (Herrero, 2011: 31). Another activist of the MPJD considered that after listening to the testimonios ‘we are left with the obligation to remember them and work for them [the murdered and disappeared], so that they have justice’ (Rocato, 2012: 3). Likewise, Roberto comments that being present in the arenas of the demonstrations involved a ‘very powerful approach to pain’, so he realised that ‘you cannot stand still; you have to do everything in your power so that this [the crimes] does not happen to anyone else’. For him, this reassured the importance of continuing to participate.

Testimonios are usually focused on a suffered injustice and introduce claims asking for recognition, empathy, and justice (Jolly, 2014; Valencia, 2017). While listening to testimonios, the public is not merely a passive listener but rather becomes a participant in the act and a co-owner of the memory of the traumatic event (Taylor, 2003). This interactive process helps to develop a sense of ‘we’ (De Marinis, 2018). The emotional dimensions of testimonios facilitate the development of a shared version of violent events to link subjective experiences to broader social arenas and articulate actions around solidarity (Jimeno, 2010). This coincides with previous findings on how individuals become attached to compound players when they consider as valuable to share emotions with other participants (Jasper, 2014).

Moreover, even if the players were not clear about what they would achieve by participating, being active in the MPJD arenas was a way of affirming their relatives’ dignity in the face of violence and the official criminalisation of the victims. ‘What made me go [to the March for Peace]? I could not avoid doing it. I had no choice – it was the only thing I could do. I did not think about doing anything else’, Teresa recalls. Likewise, Juanfra considered stepping away from the demonstrations for a while because he was ‘very emotionally touched’ but then decided to continue participating. ‘It was part of my conviction, I had to go. I was a supportive companion moved by great compassion, not pity, doing what I had to do: work with them [the victims’ relatives]’, he says. Participation in an arena of a public demonstration can be both means and ends (Jasper et al., 2022), even if players are not clear about what will happen. Thus, the grief and frustration that violence and official disdain had caused met with forms of hope and solidarity fostered in the arenas where the MPJD performed public demonstrations.

Before becoming involved in the arenas, the victims’ relatives shared moods based on depression, grief, and despair because of the crime they experienced and the treatment they received from the authorities. While the organisers – except for Javier – did not necessarily share the same kind of grief, they did share sympathy for the victims. Then, while involved in the arenas, both victims’ relatives and organisers experienced strong reflex emotions (Jasper, 2018) – the main reaction was a type of distress mixed with a form of hope that came from sharing testimonios of a traumatic experience with others. Although the victims’ relatives did not know what to expect or did not expect anything concrete either – which is similar to what Jasper (2018: 96) calls the nothing-left-to-lose effect – feeling heard and accompanied encouraged participation. Depression was not left behind, but the emotional battery of hope counteracted its demobilising features. For their part, the organisers developed sympathetic indignation in response to the grief of relatives, which fosters the will of cooperation (Jasper, 2018: 141).

The compound players that we know as social movements are usually formed building on ‘existing ideologies and sensibilities’ (Jasper et al., 2022: 5). However, the cognitive and emotional framework that strengthens collective identity is shaped by social interactions through an ongoing process that outlines – although not uniformly – the arenas, ends and means of collective action (Melucci, 1995). Therefore, although the organisers and the victims’ relatives had, respectively, some elements in common that facilitated their initial involvement, it was the strongly emotional interactions in the arenas that ultimately led the individual players to form what Jasper (2018) calls reciprocal affective commitments and moral convictions. These emotional processes strengthened the sense of community and allowed the collective identification of a compound player, the MPJD.

Conclusion

In this article, I studied the self-identification of a contentious compound player, the MPJD. First, aiming to understand their initial involvement, I discussed the structural and agency elements in the backgrounds of two sets of subplayers. Then, I discussed how the emotional content of the interactions in the arenas of the MPJD demonstrations influenced the relationships of these subplayers, developing a sense of community that fostered their identification as a compound player. In line with Melucci's work (1995), this article reiterates that the sense of unity of a social movement is not exclusively a starting point but, more often, a result of it. That is, the self-identification of a compound player is based not only on the structural and agency conditions of its single players, but on the interactions that take place in its arenas. In this sense, the structural characteristics that influence agency motivations can lead a single player to participate in a mobilisation, but it is the reciprocal affective commitments and moral convictions – a product of the interactions in emotional arenas – that foster the self-identification of a compound player. Thus, as found in other contexts (Bayard de Volo, 2006; Gravante and Poma, 2016), this research shows that emotions are at the core of a compound player's self-identification

Analyses from strategic interactionism offer us an integrated micro-level theory and language to understand the dynamics of collective action (Jasper, 2021). The ‘players and arenas’ perspective does not intend to establish macro explanations in which structural dimensions are presented as determinants of action. In contrast, what is sought is to highlight the transcendence of agency and interactions while also acknowledging structural limits. Thus, this article contributes to showing the relevance of the ‘players and arenas’ vocabulary in the study of social movements. Besides, although proponents of strategic interactionism oppose the use of concepts that cannot be directly observed in the field (Jasper, 2021), my discussion suggests that the concept of habitus – albeit with the amendments made by Crossley (2002b) – is useful for exploring the structural and agency characteristics of the single players involved in contentious compound ones.

Finally, considering that compound players quite often have disagreements around their goals and tactics (Jasper, 2006, 2015; Polletta and Kretschmer, 2015) and that self-identification is never fixed completely (Flesher Fominaya, 2019), a possible subsequent project is the analysis of the factionalism and ruptures in the MPJD coalitions from a strategic interactionist perspective.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful feedback and the editors of the journal, particularly John O’Brien, for their help with some unexpected administrative issues.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT).

ORCID iD

Johan Gordillo-García

Notes

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Compound players and emotional arenas: The self-identification of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity in Mexico

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

MPJD overview

Analytical perspective

Methods

Structural and agency elements in the subplayers’ backgrounds 2

Emotional arenas and the sense of community

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References

Structural and agency elements in the subplayers’ backgrounds²