Juana Azurduy Versus Christopher Columbus
Two Antagonistic Logics for the Building of Argentina
Adrián and Sebastián Villar Rojas
Translated by Jane Brodie
I.
In 2010, during the bicentennial of Argentine independence, the center-left government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner decided—in an act of historic reparation—to remove the statue of Christopher Columbus outside the presidential palace in Buenos Aires.
The replacement statue of Juana Azurduy, a Bolivian woman, would honor the forgotten heroes of the wars of independence.
An Italian-born conquistador—a white European male and symbol of the Spanish Crown—was, then, replaced by an enormous image of a Bolivian mestiza, a patriotic woman warrior of South American independence.
In 2015, Mauricio Macri, the leader of a nascent right-wing, pro-market political force, was elected president after twelve years of Kirchnerist administrations, first under Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and then under Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015). The monument to Juana Azurduy was immediately removed.
Few acts performed by governments epitomize as patently as these removals how one system of ideas and ideals can be replaced by another.
How do these systems take root, and what inflections make change possible? Does the origin of one of them lie in the fifteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire drove Europeans to search for an alternative to the Silk Road, which for centuries had enabled commercial exchange between Europe and Asia? Might the origin of the other lie in 1992, during the debates in the Spanish-speaking world on the occasion of the five-hundredth anniversary of the “Discovery of America” (1492), when the official—white, European—version of events was scrutinized by critical revisionism?
Old words, like “discovery” and “cultural encounter,” were utterly discredited as new ones, like “conquest” and even “genocide,” were used. At the center of the declining Eurocentric narrative was Christopher Columbus. In Latin America, he was knocked out by a powerful, perhaps unexpected, blow: an alternative story told by the defeated, the descendants of the millions of native victims who were now demanding truth and justice, and the right to their land and identity.
II.
In 2005, a group of Bolivian people from the Aymara native community performed a ritual in front of a skeleton of one of their ancestors on display in a glass case in the La Plata Museum of natural history in Argentina. Their action triggered an investigation by La Plata University Research Group in Social Anthropology (GUIAS is the acronym in Spanish), a group formed in 2006 specifically to follow the case.1 Among the macabre things GUIAS discovered in the museum before being kicked out were archaeological archives containing over ten thousand bones belonging to at least two thousand unidentified human bodies, presumably members of massacred native communities. They discovered as well hundred-year-old documentary photographs of Mapuche and Tehuelche prisoners in vexing situations. Some of the people in the images were completely naked, others in native costume, and still others in Western clothing. Some of the photographs show prisoners performing forced labor in sugarcane plantations and refineries.
In 1886, Francisco Pascasio Moreno (1852–1919), a prominent explorer and the founding director of the La Plata Museum, convinced the Argentine government to hand over Mapuche and Tehuelche individuals who had been taken prisoner during the Conquest of the Desert, a series of military campaigns waged between 1878 and 1885 to expand the national government’s dominion over the Pampa and Patagonia, currently central and southern Argentina. To that end, the Conquest of the Desert brought the extermination of the native communities who still controlled those lands. The Mapuche and Tehuelche groups were held captive on the museum’s premises, enslaved, photographed, used as models for dioramas, and exhibited as “living fossils”—the term Darwin used to describe the hunter-gatherer population that remained in the southern extreme of the Americas. When one of them would die—often in strange circumstances never investigated by the police—their flesh would be removed and their skeleton displayed in the museum’s cases as part of its archaeological collection. Several skulls of Mapuche and Tehuelche people were sent as gifts to museums of natural history in Paris and in London. Obsession with collecting the skulls of “savage peoples” in order to measure, compare, classify, and exhibit them was a distinctive feature of nascent modern sciences like anthropology and archaeology—both fueled by the mid-nineteenth-century neocolonial rediscovery of the world. Along with the many megafauna fossils also shipped to Europe, this vast collection of skulls donated by Moreno and by other eminent evolutionists, like Florentino Ameghino (1854–1911), was why Argentina and its “naturalists” gained such prestige in the most highly regarded academic circles in Europe.
In the wake of independence in the 1800s, Argentina looked to Europe for guidance as it attempted to forge a national identity. England was a model of “progress” and France of “culture.” Under the influence of both of those admired nations, the Buenos Aires elite strove to build a modern state based on the West’s “best” and “most advanced” ideas. Buenos Aires was eager to become the Paris of Latin America, and that required establishing strong ties with every field of human knowledge: the country’s “wise men” must be proven up to its ambitious project of progress.
Still in the hands of the rebellious Mapuche, Tehuelche, and Ranquel peoples, the Pampa and Patagonia had to be conquered not only for economic and political reasons but also for the sake of modern science. The bodies of the white man’s enemies would be an important piece of booty, something to be taken full advantage of by those “wise men” struggling to gain a place for Argentina in the most prestigious cultural, academic, and scientific networks in the West.
III.
The second industrial revolution, in the 1870s, was also—indeed, above all—a transport revolution. It began with the global expansion of motors, first steam and later internal combustion. Fleeing hunger and war, millions of human beings boarded ships fueled by coal and steam in the ports of Europe heading for the Americas.
Thus began the second great wave of migration to the “new continent,” this one much bigger and faster than the first. Steam-powered ships did not depend on sea currents and winds. They were autonomous, reliable, and frequent. With the use of metal alloys, wood, and industrial lacquer, their tonnage grew exponentially. Commercial transport, a huge new business, was born on a grand scale, and with it, the mass movement of people by land and sea.
Trains and steam-powered boats were heralded as symbols of progress and civilization. In the novel Around the World in Eighty Days, published in 1873, Jules Verne speaks of the virtual shrinking of the world, rendered controllable in space and time.
In just a few decades, tens of millions of Europeans came to the Americas by ship in pursuit of a better life. Compared to previous centuries, the numbers were overwhelming, with masses leaving ports in Hamburg, London, and the Mediterranean, as well as France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Denmark, heading toward North, Central, and South America. Others migrated across the Pacific (large numbers of Chinese arrived in Peru). Over the course of just a handful of years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a current of human displacement rooted in capitalism, opportunity, starvation, and war took place on a scale greater than the one witnessed by three entire centuries of exploration.
IV.
“To govern is to populate,” said Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), one of the most influential liberal intellectuals and political thinkers in Argentine history. In his 1852 book Bases, he laid the foundation of the country’s constitution. For Alberdi, immigration was a privileged source of “progress and civilization,” but mostly it was the only means to build a sovereign nation in a territory the Buenos Aires elites considered unpopulated and inhospitable to civilized society. They believed that large swathes of wild land were still in the hands of small pockets of “savage” hunter-gatherers.
Like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–1888), the other great liberal thinker from the second half of the nineteenth century, Alberdi envisioned welcoming the “surplus population” of the United Kingdom, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, and Northern Europe in general on the coasts of the River Plate.
Both Alberdi and Sarmiento stressed the importance of encouraging settlements of what they called “industrious, civilized, and free Northern European workers,” especially Anglo-Saxons. They believed those migrants would bring with them the know-how of Great Britain’s industrial revolution, Protestantism’s stoic faith in material progress, and love of freedom and mutual respect.
Alberdi in particular did not seek to exclude anybody but—in an early case of cultural eugenics—to encourage the “desired” type of immigration and to distribute it all over the nation’s territory, thus avoiding concentration in big port cities: “To govern is to populate, but to populate can also be to infest, to brutalize, to enslave. The difference lies in whether the transplanted population is civilized or primitive, poor, corrupt.…But no foreigner, no matter how vile he may be, should be excluded. If exclusion of the vile is permitted, the exclusion of the virtuous will follow as a matter of course. In freedom of migration, as in freedom of the press, license means legality.…Northern Europeans will naturally go to North America. After all, the north in both worlds is, it would appear, the realm of freedom and industry. South America, though, must give up the illusion of receiving immigrants capable of educating it in freedom, peace, and industry, unless it is able, by artificial means, to attract them.…The art of populating is, above all else, the art of distributing the population.”2 Between 1880 and 1914, the Argentine government, heeding Alberdi’s advice, opened agencies all over Europe to encourage the idea of emigrating to the new promised land. “Come to Argentina,” they urged, “where there is an abundance of jobs and food, and productive land you can easily own.” Despite government efforts, the largest wave of immigrants to South America did not come from Protestant Northern Europe but from its Catholic south, mainly from Spain and Italy. Furthermore, the dream of a settlement of Northern European farmers—in Sarmiento’s view, the Swiss family farm was the ideal production unit—that would defend the hinterland against the “uncivilized Indian” would soon collide with the powerful interests of the large Criollo landowners reluctant to share ownership of the fertile Humid Pampas with “foreign rabble.” There, most of the few settlements of that sort were scattered over the provinces of Santa Fe, Córdoba, Entre Ríos, Corrientes, and Misiones—that is, up north from the hardcore region of the Buenos Aires large landowners. A rural middle class of farmers—which both Sarmiento and Alberdi, looking to the United States, had envisioned as leading the way to healthy economic and social development—did come to exist, but it was tiny. Far from what they wanted, and akin to what they had warned against, great port cities would be the final destination of most of the millions of immigrants: sooner or later the immigrants realized that land ownership was almost as unlikely in Argentina as it had been in their native countries—large estates would ultimately win out.
V.
“Let’s water with the Indians’ blood the roots of the tree that will be planted by the Anglo-Saxon laborers,” wrote Sarmiento soon after being elected president in 1867. The frenzy to spill native blood and replace it with European blood in what would be, along with the genocidal campaigns waged in North America and Australia, one of the most ferocious—and successful—biopolitical projects known to modernity was reined in until infighting between Criollo elites from the different provinces of the former Viceroyalty of the River Plate could be worked out. Once united, they could conquer the internal frontier together.
This unification of the huinka (in Mapuche language, “white people”) would not be easy.
England demanded food for their industrial workers from countries with agricultural potential, such as Argentina and New Zealand, and that led to further expansion of the hinterland, which had been paralyzed by decades of disputes between caudillos—charismatic local rulers of the inland provinces—and the landowning and commercial bourgeoisie of the rich province of Buenos Aires and its homonymous capital city.
Some hard questions had to be asked: Who would rule the future nation, and how would they rule it? What kind of political system would best be able to balance power between the central authorities and the provincial states? Who would finance this nation-state? And, most important, who would have control of the customs taxes collected in the Buenos Aires port, the only way goods traded with European metropolises could get in and out of the country and the largest source of income for the entire nation? These were some of the critical questions answered with bullets during the sixty years it took for a unified nation to emerge. It was during the second industrial revolution, the one that took place in North America and Europe from 1870 to 1914, that agriculture became Argentina’s way into the concert of modern (far) Western nations.3 The economic integration of the country as a massive food provider was key to political unification.
Huge new ships allowed millions of tons of cereal grains and refrigerated beef to be shipped internationally. The destination for the vast majority of those agricultural goods was Great Britain, which in exchange provided Argentina, and other colonial and neocolonial allies, with industrial products manufactured in Manchester, Liverpool, and London. The first worldwide division of labor was born. The current dialectical interaction between industrialized and raw-material-producing nations took shape during this period, the age of the imperialist expansion of capital.
Mass agricultural production for export demanded and impelled the fast organization of a nation-state whose identity centered around Buenos Aires and its Western idea of civilization. It had little if anything to do with the large masses of land that held millions of pounds sterling worth of agriculture and livestock. That land was still largely inhabited by native peoples. The impending massacre seemed inevitable.
VI.
The identity of Argentina was being formed by future citizens getting off boats hailing from Spain, Italy, France, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Prussia, Austro-Hungary, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Recent arrivals were housed for a few weeks by the Argentine immigration authorities at the Immigrant Hotel, just a few hundred meters from the Buenos Aires port. Between 1880 and 1914, more than four million human beings arrived on the coast of Argentina from Europe and the Ottoman Empire, adding to a population that, in 1862, had hovered around one million. In a few years’ time, those immigrants’ Argentine-born children would speak the Spanish particular to the River Plate; in schools, they would be instructed in the identity of a nation with anthem, flag, and official history. Total integration and acculturation through elementary school was a major goal of the young republic, which was determined to make “civilized Argentine citizens” out of millions of foreigners from around the world who spoke dozens of languages and dialects. An entire Foucauldian set of biopolitical and disciplinary institutions—from museums to jails, from hospitals to universities—was built during these years. Meanwhile, General Julio Argentino Roca (1843–1914) planned and carried out a sort of “final solution” to what was called the “indigenous question.” From 1878 to 1885, he led what, pursuant to revision, is currently understood to be the first Argentine genocide: the Conquest of the Desert.
Hundreds of years before the Argentine republic was even envisioned, a population—around sixty thousand people in the 1870s—inhabited their own territories according to their own laws and customs: Wallmapu is the Mapuche term for their ancient lands (in English, “surrounding territory”), which encompassed what are now the central and southern regions of Chile and Argentina. It is estimated that the Argentine government massacred at least twenty thousand human beings; thousands of others were driven out by boat or in forced marches to concentration camps in different parts of the country (the infamous island Martín García, for instance, held a maximum-security military prison where countless Mapuche died of hunger, disease, abuse, and isolation). Thousands of others were reduced to servitude, becoming domestic workers in cities or performing industrial labor in the sugar refineries of Tucumán province.
In 1879, the Argentine newspaper El Nacional published a chronicle of the procedure: “After traveling mostly on foot, the Indians and their families arrive as prisoners. The desperate wailing is relentless as children are taken away from their mothers and given to white families as slaves. Neither the children’s screams and howls nor the mothers’ pleas, arms held to the heavens, is heeded. The Indian men cover their faces or stare at the ground in resignation, their wives pressing their children to their bosom.”4
Jorge Julio López, a retired Peronist bricklayer who had been kidnapped and missing from 1977 to 1979 during the last military-civil dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983), described a scene similar to the one in the 1879 El Nacional chronicle in his testimony during the 2006 trial of Miguel Etchecolatz, an organizer of state terrorism during the so-called Dirty War: “Then they bring out Patricia [Dell’Orto], who was screaming, ‘Don’t kill me, don’t kill me, take me to prison but don’t kill me. I want to bring up my little girl, my daughter.’ And, if her body is ever found, you will see that it bears the wound of a gunshot that came in here [pointing to his forehead] and out here [pointing to the back of his head]. Afterwards, they brought out her husband, Ambrosio De Marco, who was lying on the floor because of the torture. Two or three of them dragged him out and then shot him. Mark my words, if their remains are ever found, you’ll see that both have bullet holes in the head.” A couple of hours after giving this 2006 key testimony against Etchecolatz, who would be sentenced to life imprisonment, López was kidnapped and disappeared—this time forever—presumably by policemen who still followed Etchecolatz’s orders.
As López—and hundreds of other survivors—dared to testify, the Argentine armed forces, this time organized into “task groups” trained in torture by French specialists who had fought the National Liberation Army (FLN is the acronym in French) in Algeria, engaged in 1976 in a second genocide virtually one century after the first. They once again ignored the screams of the victims—those kidnapped by the military and police were mostly Peronist activists, politicians, and union delegates—who were taken to the more than three hundred fifty clandestine detention centers located throughout the country.
Both the “savage Indian” of the nineteenth century and the Peronists of the twentieth were constructed as the evil Other lurking within the national frontiers. For the Buenos Aires oligarchy, that Other had to be put down if the sacred values of Western civilization were to prevail.
VII.
In order to denounce how science has been used, at the La Plata Museum in particular, to violate the human rights of native communities, GUIAS held an exhibition called Prisoners of Science. It featured hundreds of photographs found in the institution’s basement, photographs that point to the pseudoscientific and derogatory logic central to the practice of appropriating the bodies and lives of a group of human beings for the almost sole purpose of constructing a discourse of racial inferiority that would legitimize the theft of their lands. The exhibition opened in the Patagonian city of San Carlos de Bariloche; at the center of its main square is an equestrian monument to General Julio Argentino Roca. The general in the statue stares out at the conquered horizon over the lake that paradoxically bears the name of a Mapuche lonko (in English, “chief”), Nahuel Huapi. Prisoners of Science culminated symbolically when exhibited at the Haroldo Conti Cultural Center, a space for memory and human rights located on the premises of the former Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA is the acronym in Spanish), one of the largest clandestine detention centers during the last civic-military dictatorship. More than five thousand people were held in captivity at the ESMA and later thrown into the sea in “death flights.” Due to the ideological matrix at stake, the interests represented, the military resources mobilized, and the extermination techniques used, the two genocides are, in GUIAS’s view, virtually the same. Both involved forced disappearance, appropriation of children, execution, suppression of identity, physical and psychological torture, and other techniques. As the collective itself explains in the text that accompanied the exhibition: “In the specific case of the museum in La Plata,…science would articulate and enact a discourse geared to demonstrating the inferiority of the original populations to the white man and his ‘civilization,’ an ideological position held to be scientifically true and, therefore, grounds for ‘sentencing’ that population to extinction.…Several factors have converged to enable the current historical reparation and struggle for justice for the victims of both Argentine genocides, perhaps the most important one being thirty years of continuous democracy [1983–2013]. It is thanks in part to an unprecedented period of democratic governments that native communities have been able to reconstruct their identity, and to engage in struggle and to voice demands. They will continue fighting for the restitution of their ancestors’ remains.”
A crucial component of the new situation described in the text is the reopening, in 2005, of the criminal cases of those responsible for state terrorism from 1976 to 1983, cases against figures like Etchecolatz—a result of the demand for justice by human rights organizations such as Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, and Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence (HIJOS is the acronym in Spanish), among many others.
The work performed by GUIAS has complemented the work of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Group, formed in the 1980s. That group has overseen the identification of the skeletal remains of those detained and disappeared by state terrorism, remains found in mass graves or in individual graves but under false identities. From the perspective of the search for memory, truth, and historical reparation, the La Plata Museum can now be reread as itself a mass grave: only a tiny portion of the more than ten thousand bits of human remains (bones, organs, skin, scalp, limbs) were correlated to an individual body and duly identified when “archived” at the institution at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
While in countries like Greece and Egypt the ground hides archaeological riches, the ruins of temples and pyramids, in Argentina the soil bears vast deposits of dinosaur fossils—the Argentinosaurus, found in Patagonia, is the largest known prehistoric animal anywhere on earth—and, some geological layers higher, countless graves and tombs with bones of the Others: the victims of two genocides that, though a century apart, were remarkably alike in terms of goals and interests, and even procedures.
That soil—its surface still, and not by chance, the productive basis of a deindustrialized and dependent country—has a great deal to tell us about ourselves and about our drive to disappearance. In an iconic song composed in 1983, the year democracy was restored in Argentina after the “Years of Lead,” Charly García, an outstanding figure in Argentine music, gathered all the bones and fossils hidden under the soil of history and memory in his song “Los dinosaurios” (“Dinosaurs”). The chorus references how the neighbor, the radio singers, the guys in the newspaper or in the streets, may or may not disappear…but dinosaurs…they will disappear. The “dinosaurs” were—as those listening to the song immediately understood—the old and ailing military men.
VIII.
Amid the names of the many military officers that are now also the names of streets and avenues in every city in Latin America, the name of one woman stands out: Juana Azurduy (1780–1862).
Born in Toroca, Potosí, Viceroyalty of the River Plate, she was a patriot who fought in the Spanish American wars of independence (1808–1833) for emancipation from the Spanish Crown. After dying indigent and forgotten, her legacy was restored one hundred fifty years later thanks to progressive governments in Argentina and Bolivia in the early twenty-first century.
She was a symbol of everything that had been suppressed and denied by the nineteenth-century liberal elites who envisioned Argentina as a neocolonial country based on mass European immigration. Behind the shift were Evo Morales, the first Aymaran president of Bolivia and a figure supported by an increasingly powerful indigenous movement, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the first woman elected president of Argentina, who was a leftist Peronist activist during her youth in the seventies and, at the time, the leader of a progressive social and political coalition. Both leaders decided to pay homage to a woman whose biography represented—in a way the traditional forefathers could not (that is, from a new gender and Amerindian perspective)—the struggle of Latin American peoples. That fight for autonomy and sovereignty was being waged once again in the region during the years surrounding the Argentine bicentennial (2010).
Juana Azurduy was of mixed race. Her father was a rich European landowner and her mother was an Amerindian woman from Chuquisaca. She spoke Spanish as well as Quechua. A rebel, she was, at the age of sixteen, expelled from the convent where she was studying to be a nun, and at twenty-five, she married Manuel Ascencio Padilla, with whom she joined the Revolutionary Army in 1809, at the age of twenty-nine. After a series of military defeats during which they lost all their property, Azurduy and Padilla—“the warrior lovers,” as they were known at the time—turned to guerrilla warfare against the royalists. For her bravery, Juana was awarded the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1816, she was wounded in battle and captured; her husband was killed trying to rescue her. She survived and—then a widow with six children—continued fighting for the cause of independence. In 1825, General Simón Bolívar, known as the Liberator, visited her. Upon seeing the dreadful conditions she was living in, he assigned her a pension and declared, “This country should not be called Bolivia in my honor; it should be called Padilla or Azurduy, because it was them who made it free.”5
The monument to Juana would replace the one that, in 1910, on the occasion of the centennial of independence, was given to the Argentine Republic by the Italian community; though they had mostly landed less than a decade earlier, hundreds of thousands of Italian immigrants already enjoyed a respectable place in society. The carvings on the plinth under the statue of Christopher Columbus made reference to progress, reason, science, and civilization. He was the hero those “good immigrants” had chosen to express their gratitude for their new home in America.
It was not until 2014 that the statue of Columbus was replaced by the one of Juana. Notwithstanding, that change in symbols uniquely captured the drama of two antagonistic political and social projects that have been fighting each other throughout the nation’s two-hundred-year history. Indeed, that struggle lies deep within Argentine society: Do we see ourselves as Europeans in the Americas, serving Western interests unconnected to our Latin American neighbors? Or are we committed to searching for those Others we have denied in order to pursue our own ethnic plurality, and to found a new relationship to radical Otherness and thus to the ethically and culturally plural nation we actually are? Will we, along with those Latin America neighbors, build what we might call the “greater motherland,” a land more inclusive, fair, and free, on the principle of our common native and mixed-race roots? Or will we and our Latin America neighbors set ourselves to build bilateral, individualistic relations with our present and past Western metropolis, on the basis—especially in the case of Argentina—of the denial of that plurality and in favor of our white European ascendants?
As a mixed-race woman and a guerrilla combatant who gave up everything for her revolutionary ideals, Juana is a good example of how far we must be willing to go, of how much we must be willing to lose, but also of how much we have to gain if we dare to jump into the abyss of political emancipation(s).6
1“The GUIAS Collective is a self-summoned organization of the Natural Sciences and Museum Faculty of La Plata National University. Our founding goal is to address the claims made by the Original Peoples to not display and to restore to their communities all of the human remains that are part of ‘archaeological collections,’ especially the 10,000 human remains found in the La Plata Museum. In pursuit of this goal, we have been working since 2006 on the identification of these remains for later restitution.” GUIAS blog, http://colectivoguias.blogspot.com/2013/02/prisioneros-de-la-ciencia.html.
2 J. B. Alberdi, Bases: y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Talleres Gráficos Argentinos de L. J. Rosso, 1914).
3 French historiographer Alain Rouquié, a specialist in Latin American military history, has used this prefix—“far”-Western nations—to refer to the peripheral, dependent capitalist countries that were born from the Western colonies of the European powers, except for the case of the US, and that now constitute a distant second or third ring within the concept of Western countries. It is useful for grasping the geopolitical situation of South America.
4 El Nacional, December 31, 1879, originally cited in Osvaldo Bayer, “Desmonumentar,” May 16, 2010, Página/12, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-145745-2010-05-16.html.
5 Rogelio Alaniz, Hombres y mujeres en tiempos de revolución: De Vértiz a Rosas (Men and Women in Times of Revolution: From Vértiz to Rosas), Santa Fe, Argentina: The Littoral National University, 131.
6 Emancipation, as formulated since the Enlightenment (only one true path: Western reason, of which orthodox Marxism is an inheritor), should give place to its plural, detotalized, twenty-first-century version: emancipation(s), the possibility of building a progressive political unity matching a myriad of diverse struggles for full citizenship and recognition (race, gender, sexuality, class, etc.)—defined by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as the construction of a collective political subject, a universal singularity, an empty signifier only valid in a certain place and time, unique, topographically determined, and always temporary, departing from democratic demands and open identities willing to go beyond neoliberal multiculturalism, culturally “cool” but politically impotent. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso, 1985; and Laclau, Emancipation(s), London: Verso, 1996.