The Maternal Contract: A Subaltern Response to Extreme Violence in the Americas

In the Americas, organized state violence takes many forms--from forced disappearance and feminicide to extralegal killings, mass incarceration, and illegal detention. In response, mothers’ organizations and collectives emerged in the 1970s to advocate for their disappeared, imprisoned, and murdered relatives. These organizations fight long and challenging battles for state and corporate accountability, demanding the creation of truth commissions, national memory archives, memory sites, and victim-oriented legislation. By implementing alternative caretaking mechanisms on behalf of survivors and victims, mothers’ organizations have become powerful actors against organized state violence, structural inequalities, and political abandonment.

In The Maternal Contract, Elva F. Orozco Mendoza traces the mobilization of mothers’ organizations against organized state violence in the Americas. Drawing on the insights and work of four mothers’ organizations--Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, Las Madres de Chihuahua, Colectivo Solecito, and Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, Orozco Mendoza introduces a novel theoretical framework, ＂the maternal contract,＂ to illustrate how these organizations create and advance their own caretaking structures in the absence of substantive political rights and representation. While these organizations emerged in different times and geographies, Orozco Mendoza argues that they are linked by a powerful commitment to protect subaltern social groups and marginalized subjects against a violence-driven apparatus that disregards human life and dignity. In so doing, she draws attention to the caretaking practices, initiatives, and responsibilities that mothers’ organizations adopt to counter chronic violence and collective suffering.

Elva F. Orozco Mendoza is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches courses in comparative political theory, decolonial feminisms, and Latin American Feminist Political Theory. She won a University of Connecticut Humanities Institute Fellowship in 2022-2023 and was a 2020 Junior Faculty Fellow at The Institute for Citizens & Scholars. Her research has been published by Theory and Event, New Political Science, Latin American Perspectives, and Philosophy and Global Affairs.