ABSTRACT
Social movements are alive in Latin America, but they do not always look the way they are expected. Over the last three decades, changes in economic, political, and associational landscapes have produced reconfigurations of political space, of political relationships, and of beliefs about what is and is not possible. It has given rise to new forms of contestation and evolving, sometimes experimental, relationships between social movements and formal institutions. The widespread adoption of democratic political institutions did not, as many expected, push contentious politics off the political stage. It did reorganize the terrain of political struggle, generating at some times more adversarial and at others more collaborative relations between movements and formal institutions. Studying social movements in Latin America has always required mapping their place in a broader political picture. It has never been possible simply to assume fixed boundaries between inside and outside, formal and informal, routine and contentious.
