In recent decades, studies on cultural heritage in Latin America have shown that heritagization processes go beyond the technical, legal and institutional dimensions traditionally associated with preservation policies. Heritage constitutes a field of symbolic and political disputes in which diverse social groups attribute values, construct senses of belonging, claim rights and elaborate collective experiences of memory. In this context, emotions emerge as a central element for understanding the ways in which individuals and communities establish bonds with cultural assets, territories, collections, archives, museums and landscapes, especially when these are threatened, destroyed, appropriated or reinterpreted. In the Latin American context, marked by colonial processes, civil and military dictatorships, armed conflicts, political violence, structural inequalities, socio-environmental disasters, population displacements and ongoing disputes over memory, emotions play a decisive role in the ways of responding to and resisting from a heritage standpoint. Indignation, mourning, nostalgia, sense of belonging, hope and resistance are dimensions that drive collective actions in defense of heritage and directly influence processes of recognition, visibility, conservation, museumification, protection or reinterpretation of cultural assets. Drawing on contributions on heritage emotions and in dialogue with critical perspectives on heritage developed in Latin America, this symposium proposes to bring together research analyzing the relationships between emotions, memory and cultural heritage in different contexts across the region. It seeks to understand how affects structure heritage conflicts, social mobilizations, territorial claims, transitional justice processes, historical reparation, the heritagization of traumatic memories and the construction of narratives about conflictive pasts. Special attention will be given to so-called sensitive heritages, understood as collections, archives, monuments, memory sites and other heritage expressions linked to experiences of violence, trauma, forced disappearances, genocides, slavery, colonialism, racism, migrations, displacement, struggles for land and food sovereignty, gentrification, environmental disasters and other forms of collective suffering. These heritages challenge traditional models of preservation, interpretation and communication, demanding new ethical, museological and participatory perspectives for their management, mediation and social appropriation. The symposium will welcome contributions from Anthropology, Museology, History, Archaeology, Sociology, Geography, Memory Studies, Heritage Studies and other related disciplines, favoring interdisciplinary approaches and empirical studies developed in different Latin American countries. Particularly welcome will be works addressing indigenous and Afro-descendant heritages, community and peasant heritages, public preservation policies, disputes over monuments, decolonization of museums, heritage activism, urban interventions, heritage education, heritage in disaster contexts and experiences of social participation in the construction of memory policies. By promoting dialogue among diverse Latin American experiences, the symposium seeks to highlight that heritage emotions are not merely subjective responses to heritage, but are part of the processes through which values are attributed. Thus, memory politics are understood as spaces of negotiation among different social actors, where heritage is configured as a terrain of conflict, recognition, reparation and social transformation in contemporary Latin America.
