https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980211073086 Memory Studies 2022, Vol. 15(2) 501–507 © The Author(s) 2022 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/17506980211073086 journals.sagepub.com/home/mss Book Reviews Elizabeth Jelin The Struggle for the Past: How We Construct Social Memories (trans. Wendy Gosselin). New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2021, 236 pp., $135.00/£99.00. ISBN: 9781789207828. Reviewed by: Silvana Mandolessi, KU Leuven, Belgium The Struggle for the Past: How We Construct Social Memories is the English-language edition of the book La lucha por el pasado: Cómo construimos la memoria social, originally published in Spanish in 2017 as an anthology of Elizabeth Jelin’s work published over 30 years of research. The Argentine sociologist is one of the leading figures in the field of memory studies in Latin America. Jelin played a central role in the emergence and consolidation of the field in the region, which, despite stemming from European and Anglo-Saxon theoretical reflections, has acquired its own unique characteristics. In the Southern Cone, particularly in Argentina, memory became an object of academic inter- est in the mid-1990s, inextricably linked to the regional context. Since the 1980s, the Southern Cone countries—Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil—had been undergoing complex healing processes and were initiating difficult democratic transitions as a consequence of ruthless dictatorships that ravaged the region. Within this framework marked by continuous debates about how to deal with the recent past, social actors began to incorporate memory as part of their political demands. As Jelin points out, in this scenario two opposing views emerged: on the one hand, there were those who advocated for reconciliation and oblivion as indispensable to strengthen the fragile democracies recently restored. On the other hand, there were those who claimed that memory was the necessary antidote to the potential repetition of the horrors of the recent past. “Memory, truth, and justice,” a slogan of the Argentinean human rights movement, condenses these claims, giving remembrance of the recent past a preponderant place in the social struggle. The academic interest in memory arises, therefore, not as an interest “distanced” from its object—both in the sense of a pretended scientific objectivity as well as that of a clear separa- tion between past and present—but in a permanent dialogue with the social actors who express their demands, with the debates in the public sphere, and the meanings constructed as result of these disputes. As Jelin claims, “at that time, the guiding idea [in academia] was to intervene in the intellectual field across the region, in order to advance topics and questions for research, reflection, and citizenship action. The challenge was to develop a conceptual model and engage in rigorous research on processes that had taken place very recently and those still underway” (p. 77). The program “Collective Memory and Repression: Comparative Views on Democratization in Latin America’s Southern Cone” (1998–2005), led by Jelin and funded by the Latin American Committee of the Social Science Research Council, was key to the development of the rigorous 1073086MSS 0 0 10.1177/17506980211073086Memory StudiesBook Reviews book-review 2022 Book Reviews