South of the South : Political Dissidence, Exile, and Latin American Transnationalism Around the “New Geography” Meetings in the Southern Cone (1960s–1970s)

Based on new archival documents and on original interviews, this paper extends recent works exploring radical and critical geographies from linguistic areas other than the Anglo-American ones. It addresses the extraordinary story of the two international meetings for the “New Geography” that took place in Salto (Uruguay) in 1973 and in Neuquén (Argentina) in 1974, still ill-known due to the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, which forced many of their protagonists to exile or to professional reconversion. Analysing surviving documents and reconstructing the trajectories of these gatherings’ protagonists allows developing an original point for today’s critical and radical geographies. That is, the frameworks of national academies are insufficient to develop critical approaches, that need first to be constructed through practices rather than mere theories, addressing societal problems in connection with activism. This business can be only accomplished though voluntarist, transnational and cosmopolitan scholars’ engagement.