Ethnographying messianic time in a scene of grassroots popular sovereignty in Latin America

This paper reflects on a scene from within the struggles for social and racial justice in a far-reaching social movement in Latin America’s pacific region. The scene shows a vernacular enactment of law in the site of a funeral ceremony for a dear departed leader, in which a messianic temporality appears within a juridically oriented activism formed in the impulse, and collective memory, of a theology of liberation. This theopolitical dimension disturbs and challenges the linear temporality of State law and gives us valuable resources to reassess the complex relation to the State in social movements such as this one. People here enact in their daily practices of grassroots organizing, and of collective mourning, a vernacular law that exceeds the State form and challenges its technique of time framing, while performing a mimetic attachment to its bureaucratic grammar. It is necessary to see in this desire of State law, a law otherwise that is religious in a way that deserves careful attention and consideration.