| Abstract | This paper traces a new memory map for Latin America, a map anchored in contemporary events not in pre-Columbian monuments. This paper will focus on Buenos Aires where a painful twentieth-century history of dictatorship, disappearance, and terrorism has given rise to new sites of memory that defy older traditions tied to exclusion and nationalism. The 1994 terrorist bombing of the AMIA community center in Buenos Aires, the most important Jewish building in Latin America, is a particularly knotty instance of the controversies surrounding remembering and forgetting on a continent often marked by narrow, authoritarian views of belonging. This paper will analyse the issues involved in memorial building and the performance of remembering at the site of the AMIA as an example of larger questions of who controls communal remembrance and what paradigms can be used to construct contemporary memory. Jewish memorial practices and the Holocaust play an especially important role in Argentina, entering into a dialogue with newly minted forms of Argentine remembering and creating a new language more suited to our times.
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