The human rights work of cities is typically described in practical, operational ways: How can cities improve access to housing, safety, transportation, and safe water? But these critical services are not the only ways in which cities engage in human rights work. In reckoning with their complex histories, cities must thoughtfully engage in the telling, re-telling, and untelling of historical and contemporary narratives, recognizing the ways in which they shape both our present and our future. Traversing the North American continent, this article examines the ways in which three cities—Culiacán, Winnipeg, and Los Angeles—are using human rights principles to challenge narratives and rewrite their stories. While distinct in viewpoint and voice, each example highlights the importance of community-based and community-built responses.
Culiacán
Truth commissions are generally employed nationally, post-conflict, and are staffed by outside experts. In Culiacán, Sinaloa, the epicenter of Mexico’s “drug war,” a civil society coalition deployed a truth commission locally, amid a still-simmering conflict, and staffed it largely with local volunteers.
At the beginning, there were serious doubts in the community. A woman at the very first orientation chided volunteers for wasting time on a project that would do nothing to reduce rampant impunity and corruption and couldn’t protect her from the clandestine drug laboratory next door to her house. But these low stakes ultimately encouraged an uncommon level of openness.
Many shared their stories for the first time, and they were far more diverse than those collected by national human rights mechanisms, which skew heavily towards victims of torture and forced disappearance. The commission heard from a family extorted into bankruptcy to keep their incarcerated son alive, a journalist who was kidnapped and later forced to interview her kidnapper on live radio, a priest who ministered to the family members of assassins as well as those of their victims, and a young gay man rescued from a hate crime by a local drug trafficker.
By sharing in a safe space, over time, the narrative arc shifted from victimhood to agency. A lawyer whose sister was murdered became an activist and then a state legislator. The mother of a disappeared police officer became one of the leaders of a national social movement. The parents of a college student who was murdered and falsely incriminated became adept legal advocates and mobilized a new constituency for the cause of human rights.
Together, their stories conjure a very different Culiacán than the common caricature of drugs, corruption, shootouts, and explosions. Recognizing local resilience and agency won’t send anyone to jail, but it’s a bulwark against a different kind of impunity.
As Canada grapples with legacies and ongoing practices of colonization, events such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (on Indian Residential Schools) and the May 2021 confirmation that 215 missing and/or disappeared Indigenous children lie buried in the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School have catalyzed a range of civic responses. In Winnipeg/Wînipêg, viewing national conversations through a human rights lens has generated local action to examine the way narratives of colonization are inscribed on the landscape through monuments and street names.
These activities include unsanctioned acts by the public, such as the toppling of a statue of Queen Victoria by a crowd on the grounds of the provincial legislature, as well as official acts by the city, such as engaging with the Indigenous Knowledge Naming Circle to rename a major thoroughfare Abinojii Mikanah (“child’s road”). This name honours the Indigenous children who survived residential schools, commemorates those who did not, and replaces the name of a key residential school architect. The city has convened a Welcoming Winnipeg: Reconciling our History initiative that aims to “resolve the absence of Indigenous perspectives, experiences and contributions in the stories remembered and commemorated” by revisiting place names and practices of memorialization.
Interrupting colonial narratives is a powerful act—it alters the space Winnipeggers navigate, “unsettling the familiar” and affirming Indigenous peoples’ continued presence. However, a human rights approach demands that the city attend to Winnipeg’s practical inequalities, including over- and under-policing of Indigenous peoples and unequal access to housing, city spaces, and resources. It demands a response to calls to search the landfills for Indigenous women and to account for the continued colonial relations upon which the city depends. Winnipeggers must continue to rewrite the city’s narratives, and these stories must articulate both symbolic and concrete impacts.
Los Angeles
As a founding member of global urban networks addressing issues from climate change to gender violence, Los Angeles positions itself as a city-state with global partners rather than a community subordinate to an increasingly xenophobic national government. For example, the Los Angeles mayor’s office has examined a city-level historical memory project, challenging the notion that such processes must be national in scope. This examination offered valuable insights relevant to communities plagued by the ongoing legacies of unaddressed human rights violations, be they in North America or in other parts of the world.
Three key insights emerged. First, Los Angeles was not alone—there are numerous city-based historic memory initiatives across the United States that demonstrate the possibility of sharing lessons about how to confront past truths and the potential of future reparations. Second, the city also engaged with and learned from transitional justice processes worldwide. This sort of trans-local solidarity showed that collective action is possible outside the frontiers of a singular nation-state and can serve as a key resource for communities confronting state-led populist xenophobia. Third, even as Los Angeles drew from global truth and reconciliation norms, it ultimately challenged and reimagined many of their long-standing assumptions.
For example, rather than limiting itself solely to past events, the city found a need to focus on ongoing and systemic exclusions. And rather than waiting for state-led processes to engage with communities from the top down, it became clear that such processes can be grassroots-led and independent of the national government. Consequently, Los Angeles proposed a comprehensive approach to the recognition of past historic harms, ongoing governmental responsibility, and future reparations. All three elements—recognition, responsibility, and repair—are essential to informing inclusive, pluralistic stories of political community that have the potential to counteract national polarization.
Continental crossroads
These three vignettes show how human rights can inspire cities to take symbolic and practical actions to narrate and navigate stories of history and difference. Offering a space of narrative possibility, cities can be sites of imagination and innovation. In a tri-national region whose own story is being edited in real time amid escalating geopolitical tensions, cities offer important vantage points below and beyond the state.
As we consider trans-local learning and connection across North America, human rights offer municipalities useful tools, prompting further questions. How does the symbolic human rights work that these cities undertake relate to changes in policy and practice that improve residents’ day-to-day lives? What happens when narratives conflict at different levels of government? How can human rights narratives and practices be disseminated to other cities, and to sub-national and national levels of governance? Our examples suggest that these questions are for communities themselves to answer through reckonings with their distinctive histories.
This article is part of a series in partnership with the Human Rights Cities Alliance. See other articles in this series here.