This study maintains that human rights struggles played a vital role in broad symbolic and material socio-cultural practices. Specific ethical, political, and creative qualities that human rights activism brought to the public sphere were in effect fundamental in constructing and deepening democracy. Drawing from observations of particular political, spatial and social interventions by human rights groups in Buenos Aires and from interviews with activists, I analyze how a human rights agenda in the 1990s acted to re-claim, re-create and expand public debates about the nation, rights, and memory.