Heirs to the movement: Next generation housing activism in neoliberal Chile

Abstract

at the heart of Miguel Pérez’s compelling historical ethnography, The Right to Dignity, is a puzzle: how do we account for the emergence of collective action against the marketisation of social rights (e.g. housing, education, healthcare) in 21st century chile, a context in which it seemed that strong arm neoliberal dictatorship and its demobilising democratic successors had snuffed out revolutionary possibility? Pérez responds to this question by analysing the organising practices and political tactics of santiago’s Comites de Allegados: housing societies composed of people residing in the homes of relatives while fighting for subsidised “homes of their own” in the now unaffordable neighbourhoods in which they grew up. following the lead of activists themselves, Pérez also looks to the history of autoconstruction in chile, and to an array of social theory – from tarrow’s cycles of protest, to austin’s performative linguistics, to Butler’s undoing of the sovereign, pre-social subject – to demonstrate how 21st century, subsidy-seeking allegados might constitute a genuine “re-emergence” of chile’s 20th century, autoconstructing pobladores. combining ethnographic, historical, and theoretical lenses throughout the book, Pérez examines how acts of “waiting” for subsidies can generate disruptive citizen subjectivities (chapter 3); how activists draw on languages of inheritance and struggle to construct an urban-based citizenship with its own progressive and exclusionary potentials (chapters 4 and 5); and how the institutionalised humiliations of living as an allegado and having to “ask permission” from homeowners to lead their desired domestic lives, have prompted chileans to rise up and demand “rights to dignity” (chapter 6). though The Right to Dignity touches on a range of fascinating issues – a quality that makes it a thought-provoking piece of scholarship and a useful teaching tool– here I will focus on three: identifying the source of revolutionary possibility in chile’s housing movements, the generational paradoxes of property mobilisations, and the origins of “dignity” as a political claim.