The uprisings in Chile in 2019 suggested a sharp break with a tired political economy paradigm in the putative home of “neoliberal” authoritarianism. The student-led movement that produced a new constitutional convention garnered worldwide attention. Once in power, former student leader Gabriel Boric struggled. The constitutional convention failed to produce a new constitution, and the populist right gained the upper hand in a new election. Though these outcomes are not the explicit focus of Simón Escoffier’s trenchant book, his analysis of activist strategies of two working-class, territorially peripheral neighborhoods in Santiago carries important implications for this national story.
Escoffier’s book is framed by a fundamental comparative question in the study of neighborhood politics: why do some poblaciónes that were hotbeds of activism in the struggle for democracy persist as mobilized communities, while others do not? The two poblaciónes selected as sites of Escoffier’s empirical work share key characteristics today that make them worth comparing: high shares of self-built housing, similarly high degrees of inequality and poverty, and similarly high perceptions of violence. Significantly for Escoffier’s research design, they also share similar histories of political struggle under Chile’s dictatorship. The neighborhoods themselves are products of land occupations pursued under the auspices of a leftist guerilla formation known as the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR) in the late 1970s. They were subject to severe repression and military raids and became key sites of working-class struggle for democratization by the 1980s.
It is at this point that the two neighborhoods diverge. Nuevo Amanecer took a path that Escoffier describes as typical for urban poblaciónes: by the early 1990s, the neighborhood was no longer mobilized. In contrast, Lo Hermida retained significant mobilization, with neighborhood activists organizing land occupations in nearby areas into the early 2000s, protesting a city-wide master plan in the early 2010s, and giving the 2019 protests a working-class foothold. Escoffier draws from participant observations, ethnography, and semi-structured interviews from his time spent with current and former activists across the two neighborhoods between 2016 and 2021. It is a straightforward and elegant research design with meaningful practical implications.
The key concept introduced by the author to explain the variation between the two cases is “mobilizational citizenship.” Escoffier uses this concept to first rescale our conception of citizenship, and then to reframe the practices associated with being a citizen, defining citizenship as “a set of culturally symbolic practices that bring people together in the act of collective organizing, shape their social positioning, and make them valid agents of community building” (p. 17). The conceptualization is itself a contribution to interdisciplinary democratic theory and builds on myriad regional literatures, ranging from Latin America, the United States, and Europe.
Most important for Escoffier’s study is his deployment of the concept of “mobilizational citizenship” to move the focus from the national to subnational scales. The practices of citizenship that most interest him are “decentralized,” as he argues that it is precisely this decentralization that sustains mobilization over time. The case of Lo Hermida becomes a critical setting in which to illustrate how mobilizational citizenship works and why it matters.
In Lo Hermida, Escoffier finds a rich and varied associational life, with organizations that coordinate new land occupations to defend against private investors thought to portend evictions, along with cultural groups focused on local folkloric and hip-hop traditions. All of these organizations feed into a contentious repertoire, with regular protests on both national and local issues, which sometimes incite police repression.
In contrast, associational life in Nuevo Amanecer is largely focused on service delivery. This produces “micro-politics of organizing” that are aligned around formal institutions, and therefore enable a process of political incorporation that precludes the kinds of contentious practices endemic to Lo Hermida.
The social profile of associational life differs accordingly. Lo Hermida’s demography is diverse, spanning older veteran activists with living memory of struggles for democracy as well as much younger generations. This generational heterogeneity appears to enable the transmission of historical knowledge about earlier struggles against Chile’s dictatorship. This takes on a curious articulation. Some activists report moments of struggle and oppression that occurred during the dictatorship literally as if they had happened yesterday. Escoffier describes this as a distinct political culture that underpins the “mobilizational citizenship” characterizing Lo Hermida’s politics. This political culture valorizes informality as a bulwark against what activists see as the incorporating practices of the Chilean state.
Conversely, political leaders in Nuevo Amanacer are focused on establishing their legitimacy within their neighborhood primarily to secure pathways of access to formal institutions. Nuevo Amanacer’s population trends much older, largely above the age of 50. Escoffier also reports that in the latter neighborhood, these older activists tend to be women.
Mobilizing at the Urban Margins (2023) provides a vivid account of starkly different tactics and strategies of mobilization at the neighborhood scale. I ended the book convinced that this variation made clear how Escoffier’s concept of “mobilizational citizenship” works in practice and why it might be substantively important beyond these two neighborhoods. The implications for broader theoretical generalizability are unmistakable.
I want to push the argument and its implications by invoking examples from South Africa. This is not an altogether strange comparison to make. Both Chile and South Africa democratized at a similar moment in history, have well-documented problems of activist co-optation, and have been subject to fierce activist contestation over the delivery of urban public goods.
First, I wondered about the stakes of “mobilizational citizenship” in the case of Lo Hermida, and the extent to which this form of activism might preclude forms of liberal citizenship in Chile’s contemporary political dispensation. “Mobilizational citizenship” seems to be constructed in opposition to some of the key tenets of the existing liberal citizenship in Chile. It is more than a simple rejection of formal participatory spaces and agents of the state. We do not see much evidence of an engagement with political parties or other kinds of organizational spaces—the bread and butter of liberal democracy. I wanted Escoffier to make clear the degree to which “mobilizational citizenship” can co-exist with more traditionally liberal forms of citizenship.
Activists in some informal settlement neighborhoods in Johannesburg have taken a stance against political incorporation and formed organizations with political cultures that, in many ways, seem to approximate the practices that Escoffier finds in Lo Hermida. Yet one similarly designed study of two informal settlements in Johannesburg, with similar variation in political practices, found that the settlement that took on a more independent mode of activist organization was consequently faced with profoundly dangerous attacks by the local state and frequent threat of eviction (Marcel Paret, “Fragmenting Urban Movements: Political Parties and Popular Resistance in Johannesburg’s Informal Settlements,” Sociology of Development. 8(3), 2022).
Second, and relatedly, I was left wondering what the policy implications of mobilizational citizenship might be. Can the liberal democratic state respond through techniques of policy and bureaucracy to demands made through this mode of activism?
And third, how does “mobilizational citizenship” help us to understand the state? I can imagine at least two ways of thinking about this question. On the one hand, the set-up to the book is the consequences of mobilizational citizenship in places like Lo Hermida for helping to scale up the 2019 protests. How did the consequences of this popular explosion reflect on the goals of mobilizational citizenship for state reform? Was the subsequent constitutional convention something that we should understand as a product of this kind of activist engagement?
On the other hand, we can think about this question through the relational Gramscian perspective that Levenson (Delivery as Disposession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Post-Apartheid City, 2022) develops in his study of two land occupations in Cape Town, South Africa. He describes how the judicialization of land rights and the focus of city bureaucracy on maintaining orderly urbanization encourages land occupiers to pursue strategies aimed at producing visibility and legibility to the parts of the state they perceive as most advantageous. Activist strategy is forged in relation to state strategy and vice versa. How might we think of the variation between Lo Hermida and Nuevo Amanacer in Santiago in light of this argument?
Escoffier’s Mobilizing at the Urban Margins is a remarkably grounded account of multiple forms of grassroots politics. As I considered these questions myself, I was struck by the global implications of an account that self-consciously roots itself in two particular neighborhoods in one particular city. This is a great testament to Escoffier’s capacity to link theory to empirics in his observations of Santiago, and, in doing so, to generate a profoundly relevant account and argument.
