Is it about elective belonging, social preservation or gentrification?: Travelling concepts and fluid narratives of place making in santiago

Some of the recent literatures within urban sociology interested in social mixing in “heritage” neighborhoods highlight the proximities but also the tensions between concepts such as gentrification (Butler, Zukin, among others), social preservation (Brown-Saracino) and elective belonging (Savage and Longhurst). My interest in this paper is to address these debates by exploring data coming from a rather different kind of city and fieldwork: Santiago de Chile. In addition, my attempt will be to question the extent to which the assumptions underlying those debates are accurate in describing the ways in which people articulate narratives of residential belonging by exercising moral claims, particularly authenticity claims. Indeed, authenticity claims are a vital part of urban politics in these neighborhoods, and regardless of the discourses of tolerance, the rejection of suburbia, there are moral boundaries at work. In addition, inequalities are still embedded in claims to place making and belonging. Thus politics of belonging depend on resources and position, and involves being able to perform and deploy a narrative of authenticity.

If authenticity has to do with resisting fixidity (as suggested previously by Boltanski and Chiapello) those that appear as having more cultural repertoires seem also to be more mobile in terms of residential trajectories, identity construction and in authenticity claiming (this appears in the literature as tensions, for example between the mobile versus the stable, the migrant versus the dweller, elective belonging versus nostalgia or the social preservationist versus the gentrifier). Thus, authenticity becomes a tool of cultural power in that it allows people to claim moral superiority or moral ownership (Méndez, 2008; Méndez, 2010).