Mobilizing at the Urban Margins: Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post-Dictatorial Chile

In October 2019, unprecedented mobilizations in Chile took the world by surprise. They defied decades of deep inequality and opened new avenues for Chilean democracy. These demonstrations resembled the events that in the past couple of decades sought to expand democracy in places like the United States, Puerto Rico, Spain, Tunisia, Argentina, Egypt, and Hong Kong. Although these Chilean protests involved a myriad of organizations with different social backgrounds and demands, the organizational capabilities provided by the urban poor proved essential in sustaining collective action in an increasingly repressive environment. This research is based on almost six years of fieldwork in Santiago’s urban excluded areas. The research features the compelling story of two underprivileged neighborhoods that had almost identical paths of development before Chile’s democratic transition. After 1990, however, these two neighborhoods embarked upon dramatically diverging paths. While one has sustained mobilization over the past 35 years, in the other neighborhood local organizing became depoliticized and was deactivated. To explain how communities in the urban margins sustain mobilization in very inhospitable conditions for collective action, the book outlines the novel framework of mobilizational citizenship. Through mobilizational citizenship those communities can also build the mobilizing capabilities needed to support large-scale protests and broader democratizing processes that extend beyond their immediate community, district, or city.