Pobladores’ Right to Dignity: The Resurgence of Housing Struggles in Neoliberal Chile

Over the past fifteen years, poor urban residents (pobladores) in Santiago, Chile have strongly mobilized against neoliberal housing policies, which have promoted the segregation of low-income families in the peripheries. The resurgence of social protests around housing is closely related to novel demands for the right to la vida digna (a life with dignity) Based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork, in this presentation I show pobladores’ right to a life with dignity, a claim based on a moral category, allows housing activists to both ethically signify their everyday experiences with vulnerability and reshape the strategic orientations of their movements. To do so, I critically engage with contemporary anthropological debates on ethics and morality, which have been concerned with ethnographic analysis of the ways that practices of self-fashioning and self-subjection turn individuals into ethical subjects. Although these approaches examine how vulnerable populations’ search for dignity results in ethical practices performed mainly in the private or domestic sphere, I hold that the quest for dignity also gives rise to political demands that are expressed in public. In this way, I maintain that moral concepts such as dignity, while allowing for the formation of ethical subjects, enable vulnerable people to signify their everyday experiences in political terms. I conclude that moral concepts can take the form of political signifiers, by means of which poor urban residents frame their claims to rights, equality, and social recognition in a context of neoliberal governmentality.