The Theoretical Construction of Pobladores and Favelados As Social Movements in Latin America

How social sciences had contributed to produce theoretically the Movement of Chilean pobladores and Brazilian favelados during the twentieth century? Through the critical review of the main theories and perspectives that sought to understand the political action of the urban poor in Santiago de Chile and Rio de Janeiro, I intend to show the close relationship between these movements and the production of social sciences, in which operates a double hermeneutic, i.e. a mutually influential reflexivity process that would eventually incurs on the constitution and recognition of the movements as such. This paper aims to analyze how social sciences perform the same social struggles that they attempt to describe. In other words, how certain academic contexts interact positively or negatively with the political and social disputes generated from the movements in question. Therefore, it reviewed the main perspectives who had studied the urban social issue: the theory of marginality; the urbanization dependent theory; the theory of urban social movements; the utilitarian readings and the theory of new social movements, showing how these interpretations had alternated between the requiem, the rediscovery and the denial of favelados and pobladores as social movements.