2 - The History of Mobilization in Chile’s Urban Settings

Summary

This chapter describes the historical backdrop against which mobilizational citizenship developed in Chile’s urban margins from the 1960s onward. It offers parallel accounts of developments across Chile’s urban margins, as well as in the communities used as case studies in this book: the Lo Hermida and Nuevo Amanecer neighborhoods. While descriptive in nature, the chapter makes several key steps. First, it addresses key moments of collective action occurring in underprivileged urban communities before the coup d’état in 1973. Second, the chapter describes the powerfully disruptive impact of the dictatorship in communities at the urban margins. Third, it chronicles the wave of anti-dictatorship protests that occurred in the 1980s. Fourth, the chapter describes the dynamics of mobilization and civil society in poblaciones after the democratic transition in 1990. Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of social groups have been demonstrating over social rights in Chile and highly disruptive, large-scale protests erupted in late 2019. The chapter demonstrates the responsiveness of active communities in the urban margins and shows how they provided the organizational structure requisite for protest diffusion.