Mobilizing at the Urban Margins: Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post-Dictatorial Chile by Simón Escoffier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Review by Emmanuelle Barozet, Universidad de Chile, Centro de Estudios de Conflicto y Cohesión Social

The problem of the causes and forms of political mobilization in urban peripheries originated from the great rural-urban movements throughout the twentieth century, which resulted in the emergence of poblaciones, favelas, barrios, and villas. These recurrent mobilizations show the cyclical significance of the movements of pobladores, depending on political opportunities and moments of repression. But important moments of political recess, or abeyance (i.e. phases in which collective action becomes isolated and without activists) have also marked this history.

Based on an ethnography carried out over six years (2012-2017) in two neighbourhoods in the east of Santiago, Chile’s capital, Simón Escoffier gives an account of how mobilizations endure – or not – in marginalized areas. Interviews, carried out in 2020 and 2021, completed this comparative fieldwork. The book draws on historical accounts of these two neighbourhoods, that were chosen because they have a past of mobilizations in the context of mass land occupations in the 1960s and 1970s and then during the process of transition to democracy in Chile in the 1980s. Although these forms of collective action are more identified as leftist, they can also be self-defined by the pobladores as autonomous from the parties, relying on family networks, neighbourhoods and often informal organizations, with few capitals, resources and opportunities.

Using the concepts of exclusion and stigmatization, the author examines why one neighborhood remains mobilized (Lo Hermida), while the other does not (Nuevo Amanecer), like most of the neighborhoods in Chile before the outbreak of 2019. The central question is: how do the urban poor sustain collective action in shifting contexts of authoritarian rule and democratization?

Far from romanticizing the collective action of the urban poor, the analysis starts with the observation that, in these peripheries, the exclusion of their inhabitants means that they cannot participate in contentious action and claim their rights. For this reason, they are under-represented in political systems despite constituting a significant and deprived part of the population. It is important to remember this point on a continent where it is very difficult for social advances to be made and then consolidated.

In theoretical terms, the book develops the concept of mobilizational citizenship, based on a broad framework that draws on history, beyond sociology and anthropology. It claims affiliation with the studies of Skocpol and Somers on comparative history and Gamson on the social psychology of collective action. It also uses process theory to analyze mechanisms of community building. It is part of a rich tradition of sociological and historical studies on the mobilization capacity of the urban poor. Simón Escoffier adds to these traditions the studies of memory and identity, where his initial training in psychology is transparent.

The argument of the book is: politicization and mobilization survived in some areas of the urban margins, where dwellers use memory and community-making to recover their identity through legacies of past activism. Calling themselves pobladores is a mark of recognition, much more than citizens for example, which for them refers to a liberal and instrumental vision of politics. The notion of mobilizational citizenship adds a dimension of active participation based on the recovery of neighbourhood memories to fight against social and urban exclusion. The author develops four dimensions of this concept (agentic memory, mobilizing belonging, mobilizing boundaries and decentralized protagonism) throughout six chapters and through the discourse of dwellers and his observation of local life. While the focus of the book is on community building within the population, it also looks at the moments when people engage in large-scale protest with the relationships and coalitions that this entails, in a context of police repression, even in a democratic period.

This book has multiple qualities: Besides its broad and comparative focus, it offers a detailed analysis of the historical conditions in which collective action takes place, and in which, in most cases, it does not, in Chile and elsewhere. It shows that demobilization is most common, not only because of a lack of self-organization, but also because of systems of local institutional political organization that put social actors in competition for scarce resources through clientelistic networks. As Simón Escoffier shows, it is not that there are no political capital or resources, however limited they may be. Rather, he argues that the accumulation of political capital by some in these areas prevent other local leaders from maintaining the historical continuity of their claims in their community. This text is useful not only for scholars of urban poor neighborhoods and contentious action but also for undergraduate and graduate students and anyone asking broad questions about the differential capacity for collective action. Additionally, it offers a very pedagogical explanation of how methodological comparisons are constructed in space and time.