Patronage for revolutionaries : the politics of community organising in a Venezuelan barrio
Year: 2016
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The political success of Hugo Chávez and Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has \nrelied on the promise of both emancipation and improved terms of patronage for \nthe urban poor. This thesis takes a journey through barrio Pueblo Nuevo, the oldest \ninformal township in Mérida city, to consider the tension between these ways of \nthinking about the relationship between people and government as a context for \ncommunity organising. \n \nDifferent kinds of evidence are presented from fieldwork conducted between 2013 \nand 2014, when Mérida made international headlines as violent protests erupted \nand the middle-class neighbourhoods around Pueblo Nuevo barricaded themselves \nagainst the state. Observations from community meetings in and around the barrio \nshow how different groups position themselves strategically in relation to political \nparties and city authorities. Experiences from nine months volunteer teaching \nwork is used to explore the participatory methodology of the barrio’s famous ‘little \nschool’ - the Fundación Cayapa education collective – and its work to reduce gang \nviolence. Experiences of living and participating in Pueblo Nuevo and of building \nrelationships with key community members are drawn on to explore perceptions \nof the lawlessness and political radicalism of Venezuela’s barrio populations. \nInterviews with activists, residents and local officials are used to map the \nintellectual landscape of the barrio, identifying different overlapping folk concepts \nabout the urban poor – including as ghetto thugs and as social revolutionaries – and \nconnecting these to notions about government and democracy. \nThese connected areas of analysis are used to bring together the existing \nscholarship around Venezuela’s experience of Chavismo – as a public narrative, as \na set of institutions and policies and as the context for barrio organising. The thesis \ncontributes to these existing areas of literature by challenging the representation \nof Bolivarianism as a break from the pre-Chávez political era. Historical evidence is \npresented to connect the contemporary experience of Pueblo Nuevo with the \nhistory of the barrio as Mérida’s first so-called “land invasion” following ruralurban \nmigration during the mid-Twentieth Century. Important continuities are \nidentified with the pre-Chávez era in the strategies of community groups, their \nadministration by partisan city authorities and within the Bolivarian public \nnarrative of class warfare and popular empowerment. The thesis argues that \ncommunity organising in Pueblo Nuevo is shaped by the inherited tension between \nprocesses of social emancipation and patronage and their premises in competing \nfolk concepts about the urban poor. \n
Author: Harry Greatorex
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2736397179