De la “desaparición” a la reemergencia: Continuidades y rupturas del movimiento de pobladores en Chile

Abstract

Over the past thirty years, the large-scale provision of subsidized social housing has redefined the relationship between Chilean pobladores (urban poor) and the state. Such transformations have put into question traditional scholarly approaches to housing movements, which were built fundamentally on the so-called Movimiento de Pobladores that took place in the 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on ethnographic material collected between 2010 and 2014, this article seeks to offset the lack of academic reflections on current housing mobilizations by scrutinizing first the historical reconfiguration of housing protests—and accordingly, the rearticulation of the category pobladores as a particular type of political subjectivity—and second, the relationship between the demand for decent housing (vivienda digna) and the claim for both the right to the city and the right to life with dignity (la vida digna).