Stigma and resistance: institutional action and community self-management in Alto Hospicio, Chile

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the institutional mechanisms that have operated in a stigmatized and impoverished territory, and the responses of community action by organizations and social groups. Through qualitative methodology, based on the interviews with 17 social leaders and activists from Alto Hospicio, institutional actions and omissions that have generated precariousness are described, but also a social capillarity of self-management. The results indicate that the social production of the territory involves public action, market dynamics and the collective agency of the inhabitants. The latter, subjected to the urgencies of subsistence, as well as to dissatisfaction with state actions, unfolds in community self-management, without yet achieving an articulation that challenges the state institutional framework in an organized way, but emerging components of identity and social revaluation that open up possibilities for both development and resistance.