Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela - Brossura

Velasco, Alejandro

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0520283325 ISBN 13: 9780520283329

Casa editrice: Univ of California Pr, 2015

Riassunto

Beginning in the late 1950s political leaders in Venezuela built what they celebrated as Latin America’s most stable democracy. But outside the staid halls of power, in the gritty barrios of a rapidly urbanizing country, another politics was risingunruly, contentious, and clamoring for inclusion.

Based on years of archival and ethnographic research in Venezuela’s largest public housing community,Barrio Rising delivers the first in-depth history of urban popular politics before the Bolivarian Revolution, providing crucial context for understanding the democracy that emerged during the presidency of Hugo Chávez.

In the mid-1950s, a military government bent on modernizing Venezuela razed dozens of slums in the heart of the capital Caracas, replacing them with massive buildings to house the city’s working poor. The project remained unfinished when the dictatorship fell on January 23, 1958, and in a matter of days city residents illegally occupied thousands of apartments, squatted on green spaces, and renamed the neighborhood to honor the emerging democracy: the 23 de Enero (January 23).

During the next thirty years, through eviction efforts, guerrilla conflict, state violence, internal strife, and official neglect, inhabitants ofel veintitrés learned to use their strategic location and symbolic tie to the promise of democracy in order to demand a better life. Granting legitimacy to the state through the vote but protesting its failings with violent street actions when necessary, they laid the foundation for an expansive understanding of democracyboth radical and electoralwhose features still resonate today.

Blending rich narrative accounts with incisive analyses of urban space, politics, and everyday life,Barrio Rising offers a sweeping reinterpretation of modern Venezuelan history as seen not by its leaders but by residents of one of the country’s most distinctive popular neighborhoods.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Alejandro Velasco is Assistant Professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Dalla seconda/terza di copertina:

Alejandro Velasco’s compelling history of one of Venezuela’s most symbolically charged urban neighborhoods illuminates the possibilities and contradictions of Venezuela’s postwar politics. No other English-language study has so effectively analyzed the complexity of popular engagement with Venezuelan democracy in the decades preceding Chavismo.”Brodwyn Fischer, author of A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro
"This book just might 'crack the code' on Venezuela, an enigmatic country that resists easy understanding. It will surely become a reference point for understanding Latin American politics and social movements."David Smilde, author ofReason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Univ of California Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0520283325
• ISBN 13: 9780520283329
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 321