Emergent Citizenships

This forthcoming monograph will examine how the Chilean case study presents an example of what I define as an “Otherwise Democracy,” which is often temporally projected into an imagined future or aspirational horizon but is nonetheless constituted by everyday experiences, understandings, lived practices, and actions where individuals re-imagine their social worlds.

During the constitution re-writing process, 155 elected delegates in a constitutional convention drafted a proposal to replace Chile’s neoliberal economic system with a plurinational state obliged to broadly guarantee Indigenous rights, social welfare, environmental protections, feminist principles, and LGBTQ+ rights through democratic practices which the delegates intended to exceed the system of governance that they proposed in the constitution itself. However, this political charter failed to be implemented after the convention’s proposal was rejected by 61% of Chilean voters in the September 2022 exit-referendum.

This project will explore how the proposed constitution and other imagined futures haunt contemporary politics at a transnational scale by drawing from 30 months of research conducted for my dissertation, “Emergent Citizenships: Mapuche (Indigenous) and Chilean (non-Indigenous) Politics and Belonging in peri-urban Santiago (Chile).”  For my dissertation, I combined ethnographic and historical research methods to explore the politics and poetics of autogestión  (Self-help) beginning with the 1960s Poblador movement, finding that autogestión has historically been articulated as a practice of lived democracy that operates parallel to, in tension with, and often undermined by liberal representational democracy.

Many policymakers and social scientists have argued that the rejection of the proposed constitution in the September 2022 exit-referendum demonstrated a popular rejection of progressive politics, enduring Chilean nationalism, and support for extractivist and settler-colonial projects. While it is true that the revision of the constitution failed, my research instead explores how the constitution re-writing process presents the culmination of three decades of global social movements by enunciating an alternative model of governance and democracy that responded to the Zapatistas’ call to envision a world in which many worlds fit.