Emergent Citizenships

Emergent Citizenships names the practices through which people secure recognition and belonging on their own terms. Based on more than thirty months of ethnographic and archival research, this book examines how Mapuche and Chilean neighbors in working-class neighborhoods of Santiago cultivate forms of lived democracy.

Beginning with the poblador movement of the 1960s and continuing to the present, the project traces how coalitional initiatives emerged in response to entrenched racial antagonisms and unequal claims to urban citizenship. Through neighborhood organizing, cultural initiatives, and shared infrastructures of everyday life, Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents developed durable forms of citizenship in tense negotiations with state institutions.

Emergent Citizenships argues that democracy is not only institutional but lived—an ongoing and unfinished process sustained through everyday forms of cooperation, care, and conviviality.