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 monograph examines how Mapuche and Chilean neighbors in working-class Santiago cultivate forms of democratic life that exceed legal citizenship, electoral participation, and demands for future institutional reform.

The project focuses on Población Lo Hermida, tracing its transformation from Hacienda Lo Hermida, a nineteenth-century hacienda, into a working-class neighborhood during the mid-century poblador movement, a center of anti-dictatorship organizing in the 1980s, and a hub for urban Indigenous cultural revitalization in the late 1990s. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how these pasts were reactivated as Lo Hermida became a focal point of neighborhood mobilization during Chile’s 2019 Estallido Social and the constitutional rewriting process between 2019 and 2023.

By combining historical and ethnographic analysis, the project engages the multiple scales through which democracy is experienced, contested, and theorized.

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