“Sustaining a Barrio Insurgency: Survival Strategies, Territorial Transformation, and the Politics of Memory and Redemption.”

• In Event: Resistance and Disruption

Abstract

Social movement scholars have long highlighted the centrality of material resources and biographical availability for the emergence and sustainability of popular mobilization. Both leadership and rank and file participants require a level of time capacity, economic stability, and risk tolerance to engage in sustained activism. This is particularly challenging for urban poor communities in the Global South, where structural economic insecurity (e.g., informal employment, irregular income, unstable housing) raises the pressure to prioritize survival strategies and reduce exposure to violence from state agents or criminal actors. These conditions make urban poor insurgencies generally episodic, short-lived, and vulnerable to capture by clientelist networks that exchange resources and institutional access in for political loyalty. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, I examine how the community of Puerto Resistencia in Cali, Colombia, which emerged from a mass uprising in 2021, has sustained mobilization by articulating survival strategies into movement activity, occupying and transforming urban space, and activating powerful political subjectivities around remembrance and redemption.

Author

• Cesar Camilo Bowley-Castillo, University of California-Los Angeles