We Must Fight! We Have Nowhere to Go!": Ethnography of a Barikadang Bayan (slum community barricade)

• In Event: Surviving the Global City: Dispossession and Urban Resistance in the Philippines

Abstract

In this paper, I discuss the experience and strategy of a ‘barikadang bayan’ [slum community barricade] within the right to the city struggles of subaltern activists facing forced relocation and neoliberal urban planning in Metro Manila. Drawing on more than two years of critical ethnography with and life histories of slum activists, I detail procedures, difficulties and risks of a community barricade, and locate these within long histories of organizing and struggles. Barricades are the last line of defense for subaltern communities and are the most visible moments of the right to the city performance. Yet these are complex reflections of long and tedious process of collective building and political organizing based on subaltern capacities. In this process, slum activists sacrifice family wellbeing and endure risks of state surveillance, harassment, criminalization, and forced disappearance. I end by returning to the street and bearing witness to the wretched experience of a state-sponsored violent demolition and to the urban subalterns’ resilience. I advocate for a reading of a community barricade beyond collective defense of informal livelihood and habitation, but as a precarious subaltern street performance for a democratic and inclusive urban future. A barricade’s success depends on the engendered subaltern right to the city sociality among urban spectators despite barricades often failing to protect urban poor homes in the face of superior state forces.

Author

• Chester Antonino C. Arcilla, University of the Philippines, Manila