Social Abjection and Political Subjectivity in Santiago’s Urban “Belts of Misery”

• In Event: Chile: Transformación y resistencia

Abstract

This paper examines the involvement of the MAPU-Lautaro movement in the nationwide protests that swept Chile during the final decade of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Through my focus on this historically marginalized component of the resistance effort, I argue that neoliberal expansion not only generates exclusionary zones and “disposable peoples,” but also new, if precarious, political subjectivities and practices, independent of the logic of the market. As a group composed almost exclusively of poor youth from Santiago’s urban shantytowns, the Lautaros challenge attempts of class categorization. The Lautaros appeared in both the mainstream and oppositional press as dangerous, delinquent, psychopathic, terrorist, monstrous, lumpen. Their rejection of deterministic notions of Marxism and of the hierarchical structure of the Left contributed to their isolation. Some have explained the Lautaro’s “peculiar” activities as a result of their economic marginalization. Others, while recognizing their importance in social mobilization, have considered them an “anti-movement” unnecessary to the unfolding processes of reconciliation and transition, and thus dispensable. I posit that the Lautaros’ innovative ways of organizing challenged neoliberal reformers’ proclamations of the so-called “Chilean miracle” and reconfigured the margins of the state. As violent conflicts between nation-states and spatially-marginalized groups continue to arise today, it is critical to develop nuanced understandings of neoliberal abjection and the making of modern statehood. This paper illuminates the process by which shantytown-based groups create performative and flexible subjectivities to counteract abasement and sheds important light on the meaning of politics emerging from marginalized peoples.

Author

• Denisa Jashari, Indiana University