“With the law on our side”: the Vernacularization of Rights in the Bolivarian “Urban Revolution”

• In Event: El Estado Venezolano: relaciones producidas entre la omnipresencia y la discontinuidad

Abstract

In this paper I will analyze occupations of land in the city of Caracas fostered by an urban social movement which has enjoyed governmental support during the Chávez and post-Chávez period. The case offers an opportunity to understand processes of convergence and departure between rights-claiming urban movements and governmental and state projects. In the context of the Bolivarian project I focus on how subjects who have long been considered lawbreakers, now encounter a shifting legal field that becomes a sphere of possibility for the achievement of their rights. I examine the “vernacularization of rights” as a process in which the meanings of rights are transformed or expanded through local histories and everyday practices, but also as an arena in which different understandings and meanings of rights interact an often come into conflict. These conflicts then are interpreted through longstanding and conflicting relationships with the law and the state and the longer histories of urban social movements, particularly in Caracas, in which, a notion of “rebeldía” or rebelliousness is central in the construction of political subjectivities (Velasco 2011). The case also shows movements as heterogeneous spaces, in which subjects position themselves according to their personal histories and positions of power based on race, class and gendered hierarchies. Thus, I pay attention not only to discursive battles but to the processes through which urban dwellers reckon with legal and institutional arrangements that seem to be “on their side” while at the same time always running the risk of taming their rebellious spirit.

Author

• Andreina I Torres Angarita, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)