Javier Auyero is Lozano Long Professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao. He is the author of
Collective Action and Party Politics in the Makings of a Squatter Settlement
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Published:February 2025
Chapter 2 examines the history of the squatter settlement, and it pays particular attention to contentious collective action and party politics. More specifically, the chapter reconstructs the history of the land occupation and settlement of La Matera and describes the ways in which its residents addressed their most pressing problems. These actions are the incarnations of poor people’s hopes for improving their material conditions of existence. The chapter focuses on residents’ hopes, not so much as they articulate them in words, but as they manifest in daily actions and activities (such as building a home or digging a trench) and in particular events (taking part in the land occupation, overcoming the damage produced by a flood).
The chapter also describes how collective action aimed at securing services and infrastructural improvements (a health center, a school, pavement, streetlights, etc.) targets different levels of the state. We also demonstrate that as state officials responded to poor people’s demands, they sought to control popular contention.
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