Historian Alison J. Bruey's new work offers a rich analysis of grassroots resistance to the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in the shantytowns surrounding Chile's capital of Santiago. The book's narrative centers around two of the city's most iconic bastions of popular mobilization, the communities of La Legua and Villa Francia. The book moves chronologically through the history of these two neighborhoods by first reconstructing their early social and political formation. While La Legua emerged out of land occupations led by Chile's Communist Party in the 1940s, Villa Francia was established as part of a Christian Democratic housing initiative in the late 1960s. Bruey then details how residents of each community confronted the September 1973 military coup that toppled Salvador Allende's socialist experiment and the state violence that ensued. Other chapters consider the popular experience of Pinochet's neoliberal restructuring, which began in the late 1970s, as well as the economic...

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