Streets, Citizenship, and the Politics of Movement in Allende's Chile

"Streets, Citizenship and the Politics of Movement in Allende's Chile"

This presentation examines Salvador Allende’s Chile as a case study that charts the rise of a new public sphere of political debate in Latin America in the post war era.  Rooting the concept of the public sphere in public space, I examine public protest as a struggle over political citizenship and for political voice.  I analyze the political significance of marcher’s location and trajectory, and the material and visual culture of political mobilization. I read these as means of creating and articulating political discourse in relation to broader languages informed by tropes of class, race and gender. Fleeting interventions in the political landscape, protests, marches, placards, posters, and slogans can be productively read as the “stuff” of political history in Allende’s Chile:  they are a political meaning-making exercises in and of themselves, a “political technology” through which an unprecedented array of actors articulated an innovative definition of public, political citizenship in relation to shifting notions of masculinity, modernity, and class.