Insurgent Ownership: Urban Land Seizures and Governance in Chile

During a five year period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, nearly 500,000 low-income Chileans took part in urban land seizures in Santiago, the capital city.  These squatters were part of an insurgency that would fundamentally alter land tenure patterns in Santiago.  Through the seizures, squatters came to be homeowners with access to a number of urban services.  Leftist revolutionaries often celebrated the seizures as a symbol of radical popular activism.  Yet while the squatters were combative and transgressed state law, they also sought to gain access to legally sanctioned private property.  They thus took part in a process that can fruitfully be called insurgent ownership.  In order to successfully establish their neighborhoods and become property owners, the squatters had to conform to the norms and regulations of urban governance.  This included developing neighborhoods that followed an established physical layout.  It also meant that squatters had to prove their worth as citizens by acting in ways considered appropriate.  These phenomena intimately shaped the neighborhoods that emerged from the land seizures, underscoring the potent reach of governing frameworks in the tumultuous settling of the city.