Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela - Hardcover

Velasco, Alejandro

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520283317 ISBN 13: 9780520283312

Verlag: University of California Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Beginning in the late 1950s political leaders in Venezuela built what they celebrated as Latin America’s most stable democracy. But outside the staid halls of power, in the gritty barrios of a rapidly urbanizing country, another politics was rising—unruly, contentious, and clamoring for inclusion.

Based on years of archival and ethnographic research in Venezuela’s largest public housing community, Barrio Rising delivers the first in-depth history of urban popular politics before the Bolivarian Revolution, providing crucial context for understanding the democracy that emerged during the presidency of Hugo Chávez.

In the mid-1950s, a military government bent on modernizing Venezuela razed dozens of slums in the heart of the capital Caracas, replacing them with massive buildings to house the city’s working poor. The project remained unfinished when the dictatorship fell on January 23, 1958, and in a matter of days city residents illegally occupied thousands of apartments, squatted on green spaces, and renamed the neighborhood to honor the emerging democracy: the 23 de Enero (January 23).

During the next thirty years, through eviction efforts, guerrilla conflict, state violence, internal strife, and official neglect, inhabitants of el veintitrés learned to use their strategic location and symbolic tie to the promise of democracy in order to demand a better life. Granting legitimacy to the state through the vote but protesting its failings with violent street actions when necessary, they laid the foundation for an expansive understanding of democracy—both radical and electoral—whose features still resonate today.

Blending rich narrative accounts with incisive analyses of urban space, politics, and everyday life, Barrio Rising offers a sweeping reinterpretation of modern Venezuelan history as seen not by its leaders but by residents of one of the country’s most distinctive popular neighborhoods.

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Alejandro Velasco is Associate Professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

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“Alejandro Velasco’s compelling history of one of Venezuela’s most symbolically charged urban neighborhoods illuminates the possibilities and contradictions of Venezuela’s postwar politics. No other English-language study has so effectively analyzed the complexity of popular engagement with Venezuelan democracy in the decades preceding Chavismo.”—Brodwyn Fischer, author of A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro

"This book just might 'crack the code' on Venezuela, an enigmatic country that resists easy understanding. It will surely become a reference point for understanding Latin American politics and social movements."—David Smilde, author of Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism
 

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"This is a landmark book in Venezuelan social and political history and in Latin American urban history."—Journal of Social History

“Alejandro Velasco’s compelling history of one of Venezuela’s most symbolically charged urban neighborhoods illuminates the possibilities and contradictions of Venezuela’s postwar politics. No other English-language study has so effectively analyzed the complexity of popular engagement with Venezuelan democracy in the decades preceding Chavismo.”—Brodwyn Fischer, author of A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro

"This book just might 'crack the code' on Venezuela, an enigmatic country that resists easy understanding. It will surely become a reference point for understanding Latin American politics and social movements."—David Smilde, author of Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism

"With this study of urban life in the four decades between the fall of Marco Pérez Jiménez’s authoritarian regime and the Caracazo, Velasco presents an innovative historical survey of lived experience at the literal and metaphoric heart of Caracas politics. Working from public records and extensive interviews, Velasco narrates the vicissitudes of political mobilization and governmental strategies intended to foster popular support. Through transitions to democratic elections, post-Cuban revolution activity, popular action, and looming neoliberal policies, the focus remains on the residents of these buildings. The book prompts reflection on Chavismo and the imprint of architectural modernity beyond the famous profiles of Brasilia and writes the people of Caracas into the story of Latin America’s 20th century."—CHOICE

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Barrio Rising

Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela

By Alejandro Velasco

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28331-2

Contents

List of Illustrations, vii, 
Preface, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xv, 
Introduction: A History of Place and Nation, 1, 
PART ONE. Landscapes of Opportunity, 
1. Dictatorship's Blocks: The Battle for the New Urban Venezuela, 21, 
2. Democracy's Projects: Occupying the Spaces of Revolution, 52, 
PART TWO. Paths to Democracy, 
3. From Ballots to Bullets: The Rise of Urban Insurgency, 1958–1963, 87, 
4. "The Fight Was Fierce": Uncertain Victories in the Streets and the Polls, 1963–1969, 111, 
PART THREE. Streets of Protest, 
5. Water, Women, and Protest: The Return of Local Activism, 1969–1977, 133, 
6. "A Weapon as Powerful as the Vote": Seizing the Promise of Participation, 1979–1988, 160, 
7. Killing Democracy's Promise: A Massacre of People and Expectations, 194, 
Conclusion: Revolutionary Projects, 227, 
Appendix, 239, 
Notes, 241, 
Bibliography, 301, 
Index, 311, 

CHAPTER 1

Dictatorship's Blocks

The Battle for the New Urban Venezuela

By all accounts, the 2 de Diciembre housing project cut an imposing figure on the Caracas landscape: thirteen residential buildings, each fifteen stories tall and containing 150 identical apartments, with only a seemingly random patchwork of colors breaking the monotony of concrete (fig. 2). The so-called superblocks rose from the hills overlooking the Presidential Palace, Defense Ministry, Congress, and National Cathedral, in an area where just months before had stood growing slums. When finished, the 2 de Diciembre project would consist of 56 superblocks and 42 four-story blocks, planned in addition to new schools, parks, athletic facilities, roads, and commercial strips. It was to become one of Latin America's largest public housing projects, capable of housing seventy thousand working-class residents while promising to remake Caracas, and the nation. And it was brought to initial fruition on the third anniversary of the 2 December 1952 coup that cemented the rule of its founder, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez.

Of all the public works built during Pérez Jiménez's dictatorship — a period of such frenzied construction that some have dubbed it "the bulldozer years" — the 2 de Diciembre housing project stood out as the most emblematic of his efforts to provide for Venezuela's rapidly urbanizing working classes a central place in the nation's body politic. Official photos of the inauguration told as much, showing Pérez Jiménez surveying the superblocks with crowds of ministers, soldiers, and onlookers flanking him, all of them dwarfed by imposing high-rises. Almost everything about the 2 de Diciembre signaled the symbolic and unmistakable ambition of Pérez Jiménez's "New National Ideal." Razing slums as well as historic neighborhoods, Pérez Jiménez cleaned the slate of Venezuela's provincial past to make way for its urban future. In their clean lines and angular shapes, the superblocks — neatly arranged one behind the other — marked the triumph of order over the chaos that had increasingly characterized Caracas's unplanned growth. In its name and location, situated by the major symbols of social and political power — the presidency, the legislature, the military, and the church — the neighborhood and its working-class population represented the popular foundations of Pérez Jiménez's government. Here, in short, was the "material expression" of perezjimenismo.

For Inés Oliveira the superblocks represented "a whole new way of life." When she was 15 and her family arrived in Block 12 of the La Cañada sector of the 2 de Diciembre, they were typical of Caracas's urban poor, forcibly moved from the crammed improvised housing that precariously hugged Caracas hillsides. Like many others, they left for their new home the night bulldozers razed what remained of their old zinc-roofed rancho. Fifty years later, Oliveira still recalled the exuberance of early life in the superblocks: "That for us was like a mansion. You know the conditions we poor people lived in? When we learned we were to be moved, no one slept from the happiness, the joy of it all. No more cockroaches, no more outhouses. ... My parents were ecstatic." Despite the dust and the tight quarters (two bedrooms for eight people) that greeted them in their new thirteenth-floor apartment, Oliveira stressed, "that was so beautiful. ... If Pérez Jiménez hadn't left, well, if he hadn't been overthrown, there would be no ranchos in Caracas, because he dreamed of a beautiful Venezuela."? So it was striking that Oliveira was among those who took to the streets to celebrate Pérez Jiménez's ouster.

At dawn on 23 January 1958, just weeks after workers laid the final slab on the neighborhood's third and largest construction phase, Pérez Jiménez fled Venezuela on a plane bound for the Dominican Republic. His departure followed a volatile month that began with a failed coup attempt on New Year's Day, several cabinet shuffles, an indefinite national strike, and violent street clashes between state security forces and Caracas residents. Finally, on 23 January, a junta composed of young military officers formally seized power in the vacuum left by Pérez Jiménez's departure. As Oliveira remembers it, at seventeen years old the self-admitted saltamonte "was one of those who shouted, ran through the streets, and got on a truck and yelled 'Down with the government! Down with the government!'" The ten-year dictatorship was over.

Oliveira's participation in the events of 23 January reveals the ambivalent relationship between Pérez Jiménez and residents of the superblocks he built to make concrete his government's vision for Venezuela. No doubt the passage of time helps wash the past in comfortable shades. But Oliveira's testimony reflects a complex, conflicted set of memories and emotions: a spirited appreciation for the man whose ouster she supported. In memorializations that followed Pérez Jiménez's ouster, these complexities were largely lost. Returning from exile, political figures now cast Oliveira and others taking to the streets that day as central players in a narrative of popular insurrection by a people unwilling to accept tyranny in exchange for concrete goods, and ready to support the promise of a democratic government, however ill-defined that promise remained. In press accounts, the neighborhood that once stood at the literal and figurative center of Pérez Jiménez's regime was now a backdrop to the coup. Press photos of the superblocks he had inaugurated with high fanfare just two years earlier now portrayed the site as emblematic of his downfall, high-rises dwarfing the crowds and tanks gathered in front of the Presidential Palace below. The very neighborhood that was founded as the symbol of Pérez Jiménez's new Venezuela turned on him to forge a new and again deeply symbolic connection with the national government. Henceforth, the 2 de Diciembre would be known as the 23 de Enero.

This chapter examines the complex social foundations of a neighborhood conceived, planned, and built to link urban popular sectors to the modern Venezuela state. Where at first the hundreds of photos...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520283317
• ISBN 13: 9780520283312
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 321
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland