Alicia Olivari | Centro de Derechos Humanos

A Politics of Care from the Margins of Chile’s Social Uprising

Carolina Rubilar — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 19:57:36 +0000

This essay addresses the Chilean social uprising of 2019 through the experiences of Marta and Juan, two residents of the peripheries of Santiago, who became involved in this event despite having no previous experience of participation in social and political organizations. It explores this event’s strength in triggering contentious actions on the urban margins, and repression by the police-criminal apparatus of the state. Delving into the ethical and biographical dispositions facilitating this couple’s politicization during the course of the revolt, it argues that the critical force of this event lies precisely in the entry of unexpected—even unwanted—actors into the political space. Through a biographical narrative approach, it details the shift of its protagonists. By way of subjectivation, this shift unfolds in them a critical attitude embodied in public interventions demanding equality and social justice and in acts of community and neighborhood solidarity. The case sheds light on a rarely explored dimension of social revolts: the way certain actors collectively experience these critical events through a politics of care, bringing the polis into the domestic space, and from such politicization of the oikos, opens an unusual way of challenging the police order of their world.

Multitude and Memory in the Chilean Social Uprising

Carolina Rubilar — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 19:54:04 +0000

Between October 2019 and March 2020 Chile experienced the most massive and heavily repressed cycle of social protests in its post-dictatorship (1973–90) history. This essay explores the social uprising as a critical event of political subjectivation through the story of Ricardo, an ordinary young medical technician with no background of political affiliation who fully immersed himself in the forefront of confrontation with the police in the ground zero protest zone, while also providing first-aid assistance to those injured. Two vectors triggering Ricardo’s unexpected and sudden transformation into an activist are identified: the intergenerational potency of antidictatorial memories and the power of the spontaneous multitude in demonstration. In recalling the dictatorship, Ricardo and his friends used to ask themselves, “What would I have done if I’d been there?” In the face of the social uprising, Ricardo brings to the present that generation-specific question and responds with total exposure, defending the multitude and healing the wounded. We argue that the event’s critical nature is interpreted in the light of the past. Ricardo’s involvement becomes an ethical imperative to his time and to his own history. This duty fuels his mobilization and desire for social transformation, blurring the analytical boundaries between ethics and politics.

Mapuche Anti-colonial Politics and Chile’s Social Uprising

Carolina Rubilar — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 19:47:24 +0000

This essay examines milestones in the life history of one subject, Mauricio Lepin, and his involvement in the Chilean social uprising. By exploring the encounter of his trajectory with the uprising, the essay reveals under-explored dimensions of the anti-colonial character of this critical event in Chile’s history of the present. Lepin’s case shows the entanglement of a long history of dispossession and resistance of the Mapuche people with a biographical story of social marginalization, political exclusion, and economic precariousness, shared with large majorities of Mapuche and non-Mapuche youth. It concludes by analyzing how through the uprising Lepin appears before himself as an actor among a multitude in struggle by putting into action the plural right to appear and the self-determination of a sovereign people.