Introduction
In many poor neighbourhoods throughout Latin America, residents participate in community organisations that seek to make their daily life more ‘liveable’ – more affordable, less precarious, more peaceful, less polluted, and so forth. From food pantries and agroecological gardens to women’s collectives against interpersonal violence and groups fighting environmental contamination, the relational dynamics of these grassroots community initiatives are not well known. What are processes that foster grassroots ‘success’? This article presents a case study of an initiative that, born from contentious collective action, has been able to persist over time and has contributed to a ‘better life’ for the community where it took root.
Latin America is characterised by persistently high levels of social, economic, racial-ethnic and environmental inequalities. Moreover, the structuring principles of those inequalities ‘are sustained by pillars as deep as they are solid’.Footnote 1 As such, it has long been understood and represented as a continent where poverty and luxury coexist side by side and where social exclusion plays an outsized role in shaping life outcomes. These inequalities endure, embedded in social relations, spatially inscribed in land and territory, and carried in the bodies of those who live them day to day.
As these myriad forms of inequality have taken hold across the region, however, so have public, oftentimes massive and disruptive, gatherings in which all sorts of people loudly make their demands for inclusion and equality heard. After all, Latin America is not only characterised by durable inequalities but also by powerful movements for change – ranging from prominent Indigenous and labour movements (such as those in Ecuador, Mexico and Bolivia) to vibrant student and feminist mobilisations (such as those in Chile and Argentina). Abundant high-quality scholarship has dissected the origins, dynamics and impacts of these collective struggles across the region,Footnote 2 demonstrating that Latin America is as contentious as it is unequal.
Less discussed, however, is the fact that these extraordinary collective actions oftentimes crystallise in more enduring community organisations that persist over time: a land invasion becomes a housing cooperative; a protest against a polluting facility becomes a health collective; a spontaneous street demonstration against hunger becomes a food pantry; and so on. While these ‘ordinary’ initiatives do not make the headlines, they tend to last longer than their more transgressive counterparts.
While we know much about the dynamics of massive belligerent contention (the combination of networks, organisations, political opportunities and frames of action that drive their emergence, development and outcomes),Footnote 3 we know much less about what remains after the heat of collective action cools down and the news cycle moves on. In many cases, contention gives way to effective community organisations that provide food, housing, protection, etc. to those living at the bottom of the social order. Drawing upon highly embedded ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the sequence of events that led to the emergence and success of one community grassroots initiative – or, as we repeatedly heard during fieldwork, a ‘thing that works’.
The perpetuation of exclusion and/or marginalisation has been, for very good reasons, the main focus of empirical and theoretical concern in the social sciences. However, we believe, there is much to be learned about the grassroots collective initiatives that are attempting to generate ‘flourishing’ lives (i.e. more free, less miserable, less oppressed).Footnote 4 Based on a case-study, our paper draws general lessons about the processes that make these initiatives possible and sustainable. We demonstrate that relationships and activities involved in caring for the community on a daily basis forge lasting power; in creating a collective rather individual solution for a problem – in this case care-work – ‘successful’ grassroots initiatives can engender enduring constituencies and thus become local political actors.
Analytic Foundations
In Latin America specifically, there is a long scholarly tradition on effective forms of collective action. Squatting and auto-construction are, for example, two of the best-studied strategies through which the Latin American poor have accessed land and housing.Footnote 5 The scholarship on land occupations as a collective housing strategy in Latin America is vastFootnote 6 – and it ranges from the organisational dynamics of squattingFootnote 7 to its relationship to democratic citizenship.Footnote 8 Classic and more recent work carefully documents the variety of responses that political parties and governments throughout the region have made toward illegal squatting (from repression, to encouragement, neglect and forbearance – or a combination thereof).Footnote 9
Land occupations are certainly not the only kind of transgressive collective action that the Latin American poor engage in. Sociologist Anjuli Fahlberg and collaborators recently reviewed a variety of strategies for obtaining jobs, education, health services, housing and public infrastructure in Cidade de Deus, a well-known low-income neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 10 These strategies range from disruptive forms of collective contention to individualistic actions – such as ‘making a ruckus’ at the health clinic or hospital emergency department in order to receive care or the reliance on personal connections to pharmacists who give antibiotics without prescriptions (analogous to what Danielle Raudenbush describes in the United States).Footnote 11 Sociologists Marcos Pérez and Federico Rossi have examined poor people’s transgressive forms of protest (in particular the staging of roadblocks) to demand the distribution of social assistance (foodstuffs and workfare programmes) in Argentina.Footnote 12
Part and parcel of these strategies is organisation building, in order to maintain collective action over time. Alexandra Abello Colak, Heidy Cristina Gómez Ramírez and María Isela Quintero Valencia, for example, have reviewed community initiatives that fight for housing, infrastructure and food security (community gardens) in Medellín.Footnote 13 Together projects like these make up a landscape of grassroots organisations in the urban peripheries of Latin American cities. Scholars have found, however, that their trajectories may differ. Some initiatives flourish at particular stages of a community’s development and then fade or lose their centrality as communities are incorporated into the urban fabric. For example, in Mexico City, the local government has introduced new participatory mechanisms, which have at times coopted and contained more radical city-making initiatives by institutionalising them.Footnote 14 In other cases, community organisations struggle to contend with violence or non-state governance, as in Brazil or Colombia.Footnote 15 Moreover, certain initiatives may proliferate during times of crisis and then fade away, such as the ‘common pots’ in Perú, which spiked during the turbulent years of the’ 90s and again during Covid-19 pandemic.Footnote 16
In this universe of literature on survival strategies and community organisations – and of particular relevance to the case at hand – is the work on women’s roles in the development and sustenance of poor communities across the hemisphere. Examples from the region abound: women are at the forefront of managing risks in the informal settlements, knitting support networks and implementing strategies in the face of pandemics, flood and fire risk, food and water shortages, among other emergencies and long-term problems;Footnote 17 at the same time, they must also work out how to take care of their families, often in the absence of state or private sector solutions.Footnote 18 In fact, women around the world are often tasked with filling in these same gaps. Time and again, they engage in grassroots efforts, creating their own organisations and networks to ensure social reproduction of their families and communities.Footnote 19
The urban poor throughout Latin America, these lines of research show, deploy a wide range of forms of collective action – from highly transgressive to less disruptive, and usually a combination of both. Our paper draws from this work and reframes it; that is, we bring these ‘persistence strategies’ (as Javier Auyero and Sofía Servián have called them)Footnote 20 into conversation with social movement literature. We do this by examining how a community grassroots initiative – low-income people coming together to address a set of issues that matters to them – stems from a peak of transgressive collective action. And, importantly, we reconstruct how the initiative outlives this peak, coming to be a ‘thing that works’ in the daily lives of the marginalised.
In sum, classic scholarship on social movement outcomes, on the one hand, tends to focus on transgressive, mass disruption, missing a rich, wide range of collective action that blends more into everyday life. While research on subsistence strategies, on the other hand, picks up on these day-to-day forms of subsisting, they generally emphasise how these strategies ultimately reproduce larger structures of inequality. What is needed, then, is a bridge between literature on social movements and subsistence. In this paper we take heed of a recent body of scholarship that zooms in on informative instances of this link.Footnote 21 Notable, and far-ranging, examples include a worker-run hotel in Argentina,Footnote 22 the ‘Platform for Mortgage-Affected People’ in Spain,Footnote 23 a squatter settlement in South Africa,Footnote 24 and a diverse set of grassroots organisations in the United States.Footnote 25
While this body of scholarship draws upon different theoretical traditions (from organisational sociology to political process), it shares a way of examining joint political action. That is, all of these studies put forward a form of political ethnography that sticks close to the ground-level of politics, ‘going granular’ by attentively observing and listening to what its protagonists do and say.Footnote 26 In this way, they unearth fascinating political dynamics. None of these studies proposes a ‘recipe’, or one single set of factors, to explain successful collective action and its crystallisation into enduring structures, but they do hint at pertinent processes at the root of persistent and successful collective action: addressing concrete problems, while framing these as collective rather than individual; engaging in public, contentious politics, while adopting organisational forms that cultivate the construction of constituents’ power; conceiving people as agents of social change instead of merely numbers to be mobilised; engaging the state strategically while appropriating existing opportunities and making a variety of alliances – to name a few. In other words, this recent research makes important strides in identifying certain shared dynamics of successful grassroots initiatives; however, it does not specifically name them as such or make this the primary focus of their findings. Therefore, in this paper, we draw on the above scholarship to scrutinise the processes that gave birth to and currently sustain a community centre and food pantry whose origin lies in a massive (and contentious) land invasion. In doing so, we outline some general methodological and theoretical lessons about how to study persistent collective action.
Site and Methods
Over the course of six months, author Sofía Servián volunteered at a community centre, known as the ‘Comedor de Virginia’, named after one of its founding members (hereafter ‘Community Centre’, or ‘Centre’ for short). From Monday to Thursday, a group that oscillates between six and 18 women distributes food rations to roughly 160 families from two low-income squatter settlements, La Matera and El Tala, located in Quilmes, a district in southern metropolitan Buenos Aires, Argentina. The women at the Centre also run a free day-care facility in a building adjacent to the food pantry.
Both neighbourhoods began as squatter settlements – El Tala in the mid-1980s, La Matera in the early 2000s – and, consequently, have various levels of infrastructural needs. Most streets in El Tala are paved, while in La Matera only a few are. Flooding affects the entire area, but the quality of housing is worse in the newer settlement. According the latest municipal figures more than 90 per cent of homes in La Matera are ‘deficient’ – that is, they meet one or more of the following conditions: they have a dirt or loose brick floor (rather than ceramic, tile, mosaic, marble, wood or carpet); they lack piped water supply inside their dwelling and/or a flushable toilet; or they live in what are known as ‘shacks’ or ‘cardboard homes’. Moreover, a third of the households do not have access to water inside their dwellings, another third are overcrowded (more than three people per room), and more than 90 per cent of homes do not have a sewer or gas connection.Footnote 27 Although there are no official statistics regarding public lighting, safety and rubbish collection, our long-term fieldwork attests that these too are worse in La Matera than in El Tala.
The Centre is a grassroots initiative that unfolded over time. That is, it started with a land invasion that took place more than two decades ago and continues functioning to this day. Oral history and in-depth interviews served to reconstruct the history of the food pantry. Ethnographic fieldwork allowed us to describe in detail its present-day operations. Together, historical reconstruction and on-the-ground research enabled us to explain the current success of this initiative.
Before writing about the lives of others it is imperative to spend time with them to figure out, as Clifford Geertz says, what they think they are doing.Footnote 28 This – time spent – is what defines ethnographic fieldwork.Footnote 29 In this sense, the research on which this paper is based (long-term engagement and a combination of participant observation and informal and in-depth interviews) emulates what other ethnographers have done before us. However, our fieldwork is different from most social science and investigative research on the topic in one crucial sense. Many of the individuals who take part in this successful grassroots initiative are Sofía’s neighbours and/or relatives. She was born, raised and continues to live in the urban area where the Centre is located. The conversations, in-depth interviews and life stories that inform the narratives we present were carried out as chats between friends, neighbours or relatives of a very similar social position.
The fieldwork on which this article is based was conducted between March 2019 and December 2021. The larger research project of which this fieldwork is part focuses on ‘persistent strategies’ (individual and collective ways of making ends meet and of navigating violence).Footnote 30 Except for the months of preventive and mandatory social isolation decreed by the Argentine government during the pandemic, between May and December 2020, Sofía conducted six months of participant observation in the Centre, working there at least twice a week. She also conducted 48 in-depth in-person interviews, and another 22 telephone interviews after the pandemic began with residents who live in the area served by the Centre. During the pandemic, the Centre’s coordinators prepared meals and distributed food for people to take home. Long, socially distanced, queues formed outside so that people could receive their rations with reduced risk of contagion. Once isolation rules were relaxed, the Centre resumed its activities, and beneficiaries went back to having their meals at the Centre.
We are certainly not the first to focus attention on collective action dynamics and the way in which these connect with specific results: a more democratic workplace, a less indebted life, a plot of land of your own, a more inclusive society. Many have asked when, how and why collective organising achieves positive effects for those engaging in this difficult endeavour.Footnote 31 When and how does collective action succeed and/or persist? What are the processes that connect more or less massive, transgressive movements with more or less successful outcomes? Plenty of excellent scholarship has addressed the consequences of collective action in politics, society and culture – studying topics such as changes in public opinion, access to decision makers, media coverage and rights to collective goods and policy outcomes.Footnote 32 This body of work agrees that the term ‘victory’ or ‘defeat’ seldom captures the impact of joint actions, given that the effects are typically broader than the explicit demands made by activists. As a result, in order to more fully understand the outcomes of a particular type of collective action, we need to grasp its inner relations and dynamics. As Charles Tilly reminds us: ‘There is no way to trace outcomes of such complex social processes [as social movements] without having robust descriptions and explanations of their operations’.Footnote 33 There is, in other words, a close relationship between collective action consequences and collective action dynamics.
With this methodological approach, we examine the trajectory of the Centre, understanding ‘success’ in this paper as a three-fold process – i.e. the initiative in question (1) has managed to persist and grow; (2) has arguably contributed to improving the lives of its members and the community in which it is based; and (3) has achieved some level of political power. Adapting from Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna and Michelle Oyakawa,Footnote 34 we define local political power as the capacity to transform (a) relational dynamics within the communities in which the grassroots initiative operates (has this initiative become an actor that other community actors have to reckon with?), and (b) political agendas (has this initiative become an actor that political authorities have to reckon with?). This measure of ‘having to reckon with’ is intimately related to the ‘power of disruption’ implicitly held by the Centre (in the sense given to the term by Frances Piven and Richard Cloward).Footnote 35 In a socio-historical context where massive collective action (in the form of food riots) is a constant threat, grassroots organisations that broker food delivery to the poor hold, almost by default, a certain level of political power. In an environment of widespread scarcity and high inflation such as the Buenos Aires metropolitan area during the period of our research, organisations like the Centre consequently command significant influence and cannot be overlooked.Footnote 36
This three-fold definition of ‘success’ cannot exclusively come from external criteria; participants’ understandings of what counts as success need to be incorporated in the analysis – thus the need for ethnographic research.Footnote 37 We argue that the foundation of local political power is laid during the ordinary, day-to-day routines carried out by the grassroots initiative. Thus, after a brief description of the Centre’s history and its current functioning, we divide the ethnographic portion of our findings into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extra-ordinary’ days, a distinction that seeks to capture the dual dimension of local political power, which successful grassroots initiatives are able to cultivate over time.
Findings: Inside the Thing that Works
Claudia is 50 years old and has been working at the Centre for more than 30 years.Footnote 38 She came to El Tala at the age of 17 from the northwestern province of Santiago del Estero. At the time she was pregnant with her first child. Amelia, her sister-in-law, put her up for her first three years in Buenos Aires. Back then, the Centre was mainly a small food pantry operating out of Amelia’s house. Claudia remembers being welcomed by Amelia and the women who worked at the food pantry as a ‘second daughter’. She started helping in the kitchen, and she also participated in the ‘casitas solidarias’ – grassroots day-care centres in the settlement. The first years at the Centre were, according to Claudia, very difficult: ‘We cooked with what we had, each one put in a little, with what came in the PAN box.Footnote 39 The few who had formal jobs collaborated [by donating] food so that we could cook.’
In a couple of interviews Claudia described what those first years of the community Centre were like, the collections they organised to buy materials to build the first dining hall, the donations of bricks from neighbours, and the monetary contributions made by a local NGO: ‘The construction of the dining room was all done by hand, it was a common effort.’ This first group of women was trying to solve a set of problems that emerged in the early life of the squatter settlement.
Since the 1980s, this area of the southern metropolitan Buenos Aires has witnessed massive, highly contentious and often successful land takeovers – of both private and public urban land.Footnote 40 Examining the squatter settlements that took place in the area between August and December of 1981 (and that included El Tala), María Cristina Cravino and Pablo Vommaro assert that these
were the result of an organised occupation … The occupants collectively invaded plots of vacant public or private land, on which they quickly built their first houses with sub-standard materials, which they later improved and built solidly … the settlements had a defined urban form, with land delimited in plots and the rectangular layout that continues that of the formal city … [These] collective and organised alternatives were more likely to resist eviction attempts due to their visibility and the social organisation that supported them. This also explains their location in the urban periphery, as the landowners (whether state or private) had less incentive to react, and also because they were generally unsuitable for development due to being close to rubbish dumps, in flood-prone areas or simply too far away from means of transportation.Footnote 41
La Matera was occupied in March of 2000. ‘Pedro organised folks block by block. He had a lot of experience from other land occupations’, María says of her husband. Given the existing squatting repertoire, squatters – known as ocupantes or tomadores – knew (or rapidly recruited those who knew) how to set the boundaries for each private plot, how to open up the streets and dig trenches so water could flow, and how to demarcate and reserve plots for public spaces like the main square and future school and health centre. ‘Everything we did, we did with a lot of effort, we got together with other neighbours during weekends and we built the pavements.’ They also had experience in negotiating with government authorities and evading the police while bringing in building materials and – when necessary – confronting them if they came with eviction orders. ‘We would put the kids in front of the mounted police so they couldn’t attack … we went through hell … when the bulldozers came to try to destroy our tents.’
As soon as the first land occupations took place, squatters had to organise food provisioning and child-care. As in many previous experiences of this kind, and given the strict and durable gender division of labour, this two-fold task fell to the female squatters.
Since those early and quite uncertain days, the Centre has increased the number of workers and services it provides. It has also diversified its sources of funding. In what follows, we describe its current operation in order to assess the causes of its growth and persistence. Before diving in, let us point out that there can be tension in the Centre between the long-time coordinators and the newcomers, who sometimes clash over the schedules everyone must comply with and the best ways to carry out certain tasks. These conflicts and minor rifts also form part of the dynamics of ‘things that work’, although for analytic reasons we choose to focus here largely on how persistence and growth can be seen as dimensions of local power.
‘My legs hurt, particularly my knees. I’ve only been working for a day doing what these women do four times a week. I’m exhausted.’ This is Sofía’s entry from her fieldwork diary on 1 July 2021. She is describing her first day of participant observation at the Centre.
1 July 2021: When we finished packing all the produce Claudia put together a list of people who could not come to pick up their food (they were sick, no adult was available, etc.). Together with Brenda, María, Fernanda and Julia, we take the food packages to them in two carts. Felipe, an old man we brought food to, gave us a bag of chocolates and sweets in return. According to Brenda, he always gives us a little present.
Sofía’s first notes capture the gruelling physical labour that goes into preparing the rations – from unloading the heavy bags from the delivery truck, to setting them up in the main room, to packing them up for distribution (which involves spending hours squatting) and taking them to those who cannot pick them up in person. That day Sofía participates in the packing of merchandise. A few days later, on the pavement outside the Centre, she sits next to two of the ‘chicas del comedor’ (‘kitchen girls’, as the women from the Centre are known) to distribute food rations. Every week, keeping the appropriate social distance imposed by the pandemic, neighbours form a queue outside the Centre to pick up their rations – neatly packed to avoid damaging the most fragile products.
The food is, in part, provided by the municipal government and private donors, and, in part, purchased by the women at the Centre. Food rations include fresh produce such as potatoes, carrots, onions, eggs and a fresh chicken and various types of dry goods such as noodles, rice, powdered milk, polenta, sugar, flour and quince paste.
Less than three months after visiting the Centre for the first time, Sofía is already part of its daily dynamics, working alongside the core group of women – to the point that they decide that she should be compensated for her commitment. One day after lunch, early in October 2021, Silvia (one of the coordinators) and Sofía have the following conversation. We reproduce it in extenso (edited for clarity; emphasis is ours) because it illustrates the ethnographer’s position – at once achieved and bestowed through her sustained engagement – and also because it anticipates the material and symbolic rewards obtained in (and conferred by) the collective care-work these women engage in (which includes but is not limited to the distribution of food):
Silvia: Sofía, who do you live with?
Sofía: With my mother and brother. My parents have been divorced for a long time. It’s only us three.
Silvia: Does your mum work?
Sofía: Yes, she is a domestic worker. She works four times a week. All is good.
Silvia: I ask because Virginia (the Centre’s main coordinator) was talking about giving you food rations every week.
Sofía: But … well, I benefit from coming here, you know I am doing research. So, I don’t think I should be given food rations.
Silvia: Yes, we know about your research, don’t waste your time telling us. But, beyond that, you are putting in your time here, and that has a certain value. Even if it is one hour, or two, or an entire day. You may not realise, but there are some activities that we wouldn’t be able to carry out without you. You give the children who come here your time, a look, a smile, a hug … that has value, and we want to acknowledge that. Even though we do not have much to give, even if it is only a pack of noodles, it is our way of showing our appreciation of you, because your time is valuable and we want to thank you. And, on top of that, well, for me, you are already one of us. Every day I ask about you because I’m used to seeing you. It (the food ration) is an appreciation of the time you put in here.
The above exemplifies the importance of food beyond the material fulfilment of a physical need: food serves to produce and recognise belonging and bonding.
Since its origin, the Centre has become a site of intense neighbourhood sociability. While food is an important part of the Centre’s operations, women like Silvia, Macarena, Majo, Claudia, Silvia and Patricia not only feed children and adults, but also educate kids and youths, and share vital (and sometimes intimate) information with their neighbours and among themselves. At the Centre, this group of women teach reading and craft, prepare breakfast and snacks for the participants, make gifts and souvenirs for the students on national holidays or for other celebrations (Children’s Day, Mother’s Day, etc.), and organise outings (during our fieldwork, children visited the ‘Ciudad de los Niños’ theme park, less than an hour away from the Centre).
These activities require constant rearrangement and cleaning of the Centre’s multipurpose room and kitchen (more than once, Sofía was in charge of sweeping up and wiping everything down after each class). This group of women also manages a day-care centre located half a block from the Centre (Virginia’s daughter, Silvi, is the main coordinator). The administrative work is also unremitting: coordinators must organise and communicate the shifts to ensure that all activities (packaging, distribution, cleaning, cooking, classes, etc.) are covered, while constantly seeking out additional donations of food and clothing. The food sent by the municipal government is never enough; every week the coordinators supplement the rations with fresh produce they themselves purchase or obtain from private donors.
In addition to their paid work (a majority have informal jobs as domestic workers, shop assistants, etc.) and the ‘second shift’ they carry out at home (cooking, cleaning their houses and raising their children), these women complete a ‘third shift’ at the Centre. They thus offer a clear illustration of women’s triple role first identified by Caroline Moser: in productive, reproductive, and community work.Footnote 42
Our ethnographic observations over the course of more than two years of fieldwork have established that these activities are now part of the daily life of the squatter settlements. The Centre is indeed a place to gather together with others, to obtain information and resources. We emphasise this aspect because it constitutes a key dimension of the local power of this initiative, which we will explore next by examining the Centre’s ordinary and extraordinary days.
Ordinary Days
The activities at the Centre can be quite diverse, yet there are also some routines that repeat daily. In this section, we will see how these seemingly mundane activities lay the foundation of local political power. The following fieldnote captures a ‘typical’ day at the Centre:
29 July 2021: When I arrive, workers are just starting their activities. There are three groups. Brenda, Mary and Betty have returned from the grocery store and are packing the food rations. Every time they pack ten bags of rations, they separate them out and write them down on a list to keep track. They have to put together 160 bags. The second group (Camila, Macarena and Anahí) are in the library unpacking the boxes of merchandise (sent by the municipal government) to prepare the rations. A third group (Claudia, Yésica and I) are putting together school kits for the children. As of Monday, face-to-face classes at the Centre are back and so are classes at the local school (after the first wave of infections during the Covid-19 epidemic). Claudia thinks it is a good idea to give the kids some basic supplies to start classes. For the elementary school children, we put together a kit that includes a folder, lined paper, pencils, erasers, a ruler and a notebook. There are also new overalls, as well as folders, paper, pencils and notebooks set aside for the high school students. While Claudia is putting together the kits, Yesi and I assemble the folders with sheets of paper. Some sheets are missing and we go and buy them. While we are doing this, Majo, Silvia and Susi arrive. The latter joins the group that is preparing the food rations.
Despite the habitual nature of these activities, what most caught our attention during the six-month participant observation period was the consideration the coordinators gave to apparently trivial details. The following notes illustrate this attention to detail and indicate, at the same time, the meaning and value they give to their work (our emphasis):
14 July 2021: Majo is in charge of drawing, cutting and gluing 69 cardboard hands to adorn the goodie bags that will be given to the children at the Centre. Yesterday, she stayed along with Priscila until 7 p.m. making the stencils for the little hands. At home, she stayed up until 2 a.m. cutting them out. ‘I had time to finish. I didn’t make dinner’, she tells me. While we are cutting out cardboard flowers and hats, I ask her: ‘You are really devoted to this. Do you enjoy doing crafts?’ ‘No, not at all’, Majo replies. ‘I do it but it’s not something I do well.’ Claudia intervenes and says, ‘Sure, I don’t think anyone here does it very well, but we make a good effort. We force ourselves to do things. Usually we wait for Miss Patri (one of the teachers) to make the stencils for us but sometimes we can’t.’ At that point, Maca comes into the room and tells Majo: ‘Everything is divine, but you do know that after getting the sweets the kids will throw away all these hands, right? ‘Yes, I know’, Majo replies, ‘but it doesn’t matter. I know that the children will appreciate the work we put into them.’
10 August 2021: We are preparing goodie bags for the kids. Majo and Virginia say in unison that the bags are missing something. They want to add cheese puffs. Virginia goes home and brings back some small transparent bags to put the puffs in. Virginia is always checking up on us. As I fill the bags with treats, I feel her eyes on me. When she thinks I put in too many or too few treats, she tells me so. She does the same with Macarena. ‘You are really good at this’, she tells me. ‘Yes’, I reply, ‘because last time with Susi we did about 80 of these.’ ‘Poor Sofía, since she got here we’re always asking her to do something, just like everyone else’, adds Majo. And Virginia concludes: ‘We are always doing something, for Children’s Day, and then Family Day, and then Christmas Day …’
As mentioned previously, once a week the Centre distributes food to 160 families and offers support classes to boys and girls from the neighbourhood. These classes are held in two shifts (morning and afternoon),Footnote 43 during which breakfast or snacks are provided. The group of women who work at the Centre (and sometimes their relatives) have lunch there every day – as a result, activity in the kitchen is always frenetic. Procuring, preparing and distributing food takes up a good deal of time. However, it is not in these activities that women find most of their satisfaction and recognition. Women at the Centre care most about – and build their identity as ‘protectors’ around – the education of girls and boys. Just like feeding families in the neighbourhood, women understand and contribute to the education of children as a joint enterprise.
Although an extreme case – due to the number of women involved in the task of helping one girl – the ethnographic note that we present below (emphasis added) illustrates very well this collective aspect of their work. It is important to note that by the time Sofía records this episode she is already part of the operation of the Centre, fulfilling daily tasks in support classes and helping to clean the premises:
17 August 2021 (Argentines commemorate the death of General San Martín, known as the ‘liberator of the country’): I arrive at about 11 a.m. Susi, Eli and Mary are the only adults present. As soon as I walk in, Bianca, Mary’s niece, comes running up to hug me. Bianca is 9 years old, her dad is in jail and her mum apparently has addiction problems and can’t take care of her. She is in Mary’s charge. I greet Mary and, instantly, she says to me, ‘Are you good at drawing?’ ‘I’m OK … not great’, I reply. ‘Bianca has to hand in a paper on San Martín and she needs a drawing or a photocopy to stick (to a piece of cardboard). I’m going to make a photocopy of San Martín, can you prepare the cardboard?’ she asks me. ‘Yes, of course’, I answer. Susi is outside playing with six children from the morning shift.
While Bianca finishes copying a short text about San Martín, which Silvi found in one of the books in the library, I write: ‘17 August, day of the liberator General San Martín’ on a piece of cardboard. Virginia shows up and says out loud: ‘This girl has a lot of homework. All of us helped her, we are going to make her a good student.’ While I am working on the cardboard, Bianca wastes a lot of time talking. ‘You do like to play with fire’, I tell her. ‘There are two hours left before you go to school and we still have a lot to do.’ ‘You are right’, she replies with a mischievous smile, ‘Maybe I should skip school.’ From the kitchen, Mary yells at her: ‘What are you talking about!? Finish your work!!’ ‘All of us helped her’, Mary tells me laughing, ‘Silvi looked up the information for her homework, Virginia helped her with her math exercises.’ When we have finished the San Martín project, we glue everything together and Mary goes outside to show it to Virginia: ‘Oh, it’s beautiful, very nice’, she says approvingly.
After a while, Susi and Eli go out to deliver a bag of food to a neighbour. Mary asks them if on the way they can make a photocopy for Bianca’s homework. ‘My homework is looking really good. I am going to get an A’, Bianca tells me, and I immediately reply, ‘We are going to get an A.’ Without skipping a beat, Mary jumps in and exclaims: ‘Yes! We are all going to pass!!! All of us will pass into fourth grade!!!’
It is 30 minutes before the school bell. Bianca is having a quick lunch, while Mary is becoming impatient. Eli is not back and they still don’t have the photocopy. ‘We can’t hand it in like this’, Mary says, ‘It looks incomplete …’
[Two days later]
Early in the morning, I arrive at the Centre and Majo, Silvia, Brenda and Bianca are already having breakfast. Silvia is helping Bianca practise reading and she asks: ‘Bianca, I heard you got a lot of help with your homework, is that true?’ ‘I did it all by myself’, she replies playfully. Mary, Silvia, Majo and I laugh out loud.
Women at the Centre understand themselves as educators and as guardians – as providers of protection. And although they do not receive a salary for their work (only an ‘incentive’ from the state, approximately US$60 per month) they think of their labour as work: as Majo told Sofía: ‘I like to do this, but it is also my job.’
The opposition between the Centre (as a place of routines and stability) and ‘the street’ (perceived as a place of danger and immorality, from which they have to ‘rescue’ youths) appears so often that it takes the form of a taxonomic scheme. This scheme serves to give meaning to the work women do at the Centre and the work of other neighbourhood institutions (soccer clubs, for example). As seen below, these institutions are understood as schools of morality, shelters to protect residents from the risks that plague the neighbourhood. As Susana tells us when recalling her first years at the Centre, ‘My daughter was really rebellious, she was never at home, she didn’t pay any attention to me. She liked to be in the street. These ladies told me to bring her here. They talked to her, and thanks to them she is not a slob. She now has her own family.’Footnote 44
The Centre is not only a place that provides food, care and education. It is also, as Sofía herself experienced during six months, a place of sociability where the women can discuss the issues that most concern them in a frank and relaxed way – from intimate relationships to parenting, from household economics (and the ever-present problem of debt) to issues of public safety:
1 July 2021: Lunch time is so much fun. The whole time they make jokes about work, food and their partners. They talk about their plans for the weekend. Julia, who lives in La Matera, says that tonight she is going to go to a friend’s house to get high and then have a night of sex with her boyfriend.
6 July 2021: During almost the entire meal we talk about two topics: braces and thefts. Three days ago, Priscila went to the dentist to have braces put on. She was charged ARG$10,500 and she must pay ARG$1,500 per month. Brenda also has braces, but she says that sometimes she has to skip a visit to the dentist for a re- adjustment because she has no money. We also talk about the recurring robberies. Brenda first says that she has never been robbed and, after a few seconds, she remembers: ‘Oh no, wait. I was robbed three times. Once when I first moved to La Matera …’
29 July 2021: While we are packing the food rations, the topics of conversation are sex education and nappies. All of them agree on the importance of having sex education in schools in order to prevent pregnancies and abuse. Several of them are deeply concerned about their daughters suffering abuse. Every time we get to work, we talk about husbands, the price of household items, the price of nappies, violence in the streets, etc.
14 July 2021: Camila, one of the younger women at the Centre, didn’t come to work because she had a migraine and didn’t have money to purchase her prescribed medication. Majo says that Camila is awaiting the ‘incentive’ to buy the medicine. Virginia asks Majo: ‘Why doesn’t Camila ask us? We can buy the medicine for her. We want her to work, but we also want her to feel well. We are not going to leave her on her own!’
As we see, during their daily activities women create sociability – that experience of being with others and for others, as Georg Simmel once said.Footnote 45 They also exchange vital information. The following note describes how oftentimes intimate conversations lead to the circulation of news that is crucial for navigating challenging circumstances. It also captures how the Centre has become a well-established actor in the community – this is something that will become even clearer on the Centre’s ‘extraordinary days’, and evidences its local power:
6 July 2021: Betty is my neighbour. As we are packing food rations, she tells me that she kicked out her husband a long time ago because he was very controlling, jealous, and a wife-beater. ‘What use is he to me?’ she says looking at me. She lives alone with her 28-year-old son who was diagnosed with schizophrenia four years ago. Betty stops Silvia on her way out to ask her what they can do about her situation. Her son had a crisis very recently and required hospitalisation but, due to Covid protocols and the lack of ambulances to transport him, she couldn’t get him into hospital. Apparently he is in a violent phase of the disease. Betty tells Silvia that she has been calling the hospital but no one helps her. Silvia asks Betty if she told them she was calling from the Centre and, when Betty tells her that she did not, Silvia says she is going to call herself: ‘When we tell them that we are from the Centre, they will attend to us quickly. They already know us.’
Information about health services, food distribution and other state services does not only circulate among the women who work at the Centre. The Community Centre is, in fact, a hub for the diffusion of much-needed information among residents who come by even if they do not work there.
29 July 2021: While they deliver food rations, Silvia and Claudia sit at a table outside in the sun to fill out administrative forms (‘do paperwork’). They know the names of everyone who stops by, they ask about their sons and daughters, their families and their work. A woman collects her ration and Silvia asks her how her son, who has autism and attends the kindergarten, is doing. She asks if she has seen the Educational Psychologist (EP) who attends to the kindergarteners. Once the boy is diagnosed by the EP, Silvia says, he can be referred for services at the neighbourhood Community Integration Centre.
Over the course of these ‘ordinary’ days – cooking, cleaning, helping with homework, doing crafts, exchanging information, hanging out, and so on – something sociologically relevant is taking place: the activities at the Centre are transforming the identities of its workers, creating a ‘common we’, or constituency of protectors and guardians. Next, in the extraordinary days we can clearly see how this constituency has become a force with which local politicians must reckon.
Extraordinary Days
Less than a month after the ruling party’s defeat in the September 2021 primaries, and perhaps in an attempt to obtain more votes in the legislative elections of November, the Mayor of the district where the squatter settlements are located announces her visit to the Community Centre. The coordinators of five other Community Centres that form a network with this one (a ‘collective’) will also be present at the meeting. The account that follows, built on the basis of extensive field notes, describes the days leading up to the (failed) visit. They intend to capture how, though in a subordinate position, the Centre is definitely an actor that merits the attention of local authorities. Before we proceed with the description, however, one caveat is in order: we do not have any empirical evidence of actual policy changes resulting from pressure exerted by the Centre. Instead, what we are arguing by way of empirical demonstration is that the Centre has managed to harness some level of local political power (in the two-fold sense expressed in the section ‘Site and Methods’ above), but we should be careful not to exaggerate its political influence.
These days capture several of the Centre’s most salient aspects: the collective dimension of its work, the emphasis on caring for children (care that is expressed in the dedication they put into the preparation of gifts, for example), the attention to the small details of the physical space (photos, a tablecloth), the recognition that its coordinators avidly seek and build together and, just as importantly, its relationship with local authorities. The reconstruction of these extraordinary days also shows how this group of women strategically avoids linking the Centre with any particular political group or faction, in order to further its capacity to obtain resources needed for its operation and, ultimately, its local power:
12 October 2021: I show up at the Centre around 10 a.m. When I get there, Maca is in the library making paper puppets with the 12 students from the morning shift. The desks are in a different position because on Friday there was a big clean-up to prepare for Mayra’s (the Mayor’s) visit. Lots of things were moved around. On the wall of the main room there was a huge hand-made coloured cardboard tree with the alphabet. Coordinators take it down and replace it with framed awards given to the Centre and pictures of themselves and the Centre’s founding members. Cleaning supplies, plants, children’s toys and tableware are also rearranged.
Majo arrives freshly bathed, with her hair loose and wearing very nice clothes. It is evident that she is dressed for the important visit. When the students leave we begin cleaning … Since Sunday is Mother’s Day, they are already preparing little gifts for the students’ mothers. Majo is preparing the stencils to make a little book with two cardboard arms around it, inside which we will paste a drawing made by the students. They will also prepare calendars as gifts. Many of the women at the Centre seem worried that they won’t be able to finish all the presents due to the Mayor’s visit. Majo approaches us and laughing at herself, tells us: ‘I thought Mayra was coming today, that’s why I got ready [for her] … and took a bath.’ ‘I put on perfume because I thought today was the day’, I reply. We now find out that the Mayor’s visit is tomorrow.
The next day I arrive at the Centre at 11 a.m. knowing that I am going to stay late. They are all sitting at the table preparing the presents for Mother’s Day. Virginia, Silvia, Claudia and Majo are making the daily planners and, at a separate desk, Maca is pasting the children’s drawings into the little books. ‘We were waiting for you’, Claudia tells me. I immediately get to work along with Maca. Mayra will arrive at 4 p.m. We all talk about how busy we are. ‘Today is going to be a long day. Only after Mayra leaves will we be able to get back to finishing all these (presents for Mother’s Day). Oh God, in the end, Mayra comes to keep us busy, not to do us a favour’, says Virginia. ‘When she leaves, we’ll get hard to work on all this’, replies Majo. On her desk they have something resembling an assembly line: one paints, another folds, another cuts, and the last one glues.
After working for while we stop and set the table to eat. At 12 o’clock we have rice stew for lunch. We are a big group: Virginia, Claudia and her husband and son, Silvia, Susana, Mary, Betty with her two daughters, Tacho, Majo with her son. As we finish lunch, Silvi arrives very well dressed. Silvi reiterates that Mayra is coming at 4 p.m. and she has ‘a tight schedule’. At this moment, Virginia raises her voice and askes the group: ‘How come we didn’t think of buying something to share alongside a mate with her, some croissants for example?’ ‘I can make bread straightaway’, says Claudia. Then they start talking about all the things that they need to do before the visit. Virginia interrupts and says: ‘OK, enough sitting around. Let’s get to work.’ Maca and I finish our cards and start helping the others to set up the place. I take out the tablecloths to wipe them down.
After clearing the table we begin to clean the dining room. Claudia makes the bread. While I sweep, Maca cleans the library. Virginia asks me to please take care of the letters of the alphabet on the main blackboard while Majo tells me to make sure every letter is well glued.
It is 1 p.m. and there are three hours left before Mayra’s visit. Virginia instructs us to arrange the chairs in a circle and, in the middle, two tables where they are going to put the things for the mate, homemade bread, glasses, juice, etc. We are constantly on the move. We hang a whiteboard right next to the front door. Then Virginia tells me: ‘You have nice handwriting, girl, please write this: ‘Friday 15th, food rations. Wednesday 13th, visit by Mayra Mendoza. Come on, come on, girls, we have to sell our work!’
It’s now 2 p.m. and we are done. We sit down to drink mate: ‘I’m going to have some mate and then I’m going to go home to change my clothes’, says Virginia. At 2:15 p.m. Claudia receives a WhatsApp message. Mayra is cancelling her schedule for 72 hours due to the murder of a 17-year-old boy outside a school in the centre of Quilmes.
We get word that the Secretary of Public Works will show up on behalf of the Mayor. One of the neighbours in attendance is Raúl who, just having shown up, says: ‘That girl doesn’t know anything’, referring to the Secretary. ‘Don’t worry, if she doesn’t know anything, today she’ll learn. She’ll leave from here knowing what it is that we do. We are going to show her’, Virginia responded to him.
The Secretary of Public Works came accompanied by the candidate for the School Board and another municipal official. Everyone introduced themselves. They gave their names and said what work they did in their respective Centres. When it was Silvia’s turn she said: ‘All right, I’m Silvia. I am coordinator of the day-care centre’, and she continued with a long list of everything that she does in the Centre without being able to hold back a laugh. ‘I do everything … and I’m also a mum.’ The introductions continued.
Eli: I’m Eli and I serve the snacks for the kids.
Majo: I’m María José and I provide educational support classes to the kids at the Centre.
Mary: I’m Mary and I cook for everyone here.
…
After the introductions, the Secretary started her speech. Being an architect and in charge of public works, she talked about that. First, she emphasised how difficult it had been and continued to be in the context of a pandemic. She said that, despite this, much had been done when it came to public works. She listed many that they had done to date. Suddenly, and only a few minutes after the Secretary had started, Silvia interrupted her and changed the subject: ‘We understand everything you’re saying, about the public works and how difficult it is to govern during a pandemic. But our demands go beyond the pandemic. Our problems didn’t start with the pandemic …’ Starting from this interruption, the coordinators of the other Centres got their courage up and started to lay out their demands to the Secretary … Virginia gave the candidate for the School Board a portfolio that they had made with photos of all the activities and projects that had been carried out in the Centre over the years. The leaders of the other Centres did the same. Virginia approached the folk music teacher – who gives classes in the Centre – and said to her, ‘Give her your portfolio and put your number in it. Let’s see if we can get her to give us something at least.’
We finish around 8 p.m., I help tidy up the place a bit and get ready to go home. I’m exhausted. They are going to stay up late finishing the presents for Mother’s Day. ‘My apologies, but I can’t stay, I have a class this evening’, I tell Majo. ‘Go, take it easy, girl. Thank you for everything’, she replies. On the way out I overhear this conversation:
Priscila: Who is the Centre with?
Majo: The Centre is with no one. With no political party.
Priscila: Well, but at the same time, we try to make a deal with whoever is in power.
Majo: Yes, well, the doors are open to everyone, but we are not with anyone.
Majo emphasises that the Centre is ‘with no one’. That is, as these fieldnotes of these extraordinary days suggest, it is not political in the sense that it eschews a firm political alignment – something we were able to verify throughout the fieldwork.Footnote 46 However, we argue that the Centre is political in that it builds local power. The above scene highlights how local authorities have to reckon with its demands. Although Sofía wonders whether the politicians were really listening, their presence on this extraordinary day is recognition that the Centre consolidates a constituency of interest to them. In other words, by going to the Centre, the authorities implicitly acknowledge that they are before a constituency with power in the community.
Discussion
As the extraordinary days clearly show, the Centre is a local political actor. Part of this grassroots initiative’s success is this then: being on the radar of local movers and shakers and affecting the way community problems are framed and addressed. This power, we argue, is intrinsically linked to the ordinary days. That is, the Centre builds power through care-work, the care-work it provides on a day-to-day basis for the families of the neighbourhood and for each other.
Importantly, from its early days, the Centre decided to make care-work a collective endeavour. Instead of carrying out these tasks solely within the family or home, community members banded together to meet the needs of food and childcare provisioning. While they started largely as a food pantry operating out of one individual’s house, they soon drew on community resources to build a dining hall, expanding their capacity to feed families and provide educational support. These oftentimes gruelling day-to-day tasks, which Sofía painstakingly outlined in her fieldnotes, both provided care and established care-work as a collective, rather than individual, issue. Thus, the Centre workers are much like Melissa García-Lamarca’s subjects, who fight against an indebted existence by transforming debt into a social problem, or the squatters ana- lysed by Zachary Levenson, who make the lack of land and housing a community issue as opposed to one to be addressed by individual citizens.Footnote 47
In doing so, the women who help out in the Centre also established themselves as a collective actor. As they worked together, they shared with one another: resources, information, gossip, affection, and so on. The impacts of these exchanges also extended beyond the Centre’s walls, as attested by the many residents we spoke with during fieldwork. They told us how they value the work of the Centre, not only as a place they can rely on for food, but also as a hub of information about important events (registration for a new state welfare plan, for example).Footnote 48 By creating and participating in this network of support, the women also strengthened their identities as guardians, educators and protectors of their community. In paying attention to the details, such as the presentation of the goodie bags, they found meaning, joy and dignity in their work. And in these relationships, there is grassroots power.Footnote 49
The passing of ordinary days has a cumulative effect in making the Centre an important community institution. Beyond providing its official services of food and education, it has become a place where people gather to obtain resources and information. By performing collective care-work, the Centre has become plugged into a larger network of service provision organisations. As the fieldnotes show, the Centre has connections with the healthcare and education system, access to which they use to further help the families they serve.
As such, the Centre has come to represent a ‘constituency’ capable of participating in local politics, as the extraordinary days demonstrate. By building capacity through the ground up – through care-work – the Centre’s workers enjoy certain latitude in their engagement with authorities; they are not ‘married’ to any one party or politician. In this sense, they can strategically blend compliance with confrontation in their interactions with the government, i.e. they can exercise the kind of bottom-up power described by Han et al.Footnote 50 In part, this independence comes from their connections with each other and the community. Because they have created a culture of care, in which workers and families are committed to the Centre’s continued success, they can count on their own ‘constituents’ to show up when needed, to meetings or other events, to exert pressure on authorities.
In this sense, recalling our threefold definition, the Centre has achieved success. First, it has not only survived over the years – it has flourished. Second, beyond expanding its operations, the Centre has most definitely made daily life more liveable, not only for the families who use their services, but also for those who spend their time there. In providing care collectively, the women of the Centre have created and continue to maintain a network of relationships, glued together by a shared identity and the dignity they find in their work. Such is the strength of these ties that they have met the third criteria of success: they have become a constituency with local political power. They are recognised as an authority within the community by both fellow neighbours and politicians.
In sum, community power was built through ordinary days and is clearly seen on the extraordinary ones. Yet, if we look at the Centre through the lens of transgressive, mass contention, even its most extraordinary days would be unlikely to make the headlines. However, in overlooking the grassroots initiatives working quietly to make daily life more liveable in extremely marginalised contexts, we miss the implicit ‘power of disruption’Footnote 51 that initiatives like the Centre build through feeding hundreds of families by wresting resources from the state. In the introduction to her insightful ethnography of hunger in Singidia, Tanzania, anthropologist Kristin Phillips states that in anticipation of resource deprivation ‘people cast wide webs of connection, obligation, and pressure’. Through ‘acts of both conflict and cooperation, and through networks of both inequality and interdependence’, their search for means to solve pressing needs bring ‘people to each other’ and ‘them to their government’.Footnote 52 Our case study dissected an analogous process: through relationships that women cast collectively, they have built a constituency; through the act of feeding and caring jointly they have simultaneously built a much-needed grassroots power to make claims on the state.
Conclusions
The paper has substantive, methodological and analytical implications. Substantively, we believe there is much to be learned about persistent forms of grassroots collective action. While we know much about the dynamics of massive belligerent popular contention, we are on less certain ground when it comes to understanding and explaining enduring organisations that emerge from public contention. Oftentimes, popular protest is followed by effective community initiatives that provide food, housing, protection, and so forth, to vulnerable and marginalised populations. What are the processes that ‘make them work’? How do they build collective power? What collective identities do they nurture?
Methodologically, if we are to capture success and persistence, we need diachronic and synchronic studies – ethnography needs to meet history. Analytically, our paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork and oral history and combines insights from (and seeks to contribute to) the literature on social movement outcomes and scholarship on poor people’s collective organising strategies. In a region characterised on the one hand by persistently high levels of social, economic, racial-ethnic and environmental inequalities and on the other by powerful social movements, it is imperative to understand and explain the processes through which extraordinary collective actions can crystallise into more enduring community organisations.
Social movement studies so often focus on mass disruptive events, and it is easy to understand why. They capture the news cycle when hundreds, thousands, or millions of people march in the streets mounting a clear, highly visible challenge to established power. At the same time, these are often short-lived bursts, difficult to maintain over the long run and, barring immediate subsequent policy change, their successes can be hard to pinpoint. Here, we choose to look for success beyond the headlines. Rather than volume, size or magnitude, we train our eyes for examples of persistence, collective action that endures over time. In doing so, this article looks for how communities build power in more ordinary places – and more ordinary moments.
The Centre has its roots in an extraordinary event. The collectively orchestrated land occupation from which it was born lasted an instant in comparison. After taking the land, the occupiers’ attention quickly shifted to organising the routines of everyday life – among these, how to attend to the basics of feeding their families and caring for their children in their new neighbourhood. Although the pace is admittedly much slower, we can attest – after Sofía spent extended time immersed in the day-to-day flow of activities in the Centre – that its operations build and sustain community power. In caring for the families of the neighbourhood and each other, the Centre workers build strong networks of reciprocity and trust. These bonds are then sturdy enough to exert pressure on other community actors and local politicians. Thus, contributing to the growing literature on ‘things that work’, we show how the processes of everyday care-work build power from the ground up.
While the Centre’s operations might not be as eye-catching as occupying land or taking over the streets, it disrupts established power. Women who may have previously carried out care-work within their homes or families become community protectors and educators, capable of feeding hundreds and making claims on the state. We theorise that, in transforming the ‘private’ into a public issue, one that should be resolved collectively, grassroots initiatives like the Centre build local power. The relationships and identities that the workers forge through caring for their community and each other produce a constituency that state actors must contend with. These findings build on the work of Han et al. Footnote 53 by showing how grassroots initiatives do not necessarily need to have an explicit agenda of policy change to build local power. Simply, by caring for one another, and converting individual problems into collective solutions, communities grow more powerful – allowing them to negotiate and obtain resources to continue making daily life more liveable for their constituents. They also become a force which established authorities (and other local actors, such as NGOs) have to consider when working in the area (delivering services, providing aid, etc.). In this way, centres like this become, willingly or not, a mechanism of governance. At the same time, they create the infrastructure to guarantee that these solutions and networks will last over time. Their power is in making life better for their community in the present, while garnering the power to ensure it lasts into the future.
What, besides the specific case at hand, have we learned from our ethnographic fieldwork and historical reconstruction? What general insights emerge from our study? The lesson for researchers interested in collective action and power among the marginalised is three-fold. For collective action to persist over time: (i) grassroots power must be built through concrete practices, oftentimes out of the news limelight; (ii) these concrete practices must socialise individual problems, i.e. private issues are turned into community concerns; (iii) these concrete practices must engage the state, sometimes through cooperation, other times through conflict. As these three processes take place, participants’ identities – that is, their self-understandings – shift. In other words, a common ‘we’, or constituency, is relationally created and reproduced.
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