Another class from last semester: Social Movements. This was a 300-level Politics seminar on Social movement theory. Not only is the topic fascinating, but my professor was incredible--perhaps one of my favorite college classes yet! It was an honor to bask in the presence of this man's intellect.

We wrote two papers for this class: one reviewing and analyzing a book read during the semester, and a lengthy research paper on a topic of our choice. This is the first essay.

Contentious Lives Analysis

Why Laura and Nana? In Contentious Lives, Javier Auyero chooses two significantly different women as the basis for his book. He claims that the experiences of these women are important because of the way that their lives intersected with two modern Argentinian episodes of contentious politics. Laura is important because the story of her participation in la pueblada “illuminates the continuity (or even circularity) between routine daily life and contention.” (p.8) The story of Nana's participation in the Santiagazo, Auyero claims, provides an analogy for “the form and fate” of the protest, as “both she and the riot speak about a frustrated, but never-ending, search for respect.”(p. 9) Though these two women are very different, their stories share common elements: both have been victims of domestic violence, both have been oppressed in their society because of their gender, and both participated in acts of contention because they were engaging in a “struggle for recognition” through which they could “make sense of both the lack of future,” and react “against hopelessness with indignation or revolt” (p. 9). Laura, as the public face of the negotiations during la pueblada, seems an obvious choice for ethnography and analysis. Although an interesting character, Nana doesn't seem to play a critical role in the Santiagazo—she hardly seems to be the “Queen of the Carnaval” that Auyero claims she is, because she doesn't play an active role as a contender. Instead, she behaves more like an intrigued spectator. However, Auyero tells an interesting and engaging story, and he illuminates the importance of the personal history of individuals in their motivation to engage in contentious politics. He argues—correctly, I think—that the protesters in both la pueblada and the Santiagazo “are indeed in search of their jobs and salaries, but they are also in search of their dignity.” (p. 8) Through Laura and Nana's stories, Auyero makes a compelling case for the place of internal, personal, and emotional motivations in the broader experience of the protest, and he personalizes the (often too scientific) study of popular contention.
 

In June of 1996, the Canadian firm that had been negotiating to build a fertilizer plant in the province of Neuquen, Argentina, announced that it would be canceling the project. The decision would greatly impact the economies of the neighboring cities of Cutral-co and Plaza Huincal. This impoverished region had already experienced the privatization of the government petroleum company, YPF, which provided most of the jobs in the area (p. 18). According to Auyero, “both Plaza Huincal and Cutral-co were born of, and developed through, oil activity,” and were economically dependent upon YPF (p. 42). After privatization, they experienced a “rapid increase in joblessness” and poverty (p. 18), and the cancellation of the deal became the final offense to a community that felt disconnected from their elected representatives. After the announcement, the local radio station urged the people into the streets to protest near a symbolic local memorial. At the close of the first day, “some protesters decide to stay in the road and, coordinating their actions through local radio, blockade all access to both towns with burning tires, barbed-wire fences, old machine cars, stones, and their own bodies.” (p. 17) The initial protests and blockades are organized by an out-of-power opposition group that is a faction of the governing party, the MPN, which organizes a rally-like meeting on the second day. The local people, who “are strangely left out of the public discussion”(p. 19), remain on the barricades and form their own organization called the “Committee of Pickets' Representatives.” Laura Padilla becomes the spokesperson for their two demands: jobs, and for Governor Sapag to come and negotiate with them. After seven days and six nights, Governor Sapag finally signs an agreement with Laura that, though vague, “summarizes the claims and hopes of picketers and residents: jobs for Cutral-co and Plaza Huincal.” (p. 21) Through Auyero's ethnography of Laura and his meticulous study of la pueblada (as the events in Cutral-co and Plaza Huincal are dubbed), he attempts to answer specific questions about what happened and why, and how Laura, a woman with no political experience, became the representative and symbol of the picketers.
 

Three years earlier, on December 16^th , 1993, a year of tension, escalation, and violence erupts in a major protest and riot in the city of Santiago, Argentina. Known as the Santiagazo, the events occurred in response to the lack of payment by the government of salaried workers' wages, which are crucial to Santiago's economy. It had been approximately four months since the government had paid wages to public employees, who compose about 50% of wage earners in Santiago. People of all ages, classes, and education levels gathered in the public square to protest. The protest soon devolved into a riotous rampage through the city, with participants looting and burning the Government House, legislature, courts, and the homes of corrupt elected representatives. At the end of the first day, “the national government sends in hundreds of troop from the Gendarmeria Nacional,” and after the second day of looting and attacks, the protest dies. (p.105) A year after the Santiagazo, the dominant narrative describes it as “a sad day,” in which “the rioters are portrayed as an amorphous mob led by callous 'subversive agitators'”(p. 112). Local officials claim that it was one day of contention over wages and that afterward, “'everything went back to normal'” (p. 112). They deny that the Santiagazo created any lasting or significant change.
 

Nana, a state employee in the courts, participates in the riots though she has no prior political experience. However, she does have experience in Carnaval as a performer, and as Auyero is particularly interested in the “carnavalesque dimensions of the riot” of December 16th, 1993, it seems he has found a subject who represents his particular interpretation of the events (p. 108). According to Nana and “most protesters,” there were three processes over a long time frame that caused the Santiagazo to be inevitable: “increasing government corruption and incapacity, daily disturbances, and growing street mobilization” (p. 109). Auyero asks how Nana and the other participants “understand their actions and themselves”. He wants to know: how they come to the decision to break into government buildings? Was this a conscious decision? Why did they use the tactics of burning and looting? Why is this particular episode of contention referred to as a “celebration” by its participants (p. 109)? In response, he suggests that their actions were deliberate and precise, that the protest became “a story full of images of parody and degradation”, and that this evidence “emphasizes the protesters' struggle against corruption” (p. 110). After interviewing Nana, Auyero is “craving more of [her] recollections,” and she eventually evolves into the focus of the second half of his book. He claims that her experience as a dancer in the Carnaval is more than just an anecdotal fact, but instead “points to a common theme underlining both the narrative of her life and protesters' (herself included) experiences”; the common theme being the “search for public recognition” (p. 111).
 

However interesting a subject Nana is for biography, it is difficult to see how her participation in the Santiagazo is truly representative of the theme or motivation for most of the protesters that participated. Auyero's biography of Laura Padilla seems quite appropriate to the study of contentious politics because she became an active part of a group seeking to redress their grievances by mobilization, demonstration, and negotiation with the aim of fulfilling collective demands. The way that Nana and some other participants in the Santiagazo view their participation seems more like riot than purposeful contention, and Auyero's biography of Nana only seems to weaken his argument that there was greater meaning to her behavior. Instead of acting as a participant in a claim-making performance of contention with purpose, Nana seems to be the spoiled youngest daughter of a poor family, who's unfulfilled dreams of becoming an actress, and her desire for attention through public performance, seem to motivate her to enjoy the destructive Santiagazo as a “celebration.”
 

Auyero successfully argues that the protesters exercised precision in their riot tactics: they had a specific itinerary, they “moved naturally” from each place that represented a symbol of corruption to the next. They specifically targeted the parliament, the government house, the courts and the homes of elected officials that had voted for the “Ley Omnibus,” an adjustment law that caused significant job loss and was highly contested. Auyero also thoroughly describes the history and causal chain of events leading up to the Santiagazo, suggesting that the public eruption was inevitable. In the year proceeding the events of December 16^th, teachers' unions, public employees, and even priests and nuns had taken to the streets, mobilized against the actions of the corrupt government. However, despite proving the reasons for the Santiagazo, and the deliberate actions of some of the participants, he fails to prove that Nana was engaged deliberately in acts of contention for any reasons other than a self-motivated interest in being part of a spectacle. She was not one of the deliberate contenders who went to the “politician's private residences,” but instead she simply “chooses to hang around the main square, 'enjoying the moment',” and “frantically moving around, 'so as not to miss anything'” (p. 106). So, though Auyero is correct in claiming that this woman's personal history contributed to her motivation to engage in contention, it seems more a way to act out her own personal frustration with the circumstances of her life that a method of engaging in contentious acts as a response to a corrupt government and political structure. And while some activists of the Santiagazo may have been engaging in a “struggle for recognition”(p. 9), Nana and some of his other interviewees seem to be present only to enjoy the celebratory atmosphere.
 

Javier Auyero intends to answer some specific questions in Contentious Lives: “Why is the intersection of collective experiences and individual biographies important? What do they add to our understanding of the meaning of contentious episodes?” (p. 5). Interested in the the way that protesters experience and make sense of lived contention, he also asks, “what difference does this focus on protester' interpretations of the episodes make in our understanding of contentious episodes in general, and of la pueblada and the Santiagazo in particular?” And, more specifically, he asks about Nana and Laura's experiences: “what events, both in the large frame of their lives as residents of a city experiencing the combined impacts of structural adjustment politics and state neglect and in the small frame of their everyday lives, coalesced to inspire their contentious actions?” (p. 12)
 

Auyero answers these questions through the analysis of their lives, through the history of the grievances and politics of the region, and through their specific participation in these contentious political activities. His conclusions strongly suggest that people's participation in protests are determined not only by “bread-and-butter” demands for necessities like jobs and food, but are also motivated by a desire for respect and recognition. Both Laura and Nana's stories—their difficult childhoods, violent treatment by men, and their gendered experiences in an androcentric society—illustrate the reasons they would seek both respect and recognition. These experiences offer the “small frame” Auyero is looking for, which has inspired them to engage in contentious political action. In the end, he concludes that participants' biographies “shape the ways in which people make sense of protests,” and specifically, that “Nana and Laura drew on elements of their lives to take action and to make sense of it” (p. 191). Auyero's extensive fieldwork, consisting of thorough research and lengthy interviews, provides a rich backdrop through which to understand the “lived experiences” of those activists engaged in the Santiagazo of 1993, and of la pueblada of 1996. Through this understanding, he attempts to make meaning of what happened in Santiago del Estero, and in Cutral-co and Plaza Huincal. Though Nana and Laura are not necessarily representative of most or all participants in either of these events, they tell engaging stories that add to our understanding of individuals and contention. Though he chooses Laura as a subject, despite the fact that she does not seem to act out of a desire to participate in a collective “struggle for recognition”(and thus she does not advance his respective argument on this topic), and despite using some questionable methods in his research by residing with his subjects, Auyero still makes a strong case for the place of biography in the understanding of contention, and he successfully emphasizes the importance of the intersection between personal biographies and the collective experience of contentious politics.

 

 

Sources:

Auyero, Javier. 2003. Contentious Lives. North Carolina: Duke University Press.