For a Proper Home

For a Proper Home
Author: Edward Murphy
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2015-01-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822980215

From 1967 to 1973, a period that culminated in the socialist project of Salvador Allende, nearly 400,000 low-income Chileans illegally seized parcels of land on the outskirts of Santiago. Remarkably, today almost all of these individuals live in homes with property titles. As Edward Murphy shows, this transformation came at a steep price, through an often-violent political and social struggle that continues to this day. In analyzing the causes and consequences of this struggle, Murphy reveals a crucial connection between homeownership and understandings of proper behavior and governance. This link between property and propriety has been at the root of a powerful, contested urban politics central to both social activism and urban development projects. Through projects of reform, revolution, and reaction, a right to housing and homeownership has been a significant symbol of governmental benevolence and poverty reduction. Under Pinochet's neoliberalism, subsidized housing and slum eradication programs displaced many squatters, while awarding them homes of their own. This process, in addition to ongoing forms of activism, has permitted the vast majority of squatters to live in homes with property titles, a momentous change of the past half-century. This triumph is tempered by the fact that today the urban poor struggle with high levels of unemployment and underemployment, significant debt, and a profoundly segregated and hostile urban landscape. They also find it more difficult to mobilize than in the past, and as homeowners they can no longer rally around the cause of housing rights. Citing cultural theorists from Marx to Foucault, Murphy directly links the importance of home ownership and property rights among Santiago's urban poor to definitions of Chilean citizenship and propriety. He explores how the deeply embedded liberal belief system of individual property ownership has shaped political, social, and physical landscapes in the city. His approach sheds light on the role that social movements and the gendered contours of home life have played in the making of citizenship. It also illuminates processes through which squatters have received legally sanctioned homes of their own, a phenomenon of critical importance in cities throughout much of Latin America and the Global South.

Communal Land Ownership in Chile

Communal Land Ownership in Chile
Author: Gloria L. Gallardo Fernandez
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351765477

This title was first published in 2002. While capitalism continues to convert former communal land into private property, communal ownership still exists throughout the world. By examining the agricultural communities of Chile's semi-arid Norte Chico region where the land commons are predominant, Gloria Gallardo Fernandez investigates the historical origins, emergence, socio-economic context and current development of this form of land tenure. The case study is contrasted with communal land areas in Mexico, South Africa, Switzerland and the UK, whose distinct historical and socio-politcal developments are also explored. This investigation documents almost four centuries, stemming from colonial archival sources, and thus fills the theoretical and empirical gap in the literature about this form of commons.

Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation

Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation
Author: Elizabeth Jane Macpherson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2019-08-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108473067

A detailed study of the engagement of state law with indigenous rights to water in comparative legal and policy contexts.

Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy

Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy
Author: Michael Albertus
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2018-01-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 110819642X

This book argues that - in terms of institutional design, the allocation of power and privilege, and the lived experiences of citizens - democracy often does not restart the political game after displacing authoritarianism. Democratic institutions are frequently designed by the outgoing authoritarian regime to shield incumbent elites from the rule of law and give them an unfair advantage over politics and the economy after democratization. Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy systematically documents and analyzes the constitutional tools that outgoing authoritarian elites use to accomplish these ends, such as electoral system design, legislative appointments, federalism, legal immunities, constitutional tribunal design, and supermajority thresholds for change. The study provides wide-ranging evidence for these claims using data that spans the globe and dates from 1800 to the present. Albertus and Menaldo also conduct detailed case studies of Chile and Sweden. In doing so, they explain why some democracies successfully overhaul their elite-biased constitutions for more egalitarian social contracts.

Language of the Land

Language of the Land
Author: Leslie Ray
Publisher: IWGIA
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9788791563379

This is the first book in English to examine the contemporary Mapuche: their culture, their struggle for autonomy within the modern-day nation state, their religion, language, and distinct identity. Leslie Ray looks back over the history of relations between the Mapuche and the Argentine and Chilean states, and examines issues of ethnicity, biodiversity, and bio-piracy in Mapuche lands today, their struggle for rights over natural resources, and the impact of tourism and neoliberalism. The Mapuche of what is today southern Chile and Argentina were the first and only indigenous peoples on the continent to have their sovereignty legally recognized by the Spanish empire, and their reputation for ferocity and bravery was legendary among the Spanish invaders. Their sense of communal identity and personal courage has forged among the Mapuche a strong instinct for self-preservation over the centuries. Today their struggle continues: neither Chile nor Argentina specifically recognize the rights of indigenous peoples. In recent years disputes over land rights, particularly in Chile, have provoked fierce protests from the Mapuche. In both countries, policies of assimilation have had a disastrous effect on the Mapuche language and cultural integrity. Even so, in recent years the Mapuche have managed a remarkable cultural and political resurgence, in part through a tenacious defense of their ancestral lands and natural resources against marauding multinationals, which has catapulted them to regional and international attention. Leslie Ray has been a freelance translator since the mid 1980s. He has translated a number of books from Italian and Spanish in the fields of architecture, design, and art history. A regular visitor to Argentina since the late eighties, he has worked actively with Mapuche organizations there since the late 1990s. In addition to his work on the Mapuche, he has also published articles on Argentine social, indigenous, and language-related issues for publications as diverse as History Today and The Linguist.

Sentient Lands

Sentient Lands
Author: Piergiorgio Di Giminiani
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2018-11-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816535523

In 1990, when Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year military dictatorship ended, democratic rule returned to Chile. Since then, Indigenous organizations have mobilized to demand restitution of their ancestral territories seized over the past 150 years. Sentient Lands is a historically grounded ethnography of the Mapuche people’s engagement with state-run reconciliation and land-restitution efforts. Piergiorgio Di Giminiani analyzes environmental relations, property, state power, market forces, and indigeneity to illustrate how land connections are articulated, in both landscape experiences and land claims. Rather than viewing land claims as simply bureaucratic procedures imposed on local understandings and experiences of land connections, Di Giminiani reveals these processes to be disputed practices of world making. Ancestral land formation is set in motion by the entangled principles of Indigenous and legal land ontologies, two very different and sometimes conflicting processes. Indigenous land ontologies are based on a relation between two subjects—land and people—both endowed with sentient abilities. By contrast, legal land ontologies are founded on the principles of property theory, wherein land is an object of possession that can be standardized within a regime of value. Governments also use land claims to domesticate Indigenous geographies into spatial constructs consistent with political and market configurations. Exploring the unexpected effects on political activism and state reparation policies caused by this entanglement of Indigenous and legal land ontologies, Di Giminiani offers a new analytical angle on Indigenous land politics.

Land Ownership

Land Ownership
Author: Annie Murray Hannay
Publisher:
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1953
Genre: Bibliography
ISBN: