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Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics
Meaningful Resistance: Market Reforms and the Roots of Social Protest in Latin America
Meaningful Resistance explores the origins and dynamics of resistance to markets through an examination of two social movements that emerged to voice and channel opposition to market reforms. Protests against water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and rising corn prices in Mexico City, Mexico, offer a lens to analyze the mechanisms by which perceived, market-driven threats to material livelihood can prompt resistance. By exploring connections among marketization, local practices, and political protest, the book shows how the material and the ideational are inextricably linked in resistance to subsistence threats. When people perceive that markets have put subsistence at risk, material and symbolic worlds are both at stake; citizens take to the streets not only to defend their pocketbooks, but also their conceptions of community. The book advances contemporary scholarship by showing how attention to grievances in general, and subsistence resources in particular, can add explanatory leverage to analyses of contentious politics.
240 pages, Hardcover
Published June 1, 2016
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January 21, 2017
In Meaningful Resistance, Erica Simmons writes predominantly for an academic audience about the role that threats to subsistence resources has in mass popular mobilizations. She bases her suppositions on two case studies: the "water wars" in opposition to water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1999 and 2000; and the tortillazo protests that shook much of Mexico, particularly Mexico City, in 2007 over the rising price of tortillas.
Essential to Simmons' thesis is the way in which grievances - particularly threats to subsistence goods such as water, corn, or rice - take on a broader cultural, social, and/or national meaning. In Cochabamba, water represented the traditional forms of farming and water usage, usos y costumbres, as well as the Andean Cosmovision. In Mexico, tortillas are not just a major food item, but have also come to represent Mexican nationalism and nationhood.
Simmons' findings are useful both in the way they portray how different responses from authorities can cripple or energize a movement, and in how threats to goods that take on broader meanings are a solid basis for mass mobilization. Simmons mentions in an American context that oil could be examined in this way, because the high prioritization of discussion of oil prices in US political discourse illuminates the importance of cars and driving to American culture.
Essential to Simmons' thesis is the way in which grievances - particularly threats to subsistence goods such as water, corn, or rice - take on a broader cultural, social, and/or national meaning. In Cochabamba, water represented the traditional forms of farming and water usage, usos y costumbres, as well as the Andean Cosmovision. In Mexico, tortillas are not just a major food item, but have also come to represent Mexican nationalism and nationhood.
Simmons' findings are useful both in the way they portray how different responses from authorities can cripple or energize a movement, and in how threats to goods that take on broader meanings are a solid basis for mass mobilization. Simmons mentions in an American context that oil could be examined in this way, because the high prioritization of discussion of oil prices in US political discourse illuminates the importance of cars and driving to American culture.
Displaying 1 of 1 review