Salvador Allende And The Villa San Luis

Through the history of this housing complex, this book illuminates Salvador Allende’s dedication to the imperative of the right to the city for Chile’s marginalized people. Built in affluent Las Condes in Santiago, on what is arguably the most expensive parcel of land in Chile, the Villa San Luis was one of Salvador Allende’s most visible and dramatic social projects. Allende’s six-year term was ended in the middle by a military coup d’état on 11th September 1973. Yet, material culture from Villa San Luis remains to convey the legacy of his commitment to providing disadvantaged families with dignified housing. It is a national lieu de mémoire and an iconic space, a reminder of a truly remarkable innovation in social housing and of Allende’s personal and political commitment to making Santiago a just city. Postcoup, the remains of the complex also relate the wider injustice of the Pinochet regime. Many of its families were violently evicted during the dictatorship. Some were dispossessed, taken away from Las Condes in garbage trucks, and dumped in poor communities around Santiago. The land was usurped by Pinochet on behalf of the army and later sold to developers to construct high-rise symbols of a new, neoliberal Chile. Over the decades, however, former residents fought back and, in 2020, they succeeded in making its one remaining structure, remnants of Block 14, a memorialized place of justice and reconciliation. It now a national monument and museum.

Attempting to connect the academic discussion around the anthropology and philosophy of the emotions to real-life, everyday experiences, this collection brings together concrete cases and situations arising from specific social and political contexts throughout the Americas. In particular, the authors explore how emotions are generated, constructed, discovered, manipulated, and experienced throughout the Americas by exploring undertheorized topics ranging from investigating the emotional lives of prisoners in Colombia and Brazil who have committed “crimes of passion,” to Colombian soldiers’ experiences of core “emotional events,” to the role of emotions in immigration policy in the United States, to how emotions affect educators’ abilities to teach certain material. Taken as a whole, this innovative, interdisciplinary, collection of original essays is not merely comparative, but rather seeks to bring voices and methodologies from North and South America into conversation to generate innovative analyses and ways to reflect about emotions in response to violence, state policies, and educational systems.

In the poorest neighborhoods of Santiago, Chile, low-income residents known as pobladores have long lived at the margins—and have long advocated for the right to housing as part of la vida digna (a life with dignity). From 2011 to 2015, anthropologist Miguel Pérez conducted fieldwork among the pobladores of Santiago, where the urban dwellers and activists he met were part of an emerging social movement that demanded dignified living conditions, the right to remain in their neighborhoods of origin, and, more broadly, recognition as citizens entitled to basic rights. This ethnographic account raises questions about state policies that conceptualize housing as a commodity rather than a right, and how poor urban dwellers seek recognition and articulate political agency against the backdrop of neoliberal policies. By scrutinizing how Chilean pobladores constitute themselves as political subjects, this book reveals the mechanisms through which housing activists develop new imaginaries of citizenship in a country where the market has been the dominant force organizing social life for almost forty years. Pérez considers the limits and potentialities of urban movements, framed by poor people's involvement in subsidy-based programs, as well as the capacity of low-income residents to struggle against the commodification of rights by claiming the right to dignity: a demand based on a moral category that would ultimately become the driving force behind Chile's 2019 social uprising.

Although everything in this imaginative and compelling biography of the martyred Chilean President, Salvador Allende, is solidly based on fact, it is cast in the form of a novel by the author, who was a close friend and longtime colleague of Allende.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1891.