Meaningful Resistance
Market Reforms and the Roots of Social Protest in Latin America

Exploring marketization, local practices, and protests, this book shows how market-driven subsistence threats can be powerful loci for resistance movements.

Erica S. Simmons (Author)

9781107124851, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 June 2016

240 pages, 17 b/w illus. 5 maps
23.6 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.47 kg

'In Meaningful Resistance, Erica Simmons directs our attention to the causal significance of grievances by examining the meaning actors ascribe to specific grievances, in this case threats to subsistence goods, and how this motivates actors toward certain actions at particular times and places. She demonstrates the power of meaning by comparing two indigenous social movements: opposition to water privatization in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and opposition to rising tortilla prices in Mexico. This study reflects extensive field work in these two countries, including ethnographic observation, semi-structured and open-ended interviews, and historical research of primary sources.' Bradley W. Williams, Mobilization

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.

1. Introduction
2. Water in Cochabamba
3. ¡El agua es nuestra, carajo! The origins of the Bolivian Water Wars
4. Corn in Mexico
5. Sin maíz no hay país: the Mexican tortillazo protests
6. Conclusions.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]