Proletarian Lives
Routines, Identity, and Culture in Contentious Politics

An ethnographic study of how people in one of Latin America's most notorious social movements became long-term activists.

Marcos E. Pérez (Author)

9781009015936, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 August 2023

260 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.43 kg

Based on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork on the Unemployed Workers' Movement in Argentina (also known as the piqueteros), Proletarian Lives provides a case study of how workers affected by job loss protect their traditional forms of life by engaging in progressive grassroots mobilization. Using life-history interviews and participant observation, the book analyzes why some activists develop a strong attachment to the movement despite initial reluctance and frequent ideological differences. Marcos Pérez argues that a key appeal of participation is the opportunity to engage in age and gender-specific practices associated with a respectable blue-collar lifestyle threatened by long-term socioeconomic decline. Through their daily involvement in the movement, older participants reconstruct the routines they associate with a golden past in which factory jobs were plentiful, younger activists develop the kind of habits they were raised to see as valuable, and all members protect communal activities undermined by the expansion of poverty and violence.

1. Introduction
2. 'I Became a Bum': Economic Reforms and Everyday Life in Argentina
3. 'The Struggle is on the Streets': Democracy, Neoliberalism and Piquetero Mobilization
4. 'I Know what it Means to Follow a Schedule': Reconstruction of Past Routines
5. 'If It Rains or Hails, You Still Have to Show Up For Work': Development of New Habits
6. 'We Drink Mate, Eat a Good Stew, Talk… and That Way Time Flies': Protection of Communal Activities
7. 'A Small Thing to Get By': Potential, Voluntary, and Reluctant Dropouts
8. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Political science & theory [JPA], Politics & government [JP]