Barrio Rising

Based on years of archival and ethnographic research in Venezuela's largest public housing community, this book offers an in-depth history of urban popular politics before the Bolivarian Revolution. It also provides context for understanding the democracy that emerged during the presidency of Hugo Chavez. “Alejandro Velasco’s compelling history of one of Venezuela’s most symbolically charged urban neighborhoods illuminates the possibilities and contradictions of Venezuela’s postwar politics. No other English-language study has so effectively analyzed the complexity of popular engagement with Venezuelan democracy in the decades preceding Chavismo.”—Brodwyn Fischer, author of A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro "This book just might 'crack the code' on Venezuela, an enigmatic country that resists easy understanding. It will surely become a reference point for understanding Latin American politics and social movements."—David Smilde, author of Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism Beginning in the late 1950s political leaders in Venezuela built what they celebrated as Latin America's most stable democracy. But outside the staid halls of power, in the gritty barrios of a rapidly urbanizing country, another politics was rising unruly, contentious, and clamoring for inclusion. Based on years of archival and ethnographic research in Venezuela's largest public housing community, Barrio Rising delivers the first in-depth history of urban popular politics before the Bolivarian Revolution, providing crucial context for understanding the democracy that emerged during the presidency of Hugo Chavez. In the mid-1950s, a military government bent on modernizing Venezuela razed dozens of slums in the heart of…