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Drawing on ethnographic data collected in three informal communities, one in Argentina, one in México, and one in Ecuador, we address the long-standing question posed by Larissa Lomnitz's and Carol Stack's now-classic studies of how impoverished people not only survive but what strategies they adopt in an attempt to build a dignified life. By focusing on the diversity of strategies by which the urban poor solve the everyday problems of individual and collective reproduction, we move beyond the macro-level analysis of structural constraint and material deprivation. Our findings show a remarkable continuity in the difficulties residents of these informal communities confronted and the problem-solving strategies they resorted to. We found that networks of kin and friends continue to play a crucial role in how poor people not only survive but attempt to get ahead. Additionally, we highlight the role of patronage networks and collective action as central to strategies by which the urban poor cope with scarcity and improve their life chances, while also paying close attention to ways in which they deal with pressing issues of insecurity and violence. The paper shows that poor people's survival strategies are deeply imbricated in routine political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing macro-historical scholarship tends to assert rather than demonstrate the wider impact of nationalism. Yet, state-sponsored national ideologies permeate the broader reaches of society to varying degrees. To investigate variations in the consolidation of official nationalism, this paper combines the content analysis of school textbooks as state-regulated and picture postcards as primarily market-driven sources. Building on this novel methodological approach, we find that textbooks published in mid-twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru promoted a similar popular nationalism that portrayed the lower classes as "true" national subjects. However, picture postcards from the same period demonstrate that the consolidation of this official national ideology varied. In Mexico and Peru, the new state-sponsored conceptions of nationhood gained presence in public life, but they did not to take hold in Argentina. We conclude that studying the top-down nationalist messages promoted by states should not be equated with studying their ideological impact in public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following is a sociological report on a particular segment of an opera audience. Its purpose is to explicate the processes of initiation in an activity typically considered “high culture.” It differs from other accounts of cultural consumption in that it is concerned not with the correspondence between social background and taste, but with the processes whereby taste is assembled. Drawing upon an 18-month-long ethnography on opera fans in Buenos Aires, this paper has two aims. First, it shows that passionate opera fans enjoy opera based on their belief that opera is something that needs to be learned in order to be properly enjoyed. Second, it describes three diverse instances in which people learn about opera. Furthermore, this paper also has a theoretical objective: to extend and refine the classic model of affiliation and initiation into cultural practices established by Howard Becker with his case study of marijuana use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work organizations are commonly studied as sites that produce and reproduce inequality. But we know much less about how organizations promote equality. This article examines efforts to broaden access to power, opportunity, and resources in Hotel Bauen, a worker-recuperated business that was converted from a privately-owned company into a worker-run cooperative. Drawing on extensive ethnographic and archival research, I analyze efforts to redesign and redefine work through collective decision-making, job rotation, and pay equity. The article concludes by identifying three mechanisms of equality—inclusion, opportunity distribution, and symbolic leveling—to theorize the relational production of workplace equality and complement the near-exclusive focus on inequality and its effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though social movement research has developed an elaborate understanding of how individuals get involved in collective action, our theories frequently fail to capture the full diversity of activists’ experiences following recruitment. In this article, I argue that in order to analyze why people follow different trajectories after they join a movement we need to focus on the interaction between their individual backgrounds and their experiences while mobilized. I address these issues through the study of activists in the unemployed worker’s movement in Argentina (also known as the Piqueteros), one of Latin America’s most influential contemporary instances of collective action. Drawing on 133 in-depth interviews with current and former activists, as well as participant observation of events in their organizations, I find that through the interplay between their practices in the movement and other aspects of their lives, some of them gradually see participation as an end in itself. Their involvement provides refuge from the personal consequences of long-term socioeconomic decline by offering a combination of three particular rewards: access to places to belong, a feeling of empowerment, and the recognition by others in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An abundant literature studies the political thought of “ordinary citizens” qualitatively, but cross-national comparative studies are rare. To begin identifying cultural differences, this article focuses on the U.S. and Argentina, two countries that are opposite in many respects, while homogenizing the age, family situation, income, and metropolitan residence of the respondents. On one hand, the analysis shows two elements (that we call ideologemes ) common to both countries: the vision of the public sphere of mothers who have experienced downward social mobility, and the recurrent reference to the breaking of a previously extant social covenant. On the other hand, it shows differences in a basic axis of discursive organization: In Argentina, personal experience is tied to political events and historicized, while in the U.S., discourses about society are predominantly articulated in terms of spatial categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]