Social Science Research Council

"From Democratic Revolution to Massacre in Venezuela: Popular Consciousness and the Emergence of the Multitude in Caracas, 1958-1989"

Since 2000, as a Ph.D. student at Duke University, I have honed my discomforts with Venezuelan and modern Latin American histories. My 2002 M.A. thesis argued that political and academic discourses of mestizaje (race mixture) exposed rather than masked enduring legacies of inequity in the state's relationship with dark-skinned Venezuelans. In May 2002, a research trip to Caracas coincided with the fallout from an April coup attempt--the latest expression of Venezuela's deeply polarized social and political life. My dissertation sets this polarization against the backdrop of decades-old grassroots political organizing in Venezuela's largest urban housing project. The "January 23" project and its residents played key roles in the 1958 revolution that democratized Venezuela. But in 1989, they were targets of the state repression that followed unparalleled protests against democracy's failures. What were the bases for popular loyalty and legitimate disloyalty in the interim? How did urban popular sectors after 1958 interpret shifting structural conditions and state policy, in times of plenty and of scarcity? How did state inattention to the urban populace shift parameters of formal and informal politics, leading to the rise of an independent political consciousness? These questions contribute to a literature on "informality" in Latin America, wherein the "multitude" as a concept links events in contemporary Venezuela to popular revolts elsewhere in the region.