Relationships de Confianza and the organisation of collective social action

ABSTRACT

This article examines the social and cultural organisation of learning and community change in a largely new immigrant and under-resourced neighbourhood in the US Situating our investigation within a local social movement for food justice, we use an ethnographic lens to study how learning is made to become consequential across relationships between people, across activities, and contexts. Our four-year ethnographic study highlights how community health workers (promotoras) build relationships de confianza as a tool that mediated new forms of action in the focal neighbourhood. We demonstrate how relationships de confianza have laid a foundation to (a) mediate social networks to organise for change and (b) promote solidarity through the response to urgent needs, creating a more holistic model of community health and sustainability. Drawing attention to relational resources foregrounds social actors and their ingenuity, promoting equity-oriented scale-making.

KEYWORDS:

• Relationships de confianza
• promotoras
• equity
• learning
• scale-making
• community development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All names of people, places, and organizations are pseudonyms.