The geographies of collective identity in the Chilean student movement

Abstract

This article is about collective identity, learning processes and political agency in the Chilean student movement. The geographies of collective identity are constituted through engaging with emotions interwoven with the political learning process by making mistakes that enabled student activists’ agency to undergo transformation between 2006 and 2011. Space articulates an identity politics as the bio-politics of existence through which life itself becomes a political action and animates a radical imaginary of politics as being-in-common. This meaning of politics is interwoven with the production of territorial assemblies in 2011 through which the Chilean student movement reasserted the space–time of the political demand for free education in spatial rather than temporal terms by reimagining a collective vision with others. This represents the main legacy of the movement and becomes a condition of possibility for envisioning free education as an alternative project that seeks to contest neoliberal common sense.

Keywords:

• Chilean student movement
• collective identity
• space
• politics
• free education

Notes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Felipe Acuña Ruz and Dr Sam Halvorsen for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Forms of student activism and youth political engagement in the Chilean student movement are largely explained by the existence of colectivos. Although there is no rigorous study of when colectivos emerged, they seem to date back to the early 1990s and to be recognised as groups comprising a multiplicity of different leftist subcultures within grassroots student movements in Chile and that exist in the margins of traditional politics.

2 Villa La Reina is a housing project built at the end of the 1960s in the commune of La Reina in Greater Santiago. The construction of Villa La Reina represented a major milestone in addressing residential segregation through social housing policies implemented by the government of Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970).

3 Pobla is a common colloquialism to abbreviate ‘población’ or shantytown.

4 Facha is a colloquialism to identify a right-wing person or group of people.

5 La Florida is an urban commune in Greater Santiago.

6 In November 2013, Camila Vallejo, former president of the University of Chile student union in 2011, and Karol Cariola, former president of the University of Concepcion in 2010, were elected as MPs for the electoral districts of La Florida and Recoleta-Independencia in Greater Santiago. Giorgio Jackson, former president of Catholic University of Chile student union in 2011, was elected as MP for the electoral district of Santiago Centre. Another student activist, Gabriel Boric, who led the presidency of the University of Chile student union in 2012, was elected as MP for the district of Punta Arenas.