(Re)gaining the urban commons: everyday, collective, and identity resistance

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the everyday, collective, and identity resistance mobilized by the urban poor to (re)gain their right to the commons and contest urban exclusion. Informed by the community of waste pickers at La Chureca, the city dump of Managua, Nicaragua, the paper, builds on theories of discard studies, urban commons, and Bayat’s everyday resistance. It shows, first, how deprived communities can create their own commons through quietly encroaching on public space and using such resources as waste. Second, it reveals how activating passive networks (e.g. spatial and professional solidarity, kinship) can be fundamental in commoning, by triggering intermittent collective resistance, giving rise to more permanent active networks (cooperatives and trade unions). Third, it shows how simultaneous strategies of collaboration with the state can be mobilized when necessary. Finally, it demonstrates how constructing a resistance identity becomes an important sociocultural mechanism for claiming access to the commons, on the basis of a heterogeneous configuration of territorial, environmental, professional, family, and spiritual identities. Resistance identity stems from and supports individual and collective resistance, to maintain access to the commons. We conclude that all forms of everyday, collective, and identity resistance are essential, and none alone is sufficient to (re)gain the commons.

KEYWORDS:

• Quiet encroachment
• urban commons
• resistance
• waste pickers
• urban social movements

Introduction

Millions of waste pickers in cities around the world make their living by recycling materials that someone else has thrown away. Through their work, waste becomes a commons (Ostrom, 1990), a resource that is valued, transformed, and appropriated by these dispossessed groups (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015; Gidwani & Baviskar, 2011; Gidwani, 2013). Waste pickers are increasingly recognized for their significant contributions to reducing the carbon footprint of cities (da Silva Carvalho et al., 2012), recovering resources (Navarrete-Hernández & Navarrete-Hernández, 2018), improving environmental conditions and the health of low-income residents, and creating jobs among the poor (Rebehy et al., 2017). Despite their contributions, waste pickers are among the most widely excluded, impoverished, and disempowered groups of society. Waste pickers are exposed to toxic materials (Gutberlet et al., 2018), suffer from widespread prejudice and stigmatization (Moreno-Sánchez & Maldonado, 2006), are persecuted by police and others (Zapata Campos & Zapata, 2013), are subject to displacement and privatization processes enclosing free access to waste (Demaria & Schindler, 2016; Hartmann, 2018; Samson, 2015), are susceptible to global market fluctuations, and are subject to exploitative relationships with intermediaries (Bjerkli, 2015; Sseviiri et al., 2022; Tirado-Soto & Zamberlan, 2013).

Nevertheless, they overcome these colossal barriers with their everyday and collective resistance practices. Everyday resistance is a subtle form of resistance that, unlike traditional social movements, occurs in the form of “quiet encroachment” (Bayat, 2000) by marginalized groups in cities of the global South. Quiet encroachment refers to the inconspicuous activities that ordinary people, such as street subsistence workers or waste pickers, carry out to meet basic needs, including housing, informal jobs, public space, and business opportunities (Bayat, 1997, 2000). According to Bayat, the quiet encroachment of these groups discontinuously alternates with collective and more organized forms of resistance.

By studying the case of waste-pickers’ struggle to regain and defend their right to the commons and their resistance to urban exclusion, this paper first, brings together urban commons (e.g. De Angelis, 2017; Gibson-Graham et al., 2016; Hardt & Negri, 2009; Jeffrey et al., 2012; Ostrom, 1990; Stavrides, 2016), discard studies (e.g. Millington & Lawhon, 2019) and Bayat’s resistance studies (Bayat, 1997, 2000); and, second, it expands theorization on urban social movements informed by research conducted in deprived contexts of global South cities (Parnell & Robinson, 2012; Robinson, 2006).

Standing on the history of resistance of the community of waste pickers working at La Chureca (the municipal landfill in Managua, Nicaragua), this paper aims to examine the everyday, collective, and identity resistance mobilized by urban poor communities to gain and regain the right to the commons.

This paper presents first theories of urban commoning, waste and commoning, and resistance, then reports its methodology. Presentation of the case of La Chureca and a discussion of findings follow. The paper ends by discussing how constructing a resistance identity becomes an important sociocultural mechanism that both stems from and fuels individual and collective resistance and access to the commons. It concludes that all forms of everyday, collective, and identity resistance are essential; none alone can (re)gain the commons.

Urban commoning

Ostrom (1990) originally demonstrates that local, self-organized forms of governance of common natural resources constitute an alternative to both the state and the market. More recent literature shows how cities are also factories for the production of these commons (e.g. Borch & Kornberger, 2015; Eidelman & Safransky, 2021; Hardt & Negri, 2009; Harvey, 2012; Jeffrey et al., 2012), such as squares (Stavrides, 2014), public space (Gillespie, 2017) commons-based housing (Stavrides, 2016), community gardens (Eizenberg, 2012), repair movements (Zapata Campos et al.,, 2020) and even waste dumps (Gidwani, 2013; Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015).

However, urban commons are not a “given” but, rather, are “made” (Gidwani & Baviskar, 2011). They require material and symbolic transformations (Harvey, 2012); are produced by collective, noncommodified, and political action; and are intertwined with the creation of common space (e.g. Stavrides, 2014).

First, resources “need framing and formatting before they can be thought of as such and used” (Borch & Kornberger, 2015, p. 8). The “yet-to-be-a-common” must be seen; such commoners as waste pickers must render visible its imagined or developed value, acquiring a naturalized familiarity with the urban commons and becoming members of a commoners community (Gibson-Graham et al., 2016). They develop often tacit but necessary knowledge and competencies to see, transform, use, and consume the commons (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015).

However, value is not a fixed quality; it is created (Çalışkan & Callon, 2009; Hawkins et al., 2015; Hawkins & Muecke, 2003), in the case at hand by commoning. This implies that consuming certain commons does not detract but, rather, increases their value (Borch & Kornberger, 2015) through commoning practices. That is, communities of commoners thrive to create value (Schindler & Demaria, 2020) – a process of value creation that is never “finished” or “static” but requires permanent “re-qualification” (Çalışkan & Callon, 2009, p. 389) for (re)gaining the commons.

Second, transforming resources and goods into commons also requires their reappropriation by political action (Gibson-Graham et al., 2016; Harvey, 2012; Jeffrey et al., 2012), e.g. claiming the right to housing through squatting or anti-eviction movements (de Andrés et al., 2015), the right of the urban poor to recover waste through waste picking (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015), or the right to access discarded food through “dumpster diving” (Zapata Campos & Zapata, 2017; Barnard, 2011.

Third, urban commoning intrinsically connects to the creation of common spaces that become not only the setting but also the means of collective experimenting with alternative forms of social organization (Stavrides, 2014). Squares, parks, workshops, and (we argue here) waste dumps become common spaces hosting the emerging practices of recycling and urban commoning. Although communities of commoners guard them, these common spaces are porous (Hardt & Negri, 2009) and osmotic (Stavrides, 2014, 2016); otherwise, they could lead to new forms of enclosure (De Angelis & Stavrides, 2010).

Waste, value, and commoning

Waste dumps constitute the end of the pipeline of linear and unsustainable modes of production, consumption, and disposal, the “excess of modernity” (Moore, 2012). Disposability and subsequent recycling are fundamental parts of modern capitalist economies, which assume that continuous growth, waste, and recycling are the only way economies can operate (Liboiron, 2016). As a result, overflowing waste dumps have turned into a new frontier of accumulation by dispossession (Demaria & Schindler, 2016; Moore, 2012; Samson, 2015).

Dispossessed urban-poor communities of waste pickers have been pioneers in creating innovative recycling services through knowledge and labor while governments still ignore them (Kain et al., 2022; Samson, 2015). These commoner communities produce the necessary knowledge (Samson, 2015; Sseviiri et al., 2022), practices, governance arrangements, and sets of rules to valuate (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015), transform, and extract value out of waste. In other words, they create “regimes of valorization” (Schindler & Demaria, 2020) that enable waste pickers to access and benefit from commoning waste.

Despite relatively open access to waste as a commons, it is still restricted to those who participate of the given regime – for example, those with access to waste, markets, and knowledge, due to spatial proximity, kinship, or ethnic ties (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015; Makina, 2020; Sseviiri et al., 2022). Thus, such common spaces as dumps are not totally open nor totally closed. They are porous (Zapata Campos et al., 2020; Hardt & Negri, 2009) and can coexist with smaller and partial forms of enclosure by powerful groups, such as waste pickers themselves and traders (Sseviiri et al., 2022).

Yet, noticing waste’s value “invariably brings with it the desire to transform commons into state property or capitalist commodity” (Gidwani & Baviskar, 2011, p. 42). State and capital actors seek to capture new spheres of accumulation that informal waste pickers create, through the enclosure of landfills for recovering materials recycling, appropriation of collection functions, separation, and transportation, or the introduction of waste-to-energy technologies (Demaria & Schindler, 2016).

Framing informal waste-management practices and waste pickers themselves as incompatible with ideals of a modern “world-class city” (Moore, 2012) and a modern “recycling imaginary” (Sseviiri et al., 2022) also contributes to enable the enclosure of waste dumps. Waste pickers represent “a visceral, visual denunciation” (Samson, 2015, p. 823) of the failure to implement these visions in practice (Moore, 2012). On one hand, predominant cultural norms framing modern recycling imaginaries as desirable have prompted the closing of dumps to informal waste picking (e.g. Bjerkli, 2015; Mbah et al., 2019). On the other hand, the viscerality of waste, its abjection (Kristeva, 1982), has attained instrumental use in other settings (e.g. to support workers’ strikes) (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015; Fredericks, 2018; Moore, 2012), in what Moore calls the politics of manifestation. By thus making waste visible, Moore argues that marginalized citizens can assert their “rights to the city”. When rendered visible, waste reveals the contradictory visions of modernity and what it takes in practice to hold the consume-and-discard society together.

Nevertheless, waste pickers do not remain impassive under attempts at accumulation by dispossession; they resist the enclosure of waste commons through various strategies. Waste pickers in Soweto succeeded in contesting the threat of enclosure by reframing themselves as producers of knowledge and, thus, questioning their “epistemic dispossession.” This is the dehumanization and stigmatization of waste pickers, their knowledge, and work (Samson, 2015). Waste workers in Dakar reframed their work as a virtuous practice rooted in the spiritual value of cleanliness stemming from the Muslim religion, using this framing and their refusal to clean through striking, to struggle against the precarization of their work (Fredericks, 2018). In New Delhi, the unexpected alliance between middle-class residents and waste-picker groups who, despite their different and, at times, conflicting rationalities, found a common cause and opposed a waste-to-energy incinerator (Demaria & Schindler, 2016). In Latin America, the articulation of political organizations of waste-picker groups and networks at the city, national, and regional levels has been very prominent (Zapata Campos et al., 2021) – for example, through processes of knowledge production, self-organization, and education, as recent experiences in Brazil or Argentina show (Gutberlet et al., 2021). That is, efforts to (re)gain waste as a commons and resist its enclosure are widespread and relentless.

Resistance and commoning

Everyday resistance and commoning

The literature on everyday resistance shows that resistance and social change, especially in more repressive and deprived contexts, cannot be reduced to apparently organized and visible collective action (Scott, 1985). Instead, less visible, dispersed, and non-dramatic everyday activities, carried out by the urban poor and often unnoticed by the government, can also become acts of resistance. From this perspective, subjects who can mistakenly be seen as passive poor, exploited, and apolitical informal workers are instead seen as having agency (Scott, 1990).

Building on Scott’s work, Bayat (2000) argues that in oppressive and disadvantaged milieus, the urban poor do not remain passive, but quietly encroach on cities and the resources they need for their survival. For example, street vendors occupy public spaces, residents of informal settlements illegally connect to water infrastructure or electricity grids, and waste pickers collect waste from dumps and landfills. Rather than a reaction to an overt threat, their actions constitute a cumulative expansion or encroachment, with actors gaining new positions in the street, dump, or electricity grid. Encroachers, Bayat argues, always try to expand as quietly and invisibly as possible, to avoid confrontation. Yet, once they expand too much and their commoning practices become too visible, state crackdowns follow, in the form of eviction, property destruction, or even enclosure with the purpose of capturing new spheres of accumulation (Gidwani & Baviskar, 2011).

Bayat argues that this quiet and gradual grassroots resistance challenges by its everyday and cumulative practices the cultural or political order: the control of public space, the distinction between public or private goods, or even ideals of modernity, e.g. what a modern landfill should be like (Moore, 2012; Sseviiri et al., 2022). In this paper, we argue that quiet encroachment can even help create urban commons – public space or other critical resources, such as water, energy, or waste, that city dwellers claim and collectively appropriate (Harvey, 2012).

Collective resistance and commoning

Although subversive, quiet encroachment practices are not articulated as a deliberate political act, but rather as the result of meeting the encroachers’ basic needs. It is only once the encroachers’ gains are threatened – in other words, when the commons risk being enclosed – that consciousness and reflexivity about the political character of their actions arise, often as a result of collective resistance or defense (Hardt & Negri, 2009).

While everyday resistance is usually subtle, atomized, and individual, the struggle to maintain these gains in confrontation with the state is often collective and more visible. The transition from everyday to collective resistance cannot, however, be taken for granted. To shift from quiet encroachment to collective resistance, Bayat argued that “passive networks” among these communities have to be activated: passive networks arise from “instantaneous communication among atomized individuals, which is established by a tacit recognition of their common identity, and which is mediated through space” (Bayat, 2000, p. 552). This means that collective action can be mobilized without the intermediation of active networks, such as trade unions and organized social movements. Instead, passive networks, such as kin, neighborhood, or ethnic relations, can support the mobilizations of the urban poor (Bayat, 1997) and be used to make claims regarding who has and has not the right to access waste as a commons (Sseviiri et al., 2022).

Identity resistance and commoning

Once collective resistance is activated, it can follow alternative, intermittent, or simultaneous episodes of everyday and collective resistance. Building on Bayat and Scott, Lilja et al. (2017) argued that not only can everyday resistance and encroachment lead to collective forms of resistance. Collective organized resistance can encourage new forms of resistance identity. Castells (1997) defines resistance identity as the developed by actors who are stigmatized and that build up avenues of resistance and survival, based on values and beliefs that differ from the logic of domination. Resistance identity leads to the “formation of communes, or communities” and the construction of “collective resistance against otherwise unbearable oppression, usually on the basis of identities that were, apparently, clearly defined by history, geography, or biology” (Castells, 1997, p. 9). On that note, as recent discard literature also shows, epistemic agencies in South Africa (Samson, 2015) and religious identities in Dakar (Fredericks, 2018) can also be mobilized to reframe stigmatized waste pickers as knowledge producers, and waste picking as a virtuous practice anchored in the spiritual value of cleanliness, respectively. In both cases, these resistance identities lead to the construction of collective resistance, to contest the enclosure of waste and worsening of working conditions.

Yet, the connection between resistance and urban commons, as well as the relationship between everyday, collective, and identity resistance, are still under-examined, with very few exceptions, in resistance (e.g. Lilja et al., 2017), urban commons (e.g. Gillespie, 2017) or discard studies (e.g. Fredericks, 2018; Gidwani, 2013; Samson, 2015). This paper aims to help fill this research gap, building on the framework we present above.

Methods

The present analysis draws on data we have collected since 2009 at La Chureca, before, during, and after the Acahualinca Development Project that transformed the place from an inhabited open city dump to a sanitary landfill with a recycling plant and a new neighborhood, between 2009 and 2013. Between 2009 and 2020, we also followed the intricate informal and formal waste management systems in the city of Managua and its informal settlements, organized by individual waste pickers, cooperatives, networks among them (often supported by NGOs and development aid agencies), and the city of Managua.

During these studies, our knowledge of these programs has grown organically, informed by semistructured interviews, nonparticipant observations of meetings, events, and work activities, workshop participation, and the study of documents, mass media coverage, photographs, and our research notes. We conducted interviews and observations with informal waste workers, residents, community leaders, NGO workers, city managers, public officers, politicians, ambassadors, development aid organization officers, municipal waste operators, waste collection cooperative members, waste handling and recycling corporations, NGO volunteers, engineers, and architects. Interviews with waste pickers always occurred in their own environments: La Chureca, in proximity to the dump, the neighborhood, or their houses. Some interviews recurred along the years, mostly with those waste pickers holding leadership positions and with whom we also developed an action-research relationship, e.g. through the involvement of RedNica and some cooperatives in our research (see Zapata Campos et al., 2021).

For this paper, we reviewed the transcripts of our interviews (mostly with waste pickers at La Chureca) and re-examined our previous analysis, coding the data with three categories in mind, i.e. everyday, collective, and identity resistance, with inspiration from both the analytical framework we present in the literature review and our knowledge of the case. Our strategy is pragmatic, in that it is neither purely inductive nor deductive, but follows patterns of creative abduction (Schurz, 2008). Inspired by Corbin and Strauss (1990), our data collection, coding, and categorizing has involved iteration between sorting, coding, probing the data, and collecting new data, until we could reconstruct the everyday, collective, and identity resistance strategies for gaining and regaining access to La Chureca.

La Chureca

La Chureca has been the municipal dump of Managua since 1972, when an earthquake hit the city, destroying 75% of the housing. The debris was moved to nonproductive land on the shore of Lake Xolotlan, on the northwest fringe of the city (Table 1).

Table 1. Key events for La Chureca.

1972	Earthquake
1990–	Local NGOs such as Dos Generaciones start operating at La Chureca
2007	The Spanish NGO Solidaridad Internacional starts a project in partnership with Dos Generaciones and funded by AECID
July 2007	The Spanish First Vice President visits La Chureca and commits to funding a development aid project
May 2008	Informal waste workers go on strike and close La Chureca to waste trucks, resulting in waste chaos in Managua
2008	The Nicaraguan Network of Waste Pickers – RedNica, the FNT-Chureca waste pickers trade union, and the Cooperativa Guardabarrancos waste pickers cooperative are created
October 2008	AECID and the Managua local government (ALMA) sign an agreement to fund the Acahualinca Development Project
July 2011	The first houses are delivered to La Chureca dwellers
January 2013	The recycling plant starts operating
January 2013	All houses are delivered and the old La Chureca slum is bulldozed; waste picking is declared illegal and many are arrested several times. Workers at the new recycling plant strike in solidarity. Police persecution recurs from time to time
2014	A two-meter-high wall is constructed, so waste pickers start “saltarse el muro”
April 2017	Protests occur after police and the city prohibit informal waste workers from entering La Chureca
April 2018	Police pressure on La Chureca relaxes due to concentration on civil society surveillance after the state’s human rights violations. The economic crisis following, first, the political situation and then the pandemic drastically reduces waste generation and increases the number of waste pickers
2020–2022	With sociopolitical (state repression), economic, health (pandemic), and natural disaster crises (hurricanes Eta and Iota), police pressure returns to La Chureca

The effects of neoliberal policies, agriculture deregulation, and structural adjustment programs, together with the war against the U.S.-funded Contras, spurred massive rural migration toward the capital city, Managua (Contreras & Lacayo, 2020). The overwhelming majority of this urban growth occurred in ever-expanding informal settlements in the inner city and on the city’s periphery, including at the La Chureca dump, which also offered the possibility of work in waste picking. Managua has 1,043,264 inhabitants, concentrating 24% of the population in the country. An estimated 78% of the population in Nicaragua work in the informal economy, 39% live in a poverty situation, and 7.6% in extreme poverty (Contreras & Lacayo, 2020).

In 2008, approximately 2,000 waste pickers worked daily at La Chureca. The small community there had grown considerably, and a large informal settlement of around 300 families had arisen. Trapped at the heart of the dump as both waste and residents grew, the residents faced worsening environmental conditions. Since the early 1990s, international and national NGOs had started a number of development programs in La Chureca to meet the residents’ and waste pickers’ material needs related to health, food, shelter, and the eradication of child labor. As a result of small-scale actions by NGOs, journalists, and activists, in 2008 an agreement was signed between the City of Managua and the Spanish Development Agency, to implement the Acahualinca Development Project, to improve livelihoods and housing at La Chureca. However, the extent to which the project has improved or worsened waste pickers’ livelihoods is very controversial (see, for example, Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2014; Hartmann, 2018), as we elaborate in the discussion (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Waste pickers collecting recyclables at La Chureca, 2010.

Source: María José Zapata Campos.

The strike in 2008

In May 2008, just before the start of the development project, hundreds of waste pickers went on strike to protest against municipal workers retrieving the most valuable recyclables during household-waste collection, reducing the waste pickers’ income. After failed attempts to establish a dialog with the local government, the waste pickers decided to close La Chureca and not let the waste trucks enter. The strike lasted for 35 days during which Managua’s waste could not be disposed of at La Chureca, creating waste chaos in the city. The Churequeros and the Vice Mayor of Managua ultimately signed a contract whose terms included prohibiting the waste-truck staff from sorting out recyclables. Another result of the strike was the formal creation of several grassroots organizations, such as the FNT-Chureca trade union, the Nicaraguan Network of Waste Pickers (RedNica), and the Cooperativa Guardabarrancos, with support from other trade unions, such as Movimiento Comunal, and civil society organizations.

Recycling plant opens, La Chureca is enclosed, and waste picking is declared illegal

The implementation of the Acahualinca Development Project lasted from 2008 to 2013. It resulted in the closing and sealing of the dump, the construction of a new sanitary landfill, and a waste-recycling plant by the new landfill, which would employ the former Churequeros, and new housing in a new neighborhood, Villa Guadalupe (Zapata Campos & Zapata, 2012, 2013; Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2014).

In January 2013, with the new sanitary landfill and waste-recycling plant operating, La Chureca became fenced in and closed to waste picking while 500 former waste pickers started working at the new waste-recycling plant. Despite plans to impede waste picking at the landfill, the activity was informally permitted as a temporary and unspoken way to compensate those who did not benefit directly from the new jobs. Over 300 such waste pickers continued to work at the landfill. Even many of the now officially employed continued illegally waste picking after their shifts at the plant, to supplement their earnings, as many claimed that their total family income had decreased. Over the years, many recycling plant workers quit their jobs or negotiated to pass them on to relatives, so they could instead return to waste picking and increase the family income. Even new residents of the new Villa Guadalupe neighborhood who had not previously worked in waste picking began doing so.

On various occasions, the police arrested dozens, to discourage ongoing waste picking. In 2014, a two-meter-high wall was built around part of the perimeter of the landfill, to deter illegal waste pickers more strongly. Soon, waste pickers found alternative ways to overcome the new physical obstacle, such as jumping over the wall (leading to a saying in La Chureca: “saltarse el muro”), placing out stones to climb on and with the help of colleagues on the other side. Later, some went under the wall by excavating a hole under a main gate close to Villa Guadalupe and bribing the officers guarding the gate (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The Wall.

Source: Patrik Zapata.

Protests after no-entrance policy in 2017

While waste picking was intermittently tolerated, more and more physical obstacles appeared to prevent access to La Chureca. The wall was extended further toward the lake, forcing waste pickers to climb a dangerous hill to gain access, causing accidents and injuries among them and dissuading the oldest. The wall was also topped with barbed-wire coils in 2017, making it almost impossible to jump. Horse-drawn carts used in transporting the collected materials had to travel along a narrow stony path parallel to the lake. When the plant created obstacles to impede cart access – for example, digging holes to block the path – the cart drivers collaborated to fill in the holes the night after they were dug.

Human rights, pandemic, and natural disaster crises, 2018–2022

On 18 April 2018, student demonstrators mobilized all over the country to protest social security reforms in Nicaragua. The violent governmental response has resulted in hundreds of deaths; the imprisoning of thousands of activists, members of the independent press, and political opposition; a ban on political demonstration and other freedoms and rights; the approval of laws permitting a ruling-party-dominated congress after the faked elections in autumn 2021; the closure of communications, NGOs, and universities opposing the dictatorial regime; and the flight of thousands of people escaping the state violence. Countries and international groups around the world have condemned Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, and vice-president Rosario Murillo for the violation of human rights and the suppression of freedoms and democracy.

While the human-rights violations initially relieved police pressure on waste pickers at La Chureca, the economic crisis following the state violence negatively affected the generation of waste and recyclables reaching the landfill and, therefore, the livelihood of waste pickers. Higher unemployment also pushed new individuals toward waste picking, increasing the pressure on the limited resources. To maintain political patronage, in 2019, the government resumed programs to support entrepreneurship as a mechanism to reactivate the economy. For instance, through the Sandinista Leadership Committees, some women from La Chureca participate in handicraft courses. Nevertheless, waste pickers continue struggling for informal and formal access to La Chureca, without reaching agreements with the municipality.

As the population of waste pickers at La Chureca has increased as a result of the economic crisis, police pressure has simultaneously returned. However, the political context of repression exercised since 2018 has prohibited further open collective mobilizations, as in previous years. Waste pickers continue approaching La Chureca as quietly as possible when police pressure lifts. The COVID-19 pandemic, hurricanes, and floods have aggravated the health exposure of waste pickers, while the government’s denial of the spread of COVID-19 has stigmatized those vulnerable groups suffering from it.

Discussion

Here, we first consider the appropriation of waste as a commons by means of the quiet encroachment and everyday resistance of the community of waste pickers at La Chureca. Then, we examine how, after the partial and total enclosure of La Chureca, waste pickers articulated everyday and collective resistance, to regain access to this commons. Finally, we develop how, as a result of and simultaneously with processes of everyday and collective resistance, a resistance identity has formed over the years.

Everyday resistance and the creation of waste as a commons

As in other cities around the globe, La Chureca and its waste have become a source of material resources to meet the critical needs of urban poor communities. Accumulation by dispossession has created a surplus population of urban poor that seeks new forms of livelihood – for example, in waste (Demaria & Schindler, 2016; Moore, 2012; Samson, 2015). Waste at La Chureca became a commons that waste pickers transformed into reusable and recyclable materials, food, construction materials for housing, clothes, newspapers, and toys (see Figure 3). A former resident of La Chureca told a friend, “Come, I am going to bring you to a mall where you can find anything you need for free.” Even for those who do not fully depend on La Chureca’s resources, the place facilitates acquiring complementary or temporary income. For example, one could go waste picking a few hours a day if one became temporarily unemployed. In the case of those who had started small businesses, it could provide complementary income until their businesses became sustainable. By creating and appropriating their own resources, dispossessed communities of waste pickers at La Chureca created their own commons (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015; Gidwani & Baviskar, 2011). Commoning stemmed from the quiet encroachment (Bayat, 2000) of urban poor communities – that is, by atomized, cumulative, mundane individual actions of waste pickers who quietly occupied the setting and worked at the dump, in response to processes of urban exclusion and lack of jobs and housing (Gillespie, 2017).

Figure 3. Waste as a commons: material constructions, La Chureca 2010.

Source: Patrik Zapata.

Attracted by the abundant waste, more people moved to La Chureca and gained access to the commons, often through ties of kinship (e.g. Sseviiri et al., 2022). Although the volume of waste was also increasing, due to the growth of the total urban population, the number of waste pickers grew even faster, reducing their income. This diversion of materials that municipal workers captured and, later, the closure of the landfill where the recycling plant now collects most recyclables accelerated the process. La Chureca initially offered a commoners’ paradise, but this commons has been successively enclosed (De Angelis & Stavrides, 2010). La Chureca as a commons space (Stavrides, 2016) thus coexisted with partial forms of enclosure. For example, ties of kinship and/or spatial proximity to the dump enabled but also hindered open access (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015; Makina, 2020; Sseviiri et al., 2022). Waste pickers developed at La Chureca their “regime of valorization” (Schindler & Demaria, 2020) that provided those who participated in the given regime access to commoning waste.

As Harvey (2012) observes about other urban commons, these threats of partial and total enclosure also embody how general “attempts to create new kinds of urban commons can all too easily be capitalized upon” (p. 74). While waste pickers at La Chureca originally created the commons, recovering materials from waste and pioneering material recycling in Nicaragua through their collective work, the valuation and requalification (Çalışkan & Callon, 2009; Hawkins et al., 2015) of waste attracted other powerful groups who noticed and tried to capture new spheres of accumulation (Samson, 2015), either as a state property or a market commodity (Gidwani & Baviskar, 2011). As one waste picker noted:

We discovered, first, that recyclable material was something that could be reused. And we could say that we were the pioneers of recycling in Nicaragua. Then, from that moment, the municipal operators who collected the waste in trucks started to set aside all the valuable material. (Interview, J)

These attempts to remove the commons from the initial commoners can also be explained in terms of how, when the quiet encroachment practices (and, consequently, their economic value) became too visible, municipal officers cracked down to appropriate their gains (Lata et al., 2019).

Also, since the new recycling plant had to be financially sustainable, it was vital to retain most recyclable materials within the city’s control. However, the city framed the enclosure of La Chureca as an act of social sustainability, allowing waste pickers, instead of informally waste picking in the dump, to work in a “modern” recycling plant with decent conditions. As Harvey (2012) observes, the difference between “urban public goods and urban commons is both fluid and dangerously porous” (p. 79). Development projects, such as the transformation of the dump into a sanitary landfill, implemented in the name of common interests, often contribute to diffuse images of modernity (Moore, 2012) and a modern “recycling imaginary” (Sseviiri et al., 2022). As has occurred elsewhere (e.g. Demaria & Schindler, 2016; Mbah et al., 2019) the introduction of modern technologies, by the hand of development agencies and state or private actors, can dangerously benefit interests (e.g. recyclable retailers or large corporations) other than the intended beneficiaries, such as the La Chureca dwellers and workers, many of whom became dispossessed of their livelihoods and turned to illegal activities (Hartmann, 2018). However, the quiet encroachment of La Chureca that followed the construction of the recycling plant challenged “the notions of order, modern city and urban governance espoused by the Third World political elites” (Bayat, 2000, p. 546). By their mere presence and their hooks, waste pickers represented a visceral and visual denunciation (Moore, 2012; Samson, 2015), through which they contested the new modern recycling plant the city government constructed with development funds (Hartmann, 2018).

Collective resistance

Heterogeneous actors, passive networks: from individual to collective action

The struggle to access the waste at La Chureca involves episodes of quiet encroachment alternating with overt collective resistance. However, articulating collective resistance in the first strike in 2008 called for activating passive networks and putting aside antagonistic interests, to enable a very fragmented community to act together.

La Chureca and the surrounding community host individuals with various and often contradictory interests. Although most waste pickers at La Chureca have belonged to this community for a long time, newcomers started waste picking when the proximity to waste attracted them. Conflicts between old and new residents quickly emerged. Conflicts also arose between “legitimate” Churequeros and those who were not, as well as between waste pickers and local middlemen. The heterogeneity of waste-picker communities at La Chureca and the associated conflicts is not an exception, as previous research shows. For instance, in Kampala, differences based on gender, kinship, or ethnicity led the parties “to make claims regarding who can (and cannot) access recyclables, as well as who is permitted to access high-value materials” (Sseviir et al., 2022, p. 17).

Yet, when looking closer at this heterogeneous community, these same invisible structures that separated them, seem to link these individuals together, serving as the means of knowledge development, collective mobilization, and resistance. Kinship and neighborhood relations appear to be the most important passive networks (Bayat, 2000) that pull people together in times of threat and necessity. People move to La Chureca or Acahualinca because they know someone or have a relative already working there. These structures serve to develop knowledge of waste picking, materials, and the recycling industry (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015; Sseviir et al., 2022), through imitation, apprenticing (Samson, 2015), or experimentation (Kain et al., 2022). They also serve as the infrastructure that transforms individual resistance into collective mobilization. In the case of La Chureca, besides kinship, these passive networks relate to the neighborhood where most waste pickers live. Former and new residents gain access to waste through their spatial proximity (Sseviir et al., 2022) to the commoning space. Another passive network relates to belonging to the waste-picking profession at La Chureca, as a commoners-community (Gibson-Graham et al., 2016) whereby they develop the practice-based knowledge necessary to access, identify, transform, and use the commons (Samson, 2015; Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015; Sseviir et al., 2022). This generates double spatial (Hourcade, 1989) and professional solidarity, interlinked by kinship relations for activation in times of crisis. The place and the profession have helped create the “Churequeros community” (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2014, p. 98), where people know one another and have developed a sense of belonging. Local residents and waste pickers, who acknowledge their many differences, tensions, and conflicts, quickly forget them to act collectively in case of need. “Toditos [i.e. all and everyone] know one another,” a resident of Villa Guadalupe claimed, “but for a small piece of plastic, they kill each other.” Simultaneously, many admit that under threat, they react together: “If they touch one of us, they touch all of us.”

The transition “from individualism to collective action” (Interview, waste picker) occurs almost instantaneously, mainly when the threat is extreme (Almeida, 2018), such as economic problems, erosion of rights, and state repression, as in the case of the strike protests in 2008:

Then I said [to my son], “I want you to support us because this is going to be good for us in the future” … Even her son [pointing towards a neighbor] supported us as well. It was through family, relatives, and neighbors that they informed people, told them. And an assembly was held, a few of them. And in these meetings, we discussed how it was important to meet the municipal officers and politicians. But there was no way to negotiate, and therefore we had no choice but to close the dump. (Interview, M. Movimiento Comunal Chureca)

This transition from individual to collective resistance is also part of the ongoing process of commoning (Hardt & Negri, 2009; Harvey, 2012; Jeffrey et al., 2012), along with the political participation of social groups, in the struggle for the free production, accessibility, and appropriation of waste. This is consistent with previous research showing how urban commons are not static but, instead, entail a social practice of commoning (Gibson-Graham et al., 2016; Harvey, 2012). La Chureca illustrates how the activation of passive networks can be fundamental to the process of commoning and the articulation of rights by urban poor communities.

Collective action: regaining the commons and the formation of active networks of resistance

Unless we are organized, nobody will listen to us in the local government. (Interview, V Cooperativa Guardabarrancos)

A result of the 2008 protests was securing more than just access to the commons. As it has occurred across global South cities in Latin America, the protests also resulted in the mobilization of more permanent active networks of resistance through the constitution of the FNT-Chureca trade union, the Nicaraguan Waste Pickers Network, the Cooperativa Guardabarrancos (Zapata Campos et al., 2020; Gutberlet, 2021), and beyond (e.g. Demaria & Schindler, 2016; Fredericks, 2018; Samson, 2015). While the formalization of these collective forms of organized resistance was in response to the transition from quiet encroachment to collective strategies, it was also the result of national support organizations. The FNT-Chureca trade union is entrenched in the Sandinista political party, which relies on the mobilizing ability of the trade-union movement in national and local politics. Similarly, RedNica, representing more than 10 cooperatives and 3,000 workers, was supported by the Young Environmentalists NGO and involved in the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Waste Pickers (RedLacre) and other international organizations, such as WIEGO. A favorable political environment, in which the cooperative and syndicalist movements were powerfully entrenched in the then-left-wing Sandinista party ruling the country and the local government, was fundamental to enabling these active networks to consolidate, unlike more repressive institutional environments, such as those inspiring Bayat’s resistance framework. Similarly, city-wide, regional, national, and global waste-picker networks were established in recent decades across global south cities (Zapata Campos et al., 2020). For example, in Brazil, the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores), which together with the strength of the social and solidarity economy movement stimulated the organization of recycling cooperatives and federations, supported federal legislation in the early 2000s (Gutberlet, 2021). This support can expose at-risk waste-picker communities to co-optation by the supportive organizations (state, market, or nongovernmental organizations), depending on the power relations in a particular context. One illustration of the case at hand was the Sandinista party trying to mobilize members of trade unions, waste-picker networks, and other organizations, to participate in public demonstrations and create an illusion of popular support under the new dictatorial regime. Another example in previous research is the Uganda Plastic Manufacturers and Recyclers Association supporting waste pickers, lobbying the national environmental agency to uphold the 2009 ban on plastic bags (Sseviiri et al., 2022) through waste-picker mobilizations (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Waste pickers protests in front of the Managua City Hall after evictions in April, 2017.

Source: RedNica.

The connections created between waste picker communities – among the poorest and most stigmatized social groups – around the world via global networks illustrate how the maintenance and defense of the right to govern the commons at the local level can extend to encompassing larger communities through networked social movements (Zapata Campos et al., 2020). That is, the struggle for the commons entails various translocal spatialities that mold supportive and solidarity relations across multiple sites (Featherstone, 2008; Sassen, 2010) and that enable resisters/commoners to “consolidate and diffuse experience, resources and knowledge across spaces and times” (Daskalaki & Kokkinidis, 2017, p. 1304). Like other urban-commoners movements, the waste-picker community at La Chureca has become more globally linked in recent years (Mayer, 2009). At La Chureca, the “contact points” (Nicholls, 2009) or relational sites (McCann & Ward, 2012; Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2014) include previous NGO headquarters, which gave external actors secure access to the dump. Nevertheless, with the enclosure of La Chureca and its physical transformation, the uncanniness (Zapata Campos & Zapata, 2012), viscerality (Moore, 2012; Samson, 2015), and abjection (Kristeva, 1982) of the place gave way to a facade of modernity, apparent order, and hygiene. This made the new La Chureca settlement, the new Villa Guadalupe, similar to other informal settlements, and waste pickers and dwellers lost some capacity to resist through these direct contacts. In Moore’s (2012) words, they partially lost their capacity to mobilize a “politics of manifestation”:

NGOs do not come here anymore … For International Women’s Day they used to take my picture, over there with my hook and my big belly. (Interview, M)

While the place lost some of its viscerality and abjection and no longer attracts potentially supportive global actors as before, new relations with national and international environmental and social networks were forged, as mentioned above (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Journalists, NGOs and researchers as “contact points” or “relational sites”, La Chureca 2009.

Source: María José Zapata Campos.

We conclude that active networks (e.g. waste-picker cooperatives, networks, and trade unions) and passive networks (of kinship, neighborhood, and profession) can coexist and simultaneously mobilize collective action in a democratic context with low levels of state repression, as was initially the case. Active and passive networks also interpenetrate one another since the unions, cooperatives, and networks are deeply entangled, with shared ties of kinship, neighborhood, and trust.

Simultaneous strategies of collective resistance, everyday resistance, and collaboration

Other strategies besides collective or everyday resistance were enacted simultaneously. One example is waste-pickers organizing a protest for several weeks in 2017. At these protests, the waste pickers presented proposals – for example, to develop credentials to allow waste pickers to formally enter La Chureca, to form cooperatives, or even to become partners in transforming the municipal waste-recycling plant into a cooperative, as has been tried elsewhere (e.g. Gutberlet et al., 2016; Samson, 2015; Demaria & Schindler, 2016). Another example is members of RedNica and the Cooperativa Guardabarrancos supporting protests against the closing of access to the landfill and facilitating illegal waste picking through distractive tactics, while members of the Cooperative simultaneously formally collaborated with the Ministry of Family and Cooperative Affairs to facilitate the participation of cooperatives in social entrepreneur fairs.

These efforts illustrate how overt and covert collective and everyday resistance simultaneously combine with legal channels in the courtroom (e.g. Demaria & Schindler, 2016, Zapata Campos et al., 2022 ), lobbying tactics, and the joint provision of services in collaboration with the government (e.g. Sseviiri et al., 2022). These efforts also show how commoning is open, porous, and diffuse, rather than fixed (Jeffrey et al., 2012), as it deploys diverse and, at times, contradictory strategies and tactics. That is, commoners-communities are in “constant negotiation and vacillation between autonomy and integration” (Bayat, 2000, p. 549), interacting with more powerful actors when necessary (De Angelis, 2017), such as the state (e.g. Samson, 2015), middle-class residents (e.g. Demaria & Schindler, 2016), or the market (e.g. Sseviiri et al., 2022). Yet, commoners continue to seek autonomy within these integrating structures. For example, even those given jobs at the plant continued waste picking or still skipped paying their electricity bills, even though their connections were no longer illegal.

As Mitlin observes in the case of urban social movements in Kenya and South Africa (2018), and Rossi in the Argentinian piquetero trade-union movement (2017), the waste pickers at La Chureca simultaneously and iteratively adopted strategies of everyday resistance, collective resistance, and collaboration, to address their survival. We conclude that in the context of this commoners-community, there is continuity between the strategies of resistance, rather than any fixed distinctions. These strategies feed into each other, and it is the articulation of each of them, not alone but in combination, that explains the resilience of this community.

Resistance identity

From everyday resistance to resistance identity

The urban and economic exclusion, and the subsequent everyday resistance strategies that waste pickers developed contributed to growing a sense of injustice and a consciousness of the many exploitative relations in which waste pickers at La Chureca were entrenched, e.g. with middlemen, municipal waste workers, the recycling industry, and the city of Managua. As an illustration, a waste picker and resident in Villa Guadalupe clearly acknowledged that the recycling industry was extracting value from the waste pickers’ work and at the expense of their hard-working conditions. He directly associated the quick-profits middlemen made with the deterioration of his health, an allusion to the biopolitical consequences of enclosure (Jeffrey et al., 2012):

They know that we are made of sun and hunger, and this is why the retailers abuse us with the low prices [i.e. for the recyclables sold to them]. I am leaving my health, my skin, my sweat every day … . and this one [i.e. the wholesaler] came with a motorbike last year and one year later he has a truck. Where did it come out? From my ribs! (Interview, F)

This reflexivity about the unbalanced power relations in which the waste pickers live and work is coupled with the self-consciousness of the double stigma of being poor and working with waste:

Because we lived among the rubbish, they considered us rubbish. And that’s also how they treated us. (Interview, J FNT-Chureca representative)

We just sneak into La Chureca, like if we are stealing something just to survive [i.e. now that the plant has been built]. And when they are patrolling, we leave the place like thieves … like coyotes or wolves. (Interview, Fc)

While acknowledging the power imbalances governing their lives, the many hazards of waste picking, and the resulting diseases and misfortunes, waste pickers have nevertheless come to define themselves as resilient people who have become “immune” to illness, accidents, and political power. That is, they have constructed an identity of empowerment, resilience, and fearlessness that coexists with the profound stigma of poverty and waste picking:

We waste pickers are immune because here comes food in the waste, and we eat it. Nothing affects us. Waste cannot harm us, nor can the lead [contamination]. We are immune. (Interview, Mt)

We never get tired – they get tired! [i.e. regarding police persecutions in 2017]. Nothing can hurt us … we don’t get sick. (Interview, L)

Now I have a problem in my spine due to a fall at La Chureca. But I continue being very much a guerilla woman! (Interview, D)

These stories of resilience and the sense of injustice tell of small-scale, local, and individualistic actions that serve to transform passive, stigmatized waste pickers into political subjects with agency to resist (Scott, 1985). They also constitute the building blocks of what Castells (1997) calls resistance identity: a sense of belonging constructed by those who are dispossessed or stigmatized. For example, Castells (1997) argues that this resistance identity in the squatter settlements in Latin America is closely “linked to the consciousness of being the exploited and/or the excluded” (p. 63), also the case in the La Chureca community. Their resilience in surviving in these conditions, their perceived immunity, and their ability to resist constant threats are often attributed to being touched by divinity, to compensate for the hardship of their lives. As Castells (1997) observes in the case of social movements in Latin America, and Fredericks (2018) in Dakar, the formation of resistance identities is often entrenched in religiosity.

Collective resistance and identity resistance

The formation of a resistance identity can result from everyday resistance, elaborated above, as well as from collective resistance, as we develop in the following.

Through the collective mobilizations (e.g. in 2008 and 2017), many waste pickers acknowledged the stigma of waste picking and waste, contesting it collectively by reframing the meanings associated with the practice, making it a profession of which to be proud. An interviewee also told us proudly that not everybody could do his job and resourcefully use the hook for waste picking:

The waste picker’s life is a critical and criticized life. They discriminate against us. They sink our self-esteem – “They are Churequeros” – but it is not anyone who can do this. Go to the office, yes, but use this hook? They just despise us because we are dirty. (Interview, Jn)

No, man, this is a job – I am not stealing, I am working! (Interview, Va)

Since the first strikes, the Churequeros have reframed waste picking as a decent profession, once again a moral and virtuous practice, in contradistinction to the stigmatized meaning of illegal waste picking as immoral stealing. This is consistent with previous research showing how epistemic agencies (Samson, 2015) can contribute to reframing waste pickers as legitimate knowledge producers (Kain et al., 2022). Another result of these collective mobilizations was the framing of waste picking as a valuable practice, not only professionally and economically, but also environmentally (Millington & Lawhon, 2019; Gutberlet et al., 2021). Accordingly, waste pickers at La Chureca reconstructed their identity as pioneers of recycling in Nicaragua, as other waste pickers have done elsewhere (e.g. Demaria & Schindler, 2016; Samson, 2015), supported by global circuits of solidarity and global discourses of environmental sustainability (e.g. Zapata Campos et al., 2020):

But then we discovered, first, that recyclable material was something that could be reused. And we could say that we were the pioneers of recycling in Nicaragua. (Interview, J)

That is, waste pickers reframe their identities as “creators of value, as ecological actors playing crucial eco-systemic roles, and as workers who save municipal governments already scarce financial resources” (Millington & Lawhon, 2019, p. 1048). However, providing this environmental service puts their lives at risk. Waste pickers at La Chureca claim their right to access the commons precisely because of their sense of belonging to this space and the associated consequences for their bodies and health. The Churequeros also claimed that they earned their right to this commons because many had been born there or lived there for years. This also speaks of a territorial or spatial identity that claims the right to the commons: “I was born here: I have been swallowing the smoke here, my children have been swallowing the smoke.” (Interview, D).

Identity resistance and commoning

Commoners-communities are claiming their right to the common-pool resources, such as land, water, or fish stocks, like users in global South cities of urban commons, such as public space for street hawkers (Gillespie, 2017) or waste at dumps (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2015), a shared characteristic that Ostrom (1990) examined.

On that note, our study shows, first, how the formation of a resistance identity also constitutes an important sociocultural mechanism to claim (but also deny, and partially enclose) access to the commons, grounded on a heterogeneous configuration of professional, environmental, spiritual, territorial, and family identities. Anand’s “hydraulic citizenship” (2017) among slum dwellers in Mumbai, Fredericks (2018) “garbage citizenship” among waste workers in Dakar, and Appadurai’s “politics of shit” (2001), referring to community groups providing sanitation services in India, are some examples of the various forms of identity and belonging that resistant commoners-communities develop, denoting different relations of power, resistance, distribution, and access (or non-access) to the city and the commons.

Second, the mobilization of a resistance identity becomes a sociocultural mechanism that stems from and sustains individual and collective resistance, to re(gain) and maintain access to the commons. Resistance identity also mediates the transition from everyday resistance to collective resistance, an unspoken recognition of the commoners’ professional, environmental, spiritual, family, or spatial identity/ies activating passive networks. This finding reveals the role of resistance identity as an institutional feature, an underexamined theme in both urban commons and Bayat’s resistance theories.

Conclusions

This paper has examined the everyday, collective, and identity resistance that an urban poor community mobilized, to regain its right to the commons. The paper makes several contributions to our understanding of urban-poor social movements in global South cities, linking the urban-commons studies, discard studies, and Bayat’s framework of everyday and collective resistance.

First, the paper shows how a marginalized urban community created its own commons, through the quiet encroachment on space and resources, in response to urban exclusion processes and a lack of jobs (Gillespie, 2017).

Second, the paper demonstrates how fundamental the activation of passive networks can be in the process of commoning and the articulation of rights by urban poor communities. These passive networks were activated at times of critical threat and related to spatial and professional solidarity networks, intersected by kinship relations. Not only was commoning regained as a result of collective resistance; these collective and sporadic forms of contention also mobilized more permanent active networks of resistance that supportive national and global circuits of solidarity enabled (Appadurai, 2001; Sassen, 2010). The connections with these circuits were made through relational sites (Zapata & Zapata Campos, 2014; McCann & Ward, 2012) that enhanced the capacity of this urban excluded community to resist, but whose disappearance later hindered it. These active and passive networks coexisted, interpenetrated one another, and simultaneously mobilized collective action.

Third, strategies of collaboration differing from collective or everyday resistance were also simultaneously articulated. Thus, while the resistance of the urban poor strengthens the autonomy of the commons, the poor still interact with the state when necessary (De Angelis, 2017). This finding confirms that the boundaries between autonomy and integration, between the commons and state, are porous, diffuse, and negotiated (Bayat, 2000) rather than fixed (Gibson-Graham et al., 2016; Hardt & Negri, 2009; Jeffrey et al., 2012; Mitlin, 2018). In other words, there is continuity between resistance and collaboration, rather than any fixed distinction, as they feed into each other. It is the articulation of each of them, not alone but in combination, that explains the resilience of this community. This is true in the particular context of our study in Latin America and, more concretely, in Nicaragua, with its strong cooperative and political social movements supported after the Sandinista revolution in the 1970s. The waste-pickers’ resistance was initially embedded in a democratic context, with the discursive support of the left-wing Sandinista party ruling the country and the municipality. This situation facilitated the development of active networks, open collective resistance, and even collaborative strategies. However, the rapidly changing situation, resulting in a shift toward a repressive state in 2018, has since constrained collective open mobilizations. Nevertheless, pragmatic collaborations between waste pickers at La Chureca and channeled through the Sandinista political party persist.

Fourth, the construction of a resistance identity has become an important sociocultural device to claim access to the commons, built upon a heterogeneous configuration of territorial, environmental, professional, family, and spiritual identities. Resistance identity stems from and supports individual and collective resistance, to maintain access to the commons. This finding reveals the role of resistance identity as an institutional feature whose role neither Ostrom’s work on governing the commons nor Bayat’s resistance theories have explicitly addressed.

To conclude, all forms of identity, as well as everyday and collective resistance, are essential; none alone is sufficient to (re)gain the commons. However, their intensity, iteration, and sequence will vary according to the political, social, and material contexts in which the community is struggling for its right to the commons.

Acknowledgements

The authors recognize the vital input of the waste pickers from La Chureca and the residents of the Virgen Guadalupe neighborhood to the research, as without their knowledge and critical experience we could not have written this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Swedish Research Council VR [grant number 2016-06289] for funding the research project “Recycling networks. Grassroots resilience tackling climate, environmental and poverty challenges”. Vetenskapsrådet.