Populist movements in Argentina: territorial appropriation in the urban peripheries?

FERNANDA TORRES

Seminario; LAG On Line Seminar Series ?Crisis, social movements and populisms in Latin America?s urban peripheries?; 2022

Populism cannot be understood in abstract terms, rather it must be appreciated through the particular, place-based contexts that allow it to be articulated and provide certain contradictions that will need to be confronted. Between 2003 and 2015 Peronism, Laclau’s (1978) archetypal case of populism, took on a progressive, centre-left form under Presidents Néstor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2003-2007 and 2007-2015), where it became a hegemonic “national popular” movement known as Kirchnerism. How are these antagonisms and subjectivities constituted? I consider the territories and places in which these processes take place to be key to understanding them. I analyzed the Tupac Amaru Neighborhood Organization in the city of San Salvador de Jujuy-Argentina and reconstructed the way in which the organization articulates political subjectivities in the national populist project, but from the place as a context, from Jujuy as a place. Likewise, the experience of social production of the urban territory, in the form of the neighborhood, I consider to be central to the production of these subjectivities and forms of political organization in Tupac.