Nicholas Garcia Johnson

This monograph project aims to address the question: What new conceptualizations of democracy emerge amongst diverse groups working across racial lines to establish viable communities together? It intends to do so by situating Mapuche Indigenous people’s participation in cooperatively managed projects (autogestión), beginning with the 1960s Poblador Movement that formed the basis of their neighborhood communities (poblaciones). During 30 months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I accompanied Mapuche and Chilean neighbors as they established new neighborhood projects while navigating a period social unrest referred to as Chile’s Social Explosion (October 2019), the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020-present), and two failed constitution re-writing processes (October 2020- December 2023). This monograph examines why new models to democratically re-write the Chilean constitution failed by comparing the practices of autogestión with the practices of state centered politics from 1960 to 2022. This project will contribute to anthropological theory regarding ethnic identity formation, social organization, and democracy by evaluating to what extend the local practices and transnational discourses of cooperative management have led to the emergence of alternative democratic frameworks that contrast with the discourses of liberal representational democracy in a globalized, neoliberal era.