citizenship in latin america || citizenship in latin america: an introduction

Citizenship in Latin America: An IntroductionAuthor(s): Evelina DagninoSource: Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 30, No. 2, Citizenship in Latin America (Mar., 2003),pp. 3-17Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3184974 .

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Citizenship in Latin America

An Introduction by

Evelina Dagnino

In the past two decades, the notion of citizenship has become increasingly recurrent in the political vocabulary in Latin America and in other parts of the world. In Latin America, this phenomenon has been linked to the emergence of social movements during the late 1970s and 1980s and efforts at democra- tization, especially in countries with authoritarian regimes. In the United States and in Europe, the assertion of multiculturalism and the struggle of ethnic minorities for recognition of their rights have been the main driving force for the development of citizenship as a powerful reference in that struggle.

Increasingly adopted since the late 1980s and 1990s by Latin American popular movements, excluded sectors, trade unions, and left parties as a central element of their political strategies, the notion of citizenship has become a common reference among social movements such as those of women, blacks and ethnic minorities, homosexuals, retired and senior citizens, con- sumers, environmentalists, urban and rural workers, and groups organized around urban issues such as housing, health, education, unemployment, and violence (Foweraker, 1995; Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar, 1998). These movements have found reference to citizenship not only a useful tool for their particular struggles but also a powerful articulating link among them. The general demand for equal rights embedded in the predominant conception of citizenship has been extended and specified in accordance with the demands in question. In this process of redefinition, strong emphasis has been placed on citizenship's cultural dimension, incorporating contemporary concerns with subjectivities, identities, and the right to difference. Thus, on one hand, the construction of a new notion of citizenship has come to be seen as reach- ing far beyond the acquisition of legal rights, requiring the constitution of active social subjects identifying what they consider to be their rights and

Evelina Dagnino teaches in the Department of Political Science at the University of Campinas. Her work focuses on the relationship between culture and politics, social movements, democracy, and citizenship. She has coedited Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures (1998) and edited Sociedad civil, esfera publica y democratizaci6n en America Latina (2002). The collective thanks her for her work in organizing this issue.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 129, Vol. 30 No. 2, March 2003 3-17 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X02250624 0 2003 Latin American Perspectives

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4 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

struggling for their recognition. On the other hand, this cultural emphasis has asserted the need for a radical transformation of cultural practices that repro- duce inequality and exclusion throughout society.

A substantial part of the attraction of citizenship and of its core category of rights lies in the dual role it has been able to play in the debate among the various conceptions of democracy that characterize the contemporary political struggle in Latin America. On one hand, the struggle organized around the recognition and extension of rights has helped to make the argument for the expansion and deepening of democracy much more concrete. On the other hand, the reference to citizenship has provided common ground and an articulatory principle for an immense diversity of social movements that have adopted the language of rights as a way of expressing their demands that helped them escape fragmentation and isolation. Thus the building of citizenship has been seen as at once a general struggle-for the expansion of democracy-that was able to incorporate a plurality of demands and a set of particular struggles for rights (housing, education, health, and so forth) whose success would expand democracy.

As a result of its growing influence, the notion of citizenship has quickly become an object of dispute over its meaning. In the past decade, it has been appropriated and resignified in various ways by the dominant sectors and the state. Thus, under neoliberal inspiration, citizenship has begun to be under- stood and promoted as mere individual integration into the market. At the same time and as part of the same process of structural adjustment, established rights have increasingly been withdrawn from workers throughout Latin America. In a related development, philanthropic projects of the so- called third sector have been expanding in numbers and scope in an attempt to confront the poverty and exclusion that convey their own version of citizenship.

Today, the various dimensions of the notion of citizenship and the dispute over its appropriations and definitions largely constitute the grounds of political struggle in Latin America. This dispute reflects the trajectory followed by the confrontation between a democratizing, participatory project of extension of citizenship and the neoliberal offensive aimed at curtailing the possibilities of that project. In what follows, I will outline the main elements of the different ideas of citizenship that have emerged from that confrontation.

Citizenship has become a prominent notion because it has been recog- nized as a crucial weapon not only in the struggle against social and economic exclusion and inequality but also in the broadening of dominant conceptions of politics. Thus, the redefinition of citizenship undertaken by social movements sectors in Latin America through their concrete struggles for a deepening of democracy has aimed, in the first place, to confront the existing



Dagnino / CITIZENSHIP IN LATIN AMERICA 5

definition of the political arena-its participants, its institutions, its processes, its agenda, and its scope (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar, 1998). Adopting as its point of departure the conception of a right to have rights, this redefinition has supported the emergence of new social subjects actively identifying what they consider their rights and struggling for their recognition.' In contrast to previous conceptions of citizenship2 as a strategy of the dominant classes and the state for the gradual and limited political incorpora- tion of excluded sectors with the aim of greater social integration or as a legal and political condition necessary for the establishment of capitalism, this is a conception of noncitizens, of the excluded-a citizenship "from below."

The concern of Latin American social movements with the need to assert a right to have rights is clearly related to extreme poverty and exclusion but also to the social authoritarianism that pervades the unequal and hierarchical organization of social relations. Class, race, and gender differences constitute the main bases for a social classification that has historically pervaded our cultures, establishing different categories of people hierarchically disposed in their respective "places" in society. Thus, for the excluded sectors, the perception of the political relevance of cultural meanings embedded in social practices is part of daily life. As part of the authoritarian, hierarchical social ordering of Latin American societies, being poor means not only economic, material deprivation but also being subjected to cultural rules that convey a complete lack of recognition of poor people as bearers of rights. In what Telles (1994) has called the incivility embedded in that tradition, poverty is a sign of inferiority, a way of being in which individuals become unable to exercise their rights. The cultural deprivation imposed by the absolute absence of rights, which ultimately expresses itself as a suppression of human dignity, then becomes constitutive of material deprivation and political exclusion.

The perception of this culture of social authoritarianism as a dimension of exclusion additional to economic inequality and political subordination has constituted a significant element in the struggle to redefine "citizenship." First, it has made clear that the struggle for rights-for the right to have rights-must be a political struggle against this pervasive authoritarianism, thus establishing the grounds for a connection between culture and politics that has become embedded in the urban popular collective movements' action. This connection has been fundamental in establishing common ground for articulation with other social movements that are more obviously cultural, such as the ethnic, women's, gay, ecology, and human rights movements, in the pursuit of more egalitarian relations at all levels, helping to demarcate a distinctive, expanded view of democracy. The reference to rights and citizenship has come to constitute the core of a common ethical-political




field in which many of these movements and other sectors of society have been able to share and mutually reinforce their struggle. The emergence of the sindicato cidaddo (citizen trade union) in the early 1990s indicates the recognition of that reference in the Brazilian labor movement (Rodrigues, 1997).

Secondly, this perception has made possible a broadening of the scope of citizenship, whose meaning has become far from restricted to the formal- legal acquisition of a set of rights under the political-judicial system. The struggle for citizenship has thus been presented as a project for a new socia- bility: a more egalitarian format for social relations at all levels, new rules for living together in society (negotiation of conflicts, a new sense of public order and public responsibility, a new social contract) and not only for incor- poration into the political system in the strict sense. This more egalitarian format has implied the recognition of the other as the bearer of valid interests and legitimate rights. It has also implied the constitution of a public dimension of society in which rights can be consolidated as public parameters for dialogue, debate, and the negotiation of conflict. This project has unsettled not only social authoritarianism as the basic mode of social ordering in Brazil but also more recent neoliberal discourses in which private interest is the measure of everything, obstructing the possibilities for an ethical dimension of social life (Telles, 1994).

Thirdly, since the notion of rights is no longer limited to legal provisions or access to previously defined rights, it includes the invention/creation of new rights that emerge from particular struggles and their concrete practices, among them rights to autonomy over one's own body, environmental protec- tion, and housing. In this sense, the very determination of the meaning of "right" and the assertion of something as a right are themselves objects of

political struggle. In addition, this redefinition has come to include not only the right to equality but also the right to difference, which specifies, deepens, and broadens the right to equality.3

An additional important consequence of this broadening has been that citizenship is no longer confined to the relationship with the state: the recognition of rights regulates not only the relationships between the state and the individual but also social relations at all levels of society. The process of

building citizenship as the assertion and recognition of rights has been seen as a process of transformation of practices rooted in the society as a whole. This

political strategy implies moral and intellectual reform, a process of social learning and the construction of new kinds of social relations-on one hand, the constituting of citizens as active social subjects but, on the other hand, learning to live on different terms with these emergent citizens who refuse to remain in the places socially and culturally assigned to them.




Finally, an additional element in this redefinition transcends a central reference in the liberal concept of citizenship: the demand for access, inclusion, membership, belonging to a given political system. What is at stake, in fact, in

struggles for citizenship in Latin America is more than the right to be included as a full member of society; it is the right to participate in the very definition of that society and its political system. The demand for political participation certainly goes beyond the right to vote, although in some countries even the free exercise of this right is still disputed. The direct participation of civil society and social movements in state decisions is one of the most crucial aspects of the redefinition of citizenship because it contains the potential for radical transformation of the structure of power relations. Political

practices inspired by the new definition of citizenship-such as those emerging in the cities governed by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' party- PT) in Brazil through the participatory budgets4 in which the popular sectors and their organizations have opened up space for the democratic control of the state through the effective participation of citizens in power-help one to visualize the possibilities. Initiated in Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, in 1989, participatory-budget experiments exist today in around 100 other cities5 and are coming to be considered as models for countries such as Mex- ico, Uruguay, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, and Ecuador.

The participation of civil society as a mechanism for the extension of citizenship has spread all over Latin America in the past decade. In recent years, however, it has been appropriated and stimulated by the state as part of a strategy for the implementation of neoliberal structural adjustment. Thus, such participation is taking place in the context of a perverse confluence between, on one hand, the participatory project constructed around the extension of citizenship and the deepening of democracy and, on the other hand, the project of a minimal state, which requires the shrinking of its social responsibilities and the gradual abandonment of its role as guarantor of rights. The perversity lies in the fact that, while pointing in opposite and even antagonistic direc- tions, both projects require an active, proactive civil society.6 With different degrees of intensity, considering the different specific timings and modes of neoliberal measures and democratizing processes, this scenario is clearly present in Latin American countries today.

A particularly important ingredient of this perverse confluence is pre- cisely the notion of citizenship, now redefined through a series of discursive shifts to make it suitable for its new use by neoliberal forces. This redefinition, as mentioned above, is part of the struggle between different political projects and attests to the symbolic power of citizenship. However, the appropriation of the notion of citizenship by the dominant sectors in Latin America also indicates the mobilizing capacity that this notion has demonstrated in




organizing subaltern sectors around democratizing projects. The need to neu- tralize the features assumed by citizenship while preserving its symbolic power has required its appropriation by neoliberal forces.

Neoliberal redefinitions of citizenship rely upon a set of basic procedures. Some of these revive the traditional liberal conception of citizenship; others are innovative and address new elements of contemporary political and social

configurations. First, they reduce the collective meaning of the social movements' redefinition of citizenship to a strictly individualistic understanding of it. Second, they establish an attractive connection between citizenship and the market. Being a citizen comes to mean individual integration into the market as a consumer and as a producer. This seems to be the basic principle underlying a vast number of projects for helping people to "acquire citizen-

ship," that is, to learn how to initiate microenterprises, become qualified for the few jobs still being offered, and so forth. In a context in which the state is

gradually withdrawing from its role as guarantor of rights, the market is offered as a surrogate instance of citizenship. Labor rights are being eliminated in the name of free negotiation between workers and employers, "flexi-

bility" of labor, and so forth, and social rights guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution since the 1940s are being eliminated under the rationale that

they constitute obstacles to the free operation of the market and thus restrict economic development and modernization. This rationale, in addition, trans- forms bearers-of-rights/citizens into the nation's new villains-enemies of the political reforms that are intended to shrink the state's responsibilities. Thus a peculiar inversion is taking place: the recognition of rights seen in the recent past as an indicator of modernity is becoming a symbol of "backward- ness," an "anachronism" that hinders the modernizing potential of the market (Telles, 2001). Here we find a decisive legitimation of the conception of the market as a surrogate instance of citizenship-as the market becomes the incarnation of modernizing virtues and the sole route to the Latin American dream of inclusion in the First World.

An additional step in the construction of neoliberal versions of citizenship is evident in what constitutes a privileged target of democratizing projects- the formulation of social policies with regard to poverty and inequality. Many of the struggles organized around the demand for equal rights and the extension of citizenship have focused on the definition of such social policies. In addition, and consequently, the participation of social movements and other sectors of civil society has been a fundamental demand in struggles for citi-

zenship in the hope that it will contribute to the formulation of social policies directed toward the ensuring of universal rights to all citizens. With the advance of the neoliberal project and the reduction of the role of the state, these social policies are increasingly being formulated as strictly emergency




efforts directed toward certain specific sectors of society whose survival is at risk. The targets of these policies are seen not as citizens entitled to rights but as "needy" human beings to be dealt with by public or private charity.

One of the consequences of this situation is a displacement of issues such as poverty and inequality: dealt with strictly as issues of technical or philanthropic management, poverty and inequality are being withdrawn from the public (political) arena and from their proper domain, that ofjustice, equality, and citizenship, and reduced to a problem of ensuring the minimal conditions for survival. Moreover, the solution to this problem is presented as the moral duty of every member of society. Thus, the idea of collective solidarity that underlies the classical reference to rights and citizenship is now being replaced by an understanding of solidarity as a strictly private moral responsibility. It is through this understanding of solidarity that civil society is being urged to engage in voluntary and philanthropic activities with an appeal to a resignified notion of citizenship now embodied in this particular understanding. This understanding of citizenship is dominant in the action of the entre- preneurial foundations, the so-called third sector, that have proliferated in countries such as Brazil over the past decade. Characterized by a constitutive ambiguity between market-oriented interests in maximizing their profits through their public image and what is referred to as "social responsibility," these foundations have generally adopted a discourse of citizenship rooted in individual moral solidarity. As in the state sectors occupied by neoliberal forces, this discourse is marked by the absence of any reference to universal rights or to the political debate on the causes of poverty and inequality.

Such a resignification of "citizenship" and "solidarity" obscures their political dimension and erodes references to the public responsibility and public interest built up with such difficulty through the democratizing struggles of our recent past. As the distribution of social services and benefits comes to occupy the place formerly held by rights and citizenship, the demand for rights is obstructed because there are no institutional channels for it, distribution depending only on the goodwill and competence of the sectors involved. Even more dramatic, the very formulation of rights-their enuncia- tion as a public issue-becomes increasingly difficult (Telles, 2001). The symbolic efficacy of rights in the building of an egalitarian society is thus dis- missed, and the consequence has been the reinforcement of an already powerful privatism as the dominant orientation of social relations.

A second set of consequences relates to the idea of the participation of civil society that has constituted the core of the democratizing project of the social movements and the progressive sectors of society. At its peak (which has varied in different countries), this project has been able to ensure the creation of public spaces for citizen participation including those that, like those




in Brazil, involved the formulation of public policy.7 With the advance of neoliberal forces and as part of the political dispute between these different projects, the notion of participation has also been appropriated and resignified. As mentioned before, in the perverse confluence of these projects, the neoliberal forces are calling for the participation of civil society. However, such participation increasingly means that the functions of the organizations of civil society are limited to the implementation of these policies, providing services formerly considered the duties of the state. The effective sharing of decision-making power-the full exercise of citizenship as conceived of by the democratizing forces-is being carried out in most cases within a frame- work established by the dominant neoliberal project.

The relations between the state and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are a good example of this perverse confluence. Endowed with technical competence and close relations with various social sectors (e.g., women, blacks)-"reliable" interlocutors among the various possible interlocutors in civil society-they are frequently seen as the ideal partners by sectors of the state engaged in transferring their responsibilities to civil soci-

ety or to the private sector. Paralleling this effort, there is an additional gov- ernmental tendency toward the "criminalization" of social movements that remain combative and effectively articulated, such as, in Brazil, the Landless Movement and certain trade unions. This selective process, reinforced by the mass media and the international financing agencies, is resulting in a growing identification between civil society and NGOs in which the meaning of "civil

society" is increasingly restricted to designating these organizations when it is not a mere synonym for "third sector." "Civil society" is thus reduced to those sectors whose behavior is "acceptable" according to government standards- what one analyst has called "five-star civil society" (Telles, 2001).

For some NGOs, the need for an eventual rejection of this role is drama- tized when they are faced with a real opportunity to produce positive results for the "target public" (the social groups benefited by specific projects), as

fragmented, momentary, provisional, and limited as they may be. For others, the fact that the state sees them as privileged interlocutors makes them consider themselves "representatives of civil society." At the same time, they see themselves as representatives in a second sense in that they "give voice" to diffuse interests in society. This representativeness is, however, much more a matter of the coincidence of these interests with those defended by the NGOs than of any explicit articulation or organic relationship between them and the bearers of these interests. With the increasing abandonment of the organic links with the social movements that characterized them in former times, this

political autonomization of the NGOs creates a peculiar situation in which these organizations are responsible to the international agencies that finance




them and to the state that contracts them as service providers, but not to the civil society whose representatives they claim to be or to the social sectors whose interests they bear or to any other organization of a truly public character. Well-intentioned as they may be, their activities fundamentally express the desires of their directors.

These attempts to reconfigure civil society and to redefine participation are intimately connected with emerging notions of neoliberal citizenship. Their aim seems to be the depoliticization of these two notions, which have been central references in the democratizing struggle for the extension of citizenship. This depoliticization represents a counteroffensive to the advances in the redefinition of the political arena that have derived from that struggle. The emergence of the notion of a "third sector" (the others being the state and the market) as a surrogate for civil society is particularly expressive of this attempt to implement a "minimalist" conception of politics and to nullify the extension of public spaces for political deliberation achieved by the democratizing struggles.

The scenario produced by this perverse confluence is a minefield in which sectors of civil society, including NGOs not supportive of the project of the minimal state, feel deceived when, motivated by an apparently shared discourse of citizenship, they find themselves involved in joint actions with state sectors committed to that project. Several social movements participating in some of the public spaces designated for the formulation of public policy have the same reaction. Some of them define the situation as a dilemma, and several are considering the possibility of rejecting any further joint action altogether or being extremely selective and careful with respect to the corre- lation of forces present in these spaces and the concrete possibilities they present (Dagnino, 2002). Under an apparent homogeneity of discourse, what is at stake in these spaces is the success or failure of very different political projects and conceptions of citizenship.

This issue of Latin American Perspectives brings together a set of articles that explore different dimensions and political uses of the notion of citizenship and their implications for particular struggles in particular contexts. The limits and challenges confronted by citizenship and the possibilities emerging from these struggles are discussed as a contribution to the current debate on the subject.

Articles by Camille Goirand and Patricia Richards discuss the uses of citizenship in popular urban movements in Brazil in the mid-1990s and by Mapuche indigenous women in Chile in 2000. They point to the limits and possibilities of the redefinition of citizenship that has come to direct the struggles of subaltern sectors in Latin America. Discussing the representa- tions of rights and citizenship of favelados in Rio de Janeiro, Goirand points




out what she sees as their fundamental contradiction. On one hand, there is a reinforcement of civic spirit when claims are "connected to an act of political belonging, to a commitment, to the assertion of civic values such as liberty, equality, or solidarity, and to the dignity of the poor." However, such political belonging is limited to the local community, since the national political system is held responsible for injustices and inefficiencies and rejected, and the resulting emphasis on the private sphere amounts to a deconstruction of the citizenship in question.8 Goirand argues, however, that an "original mode of citizenship" is being built that is based not on political belonging to a national political system but on the right to participate in its redefinition. One may add to her argument that the struggles of the poor for rights highlight the failure of Brazilian representative democracy to recognize their rights and therefore the "ultimate reference" she misses. Underlying this appraisal of the current democracy, there may be a claim for its radical transformation. In recent years, as mentioned above, attempts to make the political system more

responsive to struggles for rights have underlined the creation of participatory institutional mechanisms. Urban popular social movements have been crucial forces in this development (Baierle, 1998; Avritzer, 2002).

Patricia Richards discusses the difficulties experienced by the political system and state agencies even when they recognize the need to extend equal rights to excluded sectors. Thus the Servicio Nacional de la Mujer (National's Women Service-SERNAM), the state agency in charge of guar- anteeing women's rights to equality, maintains a gender discourse that resists the recognition of the ethnicity and cultural differences that differentiate

Mapuche women's priorities and interests from those of other women. As a result of the efforts of Mapuche women to have their interests represented, SERNAM has changed its discourse somewhat. However, the persistent failure "to recognize ethnicity as a fundamental social division that precludes the existence of universal women's interests" is rooted in the state's larger paradigm of national identity and development. In confronting this paradigm, Mapuche women are also working to participate in its redefinition.

Arturo Santamaria Gomez and William V. Flores explore the meanings of

citizenship that have emerged among Mexican-Americans in the United States. The worldwide migration accelerated by globalization has deeply affected notions of nationality and citizenship (Stolcke, 1997; Wiener, 1996). Santamaria G6mez analyzes a crucial aspect in traditional versions of citi-

zenship-the right to vote-in the context of Mexican immigration to the United States, showing how it has been redefined to include the "expatriate vote," the right of Mexican immigrants in the United States to vote in Mexi- can elections. He discusses the various political positions involved in the debate over cross-border voting rights since its origins in the nineteenth




century. Although he links the expatriates' insistence on voting rights to the cultural and political traditions of Mexicans living across the border, who have always maintained their primary interest in Mexican politics, Santamaria Gomez argues that they may be the "first postmodern citizens." Going beyond the nineteenth-century concept of being a citizen of only one nation-state, he says, Mexican immigrants living in the United States have since 1848 been binational and transstate in character, constituting themselves as social and political postmodern subjects.

In approaching the experience of these same subjects in the United States, Flores chooses a different focus, exploring the new uses of citizenship through the analysis of the struggles of California Chicano and Mexican communities as exercises of "cultural citizenship." The concept of cultural citizenship has been used in the United States since the mid-1980s (Flores and Benmayor, 1997) to emphasize the creation of new rights by social movements of ethnic minorities. Flores argues that, in arguing "for a distinct social space," for imagined communities of their own, and for rights, Chicano and Mexican communities are developing cultural practices that are politically oppositional in several ways. The idea of cultural citizenship allows them to "emerge from the shadows as new subjects with their own claims for rights," re-creating a different vision of the society of which they want to be mem- bers. There is a clear connection between this conception of citizenship and the new version that has been produced by social movements in Brazil and other countries in Latin America; both emphasize the constitution of active political subjects and the rejection of mere inclusion in the existing social and political order.

Elizabeth Jelin focuses first on aspects of citizenship that are more subjec- tive, examining at the level of personal interaction elements of the civic dimension that are inherent to the concept of citizenship: the question of alterity9 and recognition of the other and the development of solidarity and responsibility. She goes on to explore the implications of these aspects for collective and macro-social dimensions such as cultural pluralism and the right to difference, discussing the tensions and dilemmas inherent in contemporary citizenship, in which the fundamental principle of universal human rights is confronted by the emergence of collective identities that demand their right to difference.

This inevitable tension between equality and difference, which is also at the center of Richards's analysis of the Mapuche case, constitutes a crucial theme in the current debate over citizenship (Young, 1989; Fraser, 1995; Phillips, 1993; Benhabib, 1996; Bock and James, 1992; Dietz, 1992). In what is already a classic argument, the incisive question posed by feminist theory is whether a conception of universal equality modeled on Western white




heterosexual males is capable of acknowledging differences. Approaches to this tension have varied to the point of including a complete rejection of difference as a legitimate claim in the name of preserving what is seen as the left's distinctive struggle for equality as opposed to the right's conservative political appeal to difference (Pierucci, 1990). Abandonment of the idea of citizenship as hopelessly contaminated by homogenizing intentions and consequences has been suggested (Young, 1989). There have been also attempts to formulate alternative conceptions of citizenship more suitable for incorporating that tension. Jelin mentions the need for contextualization of universal human rights in systems of social relationships, a path already explored by Dietz (1992). She also calls attention, following Todorov, to the role of culture as a mediating instance between abstract universals and specific communities: "The road to universalism has to pass through particular and specific cultural immersions."

In this same direction, it is worth underlining what all the articles in this issue and the whole contemporary debate on citizenship in Latin America and elsewhere demonstrate: citizenship is a political strategy (Wiener, 1996). To recognize this is to understand it as a historical construct, culturally based, that expresses concrete interests and practices not previously defined by any universal essence. Its contents and meanings constitute a response to the dynamics of the conflict and political struggle lived by a particular society at a given historical moment (Dagnino, 1998). Taking this into consideration, it seems crucial to underline the contribution of contemporary social movements based on gender and ethnic differences in showing what is in fact an indissoluble relationship between equality and difference. Given that the

right to difference is always connected to concrete situations of inequality and discrimination (Dagnino, 1994), demands for the right to be different are

inseparable from demands for the right to equality. What these demands assert is the need for a conception of difference that will not constitute a basis for unequal treatment. In this sense, the very idea of equality today would be unthinkable without the recognition of difference. In other words, instead of being reduced to sameness, equality has to be qualified, completed, and specified by the idea of difference or it will have no meaning at all. It is this conception of equality, posed by concrete political subjects,10 that must be incor- porated into a radically democratic conception of citizenship.

What the articles in this issue make clear is that citizenship has been a vital element of the Latin American political scene in spite of-and perhaps because of-the complexity of its various dimensions. The possibilities it has been opening up for political struggle do not seem to be exhausted by neoliberal efforts at its appropriation and resignification. What this appropriation seems to show is that it is a notion worth keeping.




NOTES

1. According to some definitions by participants of social movements, citizenship is some- times even thought of as consisting of this very process. Thus agency and the capacity to struggle are seen by them as evidence of their citizenship, even if other rights are absent (see Dagnino et al., 1998).

2. For the Brazilian versions of other conceptions of citizenship deployed by dominant classes in Latin American recent history, see the notions of cidadania regulada (regulated citi-

zenship) (Santos, 1979) and cidadania concedida (citizenship by concession) (Sales, 1994; Carvalho, 1991; 1995).

3. For a discussion on citizenship and the connections between the right to difference and the right to equality, see Dagnino (1994).

4. On participatory budget processes, see Souza Santos (1998) and Avritzer (2002). 5. Because of their success, participatory budgets have recently been adopted by other par-

ties in Brazil, some of them clearly for electoral purposes. 6. Although the proactivity of civil society tends to assume different meanings within the

"minimal state" project. 7. The Brazilian Constitution of 1988, known as the "Citizen Constitution," included mech-

anisms of direct and participatory democracy, among them the establishment of management councils for public policy, with memberships equally divided between civil society and government, at city, state, and federal levels to develop policies on issues related to health, children and adolescents, social services, women, and so forth.

8. One might question this definition of the local community and the social movement as inevitably private spheres (see, e.g., the notion of "subaltern counterpublics" [Fraser, 1995]).

9. "Alterity" comes from alter (other) and expresses the capacity to acknowledge "other- ness"-the existence of others as bearers of rights-considered a fundamental requirement of a democratic egalitarian culture.

10. Since the emergence of the women's and black movements in Latin America in the late 1970s and 1980s, the Zapatistas in Mexico have brought a new dynamic to this debate (Yashar, 1998; Harvey, 1998).

REFERENCES

Alvarez, Sonia E., Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (eds.) 1998 Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Move- ments. Boulder: Westview Press.

Avritzer, Leonardo 2002 Democracy and Public Spaces in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Baierle, S6rgio 1998 "The explosion of experience," in Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (eds.), Cultures of Politics/Politics of Culture: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements. Boulder: Westview Press.

Benhabib, Seyla 1996 Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political. Princeton: Princeton University Press.




Bock, Gisela, and Susan James 1992 Beyond Equality and Difference: Citizenship, Feminist Politics, and Female Subjectiv- ity. London and New York: Routledge.

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