Download or read book Squatters and the Politics of Marginality in Uruguay written by María José Álvarez-Rivadulla and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-22 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book unveils the political economy of land squatting in a third world city, Montevideo, in Uruguay. It focuses on the effects of democratization on the mobilization of the poorest as well as on the role played by different types of brokers, from radical Catholic priests to local leaders embedded in political networks. Through a multi-method endeavour that combines ethnography, historical sources, and quantitative time series, the author reconstructs the history of the informal city since the late 1940s to the present. From a social movements/contentious politics perspective, the book challenges the assumption that socioeconomic factors such as poverty were the only causes triggering land squatting.