BECOMING A PIQUETERO: WORKING-CLASS ROUTINES AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ACTIVIST DISPOSITIONS*
Despite substantial progress in social movement research, our understanding of activism is much more elaborate with regards to the role of ideas and beliefs than concerning the influence of routines. In this article, I draw on both broad sociological literature and ethnographic research on the unemployed worker’s movement in Argentina to address this issue. I argue that an essential attraction of participating in this movement is the opportunity to engage in the daily practices associated with a respectable proletarian ethos. Through the reconstruction of past routines and the development of new habits, some participants come to see their involvement in the movement as an end in itself despite significant personal obstacles and even occasional disagreements with their organization’s ideology. These findings suggest that research on the relation between practices and activism can significantly complement the current literature and deepen our knowledge of social movement participation.
Contributor Notes
* Direct Correspondence to Marcos Emilio Perez, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Wahsington and Lee University, 204 W. Washington Street, Lexington, VA 24450, (meperez@wlu.edu). The field research leading to this article was supported by funds from the Department of Sociology and the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, both at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation (Award ID: 1406244). Online appendix available at https://osf.io/rcpgz/
† I thank Javier Auyero, Neil Gross, Michael Young, Henry Dietz, Maya Charrad, Bryan Roberts, Kenneth Andrews, Catherine Corrigall-Brown, Drew Halfmann, Natalie Aviles, and Ian Mullins, as well as three anonymous reviewers and my colleagues at the Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, for comments on previous versions of this article. In addition, the Gino Germani Research Institute at the University of Buenos Aires provided substantial logistical support for my fieldwork. Previous versions of this artilce were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, 2008, the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, 2008, the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Torcuato Di Tella University, Buenos Aires, and the Twentieth Alternative Futures and Popular Protest Conference at Manchester Metropolitan University. I thank all participants for their insightful comments and questions.