ABSTRACT
This chapter advances a framework in which rural protest is seen as more than a dry matter of determining forces or the bland calculation of economic interests. It shows how peasant activism represents the active creation of alternative modes of political vision and identity. The urban world, as the rondas will demonstrate, has no monopoly on innovation. In the peripheries of the periphery, people are also articulating fragile new orders of difference and possibility. The chapter provides a measure of understanding regarding the limits and accomplishments of their efforts to organize. Most scholarship on new social movements ignores peasants and thus misses some of the most vital new politics on the planet. Peasant protest, by contrast, brings to mind modernist images of class struggle and Socialist revolution. The word peasant sounds not even modern but medieval. On close scrutiny, peasant protests in Latin America tend to combine both a challenge of and an acceptance of authority.
