ABSTRACT
This chapter relates the "condition of the city" to the world of politics. Small producers, including artisans, engaged in a wide variety of formal and informal political expressions that forced the dominant Conservative and Liberal parties to at least partially accommodate their interests. Just as small producers in the coffee sector forced the parties to respond to their social concerns within the polity, so too did the urban artisans win a voice in shaping Colombia's twentieth-century political culture. Significantly, economic processes in both rural and urban settings enhanced the numbers and socioeconomic status of small producers, a change that had profound political consequences. Informal and formal political impulses were closely associated with partisan politics, Bogota's social structure, and the socioeconomic tensions caused by the city's rapid population growth. Nineteenth-century partisan contention led to a more widespread participation in formal politics. Explanations for the riot suggest some of the relationships between formal and informal politics.
