ABSTRACT
From 2010, community barricades erupted in Philippine urban space as a defense against forced evictions, inspired by the success of the September 23, 2010 barricade enacted by the slum dwellers of Sitio San Roque. By 2014, however, a large section of the slum was demolished despite a barricade. Many of those who previously participated condemned the protesters as violent, loud, and unproductive. Drawing from six years of engaged ethnography, this chapter traces how neoliberalism penetrates subaltern socialities. I descend to the everyday of the Sitio San Roque, a large slum facing gentrification and populated by multiple grassroots organizations, to understand the dynamics of slum politics as it accommodates, negotiates, and resists forcible dispossessions. It marks how barricades expand legal democratic spaces for ‘productive’ citizens within neoliberal urbanization. It also highlights the resulting community fragmentation and conflict as some grassroots associations are compelled to adopt contradictory functions of advocating urban surplus redistribution, market segregation, and de-radicalization in their engagement with the state’s offer of differential citizenships to secure decent shelter. These fragmentations reflect capitalism’s contradictions – elite accumulations and subaltern dispossessions – as it penetrates unserved urban poor housing markets, and present considerable challenges for inspiring class-based anti-neoliberal movements.
