Contentious Lives

Javier Auyero is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita (Duke University Press), winner of the 2001 Best Book award from the New England Council of Latin American Studies (neclas) and a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award.

• 5. The Lived 1993: The Coming and Making of the Explosion 1156. The Lived Sixteenth: The Feast and the Remains of the Riot 1377. Nana’s Life: “Thirty-six Years of Crap” 1538. Contested Memories 172Conclusions: Ethnography and Recognition 191Appendix. On Fieldwork, Theory, and the Question of Biography 201Notes 209References 217Index 229About the Series ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction: On the Intersection of Individual and Collective Biographies and Protest 1Part I. The Picketer 151. The Day before the Pueblada: A Town on the Edge 292. Laura’s Life: “How Did I Fall So Far?” 483. Being-in-the-Road: Insurgent Identities 604. After the Road: Contentious Legacies 89Part II. The Queen of the Riot 101

”Contentious Lives dares to present the lives of two women who lived hard times but at a certain moment plunged into popular movements and then had to bear the consequences of their participation, to make sense of what they had done, and to fashion new relations with other people. The two women have entrusted Javier Auyero with stories few others would want to see in print: stories of suffering, indiscretion, indecision, bitterness, regret, and passion.”-Charles Tilly, Columbia University ”Javier Auyero proves that you can go home again-and that with the proper experience elsewhere you can see more than you would have noticed if you had never left. Returning to his native Argentina as a sympathetic, well trained observer of political conflict, he shows us how intense personal lives and passionate political participation connect with each other. Auyero tells stories of Argentinian political and economic crises from an entirely fresh perspective.”-Viviana Zelizer, Princeton University