Squatters and the Politics of Marginality in Uruguay

This book unveils the political economy of land squatting in a third world city, Montevideo, in Uruguay. It focuses on the effects of democratization on the mobilization of the poorest as well as on the role played by different types of brokers, from radical Catholic priests to local leaders embedded in political networks. Through a multi-method endeavour that combines ethnography, historical sources, and quantitative time series, the author reconstructs the history of the informal city since th