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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how migrant activists in Chile contest hegemonic narratives of failure through alternative practices of citizenship. Based on ethnography, it shows how ciudadanía migrante reimagines belonging and political engagement beyond exclusionary value hierarchies.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how migrant activists in Chile engage and contest hegemonic narratives of failure that structure contemporary politics of belonging and citizenship. In the context of restrictive migration regimes and discourses that frame migrants as failed subjects—failed workers, failed citizens, or failed members of the national community—I analyze how activist networks rework political engagement through alternative understandings of citizenship. Drawing on ethnographic research with migrant organizations, the paper explores how the notion of ciudadanía migrante is mobilized not as a fixed legal status, but as a political and moral project oriented toward collective belonging.

I argue that migrant activism can be understood as a creative response to polarising value axes that distinguish success from failure, inclusion from exclusion, and legitimacy from rejection. Through three interconnected dimensions of political practice—festive protest, acts of solidarity and care, and more conventional forms of political activism—activists unsettle dominant expectations of political participation and citizenship. These practices refuse the framing of migrant political action as deficient or ineffective, instead reimagining citizenship as an ongoing, relational process of community-building.

By attending to both activists’ practices and the meanings they attribute to them, the paper shows how citizenship becomes a tool for contesting failure as a hegemonic classification and for opening alternative political horizons beyond polarisation. In doing so, it contributes to anthropological debates on failure, political subjectivity, and belonging by highlighting how marginalized actors creatively challenge exclusionary regimes of value and articulate possibilities for more democratic and inclusive futures in contexts of heightened global mobility.