How is citizenship constructed from the margins? Peripheral Citizenship examines this question by placing the urban outskirts of South America’s most populous city, São Paulo, amid processes that transformed twentieth-century Latin America: rural-urban migration and rapid urbanization, the advent of liberation theology, and the rise and fall of military dictatorships. Drawing on oral histories and grassroots archives, Daniel McDonald traces the emergence of a remarkable bottom-up rights campaign through the lives of rural migrants, progressive clergy, and allied activists in São Paulo during Brazil's military dictatorship (1964–1985) and the subsequent democratic transition. He unveils how popular movements, aligned with the progressive Catholic Church and leftist political parties, forged a vision of citizenship that combined rights grounded in everyday life with innovative forms of participatory democracy. In the process, they reshaped the city, the church, and the nation from the periphery.

About the Author

Daniel McDonald is Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford.

Reviews

“Daniel McDonald’s Peripheral Citizenship is a terrific account of how progressive activists, Catholic liberation theologians, and grassroots organizers together placed the demands of Brazil’s burgeoning urban peripheries at the center of a pioneering democratization process. A must-read for anyone who wants to understand progressive Catholicism, right-to-the-city movements, and the fleeting decades in which radical visions of democracy took center stage in Latin America’s most populous country.”—Brodwyn Fischer, Professor of Latin American History and the College, University of Chicago

"Daniel McDonald deftly explores the ways in which low-income residents of São Paulo’s urban periphery mobilized to claim new social rights from the 1970s–1990s. This insightful book has broad implications for our understanding of urban Latin America."—Bryan McCann, Chair in Ibero-American Literature and Culture, Georgetown University

"Peripheral Citizenship allows us to envision the adaptive and resilient ways that Brazilian activists on the periphery used the physical, spiritual, and ideological spaces open to them to improve their situation. A needed and most welcome addition to the literature."—Stephen Andes, Professor of History, Bushnell University