Peripheral Citizenship

How is citizenship constructed from the margins? Peripheral Citizenship examines this question by placing the urban periphery of South America’s most populous city, São Paulo, at the center of 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 the military dictatorship (1964–1985) and the subsequent democratic transition. McDonald 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.