Thinking from the Barrio: Location, Modernity, and the Popular in Alejandro Moreno

Abstract

This article examines and criticizes the question of the slum and some of its contemporary approaches in order to propose another way of framing such a question, one that emerges from the slum itself as an experience of conceiving and living in the world in a way that challenges the Modern Episteme, that is, the regime of knowledge of the West par excellence. In the case of Venezuela, as seen in the work of Alejandro Moreno, this challenge is articulated by what he calls the Popular Episteme, driven by a set of historical practices and knowledge that complicates any generalizing and dependency-driven conceptions of the slum or the barrio, to be more precise within the Venezuelan context. This thought from the barrio, that Moreno’s work helps us articulate, becomes a way of going beyond conceptions of the slum as the other side of modernity, as if trapped in a totalizing dialectic; but it also helps us take some critical ways of studying the slum to the limit and offer a view from the Venezuelan barrio as a way of illuminating the heterogeneous experience of all the sites that have been globally labeled as “slums” and the need to connect them through their difference and not because the subjectivities they harbor are equivalent. The reflection about the location from which thought departs, and Moreno’s work as an example of this, will be the crucial element and the guiding thread of this reflection.