Alejandro Velasco, “Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela” (U of California Press, 2015)

Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast · Jun 28, 2015 · 57m

In the mid-1950s, Venezuela’s military government razed a massive slum settlement in the heart of Caracas and replaced it with what was at the time one of Latin America’s largest public housing projects. When the dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown on January 23, 1958, however, thousands of people rushed to occupy the uninhabited portions of the project, taking it over and renaming the resulting neighborhood for the date of the fall of the regime: the 23 de Enero.

The neighborhood that emerged stood at the geographic and in some cases political center of Venezuela’s transition to…