The Politics of Grassroots Support: NGO Promoted Community-Based Social Change in Contemporary Puerto Rico.

Abstract

This thesis examines the politics surrounding the anti-poverty grassroots support work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in our current moment of competing political agendas and global economic crisis. Grassroots support is a community development model in which development agencies, such as NGOs, collaborate in the empowerment of impoverished communities and the transformation of their socio-economic problems. However, these generic claims of empowerment and social change obscure the fact that NGO promoted grassroots support can advance diverse and often competing political projects: from neoliberal reforms to social justice-oriented initiatives. This political indeterminacy brings into question the assumed transparency between the empowerment claims and actual effects of community-based social change efforts. In this dissertation, ethnographic case studies of two NGOs— Social Action of Puerto Rico, Inc. and the Sila M. Calderón Foundation—are used to show the political orientation and overall effects of grassroots support in contemporary Puerto Rico. Analysis of Puerto Rican and U.S. federal anti-poverty policies and programs demonstrates the entanglement of these NGOs with the post-1980s neoliberal agenda that reduced Puerto Rico’s welfare state and transferred governmental functions to nongovernmental institutions. The research also exposes the practice of grassroots support as a highly conflictive process in which the socio-economic inequalities and divergent political interests prevalent among program participants, and between these and NGO staff, hinder the accomplishment of empowerment goals. Ultimately, the research shows the limited potential of NGO promoted grassroots support as an effective strategy to overcome poverty and/or offset the negative effects of neoliberalism and economic stagnation for marginalized communities in contemporary Puerto Rico.