Towards the foundations of citizenship in Azuay: Organization and collective participation in the period 1900-1960

This research is aimed at rebuilding the main forms of collective organization in the city of Cuenca and the province of Azuay in the 1900-1960 temporal framework, as a way of understanding and explaining the foundations of an experience of participation in citizenship that presents an important historical process in the region. The study is aimed at achieving a historical memory of artisanal labor organizations and linked to the changes that were being generated in the employment structure, such as pro-improvement groups, committees, employee associations, in addition to ways linked to agricultural activity or levels of organization propitiated by some local and national government instances. Our theoretical perspective leads us to dimension aspects of material and symbolic elaboration in organizational praxis in the period. Participation in citizenship did not consist of a natural attribute. It was a social innovation, which involved more than one social sector and that did not present consequences only in the order of the formal electoral system. We consider that a sociocultural dimension in the social and human sciences consists precisely in profiling the collective faces and voices that gave body and life to the forms of social organization in Cuenca and Azuay. In conceptual terms, it seeks to contribute to the definition of participation in citizenship that implies the will of social organization and quality of participation. The research will have as a result: an academic study within the framework of the discipline of social history, in addition to a documentary documented basis with reference to goods and testimonies produced in those organizational experiences. Finally, we will have research and conceptual elements to offer a curricular proposal and approach about collective experiences of citizen participation in the region.

XII UNIVERSITY COMPETITION FOR RESEARCH PROJECTS UNIVERSITY OF CUENCA