The Rebellion of the Pots: A Performance? of Female Popular Resistance to Hunger (from the Colonial Period to the Chilean Social Uprising)

Abstract

This article analyzes the olla común (communal soup kitchen) as a performative act of popular resistance, historically led by women in response to humanitarian crises marked by hunger. The olla común is understood not merely as a practice of solidarity for survival, but as a social performance in the sense proposed by scholars such as Victor Turner and Diana Taylor: the body and collective action serve as forms of memory, protest, and social transformation. The olla común emerges as a mode of political agency that subverts mechanisms of exclusion and control—not through direct confrontation, but through communal organization that symbolically exposes, challenges, and dismantles the repressive and neoliberal structures responsible for the precarization of life. In this context, the act of cooking and sharing becomes a political gesture that confronts the dominant order, revealing its structural violence and reconfiguring social bonds through solidarity and everyday resistance.