Abstract
This article explores how poor, young men in a Manila relocation site enter into a brotherhood as a means to claim recognition from dominant society. It argues that by joining the brotherhood, which emanates out of a Greekletter fraternity tradition in US and Philippine universities, the young men establish a link to people and networks in power. Drawing on ritual and religious sacrifice theory, the article illustrates how sacrificial violence in initiation rites becomes a performance of worth. This performance of valour and worth do indeed reach dominant society. After exploring the initiation ritual of the young men the article then turns to explore the nature of the Philippine elite. This analysis suggests that while there are several, often competing strands within elite politics (legalistic, moralistic and clientelist), the efforts of the young men end up confirming and reproducing the elite and their own marginalization as unruly, uncouth goons of political machines.
Bobs shouts out in pain as he receives another blow in the initiation rituals of the Tao Gamma Phi fraternity. Tao Gamma Phi or Triskilion Grand Fraternity emerged in 1968 as a university-based fraternity out of the Greek-letter fraternity tradition in the Philippines. As such it has been part of an important element in the reproduction of the elite. Bobs’s ordeal, however, takes place far away from the halls of university; instead, he is being initiated in a poor neighbourhood in what is known as a community chapter. The room is full of young men, called brods (brothers) who sit smoking, joking and talking while the more experienced of them take the whip to Bobs’s buttocks. Bobs is standing, crucifixion-like, his arms stretched to the sides, facing the concrete wall. If he was not blind-folded he would be able to see the dramatic tarpaulin on the wall in front of him; it portrays a lion holding a bloody sword with the words, “Kaunlaran Community Chapter, Triskilion Grand Fraternity, 2009”. The tarpaulin is the only colourful artifact in the otherwise bleak and dilapidated house, located in what is known as Phase 10B in the huge resettlement site, Bagong Silang in the northern part of Metro Manila.
I will return to Bobs’s ordeal below. For our immediate purposes two issues are important: first, in conducting the initiation the brods are violating at least two laws – one outlawing the practices of hazing and other forms of violent initiation (the so-called anti-hazing law of 1995 1 ) and one aiming to protect all children under the age of 18 (the so-called Juvenile Justice Law of 2006 2 ). Secondly, as I will demonstrate below, for the frat members that I interviewed, membership in the fraternity was an attempt to seek recognition beyond the poverty of the resettlement site. Hence, in this paper I ask, how do poor, marginalized young men seek recognition outside the resettlement through engaging in violent and practices that have been outlawed in Philippine law? How do they negotiate issues of illegality and morality and how are their efforts to achieve recognition interpreted by those in power?
In order to explore these questions, I find inspiration in two distinct, yet, in this case, related lines of thought within anthropology, one on illegality and the other on ritual. In line with the overall framing by the editors of the special issue, I find Janet Roitman’s analysis of the “ethics of illegality” (Roitman, 2006) useful. She argues that people in the Chad Basin maintain a clear distinction between what is illegal and what is legitimate or licit. While they are well aware that particular practices are illegal, the practices are not necessarily illegitimate; they may even be the source of moral legitimacy. Similarly, in the Philippines, strong notions of legality co-exist with illegal and predatory yet often legitimate political practices of nepotism, patronage and violence (Quimpo, 2009). As I will show, strands 3 of legality dominate sometimes and in some places, whereas patronage seems to gain the upper-hand elsewhere and other-times. This suggests that we cannot speak of one monolithic form of societal power but should look for variations or dimensions of dominance with different configurations of illegality and legitimacy, where lines distinguishing between what is the state, the elite, or dominant society are entangled and blurred. Similar configurations of illegality and legitimacy are evident in cultural–political rituals of the fraternity. While violent rituals and sacrificial practices are often outlawed, they seem to proliferate in political and religious practices in the Philippines (e.g. Ileto, 1979). This part of the analysis draws on the insights of Maurice Bloch in his work on rituals, rebounding violence and religious experience (Bloch, 1991). Drawing on these inspirations, I argue that the rituals to which Bobs subjected himself do secure a semblance of inclusion that is recognized by parts of the elite in, for instance, the state apparatus or among politicians, but this is not the case all the time and initiates are never recognized by all parts of the elite.
The analysis of the ritual and how it feeds into or is animated by elite politics allows me to draw two conceptual conclusions. First, it is clear that state formation is intimately intertwined with elite politics and politics of patronage in which co-existing yet contradictory strands (legality, patronage and religious sentiments) are weaved into and through each other. This is particularly clear around the many elections on all levels of Philippine society that animate most state and elite politics 4 to the extent that elections are central to what we might call the “language of the state” in the Philippines (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001). Second, I suggest that the sacrificial violence and the illegal practices of the fraternity do not express resistance against elite rule. On the contrary, the illegal practices of the ritual serve to reproduce rather than subvert the powers that be.
I locate my analysis in Bagong Silang, a poor resettlement site in the northern part of Metro-Manila. It was constructed to deal with the perceived density and unmanageability of the city. At its inception, it was called la kubeta or ‘the toilet’ because of the visual impression from the air dominated by thousands and thousands of toilet bowls that marked the individual plots of the vast resettlement site. However, la kubeta is arguably also a fitting name for a place where the human debris or surplus population of Manila’s dense and poor neighbourhoods was flushed out – out of the way, out of sight – to clean up the constantly inundating city (Tadiar, 2005). I begin by exploring the fraternity and its rituals as ways of re-entering society and seeking recognition on the part of marginalized young men. In the second section, I explore the emergence and quality of the Philippine elite and its relation to the state to illustrate the co-existence (simultaneously unproblematic and conflictual) of illegality and legitimacy. In the final section, I summarize the arguments and conclude that while the rituals are illegal, they become legitimate in how they connect with religious sentiments and reproduce the vertical structures of power that ensure the continued marginalization of the brothers in the resettlement site.
Empirically, the paper draws on 10 months of fieldwork in Bagong Silang among frat members, politicians and government official (police and local government). Tao Gamma Phi is a secret organization; one core tenet is ‘never reveal to anyone, or to your friends, not to your family the concerns of the fraternity’. Readers might legitimately ask how I gathered the material presented below. While it certainly takes time to gain the trust of people, access was facilitated by several factors. Firstly, the rituals were legitimate for fraternity members even if they had been prohibited by law. Hence, they were proud of their actions and did not see anything wrong in the rituals, not least because they perceived that it was what also happened at, for instance, the university. Secondly, and related, the secrets of the fraternity were more akin to what Taussig (1999) would call “public secrets” – what nobody can know but many still do. In this way, secrecy becomes part of a performance that is aimed at an audience outside the fraternity – either me, making me an implicated actor or all those who are to recognize the ritual. The secret is only efficient if it is being performed; sacrifice only enables recognition if it is known, at least to some extent. While not all the chapters in Bagong Silang condoned my being at the rituals, they all seemed to take pleasure in my interest in them and what they did – as it is often the case with people, like the brods, who are broadly stigmatized as violent and undisciplined.
1. Brotherhood and ritual in Bagong Silang
“How many light posts are there between Bagong Silang and UP [University of the Philippines]?” Answer: 1968 – the year that Tau Gamma Phi was established in UP. This is just one of many questions that brods use to query each other’s knowledge of the fraternity of which they are members and to weed out the fake. These keys often revolve around the brotherhood’s almost sacred relation to one of the institutions of Philippine national power, the university and the networks that are established there. This relationship to institutions of power, however ephemeral, is one of the important reasons why people in Bagong Silang in the mid-2000s began to join the fraternity in the thousands. When I did fieldwork in Bagong Silang there were more than 50 chapters with up to 100 members. In order to see how this came to be, we need to briefly revisit the history of fraternities and brotherhoods in the Philippines.
Introducing Tau Gamma Phi
Brotherhoods and secret societies have a long history in the Philippines from bands of robbers and social bandits during the Spanish colonial period (Bankoff, 1996) to the revolutionary Katipunan movement of the war of independence in the mid-1890s (Ileto, 1979) to a range of masonic movements and brotherhoods in the last century that have permeated even the highest echelons of society (e.g. universities, political parties and the supreme court) (Vitug, 2010). In this way, brotherhoods and secret societies have been a staple of Philippine political culture and in the reproduction of the elite. Tau Gamma Phi emerged out of the same tradition. Greek-letter fraternities (and sororities) are inspired by the American university fraternities that have proliferated across the US since the early nineteenth century and which have been central in reproducing the male White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite in that country (Syrett, 2009). I shall return to the Philippine elite and its relationship to the state below. The relevant questions in this section are why and how poor and marginalized men began to tap into the iconography of elite reproduction. 5 Three parallel processes probably prompted Tau Gamma Phi to make it to Bagong Silang. First, in the 1990s, people from poor areas enrolled in (largely private) university degree programs aimed at educating the poor in nursing, care giving, hotel and restaurant management and shipping, providing them with skills that would be useful largely in contexts of migration from the Philippines. In this way, the poor were exposed to dominant, popular university culture that also included fraternities. This social form then spread from the low-end schools to the communities whence their students came.
Secondly, due to the discussions and debates around the anti-hazing law, the hitherto secret societies of elite reproduction became popular knowledge, including the rituals of initiation. The Internet has further popularized the secret knowledge of the fraternities. Finally, university-based fraternities relaxed their control of who entered because the elite no longer needed the fraternities to reproduce itself; this happened at an increasingly rapid pace in the context of economic globalization, as we shall see below. As the fraternities no longer played the same role in elite reproduction, groups that were structurally excluded from national recognition and possibility – among them, the young men of Bagong Silang – managed to join brotherhoods in the hope that the fraternity could offer inclusion in the national order of things.
After 2005, the fraternity began to grow. 6 The bulk of the new members of Tau Gamma Phi were young men who came from loosely organized peer groups called “tribes.” Whereas tribes were considered unserious business with few rules (a kids’ game) the brotherhood was for men and was seen as strictly disciplined, renowned and respected across the country. To join the brotherhood, the newcomers (or “neophytes”), especially those from the resettlement site who exhibited raucous and wild behaviour, needed “orientation’.” Orientation involved learning the codes, proper history and moral comportment expected of members. Initiation was a central element of orientation, heavily ritualized and quite violent. With these words, let me return to the ordeals of Bobs.
The making of a Brod
The initiation begins with a prayer to “Enlighten and strengthen our premier Secretary General, Governor General, Municipal Chairmen and Chapter Grand Triskelion and so for them to maintain the highest standard of decision making for a better and more successful Tau Gamma Phi, Triskelion Grand Fraternity.” After the prayer, two members of the fraternity hold the arms of the neophyte, who, blindfolded, faces a wall, standing in a crucifixion-like posture. The master of initiation, the MI, asks what the fraternity name of the neophyte will be. Taking turns, the other brods then hit the neophyte across the upper thighs. At each stroke, the MI reads from the codes and tenets of the organization, beginning with the founding fathers – “I love lord high Vedastro ‘Tito’ Venida, November 17, 1949, A.B. Political Science. Accept?” The neophyte then receives the blow while responding “Accept”. This continues until all of the founding fathers have been accepted along with the codes and tenets. There are strict rules governing the initiation, both in relation to the violence itself, which must be measured and ordered, rather than ruthless, 7 and in relation to dress codes, where the initiate and those wielding the whip must wear long trousers and no accessories. After the initiation, the new member is welcomed by his brothers who celebrate his membership by hosting a tagay, or drinking session, while he recovers from the whipping.
The drama of initiation draws significantly on cultural-religious registers specific to South East Asia, as well as on more general notions of ritual and sacrifice. In his book, Prey into Hunter, Maurice Bloch (1991) explores rituals of initiation in a way that is useful for understanding Tau Gamma Phi’s initiation rites. Bloch explains that the initiate is taken out of his normal context and ritually sacrificed in ways that actually do endanger him physically. Tau Gamma Phi’s initiation, in fact, often leads to life threatening situations as the blood in the thighs clots and prevents circulation. Although initiation generally runs smoothly, it does happen that initiates die, as almost happened in one chapter in early 2010. I was carrying out fieldwork with this chapter when an initiate fell into unconsciousness for several minutes.
Although initiation is sometimes less violent, especially since the anti-hazing and the juvenile justice laws were passed, initiation must involve a level of danger. It is through the violence that the initiate accepts that he gains access to more and more secrets (i.e. the tenets and codes of the organization). In a Bloch-inspired reading, these secrets, accepted in violence, transform the initiate and he is able to access a transcendental level outside and beyond the immediacy of the resettlement area. Each blow gains him access to another secret, another part of the transcendental, and he becomes something different than he was. That the initiate is blindfolded and not allowed to see the whip during initiation also suggests, in keeping with Bloch’s ideas, that the initiate is not able to face the transcendental, but must be left in the “dark,” until the initiation is over.
In many ways, Maurice Bloch’s writings on ritual follow from predecessors like Van Gennep (2004) and Victor Turner (1995) who argued that the initiation entails three phases: initial separation, the liminal phase and the return. Where Bloch differs is in his insistence on what he calls “rebounding violence.” For Bloch, rebounding violence during the liminal phase causes the initiate to lose something of his past, only to return from the world of the transcendental with a piece of it (i.e. the secrets and the discipline of the brotherhood). Possessing this transcendental element, the initiate can “dominate the here and now of which he previously was a part” (Bloch, 1991: 5) and reclaim, in a new form, the vitality he lost in the liminal phase. In this way, it is the violent return that constitutes the political moment of ritual, where the ritual allows individuals to transcend everyday life. To paraphrase Rossella Merlino in her analysis of ritual in the Italian mafia, the rituals transform “a man to a ‘man of honour’ ” (Merlino, 2012). It is precisely through violence that the political merges with the religious as it “affect[s] the new affiliates at an emotional level, add[s] sacrality to the entire experience and eventually provide[s] legitimization to their authority” (Merlino, 2012: 60), despite the obvious illegality of the practices of both fraternity and mafia.
If we look at the initiation through the eyes of Bloch, we can say that what the initiate loses in limbo is the problematic and excessive youth that drinks, engages in excessive violence (drunken brawls, fights, etc.) and lacks the maturity of an adult. Furthermore, following Bloch, the young men, half profane and half sublime, are able to conquer external forces by means of the vitality that they bring back from the transcendental. The question then is – what are these external forces or entities at whom the rebounding violence of the fraternity initiation is aimed? One immediate answer is that other fraternities constitute the victim. In equally ritualized ways, at least in discourse, frat wars, called rumbles, happen with relative frequency. 8 There might be other victims of the rebounding violence as well. In an eloquent analysis, Dan Hirslund (2012) explores the rebounding violence of young Maoists in Nepal. He illustrates that the young cadres sacrifice their youth (Bloch’s vitality lost in limbo) but through the rituals of rebounding violence target the youth that have not chosen the Maoist path. These wayward youth need to be disciplined and transformed through violence just like the initiates. Seen in this light, the victims of rebounding violence in the case of Manila fraternities are, in fact, the young men themselves prior to their ritual transformation, the human debris of la kubeta. In this way, initiation is directed at the young men themselves. However, given their invitation and canvassing of politicians along with the attempt to be recognized by the founding fathers, the practices are arguably also performed to those strands of the elite who are “watching” and assessing the brods’ sacrifice. Hence, far from distancing themselves from society, the Tau Gamma Phi ritual aims to demonstrate and perform discipline and the capacity to sacrifice for a higher cause against the dominant stereotypes casting them as criminal and violent. 9
2. Legality, morality and patronage of the Philippine elite
The initiation ritual aims to demonstrate that the brothers in the slum deserve inclusion in mainstream society and not the structural forms of marginalization that is their most likely fate. To see whether or not this strategy is effective, we need to explore in a greater detail Philippine dominant society. As noted above, we cannot understand the Philippine elite as a monolithic entity; rather, it is made up of several co-existing and often contradictory strands of legality, morality and clientilism weaved in and through each other, strands that traverse the state bureaucracy and the many political families.
Recognition of sorts: Local responses to Tau Gamma Phi
As the brods took the whip to Bobs’ buttocks they were in blatant violation of at least two laws, as I have already mentioned. After the anti-hazing and juvenile justice acts were passed, many universities, especially private ones, prohibited fraternities. Anyone found to be a member of a fraternity could be expelled. For organizations that perceive themselves to be pillars of society, this poses certain dilemmas. These dilemmas are also negotiated in Bagong Silang. For instance, what constitutes standard initiation for the Tau Gammi Phi fraternity has been revised with specific reference to the anti-hazing law. Furthermore, most fraternities do not allow initiates under the age of 18. If they do, as in Chapter 10B where Bobs was initiated, the initiation is quite mild in order to avoid trouble with the law or parents. As Jojo, a favourite interlocutor of mine and a central member of one of the Chapters with a long history in the fraternity said, “We had to minimize the amount of whips because of the laws. It was also becoming too dangerous”. Jojo was here referring to several near-death situations associated with initiations.
Certain government offices in Bagong Silang have been quite concerned about initiation rites, especially those involving children. The Barangay Council for the Protection of Children (BCPC), a body created under the juvenile justice act, had several meetings with Tau Gamma Phi where the former tried to influence the fraternity’s initiation practices. Eric, an employee of BCPC stated in an interview with me, “Actually we don’t want to end the fraternity. We just want them to know the real notion about fraternity”. In this way, Eric taps into general notions of the “uncouth” and “uneducated” people of la kubeta that often dominated the discourse of elite interlocutors in Bagong Silang and beyond. While Eric felt incapable of taking action against the fraternity for its initiation practices, since no one would bring charges against the organization, he nonetheless constantly referred to law and procedure when we discussed initiation rites.
No such concerns about violence have haunted the political class, a group that is much more concerned with winning elections. As I highlight below, political machines dominate Philippine electoral politics, while politicians try to assemble election-winning alliances. Both nationally and locally, the harnessing of Tau Gamma Phi’s voting power would be a prize for most politicians as would the successful recruitment of its many members as the foot soldiers – or possibly the goons – of an electoral campaign. In the 2010 national electoral campaign, there were a number of politicians who promised the fraternity particular favours nationally, most notably the vice-presidential candidate Bayani Fernando whose wife allegedly is a sis (belonging to the Tau Gamma Sorority). Fernando also gave PHP5.000 to the Bagong Silang council to distribute campaign flyers and put up posters, and a story circulated that, if he were elected, brods would have preferential treatment when government jobs opened up after the election. What is more, days before the national election, three politicians were allowed to address the fraternity. Two of them spoke about the general responsibility of the youth to engage in politics, study hard and behave. However, one candidate, the son of the mayor of Caloocan, addressed the fraternity as a fraternity: We promise the proud fraternity of Tau Gamma that should we win the election, we will create an office that will deal with the concerns of the fraternity – to find jobs and to help projects. You will have the full support of Mayor Recom.
The question is, of course, did the elite actually recognize their poor brothers in the resettlement site? As I presented my fieldwork at UP (with several brods present) and talked about the recognition ceremony, a professor rose and said in disgust: “I am a member of Tau Gamma Sigma [the Tau Gamma Sorority] here at UP, and I am shocked about the things you present.” Afterwards she confided to me that the UP chapter had initiated an investigation into the fraternity practices in the community “in order to put a stop to it”. Despite the signature on the paper that Jojo so proudly held up, recognition from dominant society was at best precarious as politicians clamoured for political support one day and morally condemned the poor and their blatant legal transgressions the next. To explore how such contradictions are possible, we need to revisit elite politics in the Philippines.
Philippine elite politics
For good reasons, most scholarly and public commentaries on Philippine politics are derisory and scathing. To understand why and how, we might take a closer look at politics in Bagong Silang. The politician who evoked such strong emotions among the brods was RJ Escheverri, son of the long time mayor of Caloocan City, Recom Escheverri, who has managed to build one of the most efficient political machines in the area. Recom Escheverri entered formal politics in 1998 when he was elected to the House of Representatives as a delegate from the Caloocan district. His political career had actually begun much earlier, however. In 1984, he began to build up a network of powerful political patrons. Armed with numerous alliances he attained a relatively prominent position in the 1998 election, and was thus able to strengthen his already impressive power base in Caloocan City through “pork barrel” politics. 10 In 2004, he ran for mayor in Caloocan City and won by a landslide. In order to further entrench himself and his family, Recom changed political parties in 2010, joining the Liberal Party of President Aquino. This was not Recom’s first party jump, as he had also moved among parties in previous years depending on which one held the presidency, a practice not uncommon in Filipino politics (Hutchcroft and Rocamora, 2003).
In Bagong Silang, Escheverri’s name and his mark (a smiley with a moustache) are everywhere – in the concrete of the roads he constructed, in the sports halls he built, on the gates he installed, on the water tanks he painted. He commands state resources such as the police and the fire department for electoral purposes. State employees understand, in fact, that their income depends on Recom. In this way, Recom is the incarnation of the trapo, the tra-ditional po-litician, but also the “dirty rag” in Filipino. He is true only to the interest of his own family (McCoy, 1993). He and his allies seem to be engaged in rather predatory practices where they, through their hold on state institutions, use these resources to their own benefit (Quimpo, 2009). Central to these practices is the constant strengthening of Recom’s political machine through the dispensing of patronage across patron–client networks. In other words, Recom embodies the political practices of ‘guns, goons, and gold’ (Sidel, 1999). He is the modern and urban cacique or political (land)lord that Benedict Anderson (1988) explored. Yet, while a set of strong political families have largely controlled Filipino politics, it remains a competitive system where no family can assume perpetual hegemony. This competitive aspect is part of the resilience of the system, as Anderson argues, because the horizontal competition between political families obscures the fact that power is vertically concentrated in the elite (Anderson in Hutchcroft and Rocamora, 2003: 273). Despite a host of anti-corruption and patronage policies and agencies, trapo politics survive in a political culture where illegality and legitimacy are not seen as being in conflict in the daily working of the patronage system; on the contrary, they are almost each other’s prerequisites as political patrons would find it difficult to maintain legitimacy and win elections if they did not dispense proceeds from corrupt practices or employ violence or threats of violence against their political opponents.
While the system still exists, embodied especially in former president Arroyo (Quimpo, 2009), it has also been challenged due to the ever-expanding electorate of poor people, continual pressure from the radical left and critiques levied by an urban middle class. Today, it is not possible to win if one does not pay tribute to la masa, the expanding electorate, if only in a transparently populist manner, as was the case with Estrada’s win in the 1998 presidential elections (Hedman, 2010) or through the inclusion of the poor in Escheverri-style clientelist networks. Even so, sections of the elite often view la masa with considerable contempt, viewing the poor as uncouth and uneducated, even morally reprehensible. These kinds of disdain exist especially in the case of the slum and resettlement site occupants. And while the radical left has surely faltered (Abinales, 1996), it has left an indelible mark on politics by introducing a critical discourse that has entered mainstream politics through the many candidates and elected officials who used to belong to the radical left and the thousands of peoples’ organizations (PO’s) and non-governmental organization’s (NGO’s) that proliferate across the Philippine political landscape. Finally, a highly critical and often well-educated urban middle class also challenges the traditional politicians (Coronel et al., 2007; Hedman, 2010).
It is in this way that I speak of dimensions of often contradictory elite politics where traditional, clientelist and even predatory politics coexist with forms of progressive politics and legality in the electoral system as well as inside the state bureaucracy. While we can identify particular strands in certain sectors of the elite and in some offices of the state, these strands cannot be reduced unproblematically to particular actors or bureaucratic institutions. Take Eric, for instance, the employee of the Barangay Council for the Protection of Children, introduced above. While he is not elite in terms of wealth, he personifies many of the strands I have identified here. He is a proud member of a Catholic charismatic organization called Couples for Christ and was deeply contemptuous of the fraternities and the kinds of sexuality and religion they exercised; he was also able, at a whim, to cite laws and act judiciously in his official capacity; and when his political patron lost the election, he lost his job. In this way, Eric personified each strand in different ways and at different times.
3. Revisiting fraternal recognition
In this article, I have explored how poor young men in a marginalized resettlement site claim a form of recognition through culturally intelligible but illegal rituals. Through an analysis of the ritual of initiation into the Tau Gamma Phi fraternity and the resulting rebounding violence, I argued that the politico-religious ritual was part of a performance in which the brothers attempt to convince themselves as well as members of the elite that they were worthy of inclusion into a masculine national community. By connecting, in rather stark ways, to historically and religiously recognizable cultural forms, stressing bodily discipline and sacrifice, they were able to establish transcendental links to parts of the elite that have emerged in post-independence Philippines. Furthermore, their number and potential as a voting block for the electoral machines of powerful politicians enabled a form of recognition. Their blatant breaking of several laws was a source of concern for themselves as well as for state agencies, but rule breaking is not a natural disqualifier; rather, it echoes the contradictory nature of Philippine politics where strands of legality exist parallel to moral contempt for the masses as well as rather extreme forms of law breaking, patronage and violence. While some forms of recognition do come the brods’ way, they are not seen by the elite as equals. Rather, inclusion is based on their numbers and potential loyalties to politicos and strong patrons. What is more, their inclusion in a vertically organized political machine in many ways confirms middle class stereotypes of the violent and uncouth masa in the throes of patron–client systems and trapo politicians, as expressed for instance by the senior university professor who was supposedly allied to the brods in the slum. In this way, the practices of the brotherhood help maintain the power of the elite. In conclusion, the illegal practices of the brotherhood should not be seen as acts of resistance. Rather, as argued by Linda Green, we must see the practices as “accommodation and collusion” (Green, 2004: 319) that serve to reproduce rather than subvert political and economic power, while confirming for the political authorities that they have the right to rule the uncouth and undisciplined masa of la kubeta.