Housing cooperativism for mutual help.

Education, experience and fight in Uruguay

Abstract

Housing cooperatives have been an effective response, with 50 years of history, for more than
38,000 families, towards which they feel belonging and appropriation. The cooperatives of mutual
help of users are grouped in the Uruguayan Federation of Cooperatives of Housing by Mutual Help
(FUCVAM), which is one of the most important social movements of Uruguay at present. Training
has occupied a relevant place in the organization, with diverse discontinuities and tensions.
The article analyzes these tensions raised between technical and militant knowledge, between
political and technical education (management) and the formative effects of the organization
and mobilization and the devices convened for such purposes. In particular, the moments of fight,
fundamentally of resistance to dictatorship, as spaces for training and political socialization.