We live in a regional context marked by a profound multidimensional crisis that manifests itself simultaneously in the social, economic, environmental, and political spheres throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. This crisis has a particularly harsh impact on marginalized communities, and disproportionately affects women and LGBTQ+ people, who suffer from processes of structural and environmental impoverishment: the combination of persistent material deprivation with chronic environmental risks stemming from territorial inequality, lack of socio-urban integration, pollution, precarious housing, and unequal access to common and essential goods such as water.

In this context, working-class neighborhoods sustain social reproduction daily through community care networks that extend beyond the domestic sphere and are organized into collective survival practices: soup kitchens and community centers, women's and LGBTQ+ shelters, health posts, after-school programs, and socio-environmental initiatives. These efforts unfold in contexts marked by institutional violence, the rise of drug trafficking, informal employment, urban extractivism, and territorial fragmentation. At the same time, they constitute practices that build community and sustain life where the state withdraws. This dual nature—a response to inequality and the daily production of the common good—reveals a Latin American specificity that requires recognition, analysis, and visibility.

This crisis is compounded by the hegemony exerted by mainstream media, through their various digital platforms, and other emerging digital outlets that contribute to dominant narratives with massive reach. These media outlets produce and reproduce stigmatizing discourses, social prejudices, disinformation campaigns, and hate speech that shape collective imaginaries and condition public life. These narratives reinforce the criminalization of poverty, delegitimize grassroots organizations, and trivialize or render invisible the territorial, environmental, and social conflicts that affect our communities.

Faced with this scenario, popular and alternative communication, rooted in local communities and the individual and collective experiences of their inhabitants, takes on a strategic character for challenging established narratives, dismantling fake news, recovering collective memories, and constructing counter-hegemonic narratives oriented toward social, environmental, and gender justice. Being able to speak in the first person, from each country and each neighborhood, making visible the concrete problems of these territories, the demands and aspirations of their inhabitants, and producing narratives that challenge dominant discourses, is a central tool for defending human rights and free and independent communication.

We believe that the systemic political crisis the region is experiencing also falls within this framework. We live immersed in a logic of political construction subordinated to electoral cycles, which reduces public discourse to disputes over positions, personalities, and intra-party tensions, with inward-looking debates far removed from the real concerns of society. This dynamic has deepened the disconnect between institutional politics and the people, manifesting itself in declining party membership, increased voter abstention, a lack of genuine opportunities for youth participation, and a crisis of legitimacy for institutions inherited from the 20th century.

The social challenge to this form of politics has been repurposed, in a way that serves the interests of concentrated power, as a challenge to politics itself as a collective and sustainable tool for transformation. This has enabled individualistic, meritocratic, and "every man for himself" solutions, which in every case end up harming and worsening the living conditions of the popular sectors. At the same time, the closed logic of political parties has demonstrated their inability to build processes of territorial political articulation on a Latin American scale, beyond circumstantial ties between governments.

From this situated perspective, we seek to revitalize the Working Group "Communication, Power, and Territory," articulating the network of grassroots community assemblies in Latin America, with a long-term political vision that transcends electoral dynamics and short-term speculation. We are committed to building popular power to challenge agendas and ensure that the priorities of working-class neighborhoods prevail in public debate and in the policies of various governments, through organization, data, and authentic narratives.

This strategy is also reflected in the strengthening of our multimedia platform, La Garganta Poderosa, deepening its historical social and community perspective with an emphasis on grassroots environmentalism, and articulating collective productions, collaborative coverage, and advocacy efforts with other grassroots media outlets in the region. Our 21 years as a social organization demonstrate the power of popular knowledge in dialogue with academic knowledge, and the need to produce situated knowledge, built from the ground up and for the communities, connecting with mainstream agendas and issues of interest to the middle class, and reaching broad and diverse audiences through interviews with figures such as Lionel Messi, Diego Armando Maradona, Pope Francis, René from Calle 13, Lula da Silva, Roger Waters, Noam Chomsky, Dilma Rousseff, Francia Márquez, Rigoberta Menchú, Rafael Correa, Pepe Mujica, and other personalities from the world of politics, culture, sports, and the social sciences.

Experiences such as the Observatorio Villero (Slum Observatory), Latin American territorial assemblies, and the leading role of women community leaders express a conception of research as a practice of social justice: producing information not for the market, but for collective transformation, recognizing communities not as objects of study, but as key agents of change. In a context of multidimensional regional crisis, contesting meanings, producing situated knowledge, and strengthening grassroots communication is a central political task for sustaining life and building more just futures in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The argumentative axis of the working group has the following theoretical, social and intellectual relevance in the sociopolitical context:

a) Theoretical relevance: to foster a network of Latin American assemblies, with their own dynamics of political, territorial, and institutional articulation, their own formats and communication products at the Latin American level, and a mechanism like the Slum Observatory, where the residents of impoverished communities are shifted from being objects of study to becoming agents of change, designing, planning, and constructing their own statistics to drive public policy. It is from this territorial perspective that popular communication and environmentalism gain strength and their own characteristics; it is from this perspective that statistics are generated that represent, both in their construction and their approach, the specificities of Latin American working-class neighborhoods. Studying community work, which is the bastion of building territorial popular power for social movements, allows us to decolonize our perspective, recognize the heterogeneity of the continent, and strengthen the production of knowledge that arises from the organized communities themselves, thus contributing to a more just and complex understanding of the structural inequalities in our communities, enriching the theoretical debate, and offering concrete tools for social action and political advocacy.

b) Social relevance: In the midst of the advance of the far right worldwide and particularly in Latin America, with governments such as Noboa's in Ecuador, Milei's in Argentina, Peña's in Paraguay, Paz's in Bolivia, the probable triumph of Kast in Chile, Bukele's in El Salvador, the triumph of the right in Honduras, and with the tariff, financial, media and even military attacks and reprisals of the Donald Trump government in Latin America, in a logic of imperialist intervention, having Latin America and the Caribbean as its backyard, we believe it is fundamental to strengthen the network of articulations of the Latin American social movement, based on a regional popular communication network, which makes visible the environmental problems, the violation of human rights, the need for public policies; The project involves generating socioeconomic statistics for low-income neighborhoods in each country through the Slum Observatory to influence the political and media agenda, and strengthening community-based initiatives through neighborhood leadership, the various social technologies created by each community to address its structural problems, community care work, and the importance of studying and recognizing it, since women in low-income neighborhoods dedicate more hours to caregiving than in any other social sector, limiting their labor market participation, restricting their political involvement, and exacerbating the feminization of poverty. This reality is aggravated in contexts where a lack of environmental infrastructure forces them to invest time and physical effort in tasks such as accessing water, managing waste, or coping with the effects of floods, heat waves, or pollution. Measuring and analyzing these tasks reveals the magnitude of this contribution and its direct impact on collective well-being.

c) Intellectual relevance: It fosters a field of thought on building popular power from a glocal perspective (think globally, act locally), from the standpoint of popular movements autonomous from governments, but which understand their organizational, management, mobilization, and influence capacities as key vectors for driving state policies, with a view to building a community base for the Latin American Patria Grande (Greater Homeland). In turn, it opens a whole path for reflecting on communication repertoires, organizational aesthetics, the generation of quantitative and qualitative statistics, and the analysis of time use and community care work in working-class neighborhoods. This allows us to make visible the invisible foundations that sustain social reproduction in contexts of urban and rural poverty, where women and diverse groups bear the brunt of unpaid work. Addressing care work from the perspective of working-class communities provides situated knowledge that challenges dominant research frameworks and is complemented by prioritizing critical frameworks. Data production, built from within community organizations themselves, with the participation of their assemblies and under the principles of situated research, democratizes knowledge production and challenges hegemonic epistemologies, contributing to the debate of ideas, the integration of actions, and the emergence of new voices. This not only expands the available evidence but also strengthens local capacities and challenges established narratives in the academic, media, and political spheres. Community-based care work constitutes a form of socioeconomic organization that sustains networks of solidarity, democratic participation, and the building of citizenship in territories that have historically been excluded from full access to rights. In this sense, research contributes intellectual value by connecting concrete practices of daily life with structural debates about the State, inequality, climate justice, and development models in the Global South.