Playing the NGO System: How Mothers and Children Design Political Change in the Slums of Bangkok

In the last decades, mothers have been emerging as prominent figures in leading slum dwellers’ social movements for housing rights and against the eviction policies promoted by Bangkok urban authorities. By focusing on two specific ethnographical cases, this chapter describes the characteristics of women’s rising leadership within the slum traditional power structure, once extensively organized around the moral authority of male patrons. It shows how it is connected to NGOs, to local and Western conceptions of motherhood, and to the use slum women make of the humanitarian transnational portrait of their children as victims.