Lived Experiences of Marginality in an Argentine Slum

‘This is a Lot Like the Bronx, isn’t it?
’
Lived Experiences of Marginality in an
Argentine Slum*
JAVIER AUYERO
Snapshots of ‘the other side’

‘Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes . . . Yo no sé!!’ Cesar Vallejo, Los heraldos negros.
The (potential) bicycle thief

Roberto is 35 years old, and has been living in the slum called Villa Paraı́so for almost ten
years. He works in a textile factory a half an hour from his home, where he earns a peso
and twenty cents per hour (1 peso = 1 US dollar). The round-trip bus ticket costs one peso,
‘almost an hour of my work is spent on the ticket’. He used to go to work on his bicycle,
‘but now the bike is broken, and I don’t have the money to fix it’.
The cocaine cops

Cachún is a high-school drop out, who has been unemployed for the last eight months.
Last week, he was coming back from a bar in the city (Buenos Aires) with some friends.
They were high on cocaine, and the police stopped them near Villa Paraı́so. The cops
pushed them up against the wall, and made them stand spread-eagled to be searched for
drugs. ‘The cops took my coke’, Cachún tells me, ‘cut a line on the hood of their car, and
snorted it . . . can you believe it, man?’ The cops, a friend of Cachún adds, are ‘all crazy
. . . they become cops so that they can smoke pot and sniff coke for free!’
One of those hard knocks in somebody’s life

Juan, an old-time resident of Villa Paraı́so, is in his late forties. He was a carpenter until
the factory he worked at for more than ten years shut down. He is now a garbage
collector. He heads for work every day at 3.30am. That hour of the morning is ‘kind of
dangerous here. I already changed my bus stop three times, because the kids on the corner
. . . are always doing drugs . . . and they began to ‘charge me a toll’, you know, a coin or a
cigarette . . . if I didn’t have it, they wouldn’t let me pass. . . The other day they stole the
two pesos I had for the bus, and they even got angry with me because that was all the
* This research was assisted by a grant from the Joint Committee on Latin American and Caribbean Studies of
the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by
the Ford Foundation. I wish to thank Deborah Poole, Charles Tilly, Loı̈c Wacquant, Elizabeth Jelin, and Linda
Allegro for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. I also wish to thank the two IJURR
reviewers for their critical remarks. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Graduate Student
Conference, New York University, April 1997.
ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
46 Javier Auyero
money I had at the time’. Half-jokingly, but with an expression of grief on his face, he
recounts what the robbers told him: ‘Come on, man. . . You are a grown-up. . . Aren’t you
ashamed of having only two pesos?’
A stigmatized space
Catalina is a high-school drop out who has been unemployed for the past six months. She
will soon turn 26. She says that she does not like to live in Villa Paraı́so at all. ‘I would
like to cross Rosario street, and live on the other side’. Rosario is the street that divides
the slum from an adjacent working-class neighbourhood, Villa Rubi. I ask her if she has
ever faced any sort of discrimination because she lives in Villa Paraı́so. ‘I never say that I
live here, when they ask me, I say that I live in Cóspito City, on my ID it doesn’t say
anything about Villa Paraı́so. . .’. She adds: ‘When you go to work, or when you have
friends, it is like a conflict, you know? Because people bad-mouth the slum, and I used to
be embarrassed, you know? I didn’t want to tell anybody that I lived in the slum, because
I knew that most of the things that were said about the slum were true; there are good
people and bad people. I had friends that came to visit me and were robbed, with guns . . .
and what can you do about that? Your own friend tells you that she is not coming to your
house. . . That is the conflict’.
In her most recent book, Argentinean cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo (1996) captures the
process of the dualization of Argentine society better than many sociological analyses.
Her Instantáneas is divided into three sections: ‘From this side’, ‘From the other side’ and
‘Everything is television’. Whether they intend to or not, these titles nicely convey the
image of the polarized and fragmented society Argentina has slowly developed into over
the last two decades: two ‘sides’ and an all-encompassing media.1 According to Mingione
(1991), these two apparently contradictory processes — fragmentation and polarization
— can be understood as simultaneous and mutually reinforcing. We should realize, he
asserts, that social structures might become more and more diversified ‘but that the
micro-typologies tend to concentrate around two major poles, or macro-typologies, which
differ greatly in terms of conditions of existence, life-chances, and the quantity and
quality of available social resources’ (Mingione, 1991: 436). Both extremes, ‘this side’
and ‘the other side’ in Sarlo’s image, those of sumptuous wealth and complete destitution,
blossom side by side in contemporary Argentina.
On ‘this side’, the landscape is that of most advanced societies: the luxurious wealth
of an allegedly cosmopolitan bourgeoisie. The urban scenery’s ornamentation is similar to
that of other ‘global cities’: an increasing number of — to quote Saskia Sassen —
‘expensive restaurants, luxury housing, luxury hotels, gourmet shops, boutiques, French
hand laundries and special cleaners’ (Sassen, 1991: 9). On ‘the other side’, the spectacle
is that of many third-world countries, and is presented in some chapters of Sarlo’s book as
an obscure and impenetrable drama: death, violence, hunger, abandonment, home-
lessness, child labour, street predators and poor shanty towns.
Based on life-stories, in-depth interviews, and informal conversations I carried out
with slum dwellers during an intensive year of fieldwork2 (1996), this article focuses on
the lived experiences of the inhabitants of a slum situated on ‘the other side’: Villa
Paraı́so. The article brings together structural (objective) trends of rising unemployment,
1 For different analyses of this process of polarized fragmentation, see Nun (1987), Villareal (1985; 1996),
Minujin (1992) and Torrado (1992).
2 Fieldwork was carried out from December 1995 to February 1996 and from July 1996 to January 1997, as
part of my doctoral dissertation project. The original aim of my fieldwork research was to reconstruct a
history of problem-solving in a poor neighbourhood in Greater Buenos Aires, with the purpose of
illustrating the increasing relevance of ‘clientelist’ arrangements in the way in which poor people solve
their everyday survival problems. Specifically, I studied the complex and changing relationships between
problem-solving networks linked to the Peronist Party and the survival strategies of slum dwellers.
ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

Lived experiences of marginality in an Argentine slum 47
underemployment, educational exclusion and welfare retrenchment, and their experiential

(subjective) correlates, i.e. the way in which these structural processes are perceived and
translated into concrete emotions, cognitions and actions by the residents of the slum.
Villa Paraı́so is located in the city of Cóspito, in the southern part of the Conurbano
Bonaerense3 bordering the Federal Capital of Argentina. It is one of the oldest and largest
slums in the country (approximately 15,000 inhabitants according to the last population
census) (INDEC, 1993).
The first part of this article examines the political economic context of deepening
marginalization of the slum population during the last two decades. I pay special attention
to the mutually reinforcing processes of massification of under- and unemployment,
impoverishment and state retrenchment, processes that harshly affect the conditions of
existence in poor neighbourhoods.
The necessary background from which to analyse the form that these processes take
in the slum forms the second part of the article, which provides a brief reconstruction of
the history of this enclave from its origins as a swampy wasteland to the present. This
history is the product of a particular interaction between macro-structural forces, state
policies and the active engagement which slum dwellers — as individuals and sometimes
through collective organizations — construct with those ‘external’ pressures.
The third part of the article analyses the impact of increasing marginalization on the
lived experiences of slum dwellers in Villa Paraı́so. In particular, it focuses on (1) the
dominant antagonisms that divide the residents of this destitute neighbourhood: ‘Us
versus the youngsters’, ‘Us (the Argentines) versus immigrant workers’, ‘Us versus the
drugs’; and (2) the feeling of social isolation and abandonment that pervades much of the
harsh reality of slum dwellers. The article finds some experiential similarities between
slum dwellers in Argentina and residents of other ‘territories of urban relegation’4 in
advanced societies, and suggests an agenda for future cross-national research.
Recognizing that ‘declining economic growth rates in many Third World countries,
and austerity policies implemented by debt-ridden governments, have caused urban
working and lower class living standards to plunge’, as Susan Eckstein writes in an article
in which she evaluates part of the research done on inner-city slums and shantytowns, and
in answer to her observation that there ‘have been few ‘in-depth’ community studies of
city poor under the changing economic conditions’ (Eckstein, 1990a: 168), this article
hopes to contribute to an understanding of the impacts that macro-structural
transformations are having on enclaves of urban poverty, based less on the weight of
popular imagery and more on a foundation of serious research.
Coping with marginality behind the ‘invisible wall’

The languishing of the wage-labour economy, the casualization of blue-collar jobs,5 and
the particular combination of malign and benign state neglect provoked by structural
adjustment policies6 cause widespread material deprivation, persistent joblessness and
misery, and the unmerciful pressure of economic necessity in the working-class
neighbourhoods, slums and shantytowns of Argentina. The four episodes described in the
opening section are the best examples of what I label — paraphrasing Clark’s (1965)
3 The Conurbano Bonaerense is the area comprising the nineteen districts in Argentina’s industrial heartland
surrounding the Federal Capital. The names of people and places in this paper have been changed to ensure
anonymity.
4 I am borrowing the expression from Wacquant (1996b).
5 See CEB (1995), Beccaria and Lopez (1996), Cieza and Beyreuther (1996), Lozano and Felletti (1996) and
Murmis and Feldman (1996).
6 See LoVuolo and Barbeito (1993), Cetrángolo and Golbert (1995), Golbert (1996) and Prévot Schapira
(1996).

48 Javier Auyero
seminal analysis of the ‘dark ghetto’ — the cry of the slum: a cry that comes from behind
the ‘invisible wall’ that now separates Villa Paraı́so from the rest of society. The ‘real
wall’ — a 10-foot cement barrier — constructed to hide the slum from the eyes of
‘respectable citizens’ more than forty years ago, has disappeared (some of its pieces are
now part of the slum houses),7 but another wall has taken its place: during the last two
decades an invisible wall of economic redundancy, educational exclusion, state
abandonment and sustained stigmatization has been erected. The above ‘cries’ synthesize
the paramount reality of slum dwellers: a highly oppressive mix of everyday violence and
humiliation, state corruption, educational failure, joblessness or extremely precarious
occupation attachment, and increasing drug-consumption and trafficking. This blend
fosters pervasive social and physical insecurity.
Almost three decades ago, in what would later become one of Latin America’s most
original and controversial contributions to the social sciences, a group of sociologists
tackled the relationship between the structural character of unemployment in the region
and the escalation of urban marginality. Working within a structural-historical neo-
Marxist perspective, they recovered the notion of ‘marginality’ from the realm of
modernization theories (represented by sociologist Gino Germani and the DESAL
school),8 which focused on the lack of integration of certain social groups into society due
to their (deviant) values, perceptions and behavioural patterns. Marginal groups,
according to this approach, lack the psychological and psycho-social attributes deemed
necessary to participate in ‘modern society’. Emerging in the transition to modern
industrial society, marginality was thought to be the product of the coexistence of beliefs,
values, attitudes and behaviours of a previous, more ‘traditional’ stage. Rural migrants
were seen as carriers of a ‘baggage of traditional norms and values which prevent(ed)
their successful adaptation to the urban style of life’ (Portes, 1972: 272).
In contrast with this behaviourist and value-centred approach, the structural-historical
perspective on marginality focused on the process of import substitution industrialization
and its intrinsic inability to absorb the growing mass of the labour force. At that time, Nun et
al. (1968) understood that the functioning of what they called ‘the dependent labour market’
was generating an excessive amount of unemployment.9 This surplus population tran-
scended the logic of the Marxian concept of the industrial reserve army and led the authors to
coin the term marginal mass. The marginal mass was neither superfluous nor useless; it was
marginal because it was rejected by the same system that had created it. Thus, the marginal
mass was a permanent structural feature never to be absorbed by the hegemonic, capitalist
sector of the economy, not even during its expansionary cyclical phases.
As the structural-historical school on marginality anticipated, the structural character
of the mass of the unemployed has multiple effects, most of which operate in
contemporary Argentina in a way that not even the authors of the ‘Marginality School’
could have predicted.10 These effects are: (1) the depressing of incomes; (2) the
7 Although there are some discrepancies concerning the exact year in which the ‘real wall’ was built, the
only written history of this place implies that it was built between 1953–4 (Lazcano, 1987).
8 See, for example, Germani (1966; 1980) and DESAL (1969; 1970). For a review of different approaches to
the study of marginality in Latin America, see Portes (1972), Perlman (1976) and Kay (1989). This
behaviourist and value-centred approach to ‘marginality’ seems strikingly similar to the current emphasis
on the alleged emergence of an ‘underclass’ of urban — usually black — poor in the USA. Although I will
not tackle the issue here, the thorough criticism that this approach to marginality was subjected to can be a
useful tool to contest the academic pitfalls and political dangers (Gans, 1991) of the ambiguous notion of
the ‘underclass’.
9 See also Nun (1969; 1972).
10 The ‘Marginality School’ sparked a wave of criticism (Cardoso, 1971; Roberts, 1978; Kay, 1989; see also
Roberts, 1996; Belvedere, 1997). My point here is neither to vindicate this approach nor to provide a full
fledged review of the critics but to acknowledge the fact that the relationship between marginality and un/
underemployment has been the object of serious consideration by Latin American social scientists. Current
levels of un/underemployment prove that, at least in what concerns the (mal)functioning of the labour
markets, the authors of the Marginality School were right on target.

deterioration of working conditions; and (3) the worsening of contractual guarantees for
the labour force. Thirty years later, in addition to this ‘industrial’ marginality, Argentina
is experiencing a novel kind of marginality: one related to the functioning of the
globalized postfordist economy, the dynamics of the ‘early and non-modern tertiarization’
(LoVuolo and Barbeito, 1993), and the resolute adoption by the state of neoliberal
adjustment policies.
Although it has certain traits in common with the ‘new poverty’ of advanced societies
(McFate et al., 1996; Mingione, 1996), this ‘new marginality’ also has its own distinctive
features, namely: (1) the structural character of joblessness (massive blue-collar
destruction, concentration of unemployment among the least skilled and least educated,
and persistency of long-term unemployment) (Iñiguez and Sanchez, 1995; Beccaria and
Lopez, 1996); (2) massification of underemployment and increasing insecurity of the
labour force (casualization of wage-labour relations) (Cieza and Beyreuther, 1996;
Nudler, 1996); (3) functional disconnection of employment from macro-economic
changes (Lozano and Feletti, 1996; Rofman, 1996); and (4) populist/semi-welfare state
retrenchment (LoVuolo and Barbeito, 1993; CEB, 1995).
(1) and (2) dovetail with a deep process of downgrading in the manufacturing sector
which includes: the decline of unionized workers, deterioration of wages, and the
proliferation of sweatshops and of industrial homework. All in all, the four points entail a
process that — although with different rhythms and structural causes — is analogous to
the one taking place in more advanced societies (Sassen, 1991), namely, a reorganization
of the capital-labour relation in which two simultaneous processes prevail: (1)
maximization of the use of low-wage labour; and (2) minimization of the effectiveness
of the mechanisms which have traditionally empowered labour vis-à-vis capital.
Hyperunemployment
Argentina’s rate of unemployment for the economically active population rose from 5.0%
in 1974 to 18.6% in 1995. Underemployment rose from 5.4% in 1974 to 11.3% in 1995.
Since the launching of the Menem-Cavallo’s ‘Convertibility Plan’ (1991) unemployment
has increased 200% in Argentina.
The Conurbano Bonaerense, which contains 24.4% of Argentina’s total population
(8,440,000 inhabitants) in 1.2% of its territory, has the largest industrial park of the
country, representing 74.4% of the total employment of the state of Buenos Aires and
62.3% of its total production. It is the region most affected by the process of de-
industrialization and its subsequent hyper-unemployment. According to Cieza and
Beyreuther (1996: 3), the passage of thousands of workers from factory work to informal
and precarious jobs is the most important phenomenon in the last 15 years. Numerous
plant closings and massive layoffs constitute the paramount experience of thousands of
working families. Between 1991 and 1995, there was a 277% increase in the number of
unemployed people.11 Unemployment rates doubled between 1991 and 1994, and
doubled again in the 1994–5 period.
In 1995, the unemployment rate in the Conurbano was 22.6% of the economically
active population (which amounts to 843,840 people). Unemployment and under-
employment amounted to 33.8% of the population.12 For large segments of the working
class, mass joblessness resulted in a straightforward deproletarianization. As Iñiguez and
Sanchez explain:
11 According to a governmental research institute the increase in unemployment since the launching of the
convertibility plan in 1991 was 300% (CEB, 1995).
12 Only 4% of the unemployed received unemployment insurance. Following Therborn (1986, quoted in
Mingione, 1996: 26), these are punitive forms of unemployment (low or no subsidies) as opposed to the
compensated forms (accompanied by sufficient subsidies) that prevail in some advanced societies. See
Iñiguez and Sanchez (1995).

50 Javier Auyero
If something characterizes the change in the Conurbano Bonaerense’s landscape it is the

shutdowns of industries and the subsequent transformation of the industrial workers into
unemployed, marginals or workers of the informal sector (Iñiguez and Sanchez, 1995: 10, my
translation).
In the last ten years, the Conurbano Bonaerense lost 5508 industrial plants, and between
1991 and 1995 the manufacturing industry eliminated 200,000 jobs. The rise in
unemployment has not affected every sector of the economy in the same way, nor has it
impacted the entire population in a similar manner. The manufacturing industry was the
most affected sector of the economy. In May 1991, 26.7% of the employed population in
the Conurbano was working in the manufacturing industry. Four years later, this rate
decreased to 23.1%. In contrast, the ‘commerce, hotels and restaurants’ branch of the
economy which comprised 21.1% of the jobs in May 1991, increased to 23.3% by May
1995. In this period, the ‘commerce, hotels and restaurants’ sector had 70,000 more
workers. The most striking increase takes place in the ‘transportation, storage and
communications’ branch of the economy: taking 100 as a base in 1991, the figure is 162
in May 1995. Yet, it is important to note that a third of the new jobs produced in the
commercial sector corresponds to the self-employed (CEB, 1995; Lozano and Felletti,
1996).
Unemployment in Conurbano, and in the country as a whole, seems like an ‘epidemic
disease’ (Kessler, 1996) that threatens everybody in the same way.13 Yet, contrary to the
national idiom that emphasizes the global, general and transitory character of
unemployment in the 1990s, it is neither randomly distributed nor short-lived. As in
other parts of the world (McFate et al., 1995; Mingione, 1996; Wilson, 1996),
unemployment hits certain groups harder than others: the higher rates of unemployment
can be found among the lowest income groups, those with the lowest levels of education,
those with the least skills, and the young.
Secondary-school dropouts have the highest unemployment rates. As mentioned, the
average unemployment rate in the Conurbano was 22.6% in May 1995, and for
secondary-school dropouts the average unemployment rate was 26.8%. For those who
hold a university degree the rate of unemployment is 8.7% (CEB, 1995; see also Murmis
and Feldman, 1996). The younger population is greatly affected by the increase in
unemployment: 51.8% of the people between 15 and 19 were unemployed in May 1995,
according to official figures (EPH-INDEC, 1996).
Lozano and Feletti (1996) also show that unemployment hits the poor harder than
other groups. Taking the unemployment rate of Greater Buenos Aires,14 which in May
1995 was 20.2% for the total economically active population, the average unemployment
rate of the lowest income groups was 38.8%. Poor people, thus, have to confront much
higher levels of unemployment.
Unemployment also weighs disproportionately on unskilled workers as they find their
entrance into the job market increasingly difficult. As Murmis and Feldman (1996)
consistently show, in 1995 unskilled workers represented 27.5% of the employed
population and 39% of those unemployed in Greater Buenos Aires. Those in the ‘informal
sector’ were strongly affected: 62% of the unemployed were holding casual and
precarious jobs. Construction workers and domestic service workers were particularly
affected by the ‘epidemic disease’. They represented 13.9% of the employed population
and 29.8% of those unemployed. I highlight these two occupations because, as we will
see, they are (or rather, they were) the two most important sources of employment for the
inhabitants of Villa Paraı́so.
13 Several surveys show that the fear of losing their job is widespread among the Argentine population (Galli
and Malfe, 1996; Murmis and Feldman, 1996).
14 Greater Buenos Aires comprises the Conurbano Bonaerense and the Federal Capital.

Thus unemployment is neither generalized nor transitory. Indeed, there has been a
notorious increase in the average duration of unemployment. A large proportion of those
unemployed have been without a job for at least six months (25.9% in Greater Buenos
Aires), becoming what is technically known as the long-term unemployed (Murmis and
Feldman, 1996: 200).
Poverty, inequality and the state

The year 1991 marks a vast change in the functional connection between macro-economic
trends and levels of employment (Lozano and Feletti, 1996; Monza, 1996). From then on,
GDP growth is accompanied by an increase in unemployment. According to the data of
the National Central Bank and the Ministry of Economy, the Real GDP growth was 8.9%
in 1991, 8.7% in 1992, 6.0% in 1993 and 7.4% in 1994. In this expansionary phase of the
economy, the unemployment rate grew, according to the same sources, from 6.9% to
10.7%. Considering the leading industrial firms, the functional disconnection between
economic growth and employment can be clearly grasped. There was a 35% increase in
their GDP between 1991 and 1994, and a 10% reduction of their personnel among leading
industrial firms.
Not surprisingly — due to the strong correlation between them15 — poverty
accompanied the growth of unemployment described in the previous section. In 1980,
11.5% of households were below the ‘poverty line’ in Greater Buenos Aires. In 1994,
20.4% of households were below this line, and in 1995 one out of four households were
below the same line (25.8%).16 In 1995, the officially estimated value of monthly family
expenses was $976.19.17 Thirty-nine percent of households in Greater Buenos Aires
earned an income below $703. Nearly 60% of households earned an income below
$1001.70 (very close to the estimated value of family expenses) (Lozano and Feletti,
1996).
The other side of impoverishment, hyper-unemployment and underemployment, is
the growing concentration of wealth among high-income groups. According to Barbeito,
‘the poorest 40% of families in Greater Buenos Aires received 16.9% of the total income
in 1977, 15.7% in 1983, and 11.7% in 1989. The wealthiest 10% of families, on the other
hand, received 31.6% in 1977, 32.5% in 1983, and 41.6% in 1989’ (quoted in Acuña,
1995: 61). From May 1995 to May 1996, the household income of the poorest 10%
decreased 9.2%; in the same period, the household income of the wealthiest 10%
increased 7.1%.18
The impoverishment of larger segments of the population constitutes, as Mingione
notes, ‘a favourable resource for improving the life-styles and opportunities for
enrichment of high-income groups’ (Mingione, 1991: 252). The ‘other side’ provides
‘this side’ with an army of service workers: domestics, baby-sitters, car-service drivers,
messenger boys, who — reproducing the pattern of casualized labour — earn derisory
wages and almost always lie outside the protection of labour legislation.
In Argentina, social rights are associated with employment (Kessler, 1996), and
social policies were traditionally designed under the assumption of a fully employed
economy (LoVuolo and Barbeito, 1993). Today, more people are unprotected not only
15 For an exploration of this correlation in the case of Argentina, see Murmis and Feldman (1996).
16 Golbert (1996). In 1993, the poverty line for a family of four was $420 a month (Minujin and Kessler,
1995: 63).
17 This figure includes part of the expenses in clothing, dwelling and health care for four people in Greater
Buenos Aires.
18 This process of income concentration can also be illustrated by taking into account income differences: in
1995, the income of a person belonging to the wealthiest 10% was 19.4 times the income of a person
belonging to the poorest 10%; this proportion was 22.4 in 1996. See Página12 (1996). As Lloyd-Sherlock
(1997: 39) asserts, ‘by 1994 Argentina’s income distribution was more unequal than for any other year on
record’.

52 Javier Auyero
because they are unemployed, but because the state — with its indifference, its ‘averted
gaze’ (Scheper-Hughes, 1992: 272) — reinforces the pattern of impoverishment and
inequality.
The retrenchment and dismantling of the welfare component of the populist state,
caused by the resolute adoption of structural adjustment policies, makes the risks
involved in situations of material deprivation — and the inequalities — even greater. The
last decade has witnessed a constant degradation of the public school system and the
health system, while public support for low-income housing has become negligible. The
chaotic character of the policies destined to ‘fight unemployment’ and of social policies
dedicated to ‘fighting poverty’ make things even worse: the poor are increasingly
vulnerable and weak (see Cetrángolo and Golbert, 1995; Golbert, 1996; Prévot Schapira,
1996).
The degradation of the public school system has been noted in several studies (Tenti,
1989; Lumi et al., 1992). Much like ghetto adolescents in the United States, poor
youngsters in Argentina face ‘a separate and unequal set of educational opportunities that
continues throughout their schooling. One could easily argue that their educational
experiences are not intended to and cannot prepare [them] to function in the same society
and the same economy’ (Orfield, 1985: 176, quoted in Wacquant, 1994: 262). As a recent
study shows (Beccaria and Lopez, 1996), there are striking differences in integration into
the school system. Only 42% of children aged four through five pertaining to the lower
strata have access to the pre-school level (compared to 72% of those in the upper strata).
One hundred percent of youngsters (between 13 and 17 years old) of the upper strata
attend some educational institution, while only 50% of those in the lower strata do so. Of
that 50%, only 25% have a job. This means that ‘there is a significant number of
adolescents belonging to the lower strata that begin their day without any activity that
implies growth or integration’ (Beccaria and Lopez, 1996: 104). The most important
inequalities can be seen among those youngsters between 18 and 25 years old. In the
lower strata, only 15% are still in the educational system, half of whom are at the
secondary level. In the upper strata, 62% are still studying, almost all of them at the
university or tertiary level. Against the background of an increasingly restricted and
exclusionary job market, this clear inequality in the accessibility of educational
opportunities is having devastating consequences on the possibilities of integration of
an enormous part of the population.
The public health system is also rapidly deteriorating, to the point of being on the
verge of a total breakdown. Since the 1970s it has suffered a structural and techno-
logical involution (CEB, 1995). It is progressively unequal and regionally uneven.
Health policy planning is chaotic and fragmented (CEB, 1995). The last decade
witnessed an expansion of demand which the public health system in the Conurbano has
not been able to provide. This increasing demand is basically due to rising prices in the
private health sector. From 1986 to 1991 there has been a 34% increase in outpatient
consultations in the public hospitals of the Province of Buenos Aires. Between 1991 and
1992, the increase was 52% (CEB, 1995). And yet, in 1994, as the global resources of
the province rose 9.4%, state expenditure for the health sector decreased 15.8%. A
lower budget confronted a burgeoning demand, resulting in a further deterioration of the
quality of services.19
19 The casualization of labour not only means lower incomes but also — due to the connection between
employment and social security — lack of protection through the institutions of social security. Among
the women between 15 and 49 years old, 53.6% of those in low socio-economic strata do not have any
health coverage whatsoever. This figure is 20.5% for those in the upper-middle level and 13.1% for those
in the upper level. Considering children under 6 years old, 62.5% of those located in the lowest strata
have no health coverage. The figure is 4.3% for those located in the upper strata (Beccaria and Lopez,
1996).

Public support of low-income housing is insignificant. In 1992, public authorities

estimated the housing deficit at 3 million houses (35% of total houses in the country).
During the last decade, the public construction/financing of housing units covered 15% of
the total units built. In 1980, publicly-owned housing represented 46% of the housing
market in England and 37% in France (LoVuolo and Barbeito, 1993; Wacquant, 1994).
According to LoVuolo and Barbeito (1993), the current government (Menem) practically
dismantled public housing policies. In 1992, public investment in housing was 33% less
than that in 1980 and 1987. Keeping in mind ‘the obvious fact that private developers will
not build for the poor’ (Wacquant, 1994: 158), this dismantling has the effect of leaving
the poor without any other resource than their private efforts to construct their dwellings
(e.g. Grillo et al., 1995).
Villa Paraı́so: historical background

What is the form that these processes take in enclaves of urban relegation like Villa
Paraı́so? Before we can answer this question we need to reconstruct the history of this
enclave. It is only against the background of this history that the form taken by these
objective trends in a particular place (and their translation into concrete beliefs and
practices) can be understood.20
In the early 1930s, Argentina embarked on a process of import substitution, giving
birth to a new manufacturing sector dedicated mostly to consumer goods at the expense of
heavy industry. The growth of manufacturing, and the reduction of the agricultural sector
in the Pampas and in the rest of the interior, fostered a massive internal migration from
rural areas in Argentina into Buenos Aires, and the subsequent process of
proletarianization of the new urban industrial working classes (Rock, 1987; 1993; James,
1988; Torre and De Riz, 1993). Between 1937 and 1947, nearly 750,000 internal migrants
came to Greater Buenos Aires. As Rock summarizes:
As industrial growth quickened, annual migration increased from an average of 70,000 between
1937 and 1943 to 117,000 between 1943 and 1947. The population of the city of Buenos Aires
grew from some 1.5 million in 1914, to 3.4 million in 1935, to 4.7 million by 1947. Numerous
migrants also settled in working-class suburbs of the Capital like Avellaneda, which by 1947
had a population of more than 500,000 (Rock, 1987: 235) [Villa Paraı́so was at that time part of
the district of Avellaneda].
In the years that followed the first massive internal migrations, the annual rate of
migration to Greater Buenos Aires (GBA) from the country continued to increase. In
1947, 4.7 million people were living in GBA. Thirteen years later almost 7 million had
come to occupy a considerable amount of new suburban settlements: working-class
neighbourhoods (barrios) and slums or shantytowns (villas). As standard housing was
scarce and extremely expensive in relation to the low income of the new migrants-
becoming-industrial-proletarians, deserted land around the central city and close to
newly installed factories, like Villa Paraı́so, became natural squatting grounds for
thousands of migrant families. For newcomers to the city — the ‘bridgeheaders’, as
20 For this section, I am relying heavily on various secondary sources: Lazcano (1987), De Luca (1976) and
Municipality of Lanús (1996), as well as on several life histories I conducted with the older residents of
Paraı́so. Needless to say, reasons of space prevent me from providing a full detailed account of the history
of the slum. In this section, I only attempt to highlight those elements in the history of this space that are
deemed central to grasp its present shape and the experiences of slum dwellers. Therefore, the following
account emphasizes the types of relations that the slum has established with larger society, while providing
an admittedly shallow portrait of the almost fifty years of life in the slum.

54 Javier Auyero
Portes calls them — ‘occupation, and not housing, is the paramount consideration’
(Portes, 1972: 279).21
The massive occupation of Villa Paraı́so began around 1948, when the first migrants
from the provinces settled in what at that time was a no man’s land covered by several
lagoons, and thus not available for urban use. Villa Paraı́so grew by accretion (not by a
collective invasion), spreading along the paths of solid ground within a larger swamp
field.22
‘What was the first thing that caught your attention as soon as you arrived in Villa
Paraı́so?’ I asked Victoria, a long-time resident of the slum:
It was horrible, you know? It was dreadful. . . I used to ask to my husband: ‘Is this Buenos
Aires?’ Because when you live in the province, you think Buenos Aires is the best thing, you
think that it is beautiful. When he brought me here, I thought to myself: Am I gonna live here?
But, you know, necessity . . . and I had to stay. This street was a garbage dump. . . I didn’t even
dare go outside my home because I was very shocked . . . stepping in the mud and seeing all that
garbage (Victoria).
Much like the favelas in Brazil the slum is, in part, the product of what some authors
call ‘hyper-urbanization’ (Perlman, 1976: 5): adequate urban institutions and indus-
trialization do not accommodate themselves fast enough to urban expansion. While
masses of immigrants were flocking to the city of Buenos Aires and the metropolitan area
in unprecedented numbers, the Peronist government (1946–55) tolerated their illegal
occupation of public and private lands. Many neighbours told me, ‘this area was not even
fit for raising cattle’. They all remember the lagoon-like character of the area, the lack of
urban services (water, sewage, garbage collection, electricity and other facilities) and the
difficulties of everyday life:
My father used to tell me that when they came to the villa it was like a ditch, it was all dirt . . .
there was a lagoon right here . . . the shacks were made of metal sheets, very tiny shacks. . .
(Nora).
Seventy percent of Villa Paraı́so was covered with water, a river divided the slum in two (Toto).
While life in the slum was very hard, it was seen as transitory. Either because (they
believed) new apartments were being constructed for them by the Peronist government, or
because they perceived themselves as part of a general movement of upward mobility of
the working classes,23 slum dwellers thought they were going to leave the slum. The
prospect of new homes is something that many inhabitants remember as imminent in the
first years of residence in the slum. The slum was understood as something temporary, as
a transient step from rural despair to urban advancement. Getting a new house or being
21 As Grillo et al. (1995) comment, at that time the slum was one social form available within the ‘menu’ of
alternative forms of settlement for the urban poor. In addition to self-constructed shelters, cheap hotels and
lodges, the slum became a spatial configuration linked to the outgrowth of import substitution
industrialization. As in many other cities in Latin America, a ‘growing stream of migrants produced an
overflow of the . . . slums into spontaneous or self-developing settlements at the fringe of the formal urban
employment’ (Lomnitz, 1978: 186; see also Gilbert, 1994). Around the 1940s, slums became a permanent
element within the urban landscape. In 1956 a census carried out by the Comisión Nacional de la Vivienda
reported that 112,350 people were living in slums in Greater Buenos Aires, representing 1.9% of the total
population (Yujnovsky, 1984).
22 These paths are the origins of the streets that today run through the slum from north-west to south-east. At
that time, these streets were called ‘roads’ (caminos): there were five caminos by which slum dwellers
entered the slum. These roads were the highest parts of the slum, and although the ‘roads’ are now paved
and have street names, many neighbours still use the names: First Road, Second Road, Third Road, Fourth
Road and Fifth Road. As we will see later, conditions of existence and urban infrastructure drastically
deteriorate from the First to the Fifth road.
23 This widespread perception of upward mobility based on a ‘right to social justice’ among Argentine
working classes is analysed by Rubinich (1991).

evicted was part of the everyday life of the first inhabitants, especially when Perón was
ousted from power in 1955, and the whole urban policy of the new military regime
drastically changed.
In the same way that almost every older resident recalls the swampy character of the
slum, they recount how obtaining drinking water was the major problem faced by its
residents. Familial, kinship and friendship networks are remembered as the sources for
solving such shortages. Procuring drinking water, building their dwellings, filling the
lagoons, constructing precarious bridges to cross them: everything is said to have been
made possible through the active cooperation of neighbours, friends and relatives.24
Many neighbours stress that, although survival was a tough and painful everyday
effort, living in the slum was full of entertainment. Almost every older resident recalls the
various dance places and bars that populated the slum and gave Villa Paraı́so its
reputation as, in the words of one neighbour, a ‘very fun place’.
Thus, the slum is recalled as impressive, transitory, but also fun and — in contrast to
the dangers of present-day life (to be further discussed) — communal. Innumerable
testimonies highlight the familiar character that the slum had for them, a feature that is
considered lost nowadays. Former living conditions in the slum are also compared to the
present day conditions of unemployment. It is probably Olga who best summarizes how
life in the slum used to be:
In those years there was a lot of work . . . uuuhh . . . plenty of jobs. . . We didn’t have electricity,
we didn’t have water . . . we didn’t have anything at all. There was only one bus to go to the
capital, but you had to cross the slum . . . at that time you were able to cross it. I used to cross the
slum at 4am, with my child, and it was as if I felt protected because we were all
acquaintances. . . (Olga).
Villa Paraı́so was literally surrounded by large industrial plants, mainly metallurgic
and textile firms where Paraı́so residents got their first industrial jobs through relatives
and friends. For many inhabitants, everything they needed, including a job in a store or a
factory, could be found near the slum. Today, in a context of generalized under- and
unemployment (discussed in more detail below), residents remember taking for granted
the easy availability of jobs at any of the plants that were close to the slum as an aspect of
their everyday life.
The year 1955 marks a turning point in state policies towards the slum. Once Perón
was ousted from power, the Revolución Libertadora began to consider the slum a
problem: not only a housing problem, but a social one as well.25 The ‘Emergency Plan’
crafted by the Comisión Nacional de la Vivienda had as its major aim the removal of the
‘emergency slums’ (Yujnovsky, 1984: 98). As threats of eviction began to escalate within
the slum, the ‘Unión Vecinal de Villa Paraı́so’ — the first neighbourhood council — was
created. It was the first neighbourhood organization designated to deal with land tenure
issues. During the late 1950s and early 1960s a distinctive pattern of problem-solving
began to crystallize among slum dwellers that combined (1) collective claim-making to
the local and provincial governments (and changing state policies towards the slums),
with (2) the collective efforts of Paraı́so residents to improve their dwellings and habitat.
This pattern of problem-solving and claim-making denies any allegation that the slum
population was the bearer of a ‘culture of dependency’ in its migration process (and that
had supposedly found fertile ground in the ‘ecology’ of the slum), and confirms what
24 This means that, as in many other poor neighbourhoods in Latin America (Lomnitz, 1975; 1978; Margulis,
1982; Friedman and Salguero, 1988; Hintze, 1989), networks of reciprocal help were central elements in
the survival strategies of slum dwellers. For different analyses on the processes of adaptation of migrants to
the new urban setting, see Mangin (1970), Perlman (1976) and Butterworth and Chance (1981).
25 In the analysis of the interaction between state policies and slum dwellers’ organizations, I follow Lazcano
(1987) and Yujnovsky (1984).

56 Javier Auyero
other works (Castells, 1983) found for other low-income settings: the central role played
by grass-roots movements in the acquisition of urban services (‘collective consumption’).
The democratic interregnum of 1958–62 once again brought change in the policies
towards the slums in the Federal Capital and in Greater Buenos Aires. The government of
Buenos Aires passed Law 6526 (1962), which declared the plot of land where Villa
Paraı́so is located ‘subject to expropriation’. This law put a halt to the offensive of private
land owners, neutralized any attempts to evict slum dwellers, and marked a turning point
in the history of the neighbourhood: residence in the slum ceased to be transitory and
conditions there improved rapidly. The remaining lagoons were almost completely
eliminated, signs of asphalt construction were seen, the installation of the first water
networks and public lighting began, and a first — precarious — health centre was built.
The slum not only improved its habitat, but also dozens of local organizations
mushroomed there.26
The military takeover of 1966 marked another change in policy towards the slums.
This was accompanied by floods that had unprecedented effects in the southern part of
Greater Buenos Aires. In October 1967, Villa Paraı́so was literally covered with water. A
‘nightmare’, ‘horrid’, are the terms used by the neighbours to recount that experience that
‘deprived us of the little we had’, as Olga told me. The floods sparked a double process: a
government-led offensive towards the ‘definitive removal of the slums’, and a generalized
mobilization in the neighbourhood and the birth of several community organizations.27
These groups (many of them inspired by the youth branch of the Peronist party, the
Communist Party, and the Movement of Third World Priests) promoted not only a
defence against removal in public gatherings, but also accelerated the process of street-
paving, the construction of the new primary school, the day-care centre and bus shelters.
According to one resident, the 1970s were ‘the most active period in the neighbourhood.
The cardboard houses disappeared, the alleyways were improved, light and water
networks were installed’ (Lazcano, 1987: 117). During those years of mass political
upheaval in Argentina, ‘joint action in pursuit of common ends’ (Tilly, 1978: 84) was at
its peak in Villa Paraı́so. During the Peronist government (1973–76), the most important
common end of neighbourhood organizations was the health centre, which was finally
inaugurated under the military regime (1977).
After the military coup of 1976, ‘the cities and countryside were divided up into
zones that were searched in operatives known as rastrillos (‘to rake’). Entire
neighbourhoods were blocked off, one by one, as military forces searched homes asking
for identification of all those present and the whereabouts of those absent’ (Taylor, 1997:
26 In retrospect, the organizational density that slum dwellers developed in those years is impressive.
Neighbours were organized around specific issues (paving or lighting an alleyway, installing part of a
water network, digging the sewer etc.), and broader organizations — like the Junta Vecinal or the Sociedad
de Fomento — were the institutional links between the slum and the local and provincial governments.
Although they might sound idyllic from today’s perspective, memories of a warm and supporting
community abound among the older residents. Even though those memories are bound to be highly
idealized in retrospect, the longing for a ‘lost community’ offers an interesting critique of present social
isolation, marginalization and low organizational density. People at that time were building their place in a
collective struggle that included neighbourhood organizations, interaction with the state and individual
efforts of residents. When older residents say that ‘we used to know each other’, that ‘the neighbourhood
council of the time was working very well’, and that ‘we made this and that, all together, struggling hard’,
their voices stand in sharp contrast to present living conditions. Against the background of today’s extreme
material dispossession and of the deprivation of the control over one’s collective representation, the sense
of living in a self-constructed place that residents recount gains its full significance.
27 The military government crafted the Plan de Erradicación de las Villas de Emergencia de la Capital Federal
y del Gran Buenos Aires (PEVE), whose aim was the removal of the more than 70,000 families inhabiting
the slums of the Capital and of Greater Buenos Aires, representing a population of approximately 280,000.
Defining itself as a ‘totalizing and coherent’ policy (Yujnovsky, 1984: 163), the removal programme was
aimed not only at the relocation of the slum dwellers but also to their ‘readaptation in society’. For an
analysis of the meagre results of this program, see Yujnovsky (1984).

97). Villa Paraı́so was singled out as a special target of these operatives, due to the alleged
heavy ‘subversive activities’ taking place there. Organization and mobilization in the
slum suddenly discontinued during the dictatorship. Although there are no precise
accounts, 12 people who at the time of the coup were politically active in the slum,
disappeared. Others, like the secretary of the Junta Coordinadora were jailed. All
intermediate organizations were prohibited except the Sociedad de Fomento whose work
was extremely limited and controlled. Although no further removal of the slum was
intended (in sharp contrast to the ‘cleaning’ policy carried out in the Federal Capital),28 it
was occupied by the military from 17–29 May 1978, and its whole population became
subject to inspection.
To summarize: the slum went from a period of transitory residence to one of
consolidation in place, heightened mobilization and collective problem-solving. Twenty
years later, after the dark years of state repression and large macro-economic
transformations, the slum looks quite different and it has a different relation to the rest
of society. Many slum dwellers now perceive that they are better off in their present
circumstances than they were twenty years ago, i.e. their conditions of existence have
improved. However, once we change our empirical focus from conditions to connections
another image emerges, an image that casts many doubts on the future of the slum.
Former workers who used to obtain the most important urban services (light, water,
paving of the streets etc.) through their collective organization (and through household
and individual efforts), and whose survival needs (food, medicine, clothing) were
provided by means of the monetary income received from their paid (formal and
informal) employment, are now unemployed or underemployed: (1) with scarce cash
incomes; (2) their reciprocal networks of help are being depleted from their resources;
and (3) they now face problems other than the infrastructural improvement of their
habitat, like that of sheer survival.
Jobs and education in Villa Paraı́so

In Paraı́so, as its residents call it, the links that used to tie slum-residents to the
functioning of larger society through their participation in the labour market and in the
school system have drastically deteriorated, or, worse still, been severed. In other words,
Paraı́so has ceased to be a place where the lower segments of the labour market reproduce
themselves, a transitory place in the (more or less real, more or less generalized) process
of upward mobility of the working classes. Paraı́so is now a space of survival for those
excluded. A brief consideration of the data on education and employment sheds light on
this functional disconnection.
A comparison with the centre of Cóspito city — the district where the slum is located
— clearly illustrates the disparities in the integration into the educational system that the
inhabitants of Villa Paraı́so face. Eighty-one percent of the school population attends
deteriorating public institutions. In the centre of Cóspito, this figure decreases to 55%. Of
the total number of people that did attend school but are not currently attending, only
5.9% of the population of Villa Paraı́so finished high school. The figure for the centre of
Cóspito is 22.9% (INDEC, 1993).
Widespread unemployment is the single most significant defining characteristic of
Villa Paraı́so. Domestic service and jobs in the construction sector had been the
predominant occupations among the unskilled and least educated women and men in the
slum until recently. The impact that the two predominant occupations have suffered can
be seen in the current levels of unemployment in Villa Paraı́so. My own survey shows
that 62% of the population between 18 and 60 years old is currently unemployed.
28 For an analysis of the process of slum eradication in the Federal Capital, see Oszlak (1991).

58 Javier Auyero
Unemployment affects women (71% are unemployed) more than men (51%). Long-term
unemployment is rampant: more than half of those unemployed have been without a
steady job during the last year. Most of them rely on casual, temporary odd-jobs as a
source of (always scarce) monetary income.
The avenues that used to link the slum economy to outside wage work are now
interrupted, and the monetary flow that used to enter the space of the slum, becoming the
‘blood’ of networks of reciprocal help, is severely narrowed. When rejection from the
labour market is no longer temporary, and income reduction affects every single job that
the unskilled population of Villa Paraı́so is able to obtain, the social economy of the slum
loses its traditional function. In other words, the slum ‘popular economy’ (Mingione,
1991) ceases to be a buffer that helps cushion the impacts of economic hardship.29 Thus,
much like in other enclaves of advanced marginality, ‘individuals durably excluded from
paid employment in neighbourhoods of relegation cannot readily rely on collective
informal support while they wait for later work which, moreover, may never come’
(Wacquant, 1996a: 127).
Informal work in family sweatshops ‘off the books’ is also a source of income that
has been dramatically and steadily deteriorating during the last couple of years. Pedro,
Coco and Rosa made Pierre Cardin purses in their home. ‘Pierre Cardin made in Paraı́so’
they jokingly tell me. They work for a large firm that gives them the purse’s model and
the materials. They work for more than 14 hours a day, with no insurance or health
coverage. Two years ago they used to make $700 every two weeks, now they are making
$800 every month. The purses that they make for $10, are being sold in the most
expensive stores in the city of Buenos Aires (with the label Pierre Cardin-Paris) for more
than $60. At least, they have their revenge: they are the only ones who know that the
purses are not authentic Pierre Cardin. They are as fake as the US$100 bill they received
last month (October 1996) from the owner of the factory in payment for their work. ‘You
have to watch out, everybody is trying to screw you. . .’, Pedro told me.
Down and out: the experience of living in the slum

The surrounding landscape of the slum and the internal make-up of the alleyways are
probably the best indicators of the fate of this space called Villa Paraı́so. In the south-
eastern part of the slum stands the huge abandoned skeleton of the Fabricaciones
Militares factory, and the household-appliances factory where many inhabitants of
Paraı́so used to work is now a storage facility with no industrial activity whatsoever; in
the north-west, the metallurgic factory has been significantly downsized. These empty
factories are an illustration of the state of the slum and its inhabitants, and of the way in
which the withering away of the wage-labour economy is being inscribed in the urban
landscape: abandoned buildings and desolate fences. Villa Paraı́so, once the place of the
new-born working class is now the space where the unpopulation (unemployed and
uneducated) survives (Williams, 1992).
The internal make-up of the alleyways is also an unconventional sociological
indicator of the changes the slum has suffered in the last twenty years: the walls of the
29 This is not to deny the actual relevance of household and neighbourhood survival strategies embedded in
reciprocal networks. As much urban research in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America (Lomnitz,
1975; 1978; 1988; Margulis, 1982; Hintze, 1989) has documented, family and neighbourhood networks are
key elements in the survival strategies of the poor. ‘Proximate networks of reciprocity with neighbours and
kin’ (Friedman and Salguero, 1988: 11) are well-studied elements in our understanding of how poor people
confront the challenge of survival, and of what type of relationships they establish in this process. My point
is that with the generalization of unemployment, income reduction and contraction of the informal
economy, these networks do not cease to exist but that they stop performing their usual functions, i.e. being
a ‘surrogate social security system’ (Lomnitz, 1975) for individual survival among shantytown dwellers.

houses facing the alleyways have been substantially elevated. Once, the alleyways were
roads from which the interior of the houses could be seen, the neighbours could talk
across them. Now, the alleyways look like veritable tunnels: the elevated front walls serve
as a defence against the social predators that intimidate slum dwellers.
Villa Paraı́so is a very heterogeneous slum. From east to west, housing and urban
services significantly deteriorate. The nearer one comes to the north-west border of the
slum (the area known as ‘The Fifth Road’) the more marked the deterioration. Yet, an all-
encompassing experience of slum dwellers is that the slum has dramatically changed its
shape in the last two decades: the asphalt of the streets is the major achievement, that
marks a before and after in the history of the slum according to them. Before the asphalt,
their habitat was considered a slum (una villa); now it is truly a neighbourhood (un
barrio). These changes in the conditions of the habitat are a ubiquitous experience of
Paraı́sos residents; for most of them the slum is ‘much better’, so much so, that it is not a
slum any more.
Some time ago, you couldn’t even walk in the alleyways, it was all dirt, infection, everything
was mud. . . (Susana).
The neighbourhood was a disaster, it was not as it is now. Now I see it as a neighbourhood
(barrio), I don’t see it as a slum . . . sometimes I get offended when people say that this is a slum,
because this is not a slum. There are alleyways as there are in the slums, that’s right. . . But
before it was awful, because the streets were muddy, you couldn’t even walk in the alleyways,
the houses were a disaster. Now you enter into a house and you say: this is a nice house. . .
(Mimi).
Although some of the slum dwellers (especially those living in the area adjacent to the
Fifth Road) consider Paraı́so a slum, most of them agree that the asphalt, the lighting, the
(precarious) sewer network, the phones, are indicators that prove that ‘this is not a villa
anymore; this is a ‘barrio’, or even ‘a city’ as Rodolfo cordially told me: ‘When you get
married, you can come and live in Ciudad Paraı́so (Paraı́so City)’.
Yet, two qualifications should be made in regard to this general betterment of the
slum as perceived by its inhabitants : (1) all of them point out that the Fifth Road is yet to
be improved; and (2) almost all of them clearly differentiate the physical improvement
from how they feel and live in this more appropriate environment. Mario wonderfully
synthesizes this feeling: ‘Yes. . . we are much better now, there is light, pavement, phones
. . . but you know what, brother . . . we live very badly’.
The Fifth Road: dealers, ‘little pirates’and shoplifters

It is a hot Thursday afternoon in December 1995; Eloisa, an old-time resident, is sitting in
the neighbourhood association’s bar, watching TV. Outside, two men park a stolen car
and leave it there, right in front of the association’s main door. Eloisa comments: ‘They
always steal cars . . . I don’t know . . . here, as times goes by, we are more and more
isolated’. Then she adds, ‘cab-drivers don’t want to come into the slum . . . they say that
they don’t want to be robbed’.
Paraı́so is a locality bad-mouthed by everyone, a blemished site. It is seen as a
degraded space which, in spite of its internal differences, disqualifies its inhabitants in
toto: they are the ‘villeros’, the object of public scorn. Much like living in the black ghetto
in the United States30 — and although no physical markers signal their inhabitants as such
— the defamation of their place of residence shows up in many concrete interactions:
from friendships (as shown in Catalina’s testimony quoted in the opening section of this
article, or in Nilda’s son who ‘keeps on asking’ his mother ‘to leave the alleyways
30 The following discussion of the sense of indignity and of the social divisions within the slum draws upon
Wacquant’s examination of stigma and division in the North American and French territories of urban
relegation (Wacquant, 1993).

60 Javier Auyero
because he is ashamed of bringing his friends here’), to the everyday dealings with the
police that youngsters have. Inscribed in its still pervasive physical dilapidation and in the
radical inferiority of its institutions (like the public school or the municipal services) the
defamation of the slum is reaffirmed in the everyday attitudes of (1) outsiders like drivers
of car-services or cabs who refuse to ‘cross the bridge’ that leads to the area, or to ‘risk
going into the villa’, as one young resident admits; (2) delivery trucks which, according to
some neighbours, have cancelled their services to the groceries and other stores of the
‘Fifth Road’ because, in the words of one middle-age resident who was born in the slum,
‘they are frightened’; and (3) relatives and friends who rarely venture into the slum. As
Hugo describes, ‘The men who sell milk, soda and bread do not enter this area any more,
because they get robbed. . . They stole my bicycle . . . the ones who come to buy drugs
stole my bicycle’. Or as Mario says, ‘No . . . my daughters don’t come here, it’s
dangerous’.
As in many other poor neighbourhoods, the territorial stigma, the sense of indignity
of living in a cursed place is, many times, deflected by thrusting the stigma onto others. A
specific forbidden zone within the area (in this case, the ‘Fifth Road’), a specific social
group (the ‘street corner guys who are drinking beer all day long, and God knows what is
inside the bottle’), or a specific ethnic group that has gained visibility in the last years (the
Koreans, or the ‘Bolivians who steal our jobs’, the Paraguayans who are said to be ‘wise’
in their profiting from the distribution of food carried out twice a month by the
municipality), are singled out as those responsible for the overall situation of the slum.
When you tell a Paraguayan that they are distributing food in the Municipality, he will go with
all his family, his daughters, his sons-in-law. . . And he will get the food for the whole month. . .
Here foreigners have access to everything. Bolivians and Chileans come to this country to have
their surgery. . . Why do they have priority? If an Argentine goes to Paraguay, they won’t even
look at him. . .
The prevalence of unemployment and underemployment and the inadequacy of public

assistance foster a wide group of illegal activities in the slum — like drug dealing, petty
crimes, and the selling of stolen merchandise (carried out by shoplifters, popularly known
as mecheras) — that find fertile ground in the intricate alleyways of the most deteriorated
sector of the slum: the Fifth Road. With its narrow — and, for the outsider, almost
impenetrable — passages, the Fifth Road is the place where the petty entrepreneurialism
(Williams, 1989) of drug-dealing and predatory crime takes root.
The ‘Little Pirates’ were a gang of adolescents who used to rob private cars, buses
and trucks by lying down in the streets, waiting for vehicles to slow down, and assaulting
them like pirates taking over an enemy ship. They would later hide in the alleys from the
— always late in coming — police raids. As many neighbours acknowledge, ‘they (the
‘Pirates’) are the ones who know the passages best’. They would also hide themselves in
the abandoned skeleton of the huge factory that borders the ‘Fifth Road’.
Along with the drug-dealers, these little pirates terrorized the neighbourhood, feeding
the dominant antagonism that runs through the slum: youngsters versus the rest. Older
residents persistently point to the youngsters of the slum as the major source of
delinquency, insecurity and danger. Holding the youngsters publicly responsible for
everything that happens in the slum, and singling out the Fifth Road as the place where
they hide themselves, seems to be the most important strategy of stigma displacement
(Goffman, 1963) in which residents engage.
Youngsters are thus the targets of the stigma’s circulation within the slum: they are
the usual suspects. They are seen as dangerous and unpredictable, and are perceived as the
ultimate cause of a process that some authors detect in other social settings: the
diminution of the level of social trust among neighbours (Bourgois, 1995) or the
‘depacification of everyday life’ (Wacquant, 1996c) in the slum. The everyday socio-

economic and symbolic violence of which the youngsters are victims (their encounters
with the police, their constant rejection from the labour market, the uselessness of their
scarce school credentials) fosters the defiant attitude that neighbours fear and condemn.
Although youngsters are the objects of many accusations linked to the violence and
insecurity that pervade the slum, ‘youngsters versus the rest’ is not the only social
antagonism in the slum. There is another cleavage related to the experience of
unemployment: Argentines versus immigrants.
Succumbing to a classic ‘divide-and-conquer logic’ (Bourgois, 1995: 166), many
residents — and especially youngsters — direct their discontent over their structural
vulnerability in the labour market and within capital-labour relations, to the recent
immigrants, mainly the Bolivians and the Paraguayans. Although low incomes and
unemployment are believed to be affecting ‘everybody, everywhere’, as one neighbour
observed, immigrant groups are increasingly becoming scapegoats for the venting of
frustration over poverty and exclusion. A group of youngsters told me:
Foreigners screwed us up, the Bolivians really fucked us. . . They are cheap labour. . . They earn
the money here. . . and they send it to Bolivia. . . (Marcelo).
There are a lot of Peruvians and Bolivians, who earn very little but they do not ask for anything
else. . . People will hire them, because they won’t demand anything . . . they won’t hire me
because I will claim the payment I deserve. . . (Juan).
I used to work in a shoe factory and the Paraguayans have taken over the place. . . We used to
get 80 cents for a pair of shoes. I was sick for a week, and when I came back there were two
Paraguayans working for 40 cents per pair. And the guy at the factory told me: ‘The job is yours
but for 40 cents per pair’. Fuck you, I said. What will I do? Burn the factory? (Chango).
According to the last population census, 14% of Paraı́sos population was born in one
of the countries bordering Argentina (Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay)
(INDEC, 1993). Immigrants have been part of the reality of the slum for a long time, as
indicated in the country of origin of those who are between 50 and 64 years old: 20.3%
were born in a bordering country. Yet, with the generalization of unemployment and with
the (both material and symbolic) disappearance of the state, immigrants have become
more visible within the slum. Bolivians, Paraguayans and Peruvians are now accused of
‘stealing our jobs’ (Marcelo), because they are more ‘exploitable’ (Rolo), of ‘sending the
money back’ (Marcelo) to their countries, and of profiting from social assistance
programs they do not deserve ‘because they are not from here’ (Juan).
‘Youngsters versus the rest’, ‘Argentines versus foreigners’ and ‘Us versus the drug’
are the antagonisms that sometimes overlap. ‘Here, on the corner’, Rosa, a middle-age
woman, tells me, ‘there’s a young Bolivian couple who sells drugs. . . They are making a
lot of money’. These antagonisms increase the level of distrust and divide the neighbours.
The generalized absence of employment and cash income, and the escalation of the drug-
economy and the increased presence of drug-dealers, cast some doubts on taken-for-
granted moral judgements: ‘You know, sometimes I feel like all of us should be selling
drugs . . . we would be making a lot of money’, Tota told me after explaining that she had
bought her jeans from one of the slum’s mecheras (shoplifters).
The destructive consequences of the drug economy that have been analysed in other
‘neighbourhoods of relegation’ in advanced societies (Williams, 1989; 1992; Bourgois,
1995; Wacquant, 1996a) make a strong impact on the slum, which, according to official
information, is the locality with the highest percentage of drug trafficking and addiction
in Greater Buenos Aires. Especially in the area adjacent to the Fifth Road, insecurity is
the most pervasive feeling among its inhabitants. Drugs are contaminating the space of
the neighbourhood, terrifying and humiliating neighbours, and making them insecure
about their own future. As Wacquant asserts in his analysis of the North American ‘black
ghetto’, the drug economy ‘creates an environment of poor health and high risk of death

62 Javier Auyero
at an early stage, strains family relationships, and severely weakens local social cohesion.
And it causes rampant violence and a sharp decline in neighbourhood safety’ (Wacquant,
1994: 249).
Drug-dealers and addicts are a tiny minority of the slum population, but they have
taken over the public space of the slum — particularly on the Fifth Road — and managed
to ‘set the tone for public life’ (Bourgois, 1995: 10). Or in the residents’ own voices:
The problem here is drugs . . . dealers are killing the kids. . . (Lucho).
This is terrible . . . on the corner, many kids get together and they smoke . . . weird things . . . you
can’t take your kids to the sidewalk because of the smell. And at night it is terrible, they fire
their guns at the police. . . (Adela).
There are a lot of drugs, insecurity. . . (Juan).
You can’t allow your kids to play on the sidewalk, because everyone is smoking marijuana,
doing drugs. . . (Victoria).
There are a lot of kids who have been stealing since they’re five or six . . . they act as lookouts,
who tell the others if the police come. . . (Josefina).
Drug-trafficking and diverse addictions (mainly alcohol, marijuana and cocaine) are
having devastating consequences on the life-world of slum-inhabitants. Their feelings
about dealers and consumers, not only point to the insecurity they feel, their fear of being
mugged or assaulted, but also to the abandonment and the impotence they experience.
Violence is becoming, to speak with Elias, an ‘unavoidable and everyday event’ in the
slum, pervading ‘the whole atmosphere of this unpredictable and insecure life’ (Elias,
1994: 448–9).31 The state is viewed as both impotent in solving this problem and also
suspect in arrangements with dealers:
You can’t trust the police. . . (Juan).
No one cares if you denounce people selling drugs. . . I cannot say that it is true, but I heard that
the councilwoman knows about the drug problem, and doesn’t do anything about it (Adela).
Most people are afraid to complain about the dealings, or see no point in denouncing
dealers because the police and state officials ‘are with them’. Others, like the president of
the local council of the nearby neighbourhood, are ready to launch their own private war
against them: ‘I’ve been telling people about this idea I have . . . if we burn the house of
one of the dealers, you will see that nobody else will dare to do it’. But the generalized
feeling is one of fatality, a mix of anger and pity about street corner youngsters:
Everybody knows where they (drugs) are sold, but no one dares to get in the middle of that . . .
one thinks about the punishment. . . They have killed (reventado) a lot of people because of
drugs. . . (Roberto).
I don’t denounce them because if they find out that I am the one who is accusing them . . . you
know . . . I have kids, I don’t want to risk my family. . . (Victoria).
Here in the alleyway, there is a woman who was badly hurt, and she doesn’t want to denounce
them because she is afraid . . . she has two daughters . . . and the guy who hurt her walked in and
out of the alleyway (Alejandra).
We are not going to have any future if we don’t lend a hand to the kids . . . they do drugs as if
they were eating candy. When you are cleaning the alleyway you find lots of [hypodermic]
31 For an argument concerning the generalization of violence in Latin American shantytowns, see Pinheiro
(1996).

needles. . . They do drugs everywhere, there is no respect . . . sometimes you feel anger because
you are helpless, you can’t do anything. Because if their parents don’t do anything, maybe we
go to help them and they kick our ass. . . (Monica).
Most neighbours living close to the Fifth Road know that there are — at least — five
locales for the sale of narcotics on the block near the local school. Occasionally, I would
step on hypodermic needles near that area. Hugo and Alejandra, both living on the Fifth
Road, best summarize the generalized feeling that pervades much of the slum: the feeling
of being socially isolated, abandoned by the state, and at the mercy of drug-addicts and
dealers who terrorize them:
During the weekend this is like the Wild West, there are a lot of gun shots . . . at night you can’t
sleep. . . (Alejandra).
The guy next door sells drugs. You can’t denounce him anywhere, because he might rob you, or
even worse, hurt you. Every night they smoke pot or fire guns right outside my window . . . we
are cursed (Hugo).
The Bronx and the Wild West

When I told Coca — a long-time resident of Villa Paraı́so — that I was planning to
conduct my research in the slum, her son Cacho — knowing I live in New York —
jokingly asked me: ‘This is a lot like the Bronx, isn’t it?’ On that first day of my research,
Cacho nicely encapsulated the general feeling that permeates Villa Paraı́so and many
slums, squatter settlements and other poor neighbourhoods in the Conurbano Bonaerense;
a feeling that, although for different political, cultural and economic causes, is similar to
the one that pervades the fate of the contemporary ‘black ghettos’ and inner-cities in other
advanced societies. Those enclaves of urban poverty are becoming ‘theaters of dread and
death’ (Wacquant, 1994: 232), or as the priest Farinello says about the slum where he
works, ‘Nowadays the slum is almost an inferno’ (Farinello, 1996: 48).
However, contrary to the decay occurring in the ‘Black ghetto’ and in other European
and North American inner cities, the slums — both in Argentina and in much of Latin
America (Gilbert, 1994) — have witnessed major infrastructural improvements in their
physical geography during the last two decades (sewage, water networks, street
pavement, lighting); residents of these slums remark on this fact time and again. Yet,
Mario’s statement quoted above (‘Yes. . . we are much better now, there is light,
pavement, phones . . . but you know what, brother . . . we live very badly’) sheds light on
one interesting commonality in the fate of those urban forms. Although there are now
urban services in the slum (marking a significant difference from past living conditions,
and from the ‘more than a quarter century of continuous deterioration’ in North American
inner-cities (Wilson, 1996: 34)), the functional links that used to tie the slum to larger
society (‘this side’ to ‘the other side’ in Sarlo’s perceptive formulation) have been
severed. To use a well-known image: the betterment of urban services in the slum over
the last twenty years resembles the improvements made in the cabins of the Titanic before
its last voyage. They made life in the slum better, but. . .32 In other words, enclaves of
32 This is not to suggest that community struggles over services of collective consumption (Castells, 1983) are
unimportant. As many studies of third-world low income point out, these struggles have animated (and still
encourage) class and/or community action in many settings and have won important material gains (sewage,
electricity, water, schools, streets etc.) (see, for example, Kowarick, 1988 for Sao Paulo; Eckstein 1990a;
1990b for Mexico City; Merklein, 1991 and Grillo et. al., 1995 for Buenos Aires; Gay, 1994 for Rio de
Janeiro; and Burgwald, 1996 for Quito. For a recent overview, see Gilbert, 1994). As the brief section on the
history of the slum shows, these collective struggles were responsible for substantial material gains for the
slum (the health centre, land titles etc.). The analogy of the cabins of the Titanic points at the structural
connections (or, better, the structural dislocations) between the space of the slum and the rest of society.

64 Javier Auyero
urban poverty in the first and third worlds are ceasing to be the places where the lower
segments of the labour market reproduce themselves, transitory places in the (more or less
real, more or less generalized) process of upward mobility of the working classes (see
Rubinich, 1991). Considering functional linkages with larger society, and despite urban
improvements, the ghetto, the inner cities and the slums share a similar destiny: they are
turning into spaces of survival for those ‘excluded’.33
As a consequence of deepening marginalization, the challenge for the (ex)proletarian
families living in Villa Paraı́so is not to improve their homes and their environment — as
it used to be twenty or thirty years ago — but to survive. As a consequence, the life-world
of slum dwellers is saturated by a feeling of fatality, pessimism and gloom. The future
(once represented by the pavement of a street, the lighting of an alleyway etc.) is now
obscured, blocked from view; the future is limited to tomorrow, or even worse, as a young
slum-dweller named Chango puts it, quoting the lyrics of a rock band, ‘The future is
already here’. Once a transitory residence, and then a place in which improvements were
possible — a ‘slum of hope’, to paraphrase Eckstein (1990a) — the slum is now a
desolate space of despair, of social immobility and of pervasive physical and social
insecurity. In this context, the images of the Bronx and the Wild West — global bywords
for destitution, violence and isolation — are Cacho’s and Alejandra’s ways of stating that
‘paradise’ is becoming hell.
Coda: is this slum like the Bronx? Notes for future cross-national
research
This article has made a case for discontinuity: although the conditions of living in the
slum have improved, the relations (or rather, the lack of them) that the slum now has with
the rest of society are unprecedented. By paying direct attention to objective trends of
rising unemployment, educational exclusion, welfare retrenchment and their subjective
correlates, I explored the functional disconnection between ‘this side’ and ‘the other side’.
Throughout this paper I also observed certain parallels between life in the slum and what
recent research detects in ghettos and inner cities in advanced societies: internal divisions,
increasing violence, decreasing mutual trust, depletion of networks of reciprocal help etc.
I would like to conclude by highlighting some other dis/similar processes and
outcomes that need further exploration. These can be subdivided into three major areas:
(1) the context in which socio-economic destitution evolves; (2) the pivotal role of the
lack of employment in the new type of relationship between areas of relegation and the
rest of society; and (3) the discursive framework that encompasses these new dislocations.
1 In his comments on Wilson’s pathbreaking work, Michael Katz (1997: 165) points out
that earlier urban poverty in the United States ‘coexisted with urban growth and with
the expansion of opportunities for unskilled and semiskilled work. Prospects for
modest social or economic mobility, especially for one’s children, remained
widespread. As a result, poverty existed in a context of hope’. In contrast, nowadays
poverty exists ‘within a context of hopelessness’ fuelled by deindustrialization (Katz,
1997: 165; see also Wacquant, 1994: 1996a).
In the first part of this article, I point out that this new context is also present in
Argentina. Today, poverty in the slum exists in a context of deindustrialization and the
generalized downward mobility of formerly large middle classes (Minujin, 1992;
Minujin and Kessler, 1995). As a consequence, slum poverty ceases to be perceived as
33 The change from ‘place’ to ‘space’ is one of the underlying shifts in the process of hyperghettoization
analysed by Wacquant in several other articles (1994; 1996a; 1996b).

transitory; social or economic mobility is unthinkable. Both perceptions mark a real

difference from past beliefs, and point at a commonality with the kind of poverty that
now prevails in advanced societies.
2 Another new trend is encapsulated in the term deproletarianization. As I explained in
the second section of this article, the availability of jobs (both in formal and informal
sectors) was an aspect of life taken for granted in the slum up until the 1970s. Today,
the problem of the slum residents (much like that of inner-city dwellers) is ‘not just bad
jobs but no jobs at all’ (Katz, 1997: 165; see also Wilson, 1980; 1987; 1996). In a
context of generalized unemployment and extremely low wages, the inquest
formulated by the authors of the Marginality School almost three decades ago (i.e.
How does the marginal mass survive? (Nun et al., 1968: 45)) is now much more
pressing. How do those without stable jobs obtain money to pay for their food? How
do they take care of their health? How do they build their dwellings? In the context
described in previous sections, these elementary questions regain their importance.34
3 Political discourses surrounding the processes of deepening marginalization are key
elements in the classification of the poor, in the qualification of poverty as a social
problem, and in the definition of the social policies associated with it (Himmelfarb,
1984; Katz, 1989; 1993; Silver, 1996). Although the racial element does not have the
same prominence in Argentina as it has in other socio-spatial configurations in
advanced societies (especially in the North American ghetto (see Massey and Denton,
1993; Wacquant, 1995)), bringing discourse back into the analysis of poverty sheds
light on the euphemized racist discursive classification of the slum population. In their
recurrent campaigns to cleanse the city of (polluted) slum dwellers, state elites
constantly adopt a ‘poverty rhetoric’ (Silver, 1996: 106) that racializes the slum
population.35 During the last two decades, both the military and the democratic
governments of Argentina constructed the slum population as an object to be removed,
as an out-of-place population, as the obnoxious and repugnant other, always
undeserving and tainted.
Bringing discourse back into the analysis of poverty also sheds light on certain
similarities between these racist classifications and the behaviourist notion of an
‘underclass’ (Katz, 1989; Gans, 1991; 1996; 1997). Thereby, an agenda for future
cross-national research should also include an analysis of the languages of poverty
that, notwithstanding different vocabularies, may share similar symbolic effects.
Hopelessness, deproletarianization, racist classifications, violence and divisions,

diminution of social trust, disconnection from larger society and subsequent social
isolation: the image of the Bronx that Cacho had in mind when he asked me how close the
slum where he was born and raised was to the inner city, points to some interesting and
complex commonalities. Future research should attempt to explore and explain these and
other similarities and differences between Latin American and US/European areas of
relegation.
Javier Auyero (auyero@aol.com), Department of Sociology, State University of New

York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York 11794-4356, USA.
34 My own research shows that ‘clientelist’ networks linked to the Peronist Party are becoming increasingly
relevant in the survival strategies of slum dwellers.
35 See Oszlak (1991). For the politics of the favelas in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, see Perlman (1976) and
Gay (1994).

66 Javier Auyero
References
Acuña, C. (1995) Politics and economics in the Argentina of the nineties (or, why the future no
longer is what it used to be). In W. Smith, C. Acuña and E. Gamarra (eds.), Democracy,
markets, and structural reform in Latin America, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Mexico,
Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick.
Beccaria, L. and N. Lopez (1996) Notas sobre el comportamiento del mercado de trabajo urbano.
In L. Beccaria and N. Lopez (eds.), Sin trabajo. Las caracteristicas del desempleo y sus efectos
en la sociedad argentina, UNICEF/Losada, Buenos Aires.
Belvedere, C. (1997) El inconcluso proyecto marginalidad. Apuntes de Investigación 1, 97–115.
Bourgois, P. (1995) In search of respect. Selling crack in el barrio. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Burgwald, G. (1996) Struggle of the poor: neighborhood organization and clientelist practice in a
Quito squatter settlement. CEDLA, Amsterdam.
Butterworth, D. and J. Chance (1981) Latin American urbanization. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, MA.
Cardoso, F.H. (1971) Comentarios sobre os conceitos de superpopulacao relativa e marginalidade.
Estudio CEBRAP 1, 99–130.
Castells, M. (1983) The city and the grassroots, Edward Arnold.
CEB (1995) Informe de Coyuntura 51.1, Buenos Aires.
Cetrángolo, O. and L. Golbert (1995) Desempleo en Argentina: magnitud del problema y polı́ticas
adoptadas. CECE: Serie Estudios 8, Buenos Aires.
Cieza, D. and V. Beyreuther (1996) De la cultura del trabajo al estado de malestar. Hiper-
desocupación, precarización y daños en el Conurbano Bonaerense. Cuadernos del IBAP 9,
Buenos Aires.
Clark, K. (1965) Dark ghetto. dilemmas of social power. Harper & Row, New York.
De Luca, J. (1976) Teologı́a concreta. CUNP, Buenos Aires.
DESAL (1969) Marginalidad en América Latina: un ensayo de diagnóstico. Editorial Herder,
Barcelona.
—— (1970) Marginalidad, promoción popular e integración Latinoamericana. Ediciones Troquel,
Buenos Aires.
Eckstein, S. (1990a) Urbanization revisited: inner-city slum of hope and squatter settlement of
despair. World Development 18.2, 165–81.
—— (1990b) Poor people versus the state and capital: anatomy of a successful community
mobilization for housing in Mexico City. International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 14, 274–96.
Elias, N. (1994) The civilizing process. Blackwell, Oxford.
EPH (Encuesta Permanente de Hogares) (1996) INDEC, Buenos Aires.
Farinello, L. (1996) La mesa vacı́a. Desocupación y pobreza en la Argentina. Carlos Serrano
Editor, Buenos Aires.
Friedman, J. and M. Salguero (1988) The barrio economy and collective self-empowerment in
Latin America: a framework and agenda for research. Power, Community and the City 1, 3–37.
Galli, V. and R. Malfe (1996) Desocupacion, Identidad y salud. In L. Becaria and N. Lopez (eds.),
Sin trabajo. Las caracteristicas del desempleo y sus efectors en la sociedad argentina, Unicef/
Losada, Buenos Aires.
Gans, H. (1991) People, plans, and policies: essays on poverty, racism, and other national urban
problems. Columbia University Press, New York.
—— (1997) Uses and misuses of concepts in American social science research: variations on Loı̈c
Wacquant’s theme of ‘Three pernicious premises in the study of the American ghetto’.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21.3: 504–7.
Gay, R. (1994) Popular organization and democracy in Rio de Janeiro. A tale of two favelas.
Temple University Press, Philadelphia.
Germani, G. (1966) Polı́tica y sociedad en una epoca de transición: de la sociedad tradicional a la
sociedad de Masas. Paidos, Buenos Aires.
—— (1980) Marginality. Transaction Books, New Brunswick.
Gilbert, A.G. (1994) The Latin American city. Russell Press, Nottingham, UK.
—— and P.M. Ward (1985) Housing, the state, and the poor: policy and practice in three Latin
American cities. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Goffman, E. (1963) Stigma. Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Simon & Schuster, New
York.
Golbert, L. (1996) Viejos y nuevos problemas de las polı́ticas asistenciales. CECE Serie Estudios
12, Buenos Aires.
Grillo, O., M. Lacarrieu and L. Raggio (1995) Polı́ticas sociales y estrategias habitacionales.
Espacio Editorial, Buenos Aires.
Himmelfarb, G. (1984) The idea of poverty: England in the early industrial age. Knopf, New York.
Hintze, S. (1989) Estrategias alimentarias de sobrevivencia. Un estudio de caso en el Gran Buenos
Aires. CEAL, Buenos Aires.
Hirschman, A. (1984) Getting ahead collectively: grassroots experiences in Latin America.
Pergamon Press, New York.
INDEC (1993) Censo´91 Avellaneda, Lanus. INDEC, Buenos Aires.
Iñiguez, A. and A. Sanchez (1995) El conurbano bonaerense y la provincia de Buenos Aires:
condensación de la tragedia nacional de la desocupación y la subocupación. Cuadernos del
IBAP 7, Buenos Aires.
James, D. (1988) Resistance and integration: Peronism and the Argentine working class, 1946–
1976. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Katz, M. (1989) The undeserving poor. Pantheon, New York.
—— (1993) The ‘underclass’ debate: views from history. Princeton University Press, Princeton,
NJ.
—— (1997) Inner-city as place. In K. Erickson (ed.), Sociological visions, Rowman & Littlefield,
Lanham, Maryland.
Kay, C. (1989) Latin American theories of development and underdevelopment. Routledge,
London.
Kessler, G. (1996) Algunas implicancias de la experiencia de desocupación para el individuo y su
familia. In L. Beccaria and N. Lopez (eds.), Sin trabajo. Las caracteristicas del desempleo y sus
efectos en la sociedad Argentina, UNICEF/Losada, Buenos Aires.
Kowarick, L. (ed.) (1988) As lutas sociais e a cidade: Sao Paulo: passado e presente. Paz e Terra,
Brazil.
Lazcano, C. (1987) Historia de la consolidación de Villa Jardı́n. Unpublished Manuscript, Buenos
Aires.
Lloyd-Sherlock, P. (1997) Policy, distribution, and poverty in Argentina since redemocratization.
Latin American Perspectives 24.6, 22–55.
Lomnitz, L. (1975) Cómo sobreviven los marginados. Siglo XXI, México.
—— (1978) Informal exchange networks in formal systems: a theoretical model. American
Anthropologist 90, 42–55.
LoVuolo, R. and A. Barbeito (1993) La Nueva oscuridad de la polı́tica social. Del estado populista
al neoconservador. Miño y Dávila, Buenos Aires.
Lozano, C. and R. Feletti (1996) Convertibilidad y desempleo, crisis ocupacional en la Argentina.
Aportes Para el Estado y la Administracion Gubernamental 3.5, Asociación de Administradores
Gubernamentales, Buenos Aires, 151–81.
Lumi, S., L. Golbert and E.T. Fanfani (1992) La mano izquierda del estado. Miño y Dávila
Editores, Buenos Aires.
Mangin, W. (ed.) (1970) Peasants in cities: readings in the anthropology of urbanization.
Houghton Mifflin.
Margulis, M. (1982) Fuerza de trabajo y estrategias de sobrevivencia en una población de origen
migratorio: colonias populares de Reynosa. Demografı́a y Economı́a XV, 3–47.
Massey, D. and N. Denton (1993) American apartheid. Segregation and the making of the
underclass. Harvard University press, Cambridge, Mass.
McFate K., R. Lawson and W.J. Wilson (eds.) (1996) Poverty, inequality and the future of social
policy. Russell Sage Foundation, New York.
Merklein, D. (1991) Asentamientos en La Matanza. Catálogos, Buenos Aires.
Mingione, E. (1991) Fragmented societies. A sociology of economic life beyond the market
paradigm. Basil Blackwell, Cambridge.
—— (ed.) (1996) Urban poverty and the underclass. Basil Blackwell, Cambridge.
Minujin, A. (ed.) (1992) Cuesta abajo. Los nuevos pobres: efectos de la crisis en la sociedad
Argentina. UNICEF-Losada, Buenos Aires.
—— and G. Kessler (1995) La nueva pobreza en Argentina. Planeta, Buenos Aires.

68 Javier Auyero
Monza, A. (1996) Evolución reciente y perspectivas des Mercado de Trabajo en la Argentina.

Aportes Para El Estado y La Administración Gubernamental 3, 65–78.
Municipality of Lanús (1996) Historia de Lanús. Secretaria de Prensa y Difusion, Buenos Aires.
Murmis, M. and S. Feldman (1996) De seguir ası́. In L. Beccaria and N. Lopez (eds.), Sin trabajo.
Las caracteristicas del desempleo y sus efectos en la sociedad Argentina, UNICEF/Losada,
Buenos Aires.
Nudler, J. (1996) Trabajo no hay y ademas es malo. Página12, 12.15, 7.
Nun, J. (1969) Superpoblación relativa, ejército industrial de reserva y masa marginal. Revista
Latinoamericana de Sociologı́a 5.2, 178–236.
—— (1972) Marginalidad y otras cuestiones. Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales 4, 97–
127.
—— (1987) Cambios en la estructura social de la Argentina. In J. Nun and J.C Portantiero (eds.),
Ensayos sobre la transición democrática en Argentina. Puntosur, Buenos Aires.
——, J.C. Marı́n and M. Murmis (1968) Marginalidad en América Latina. Documento de Trabajo.
Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, Instituto Torcuato Di Tella 53, Buenos Aires.
Oszlak, O. (1991) Merecer la ciudad. Los pobres y el derecho al espacio urbano. CEDES-
Humanitas, Buenos Aires.
Página12 (1996) Suplemento Cash333. Buenos Aires.
Perlman, J. (1976) The myth of marginality. The University of California Press, Berkeley.
Pinheiro, P.S. (1996) Democracies without citizenship. Nacla XXX.2, 17–23.
Portes, A. (1972) Rationality in the slum: an essay in interpretative sociology. Comparative Studies
in Society and History 14.3, 268–86.
Prevot Schapira, M. (1996) Las polı́ticas de lucha contra la pobreza en la periferia de Buenos Aires,
1984–1994. Revista Mexicana de Sociologı́a. 59.2, 73–94.
Roberts, B. (1978) Cities of peasants. Sage Publications, Beverly Hills.
—— (1996) The social context of citizenship in Latin America. International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 20.1, 38–65.
Rock, D. (1987) Argentina 1516–1987. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.
—— (1993) Argentina, 1930–1946. In L. Bethel (ed.), Argentina since independence, Cambridge
University Press, New York.
Rofman, A. (1996) El desempleo en la capital y en el interior: perfiles actuales del desempleo
estructural en la Argentina. La distuación diferencial del Gran Buenos Aires y el interior. In S.
Peñalva and A. Rofman (eds.), Desempleo estructural, pobreza y precarieda, Nueva Visión,
Buenos Aires.
Rubinich, L. (1989) Apuntes sobre nociones de derechos en sectores populares urbanos. CEDES,
Buenos Aires.
Sarlo, B. (1996) Instantáneas. Medios, ciudad y costumbres en el fin de siglo. Ariel, Buenos Aires.
Sassen, S. (1991) The global city. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992) Death without weeping. The violence of everyday life in Brazil.
University of California Press, Berkeley.
Silver, H. (1996) Culture, politics and national discourses of the new urban poverty. In E. Mingione
(ed.), Urban poverty and the ‘underclass’ , Blackwell, Cambridge, MA.
Taylor, D. (1997) Disappearing acts. Spectacles of gender and nationalism in Argentina’s ‘dirty
war’. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Tenti, E. (1989) El estado educador. In E. Isuani and E. Tenti (eds.), Estado democrático y polı́tica
social, Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires.
Tilly, C. (1978) From mobilization to revolution. McGraw-Hill, New York.
—— (1996) Durable inequality. Working Paper 224. New School for Social Research, Center for
Studies of Social Change, New York.
Torrado, S. (1992) Estructura social de la Argentina. Ediciones de la Flor, Buenos Aires.
Torre, J.C. and L. De Riz (1993) Argentina since 1946. In L. Bethel (ed.), Argentina since
independence, Cambridge University Press, New York.
Villareal, J. (1985) Los hilos sociales del poder. In E. Jozami (ed.), Crisis de la dictadura
argentina, Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires.
—— (1996) La exclusión social. Norma-Flacso, Buenos Aires.
Wacquant, L.J.D. (1993) Urban outcasts: stigma and division in the black American ghetto and the
French urban periphery. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17.3, 366–83.
—— (1994) The new urban color line: the state and fate of the ghetto in postfordist America. In

C.J. Calhoun (ed.), Social theory and the politics of identity, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
—— (1995) The comparative structure and experience of urban exclusion: "race", class, and space
in Chicago and Paris. In K. McFate, R. Lawson and W.J. Wilson (eds.), Poverty, inequality and
the future of social policy, Russell Sage Foundation, New York.
—— (1996a) The rise of advanced marginality: notes on its nature and implication. Acta
Sociologica. Journal of the Scandinavian Sociological Association 39.2, 121–39.
—— (1996b) Dynamics of relegation in advanced societies. Paper presented to the International
Conference on Globalization and the New Social Inequality, Utrechts, The Netherlands,
November.
—— (1996c) Elias in the ghetto. Unpublished manuscript. Prepared for Amsterdam Sociologisch
Tidjschrift (as postscript to the Dutch translation of ‘Décivilisation et démonisation’).
Williams, T. (1989) The cocaine kids. Addison-Wesley, New York.
—— (1992) Crackhouse. Notes from the end of the line. Penguin, New York.
Wilson, W.J. (1980) The declining significance of race. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
—— (1987) The truly disadvantaged. The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
—— (1996) When work disappears. The world of the new urban poor. Vintage, New York.
Yujnovsky, O. (1984) Las claves polı́ticas del problema habitacional Argentino. Grupo Editor
Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires.

Lived Experiences of Marginality in an Argentine Slum

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Judul Asli

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Lived Experiences of Marginality in an Argentine Slum

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

‘This is a Lot Like the Bronx, isn’t it?

Snapshots of ‘the other side’

The (potential) bicycle thief

The cocaine cops

One of those hard knocks in somebody’s life

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

underemployment, educational exclusion and welfare retrenchment, and their experiential

Coping with marginality behind the ‘invisible wall’

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

If something characterizes the change in the Conurbano Bonaerense’s landscape it is the

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

Poverty, inequality and the state

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

Public support of low-income housing is insignificant. In 1992, public authorities

Villa Paraı́so: historical background

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

Jobs and education in Villa Paraı́so

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

Down and out: the experience of living in the slum

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

The Fifth Road: dealers, ‘little pirates’and shoplifters

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

The prevalence of unemployment and underemployment and the inadequacy of public

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

There are a lot of drugs, insecurity. . . (Juan).

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

The Bronx and the Wild West

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

transitory; social or economic mobility is unthinkable. Both perceptions mark a real

Hopelessness, deproletarianization, racist classifications, violence and divisions,

Javier Auyero (auyero@aol.com), Department of Sociology, State University of New

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

Monza, A. (1996) Evolución reciente y perspectivas des Mercado de Trabajo en la Argentina.

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999

Anda mungkin juga menyukai