Javier Auyero

The Hyper-Shantytown Neo-Liberal Violence(s) in the Argentine Slum

Ethnographic observation, archival data, surveys and newspaper reports are combined to depict the social transformation of Argentine shantytowns during the last two decades, focusing on three different kinds of violence that impact the lives and social strategies of their residents: daily interpersonal violence, intermittent state repression, and the structural violence of mass unemployment. These violences are interrelated expressions of the broader socio-economic and institutional changes that have swept Argentina as the country adopted and implemented neo-liberal economic policies. As a consequence of the withering away of the wage-labor economy, the official indifference of the state, and the breakdown of the organizational fabric of these territories, shantytowns run the risk of becoming functionally severed from the larger society.

The Dynamics of Collective Violence: Dissecting Food Riots in Contemporary Argentina

This article combines a statistical analysis with qualitative research to investigate the dynamics of collective violence in one of its most recurrent forms – the food riot. Using an original dataset collected by the authors on 289 food riot episodes occurring in Argentina in December 2001, the article argues for the need to dissect the local, contextualized inner-dynamics of the episodes. We find significant interrelationships between three important factors: the presence or absence of police, the presence or absence of political party brokers, and the type of market looted (big/chain or small/local). We then conduct a qualitative and ethnographic analysis to illustrate how these interactions might play out in two ideal type looting scenes – one illustrating the role of public authorities at big, chain supermarkets, the other showing the importance of party brokers at small, local food markets. We conclude by calling for more such research to better understand the mechanisms and processes, especially the relationship between state power and party politics, involved with all forms of collective violence.

‘This is a lot like the Bronx, isn’t it?’ Lived experiences of marginality in an Argentine slum

Based on life-stories, in-depth interviews and informal conversations, this article focuses on the lived experiences of the inhabitants of a slum in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The first part of the article explores the political-economic context of deepening marginalization of the slum population in contemporary Argentina, paying special attention to the mutually reinforcing processes of massification of under- and unemployment, impoverishment and state retrenchment. The second part of the article analyses the impact of such increasing marginalization on the lived experiences of slum-dwellers in Villa Paraiso. In particular, it focuses on (a) the dominant antagonisms that divide the residents of this destitute neighbourhood; and (b) the feeling of social isolation and abandonment that pervades much of the reality of slum-dwellers. The article finds some experiential similarities between slum-dwellers in Argentina and residents of other enclaves of urban poverty in advanced societies. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.

In harm’s way at the urban margins

Residents of poor barrios in Buenos Aires are deeply worried about widespread violence (domestic, sexual, criminal, and police) and about environmental hazards – two dimensions of marginalization that policy-makers tend to disregard and social scientists of the ethnographic persuasion seldom treat together for what they are: producers of harm. Based on 18 months of collaborative fieldwork, this article dissects poor people’s experiences of living in harm’s way.

The Political Makings of the 2001 Lootings in Argentina

Based on archival research and on multi-sited fieldwork, this article offers the first available description of the food lootings that took place in Argentina in December 2001. The paper joins the current relational turn in the study of collective violence. It examines the existing continuities between everyday life, routine politics and extraordinary massive actions, and scrutinises the grey zone where the deeds and networks of looters, political entrepreneurs and law enforcement officials meet and mesh. The article reconstructs the looting dynamics at one specific site and highlights the existence of three mechanisms during the episodes : 1. the creation of opportunities by party brokers and police agents, 2. the validation of looting by state elites, and 3. the signalling spiral carried out by party brokers.

PERFORMING EVITA A Tale of Two Peronist Women

Based on the first ethnography of urban political clientelism ever carried out in Argentina, this paper focuses on the public performances of female political brokers belonging to the Peronist Party. Drawing on the analytical tools provided by cultural sociology and the anthropology of performance, the paper explores the way in which brokers, through their “presentation of the self,” attempt to foster impressions in their audiences and construct a particular sociodicy of their social place. When appearing in public, brokers (as other politicians) have a plethora of motives for trying to control the image the audience receives of the situation. The article examines some of the common techniques of impression-management utilized by the brokers in front of their audience (mostly poor people), each time they grant a favor, every time they hand out a food package or a needed medicine.

Violence and the State at the Urban Margins

Based on thirty months of ethnographic fieldwork in a violence-ridden, low-income district located in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, this article examines the state’s presence at the urban margins and its relationships to widespread depacification of poor people’s daily life. Contrary to descriptions of destitute urban areas in the Americas as either governance voids deserted by the state or militarized spaces firmly controlled by the state’s iron fist, this article argues that law enforcement in Buenos Aires’s high-poverty zones is intermittent, selective, and contradictory. By putting the state’s fractured presence at the urban margins under the ethnographic microscope, the article reveals its key role in the perpetuation of the violence it is presumed to prevent.

The Geography of Popular Contention: An Urban Protest in Argentina

Abstract This article examines the spatial dimensions of a highly singular riot in contemporary Argentina: the episode that came to be known as the Santiagazo. On 16 December 1993, thousands of public employees sacked, burned, and looted three government buildings (the Government House, the Courthouse, and the Legislature) and the private residences of nearly a dozen local politicians and officials in the city of Santiago del Estero. Based on in-depth interviews and archival research, this article examines how both physical and symbolic space structures (i.e., constrains and facilitates) protest, paying particular attention to the construction of the riots itinerary, to the selection of the crowds targets, and to the geography of policing. It also explores how protest structures space—both physical and symbolic—focusing on the specific creative actions of the protesters during that day, on their experiences, and on the meanings with which they later came to imbue the looting.

Poor people's lives and politics: The things a political ethnographer knows (and doesn't know) after 15 years of fieldwork

This paper reflects on a decade and a half of ethnographic research on five different topics: patronage politics, the intricate relationship between clientelism and collective action, the role of clandestine connections in politics, urban marginality and environmental suffering, and poor people’s waiting as a way of experiencing political domination. The paper examines the contributions that political ethnography can make to a better understanding of these themes and highlights areas for further empirical and theoretical work.

Researching the Urban Margins: What Can the United States Learn from Latin America and Vice Versa?

Over the decade and a half that I have been conducting research on poverty and marginality in Latin America (with a specific focus on Argentina), I have become increasingly aware of the lack of dialogue between scholars working on similar issues north and south of the border. The striking similarities in the ways neoliberal economic policies and political transformations are now affecting the lives of the urban poor throughout the Americas might present a good (and well overdue) opportunity to break down artificial, but well-entrenched, “area-studies” boundaries and to scrutinize the manifold (sometimes similar, sometimes not) processes that are shaping the dynamics of urban relegation throughout the continent. True, ghettoes, inner-cities, favelas, villas, comunas, poblaciones, colonias (to mention a few of the terms used to describe the territories where multiple deprivations accumulate throughout the region) are not the same urban forms. While a few economic, political, and/or demographic dynamics that gave birth to, say, a villa miseria in Buenos Aires and the ghetto in Chicago (such as rapid industrialization and mass migration) may have some resemblances, the differences (racial segregation, housing policies, etc.) are far too important to be ignored. The causes and experiences of destitution in the developed North and the (always) developing South are, indeed, quite varied. And yet, years of field research at the urban margins armed with theoretical tools developed with diverse realities in mind have convinced me that sustained and serious engagement between researchers of urban poverty and/or marginality throughout the Americas can lead to better understandings and explanations of the diverse ways in which neoliberal states and economies bolster social and economic vulnerabilities. What can urban sociologists in the United States take away from reading about current dynamics in the sprawling informal settlements in Latin America? Conversely, what can urban sociologists in Latin America learn from reading about the living conditions in enclaves of urban poverty in the United States and the predicament of their residents? In this brief essay, I highlight a few themes found in both bodies of urban poverty research, which have rarely converged in a fruitful exchange; themes present in one literature that can benefit the other; and one theme that, surprisingly enough, has received little (if no) attention in either the United States or Latin America. In doing so, rather than focus on the substantive similarities in the forms and meanings of dispossession, I draw attention to the ways in which social scientific studies of urban poverty in some places