citas guano

The neoliberal government—it had become clear to many—
had little interest in protecting the middle-classes.8 In the perceived
absence of institutional policies and interventions, everyday
strategies such as spatial segregation, symbolic evictions, and the
construction of social invisibility were among the measures enacted
to contain the alleged intrusion. All of these strategies had deep
roots in the local history of class struggle.
As Mitchell (2003) suggested, dominant social groups may
prevent urban space from becoming more “public”—hence
more inclusive—by tailoring the rules for spatial practice on
themselves. As they claim to embody the legitimate urban public,
these groups attempt to undermine the right to the city of those
who fail to comply with the dominant prescriptions for belonging.
It is through social struggle that marginal social groups can strive
to establish a “space for representation” (2003: 33) where it is possible
for them to become socially and politically visible. A space
for representation is an arena where one can posit oneself, and be
publicly acknowledged, as a citizen: a legitimate member of “the
public,” and a political actor endowed with the right to advance
claims about what reality is and should be.
Throughout the twentieth century, much of the struggle over
visibility in the Buenos Aires’ urban sphere was closely connected
to the clash over the cultural and political citizenship of the subaltern:
the thousands who lived in the slums, the tenements, and
the working class barrios at the margins of the bourgeois city. It was
between 1945 and 1955 that the socially and politically mandated
invisibility of the Buenos Aires lower classes was finally shattered—
even though only temporarily. During this time, Perón’s army of
the “shirtless” (descamisados) succeeded in appropriating Buenos
Aires’ bourgeois downtown as its own “space for representation":
an arena where it could exert the role of the most visible public
of Peronism. As the physical embodiment of the pueblo argentino
(the Argentine people), the poor could be periodically seen as they
acclaimed Perón and his wife Evita in raucous ceremonies held in
Plaza de Mayo. Most supporters of Perón’s 1946–1955 government
were members of those mestizo lower classes that had been consistently
disenfranchised by the elites and their governments, as
well as by many of those who opposed them. Poor, dark-skinned
Argentines had also been consistently excluded from the vision
of social justice that was upheld by immigrant European socialist
activists (Walter 1977). By bringing a mass of mestizo workers and
lumpenproletarians to the heart of Buenos Aires, Perón launched
a symbolic aggression against the white middle and upper classes
(Foster 1998:6; Ciria 1983:277).9 Under his presidency, the bourgeois
city became a stage for the glorification of a proudly self-referential
barbarism and its challenge to the exclusionary civilization
of the elite (Svampa 1992).10

Their presence in an urban sphere dominated by the middle and upper classes was still
categorized at best as invisible, and at worst as that of the intrusive
Other.

Faced with their own “disconnect” from modernity—a disconnect
that blatantly contradicted the neoliberal shibboleth of
Argentina’s successful modernization, in the late 1990s many
middle-class Buenos Aires residents experienced urban space as a
location where the drama of modernization through the looking
glass struck them with the force of first-hand experience. Fully
aware of their precarious hold on middle-classness, many of them
tried to reiterate their symbolic entitlement to a city that they
viewed as coessential to their own class identity, and on the verge
of being swallowed by the disorganizing forces of a reterritorialized
“third world”. In the attempt to explain and resist their predicament,
those who were concerned with their own fall from grace
inscribed a legacy of modernity into what they envisioned as
“their” urban space, and erected physical, but most often conceptual,
boundaries in the hope of safeguarding the social and spatial
integrity of middle-class Buenos Aires. Tropes of foreignness, pollution,
and propriety supplemented practices of segregation and
surveillance in the attempt to redress the trespassings. Articulated
along the distinction between civilization and barbarism, first and
third world, and modernization and its opposite, pervasive representations
of spatialized identities and identified spaces helped
middle-class residents to reinforce a fading social difference, while
simultaneously blaming their predicament on graspable culprits:
those who did not belong in the modern city.

Text 2003

page 7 Zygmunt Bauman (1994) has argued that the late-capitalist city creates a
sharp polarization of public and private space as a false alternative for an increasingly
captive flaneur. As public space becomes the urban jungle of danger,
decay, and fear, the flaneur can only resort to private spaces (malls, theme
parks, and citadels) to carry out his practice. However, through their Disneyfied
landscapes of meaning that seduce, capture, and discipline the gaze, these
urban sanctuaries appropriate the signifying playfulness and the freedom that
(supposedly) characterized modern flanerie. The postmodern flaneur, Bauman
concluded, is then at risk of becoming a passive gaper whose practice and experience
are controlled from above. It would, of course, be farfetched to categorize
the elegant downtown of Buenos Aires as a jungle of fear and decay, nor
has modernist flanerie disappeared from the life of middle-class portenos. And
yet, throughout the 1990s, open, centralized, and "Parisian" Buenos Aires
faced an erosion brought about by these new spatial formations. Malls, citadels,
and theme parks became the sites where the synergy of spectacle and segregation—
the spectacle of a transnational and elitist consumption and a segregation
that separated these places from the rapidly expanding slums—strove to
inscribe the ideology of neoiiberaiism into the everyday life of portenos.

In what follows I explore three of the most popular loci of "North American"
Buenos Aires: the Puerto Madero waterfront, the luxurious downtown
shopping malls, and the Tren de la Costa tourist railway. My object is to show
how, by implementing the strategies of segregation and spectacularization that
Bauman sees as essential of postmodernity, these spatial formations strive to
exert a compelling control on how the porteno flaneurs and flaneuses experience
the "North American" city. Hence, I argue that Puerto Madero, the malls,
and the Tren are not simply stages for the self-congratulatory dramatization by
the upper class of its own economic prowess and its status-building taste for
transnational consumption. In fact, even though they explicitly exclude the
"dangerous" lower class, these enclosed spectacles address yet another audience:
the middle-class public—a somewhat marginal public yet a necessary
one. Drastically affected by neoliberal policies and reforms but still politically
undecided, the porteno middle and lower middle class form a large social
group that has to be persuaded into accepting the dominant ideology.12 The
self-contained spectacles of the neoliberal city cater to these increasingly impoverished
flaneurs and flaneuses with a simulacrum of inclusion.

For porteno malls are not just about spectacle; they are about segregation,
too. Their success is inextricably connected to fear of a public space that the
middle classes have come to associate more and more with the "dangerous"
lower class.... However, just as with Bauman's flaneur-turnedgaper,
they are also trapped in a place that allows little room for alternative
practices and readings. Some portenos may not mind; others do.

p 17 What is sold in Buenos Aires's malls is not just foreign goods but,
even more importantly, the idea of consuming foreign goods. What is displayed
in the malls is the free market with its tantalizing promise of participation
in the privileged Western modernity to be found in the northern hemisphere—
still so distant from the south of the world.