Auyero Poor People’s politics

In the context of contemporary interpretation of political clientelism as one of Latin Americas’ political limitations to democracy, Auyero offers an alternative analysis of the problem solving networks between problem holders and solvers (brokers) as a means of creation of an alternative for the creation of subsistence among the large groups of socially and economically excluded groups inhabiting Greater Buenos Aires slums in the 1990s. In a context of structural division of the labor market and of both economic neoliberalism and state abandonment, the peronist networks offer the sometimes only alternative for accessing necessary services and goods, but also as an institution that gets involved with this sector. He critiques the interpretations of clientelism as a form of political and ideological submission, as a rational “exchange” of goods for votes or as a political strategy for dividing the field of the popular. Rather Auyero offers a “microphysics of politics” to understand the “way politics affects and engages the real lives of people” (24) in this problem solving networks recreate the bases of political party organization by reinventing populism. Through material and symbolic practice. He also offers reading on gendered dimension on politics in which the constitution of a feminine field is not only an opening of a sphere of resistant for women’s participation, but rather contributes in a particular way to reinforce forms of subordination. The neighborhood he works at was a result of the rural urban migrations of the late 1940s, and that benefit form peronist politics until 1955. If the military dictatorships were both efficient in developing the shanty town with infrastructure they were also in evicting people form it. Finally the 1980 and 1990 was the moment in which the neighborhood stopped being a place of upward mobility that would take people out of the shantytown and transformed into a permanent place of survival for the socially and economically excluded (66). In this context an everyday type of “internal” violence emerged as a result of the recourse to criminality and drug traffic by some sectors of the youth, and of development of forms of stigma against the immigrant population of the neighborhood. This has generated a strong and violent presence of police in the everyday life (73-77). To understand the way networks function he unpacks the practices of political brokers and in particular the women that function as the coordinators of state social programs made effective through the party structure. He claims that is not enough to understand the structural position of brokers but also the specific performance they unfold. The brokers function as gatekeepers to the benefit of programs and of general help, but they present as disinterest coordinators totally committed to social solidarity. This brokers are mostly women and have a particular life trajectory: strong family ties with peronist networks and a early start in social work. Further Auyero claims that they create relations with their followers by presenting themselves as incarnations of Evita, they perform Evita and this is part of the way they produce their life trajectories. Brokerage is not something fixed but a patter of coherent articulate conduct that occupies the available social spaces and reenacts the past and therefore it reinscribes it. Women brokers present themselves as being close to the people as a maternal figure. Thus they work disinterestly as maternal caregivers for their unprotected children something assumed as “natural” of the feminine condition, and that operates in a realm different form politics (even when they could eventually be involved in politics latter).
He points to brokers and political leaders mobility as a form of performance that creates a territoriality of it dominium. By moving, both the municipal major and the brokers impart a “personal touch” to the local politics they get in touch with the people by physically getting to them, transversing the neighborhood in a bike entering the intricate shantytown pathways, is a way in which Evita is embodied in practice, an Evita performance that re-actualizes her figure as mother of the poor.
In regards to this collapse of politics and kinship the actualization, the constant recreation of the practice and image of evita as mother, is done through incessant broker´s performativity. In it they produce their circle of followers as a family. He quotes Bourdieu “a united integrated entity which is stable and indifferent to the fluctation of individual feelings” “a transpersonal person” in which the laws of economic exchange and interest are apparently suspended, of trusting and giving. (138) This is a space of the women as care givers and the men as responisibel and providers. Women brokers have to work within this parameter: they shape their public role on gender, women comply what men decide and they do social work while men do politics.
“Performing Evita, restoring constructed behavior, is not purposely engineered or cynical action. It is not theatrical. It is a practice in Bourdieu’s sense of the term: taken ofr granted, unreflective and outside of the realm of discursive consciousness. Their practice is an embodiment of the way a woman should behave if she is going to be a public peronist woman.” “these women perform Evita not only ou of affinity and admiration for Eva, but laso because, as Eva Perón herself found out there are few good roles for women in the public arena. But their practice is also improvisation.” (145) By constituting social work as a duty they occupy a space of relative autonomy opened to them. Through this embodied aesthetic, discursive practice women enter the field of politics but they also construct it, they both seek to satisfy personal interest as they feel impelled to embody Eva to be peronist women. For Auyero the presentation of the women broker operate as an ideological mechanism in order to veil relations of power.