Guano

Emanulea Guano in her ethnograpy of the portenyo middle class points to the production of meaning around the legitimate terms of being portenyo in the face of the economic and political transforamtions effected by the 1990s neoliberal policies. The transformation of te econom that resulted in the encrease of unemployment and the empoverishment of the middle classes had as effects the encresed perseption of fear, loss and intruition among this sector. Fear of lossing their propoerty and social capital of being a white europeanized middle class, loss of the property but also of a city expected to be modern and european like. This generated a need of redifining and reinforcing separation form the "intruders", the urban poor whose population rised steadily. This need of diferentiation was not made just on the bases of class, but there was a growing claim that the poor invading the city as immigrants of neigbouring coutries and also racialized as non white. Even though the long tradition of the peronim of reclaiming the site of the "dark" "poor" shanty twon dwellers as an important part of "the people" and the centre of a ntional identity, the midle class reprasantions seem to be more linked with the discourses and desire of modernization, of becoming "real first world". Guano associates this with neoliberalism and call it "to see modernity form the looking glass", while embracing the project to be in modernity becomes more and more distant. Thus the middle class along with some of the dominant discourse of the government and the pres, construct a sense of disapearing middle class, along with a invasion of immigrants. It is for her a reactualization of the civilization/barbarism discourse. In which the middle class recoginizes as the inheritors of a european city only to see its cluster of slumnines in the cirujas [this is a pre cartonero research], the squatter and the insequrity. In this contexts only the granting of security, more than only possesion can guarantee the remaining in the middle class, thus the proliferation of location of exclusion, or the self enclosing of the public space in the mall, and the formation of gated communities. It is in the desparete definition of the other that middle class atempts to avoid the fact that is very close or with no clear distinction than this other.