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.

Mawani, Legal Geographies of Aboriginal Segregations

The article is structured around the relation between space and race, and specifically spatial segregation, in the 19th
Century as a central aspect in the consolidation of modernity and of colonial domination. If separation of white and native populations was a pattern in different colonial contexts, the author points to the difference between the practices of exclusion in dependent nations in which the extraction of natural resources was the main point of operation of power relations, from thesocio -spatial relations established in settler colonies, in which the emphasis is on the expansion of white residency. In this last cases therelation between practices of isolation, tha formation of racialized identities and the law appear to be directly connected in constituting white dominance. This is what she explores in the formation of the city of Victoria (BC) as a site of white supremacy that implied the creation of the Songhee reservation as a means of spatializing difference in a
distant place. The production of race is central in this analysis as it produces colonial power and has as effects theconstitution of white and indigenous subjectivities. This was made possible through the use of law, and not through military occupation, in a disputed process between indigenous, white settlers and indigenous people. It s the frame of legality that makes it difficult to critique violence implicated in this process. If initially the population of Victoria was an intermingled group of a majority of indigenous people and a few white fur traders, the creation of theSonghee reserve is an initial strategy for outcasting indigenous out of the city, (in the opposite shore and across a bridge) but still in some proximity. The discourse legitimating segregation points to hygienic and moral reasons for racial separation. Indigenous were thus confined to a reduced space
they had to share with a diversity of other indigenous groups, and their life gets subjected to disciplinarian measurements such as having to avoid the city as much astehy can and being baned to be there at all at night (because of alluded alcoholism and prostitution problems), in sum excluding difference form colonizers spaces. This techniques were then producing racially homogeneous population that turned to be a spatial categorization that were part of the bureaucratic rationalization of the city, by a process of creation of the "empty" spaces the colonizers imagined to be occupying [cfr argentina y los desiertos].
Latter the white settlers considered the reserve to be too close to the city and a source of problems so there was an intensified pressure to remove it. An anxiety that not only made visible the racial distinction but also produced it. It took 60 years to the colonial administrators to do this as their concern with the rightfulness of this eviction prevented them to make it effective. The space of the reserve becomes then a signifier of racial disorder, a place of corrupt and savage indians in constant danger of violent explosion against the civilized whites. In regards to this images the space of the reserve becomes a material reality of
segregation of all indigenous "Space are not fixed, dead or undialectical, as Edward Soja Explains, but on the contrary have an important relationship with the people seen as interior and exterior to that space" (182) In sum the constition of Victoria and its citizenship was made through projecting all that hites were not, to the Songhee peole and to the space of he reserve . Again this negation was unfolded in the matreiality of the daly forms of colonial intervensions, tehnologies of degregation, and in the end the enforced removal. In this dinamic "officials used the law to envison and constitute theri own whiteness and civility" (???), however this was not uncontestedbut took several years of debate. The songhees both resited eviction and ignored the presures to make them leave the area. Official were determined to get Songhee agreement in order to justify their embrace of liberal ideals. But agreement does not imply there was consent , rather the ideals of justice and equality raced by the discourse of law were produced on the base of racialized notions and thus was a form of producing unequal relations between colonizers and colonized. Eviction was justified by this -supposedly- consensus, and was thought as a necessary step in the civilizatory process. "Eurocanadians colonists envisioned their own subjectivities and their civic imagineries against the bodies and spaces of the indigenous inhabitants. The contradiction between the forced exclusion of natives and the liberal values of fairness and rationality was reconciliated by the legitimation of the law, and by framing it as the indigenous best interest, while letting white authorities and residents constitute their subjectivities as free, rational, fair." (page??) This of course neglected the violence of land dispossession, destruction of possibilities of mantaining a cultural habit, and teh ongoing social, political and economic marginality effected.


The photograph is form a "Residential school group photograph, Regina, Saskatchewan" taken form http://www.heyokamagazine.com/HEYOKA.6.LouieLawless.htm is not the same as what the text's case, but gives (me) a picture of other related institution.

Wacquant, Loic. 2007. Urban Outcasts

23) Wacquant, Loic. 2007. Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.

Wacquant makes a critic o media characterization of spaces of urban marginality as lawless and dangerous. He argues that this discourse is indeed part of what fabricates this marginalization. “Advanced marginality is a novel regime of socio-spatial relegation” (2) he argues. Instead of analyzing contemporary marginalization as a common phenomenon that can be characterized as a “ghettification” of major cities worldwide, and the emergence for an “underclass” (as the media and main stream urbanists have argued) he proposes that marginality is not the same everywhere. He wants to delineate “Social morphology, organizational makeup and functions that neighbourhoods of relegation fulfil for their respective metropolises” (4) For this he takes both the Chicago black ghetto and the Parisian banlieue. The first part of the book offers an alternative to the Chicago School analysis of poverty as a disorganizing force, to follow the connections between racial domination, class inequality, state (in)action, and spatial enclosures. He also critizises the model of the consolidation of the “dual city“ to argue that has been a process of fragmentation of the marginal and unification among dominant groups. He understand this “social fragmentation from below” as the condition of impossibility of articulationg political claims in terms of shared identity, and rather the proliferation of a variety of fragmented strategies of subsistence socialization. The second part is a comparison made on the base of structure, experience and political economy of urban marginality in the US and France. He combines quantitative and ethnographic analysis in order to historize how both formations have changed over time as result of external causes and what are the implications of this for people living in places of exclusion. He relates the creation of the North American hyper-ghetto with: 1) the deepening inequalities generated by capital concentration, and 2) the withdrawal of state policies of welfare, generating the decay of institutions of the ghetto and a state of social abandonment,3) the strengthening of policies of racial segregation among which there is a growing , 4) of policing and criminalization of the ghettos. The European balineues contrarily rather than being space of racial segregation are constituted from the chronic unemployment and employment precarization, in the ethnically heterogeneous former working-class neighbourhoods. He analyzes how in both cases there is territorial stigmatization that enhances process of de-solidarization, operating in different dimensions in each case: exclusion in France is based in terms of class while in the US is based in racial terms. The general critique we can make is that he follows a too schematic logic of cause- effect and flattens the complexities of He is very about state role in the configuration of space (he does not quote Lefebvre nor acknowledges most of of the theoretical debates over social dimension of space except for some of Bourdieu’s considerations taken form a systemicist perspective) “effects of space turn out to be effects of state projected on to the city”. (6) He emphasises that violence is more a consequence of all these historical processes rather than any sudden “explosion” of ethnic rage, and that ultimately erodes any possibility of citizenship as a category that would even up capitalism’s inequalities.