escapando de la villa y visita

bue primeras dos semanas y no llegue con mi objetivo, quizas deba cambiarlo para no fracasar tan rapido. quizas deba dejar de tener insomnio por preocupaciones economicas respecto al a;o que viene, quizas deba dejar de enfurecerme con la institucion q me deja sin alternativas en un momento de particular vulnerabilidad. aca va lo que si escribi y que son mas unas 500 palabras por dia de trabajo. aun desordenadas, descriptivas, sin clara linea argumental aun. pero bue ahi va. escapando de la villa al barrio

1. Discourse
One of the first things that I heard about the Toba neighborhood from the older people living in it was how important was its constitution as a way to “get out” of the different villas (shanty towns) they were living in. This view was also shared by the people working in two NGO's who have helped them put together the project to receive the land donations and to generate a housing project, and different anthropologists who have been in touch with them during that period. Regardless the different moments of arrival to the city from the Chaco, the people that now constitute the barrio have lived and moved around several of the biggest shanty towns in Buenos Aires. Some of those shanty towns are very well-known through the press as being “holes of criminality”. Describe them as centres of illegal drug distribution, the residence of robbers and kidnapers that have generated a supposedly wave of insecurity, thus regarded as the responsible for one of the most compelling issues of concern of Buenos Aires Citizens (Quote TN, Macri’s campaign). Echoing the media discourses the common narrative among the “heads” of the families of the barrio is that life in the villas was getting unbearable: violence was escalating as a result of confrontation between gangs and with them and the police, drug dealing started to be a more common activity, and in the last years a lot of new people had arrived turning relations between neighbors into relations of strangers. Some people explained they had gotten robbed “even inside the villa” as a reference of the transgression of the basic respect of not stealing to fellow poor neighbors (a shift that Alarcon refers to in his journalistic research, 20xx).

Villas In all these descriptions a sharp contrast between the life in the villas and in the Chaco was stressed. The Chaco is presented as a place with no violence, where drug dealing and consumption is unknown, neighbors share food and tools and cooperate with each other. The adults in the neighbourhood (people in between 45 and 65) explain that they felt a total estrangement in the villas when they arrived to the city they and had no other place to go but to where most working class rural migrants settle.

Quote interview CL

The villas or barrio de emergencia, are scattered around different vacant areas near the city centre (such as railway lots) but mostly around the different concentric “rings” that surround Buenos Aires city constituting the conurbano or metropolitan Buenos Aires, a jurisdiction different from the city of Buenos Aires. People explain that they had no other networks in the city than with people living in villas, or when they did, it was in the villas where they were able to get a place to be. Coming from rural villages, marginal neighbourhoods in Chaco towns and cities, most people explain that they were unfamiliar with the dynamics of the villa, they felt observed, did not want to join collective events, were afraid of being caught in the middle of a dispute between youth banditas (gangs). Their estrangement got to the point that they were staying inside their homes most of the time in fear to being outside, they did not allow their children to play in public space, they run their way in and out of the neighbourhood to work, and could not receive visits because they were afraid of going there.

Quote Interview AM

Context of migration and arrival to villas. This, they explained, was in total opposition to how they use space in the Chaco, where most of the day is spent outside, meals take place around the outside kitchen, children come and go with ease being taken care by multiple women at the same time, and where visits are received in the galleries outside of the houses. Synthesizing this one man in his forties explained after a visit to the Chaco that he missed “the liberty to be outside, walk wherever you want, go hunting to any field”. The contrast was established in particular among the people who had arrived in the late 1980s and the 1990s to the city, a moment of deep economical crisis followed by the instauration of strict neoliberal reform. This reform that generated unemployment in the rural areas and in a broad sense can be identified as a cause for migration, also implied a drastic turn in the life in the city. State welfare programs and services were drastically reduced, the markets opened to foreign commodities and investment that generated national industry’s collapse and massive layovers of workers, state indebt and dependence from foreign loans that established the terms of those loans. The Tobas had experienced some of this process in the Chaco with the reduction of employment resulting from the crisis in the agro-industries and the mechanization of some of the processes they have been hired to cover decades before.

The first men coming for periods to Buenos Aires between the 50 and 70 had experienced the city in a different way. For them the city was a site of enhanced possibilities of accessing to a paid work, and to obtain better salaries than what they get in the Chaco. For these men, as for most migrant men the shanty towns were still potentially transitory places, however the context of the late 1980ies and the 1990ies the villas were places where people barely subsisted under the level of poverty and in some cases in state of indigence. For people arriving in the 1980 it was clear that people there no longer had the expectation of being able to get out of the villas.

The combination of successive crisis and unemployment, the retraction of state services, the exaltation of consumerism embraced by the middle classes, the arrival of illegal drug dealers are marked as elements introducing major shifts in the villas’ life. Unlike what their parents had experienced, for young men living in the villas in the 1990s the option of finishing secondary in a public school, finding a job in a factory or construction industry, saving money to have an independent home, stopped being a clear possibility. They did however share the desire for commodities, and the exposure to the search for immediate and intense forms of pleasure. This desires motorized by by the so called “the big 1990 party”, referring to the excess of commodity consumption, of political corruption, of easy money making to some groups, paired up with the experience of the impossibility to access education, health, the deferral of a accessing a salary, appear as the main reasons to explain why young men belonging to the former working classes got into robbery and into drug trafficking ( alarcon, “pibes chorros” svampa?) The involvement of young men in these activities conversely is what is presented as responsible for the start of a new era in the villas. An era in which the former widely accepted solidarity among the workers and poor was no longer sustained.

The Tobas however claim they have always kept themselves distant from those dynamics. They have been equally affected by economic crisis and social exclusion but in the narratives they present those changes as something exterior to them. In the narratives of people living for a longer time in the city they explained how the villas were very rapidly filled with people from other countries that were robbers, gangs known to have deals with the police, that generated situation in which they were caught in the middle with a reduced agency. All these events were presented as clear demonstrations for the need to leave the shanty town. Unlike other groups identifying with the shanty town in different moments of their history and all the social movements that have tried to transform the conditions of the villas and the life of the people in them, the Tobas now living in the neighborhood planned their way out.

Even when in longer accounts these experiences of feeling aliens to the villas were made relative, that the people they present as aliens and threats were in some cases good friends too, and when I found that not all the generations of each family had the same relation to the villas, the estrangement was a structuring narrative about the villas. In addition this estrangement is what explained the very existence of the barrio: as indigenous people they were not meant to be there, they had a different culture, they needed to be on their own in a calmer place. The NGO’s, schools, and anthropologists claimed the same, a suburban shanty town becoming violent could be a place for other people but was not a place for them one of the indigenous groups that have kept their authonomy form the Argentinean state for a longer time, who speak their language and thus are regarded as some of the most authentic unpolluted groups in the country. The indigenous are different: they had to be aided in finding a way out of the shanty town.

The barrio is therefore presented as a place of a necessary restoration of an order, in which in the Tobas distance themselves from other urban marginal groups, and in which the place they occupy is to be defined as a distinct place of aboriginality. In the words of one of the residents of the neighbourhood, a man in his forties, during a talk at a school, getting the lands of the neighbourhood was somehow like "going back to the chaco”, they now had big lots of lands with a garden and green fields around, they could see the sky and let the kids play outside. To this I would add that they also went back to living in delimited "Toba" locations and with a strong presence of the church, as the land donors and their immediate neighbours is a religious school (this is not to say that there is a relation of dependency, but that for many decades aboriginality in the Chaco is strongly intertwined with catholic and evangelic churches).

Barrio vs shantytown When I went to the neighbourhood the difference between villa and barrio were not absolutely evident in a first glance. I appreciated the main differences, in the barrio they have much bigger lots with space for a garden, they had brick houses, there was a smaller population density and the area was not as highly associated with criminality. However the young couples still had to take build themselves houses in plots they take, and they build these houses in a precarious way in the same way as shanty town houses are built. In addition in the dominant images the whole conurbano is a space of a general insecurity, housing of pauperized working class, (except of course for the north zone by the river and the spots of privilege represented by the gated neighbourhoods).

The first day I went to the neighbourhood the difference between barrio and villa was not so clear to me. I had received detailed instructions on how to avoid some dangers, go in the early morning, take the train in Retiro, do not walk from the train station but rather take a bus that would leave me in the barrio. I was in the middle of taking mates with the family that was my first contact that a kid clapped its hands outside, the younger of the men I was talking to went outside and asked the kid what was the matter, the kid replied they were collecting money to pay for the coffin of a neighbor that had killedhimself in the middle of an drug overdose. They explained everyone knew the man was very into drugs, he was unemployed and had a big family and robbed every now and then to get money just for the drugs. The barrio then was not an absolutely different space from the shanty towns. It was not exempted from the characteristics alluded as the reasons for moving away from the villas. Especially among Toba youth it could not be said that women and men were having better opportunities to find a job accessing education and saving for an independent house. If the improvement could be mostly measured in regards to owning plots and brick houses, why was such a huge distinction being made between one space and the other? In the initial months of my work and as I collected histories about the constitution of the barrio it was not clear for me how such a big qualitative difference could be established, except for the fact that the neighbourhood became a distinctively an indigenous place.

It is exactly because the neighbourhood is not only a "place" but mostly the result of successive flights form other places and situations that it is not enough to analyze of the narratives of how the neighbourhood contrasts with the shanty towns, how shanty towns contrast with the Chaco, how the neighbourhood is somehow like the Chaco. In this sense place making can be analyzed through semantic analysis to reach how places are experienced by people. However I find this is not enough. If place is a result of bodies moving in space and establishing new connections, of embodied rejection to become a villero (Agamben's muslim?), of the desire of being close to the big city of Buenos Aires, I found it was relevant to focus on the moving trajectories of those bodies. I did this by , tracing these movements in the narratives of people of the barrio and by joining some of their movements opening up space (Massey 2005). When people I talked to mentioned that coming to the neighbourhood was a relive as it implied moving out of the villas they were not just contrasting two places. They were also talking about the efforts they had to do to find a new place, the resources and relations mobilized and the fact they have succeeded to get away from a place that motorized relations they were not interested in pursuing but mostly to be placed in that location generated a series of stigmatizations they were not willing to carry. One question to pose is why they were not willing to renounce to be identified as indigenous while they did not accept to be regarded as villeros, ie pauperized working class, marginal, lacking of education and refined manners, even criminals. Unlike other ethnically marked urban enclaves, the creation of the neighbourhood then is not only the recreation of communal ties existing in place they migrated from, nor is it only the unplanned grouping resulting of chain migration, but rather is the result of a collective plan of escape, in which indigenous identity joins a groups of people from different Cahco areas, and is used to distance from the villas and the villeros. Thus to understand history of the neighbourhood it was not enough to compare country and city, Chaco and Buenos Aires, but to learn some more about the villas they were coming form and where many families have lived for more than ten years.

2. Visit

I worked with Z since the beging of my fieldwork. Being over seventy he is one of the older people, one of the first to come to Buenos Aires during the military service. Z is father of eleven sons and daughters, most of them adults with their own children living now in independent houses in the neighborhood. Because of his own children and as he helped other relatives to come he has generated one the biggest of the extended families networks in the barrio. In addition Z is experienced in working with anthropologists and linguists, and quite critical of them too. Z is sociable and fun, his daughters and adult granddaughters are particularly sociable and active. As Z got easily upset if i did not visited him when i was in the barrio, stopping at his place was thus always the first or last stop on my visit to the barrio.

After some of these visits I asked Z to make his life history. In it he told me about his childhood in the Chaco, his coming of age hunting with a distant uncle and cousins. He marked his pass through military service as a turning point that brought him to Buenos Aires, where he learnt and was able to do construction work on the weekends. He later went back to Chaco but returned several times to work for periods and svae some money and then come back to the Chaco, and finally his decision to move with his whole family to the city and the movements until they settled in one of the major villas in Ciudadela where they lived for fifteen years (check) and finally their moving to the barrio. It was at this point and after we have met for several times that we started talking about how the life of one of his daughters was as she, along with other of the older children, had stayed in Ciudadela when the rest of the family moved to the barrio. As we talked about this the idea of visiting her came about.

We met a Sunday morning at the train station, the station is one that sits on the limit between the city of Buenos Aires city and the suburbs named as conurbano. It is the line that runs from the capital city over the river at the east to the “big” Buenos Aires to the west. This is an area known for being inhabited by a lower middle class and a lower class this train carries the stigma of taking you to dangerous areas even when it is a succession of residential areas. Z was wearing a red beret, that was a personal item identifying him and that he wore for special events and visits, a black leather jacket and jeans and sneakers, all in perfect conditions, of a drastic cleanness and ironing. He conducted me to a bus stop under the highways that marks the limit of capital and the suburbs. We took a regular bus that zig zaged through the streets of the first suburb for less than half an hour until we got off in a corner of another street of a neighbourhood with flat and small houses. We walked east from where the bus have left us and as we did so he explained that that bus used to cross through the middle of the monoblocks the buildings that constitute the centre of the so called Fuerte. We arrived at a street that had a coffeshop at one corner and a closed grocery in the other, on the other side of the street there was an open space and a street getting pass through it. In the open space I could see the multiple carts of a Sunday fair Z has talked to me about. After the and contrasting the grey sky I could see the monoblocks, the multiple unit buildings of the housing project built during the third presidency of Peron (check). There was a typical Sunday morning movement in the area.

On one corner and under a tree there was a group of men in suits and women in long skirts, I identified as a group of the church ready to a Sunday service or to visit neighbors for bible readings. On the other corner there was a pretty different group that disrupted with the relaxed pase of a Sunday but reminded me that I was entering the supposedly most dangerous location in the country. A four wheel truck of gendarmeria nacional was parked in the entrance to the Fuerte. Beside the truck four men dressed in green battle uniforms, all of them taking long caliber guns and watching over the movements of the people passing by. We passed by them and made our way into the fair, we passed through it and arrived to a very well built soccer court, with synthetic grass, a tidy fence and professional looking goal fences.