Buenos Aires en el Chaco

Estoy hace dos semanas releyendo historias de vida, feliz de tener esta grabaciones y leerlas y releerlas. Termine el lunes con la de Lorenzo (seudónimo) persona de mayor edad del barrio y legendario "informante" de generaciones de antropólogo (y me pregunto si tiene sentido usar seudónimo, pero sí). Algo que me sorprendió es que en sus aventuras en el Chaco aparecen en distintos momentos figuras no humanas que remiten a su posterior experiencia en Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires ya y de antemano había determinado su experiencia en el Chaco, incluso antes de haber siquiera imaginado ir para allá.

A los 11 años se le aparece un ser con la capacidad de mutar, que lo sigue y le ronda en distintos momentos de su vida. En este caso toma la forma de tigre. Lo ve primero caminando, cerca de un laguna. Esta vestido de azul y pasa fumando. Deja el cigarrillo se aleja y desaparece entre los pastos para aparecer de nuevo con forma de tigre, rayado. Le pregunto si cuando es humano esta vestido como  gaucho y me dice que no que es el trajecito de trabajador como el que usaba después en el puerto, pero bien limpito.

Otra vez es joven de unos 20 años y esta pescando y ve algo raro, como una lancha pero que no es lancha de verda. No le dice a los compañeros pero esa noche vuelve solo y se encuentra con un puente, igual al punte que años después construyen entre La Boca y Dock Sud.

Estaba mas bien concentrada en los otros desplazamientos, del Chaco a Buenos Aires, o los posteriores de Buenos Aires de vuelta a Chaco pero que son en forma de mercancías, mensajes, noticias. No había considerado como llega Buenos Aires al Chaco antes de que ellos lleguen, y menos aun los desplazamientos no-humanos en los que Buenos Aires de extiende al Chaco.

day 3

I arrived in Buenos aires being the second night for me without sleeping. This plus the factit seemed really bizzar to get out of the vanouver habit all of a sudden and leave the collective bodies connections i have there, made me arrive in a state of particular estrangement. I am writing this down quickly before the effect vanishes and i get repositioned my self and by my previous portenyo connections. i am deciding to try to keep this in english, maybe because i am afraid of losing the resonance of many talks in that language and also maybe to keep some sense of estrangement, the language of empire, also the language of good comedies. i will jump whenever i need anyways.


buenos aires started in the waiting room in Atlanta, full of two types of people. The first visitors expecting to find that energetic and strangely huge city they heard about form other fellow traveller friends, internet, guide books, travel agents, news. every one will love them, will show them how cool, interesting deep, combativos, we are. they will be overwhelmed, seduced, disgusted by the city. The second of course portenyos talking on their cel phones in spanish about how many good buisnesses they have done in the us, how great a trip they had, what they had bought. i can't stand portenyos pretending to be something that no one is very sure what it is. however none cares to show that they are pretending, nothing is covered or behind or below or in reality. is all there. we all know. the man with the belly looking grey, stressed telling his cel "no paramos de abrir locales, nos va barbaro" .

so the trip is going back, get surrounded by old objects, in a space that makes her wonder when exactly is that. space has some grip, stops and directs how and where will she start moving. more or less the same. retiro , a shower, put on some old clothes, eat a fruit, chat, make a couple of phone calls, san telmo, suitcases with what she was using yesterday with some other thongs around and in other assemblages of people, objects, music, ideas, temperature. unpack, clean, go to the computer space -which remains almost the same-. sleep. wake up. mate and off to the street. the grocery in front, some neighbour, microcentro, long lines of waiting, moving compacted, cursing. bakery the woman chats her she is hungry, about to eat, misses mate in the summer. stop at the fruit store, the peaches are too good, smell sweet. and on to an apartment. a bus guard fights with a woman with the wrong ticket, the rise of the ticket was recent, other people get anxious, tell the woman to get off or to pay, she pays tells the guard he can now be happy with his miserable salary siendo un buchon. fresh night air and now you can start the day again.

so this is my provincial experience. not of being nowhere or wherever, but in a city where most of the people is around. not only flow but lots of grip and happy or unwanted stopping. and the style of this writing is Kathleen Stuart even when the duration of the events are probably two long and linear.

The Dynamics of Contingency

La defensa de proposal de Ms Sternberg se aproxima.... me gustar'ia ir por varios motivos,


*GEOGRAPHY COLLOQUIUM*

* *

*PhD Dissertation Proposal*

* *

*/Carolina/**/ Sternberg/*

*/Department of Geography/*

*/University/**/ of Illinois/**/ at Urbana-Champaign/**//*



*The Dynamics of Contingency: Neoliberal Growth Governances in Buenos Aires and Chicago*



ABSTRACT


Neoliberal growth governance has been ascendant worldwide in the last two decades and has come to profoundly influence mainstream urban politics. This project seeks to understand these formations from a comparative vantage-point, focusing on the global cities of Chicago and Buenos Aires. The study critically interrogates these governances to determine the degree to which they have significantly different institutional affiliations, operations, and outcomes. At issue is an important notion in the theorizing of these governances: contingent neoliberalism. While nascent research has suggested the possibility of a strong contingent aspect to these governances, its specifics remain under-explored.
The intellectual merits of this project thus rest on a novel focus: the study of contingent urban neoliberalism. Current work on contemporary urban governance in the west, to date, peripheralizes the centrality of contingency. Common sets of institutions, interests, programs, and motivations are seen to permeate and characterize these governances across the enormous diversity of places (Mitchell, 2001; 2004; Keil, 2002, Wilson, 2004). My study, in contrast, probes the nuances of these features to reveal their rich specifics and place-rooted basis. Using a cultural economy frame, my goal is not to marginalize the influence of structures that embed within capitalist economies and societies. Indeed, this is a foundational part of my study. However, I chronicle the inseparability of local-ness, place rootedness, historical specificity, human agency, and political variability that poignantly embeds within the human made operation and effects of locally circulating structures.



*Friday, October 3, 2008*

*3:00 PM*


219 Davenport Hall

*refreshments will be served*

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.

Grimson bolivianos en Buenos aires

mas foto de fiestas, esta en el barrio



Grimson analizes the identity construction among Bolivian migrants to Buenos Aires as constituted within intra and intercultural frames of communication. This migratory process is not only seen as problematic by the Argentinean society, both by the state and by a public sphere, but is also falsely connect migration with unemployment. Communication for Grimson is not just the instance of the interpellation of migrants as others made by dominant discourses nor is an analysis of the interpretations of the immigrants readings of the dominant cultures but rather works over multiple dimensions of the communicative process. To do this he reconstructs the self construction of identities among the Bolivian immigrants, living in the charrua neighborhood (inhabited by a majority of immigrant and second generation of Bolivians) in the symbolic interaction that put into play multiple systems of meaning both in the everyday production of meaning that include the interpretation and appropriation of technological mean of communication (the radio). In this sense he carefully follows the interpretations of the actors of the social relations in which identity is recreated. He therefore analyzes the intercultural encounters in the spaces of everyday life: from the public transportation to the factory and interaction with the police. Even though he does not engage in a racial critique, he recognizes the force of the stigma carried in the body. He claims that “the inequality proclaimed by vast sector of the receiving society associate a symbolic difference with a sociobiological one.” (50 my translation). Its extreme construction associates a body fisionomy to poverty, lack of “education”, criminality and amorality. The body is thus a marker of difference read by the “porteños” who react in different ways as they recognize them as others, mostly in either direct verbalizations of stereotypes (among working class and “provincial” porteños) or by bodily signs of demarcations of difference, such as looking down, or showing fear of a projected criminality, among the “educated” middle class. In this sense for Grimson communication is also about proxemics and body communication. To this situations Grimson show how people react by either letting the stigma be manifested, by pushing the stigma to a limit through reinforcing it with exaggeration and by inverting the stigma and “giving it back” to the producer. This is what he call counterstigmatization strategies He uses the notion of hibridity to give account of the way identity is recreated in Buenos Aires in the intersections of nationality, religiosity, indigeneity, profession, and generational lines that converge in it. In his book he unpacks four dimensions of the communicative process: a) the every day situations of intercultural communication in the city especially in their interactions with different social groups defined by them as: educated and provincials porteños, Koreans, Paraguayan, Peruvian and chilenian; b) the analysis of the festivities in the charrua neighborhood as a site of community building and of negotiation of tensions with the “receiving” society ; c) the appropriation of technological media for a self construction of identity and a self generated space for bolivianness; and d) the use of the television as educational political and position taking tool in diverse reception practices. A great quote by one of the “informants” : mira la sociedad argentina quiere aparentar ser mas mala de lo que es, quiere aparentar ser mas linda de los que es, quiere aparentar ser mas inteligente de lo que es. Pero si vos tratás con ellos te das cuenta que no son tan malos como parecen, no son tan lindos como parecen ni son tan inteligentes como parecen.” (49) He finally points to the fact that even though that form hegemonic position there is a tendency to attribute a social homogeneity the field of the popular is trasversed by forms of fragmentation of the practice that restricts a unified mobilization and the articulation of common interest.