Professional Documents
Culture Documents
3- Tamagno, Liliana. 2001 Nam Qom Hueta' a Los tobas en la casa del hombre
blanco. Ediciones Al Margen. La Plata.
Tamagno analyzes the recreation of Toba identity in the city of La Plata, through
recreating cultural practices. She questions how is identity maintained in spite of
assimilationist, proletarization processes. Identity is redefined by recreating
territoriality as a discontinuous urban and rural extension. This experience of
migration is thus reconstructed through a series of significant points during
migration, as are the intermediate points in between places of origin and the
final destination in the city. In spite of the spatial discontinuity among these
places there is a symbolic unity, recreated by history and by the trips to the rural
areas. There is a strong emphasis among the Tobas to get a place in the city
where "they could live all together". The toba presence in the city starts in the
1960s. In spite the first settlements were connected with other settlements in
cities and with the rural communities, the question whether the people were
aboriginal outside the Chaco is a paradox to recognition. Should government
apply indigenist policy with them? The Chaco appears as a unifying and
reference point in the historical narratives about migration and coming to the
city. If initially the group was located in Quilmes, then a part of it moves to La
Plata. Others come form Ciudadela Norte, they move form Ciudadela and
Quilmes to either La Plata or Derqui, however some families remain in those
locations. In La Plata they get land and the possibility of building houses, a work
that started in 1992, through the governmental plan. The particularity is that the
indigenous specificity is not recognized, they are given the houses as urban
poor, the lands remain fiscal. The group is not included as legitimate demanders
of historic reparation measures as they are not settling in their traditional lands.
However, in 1999 the city mayor recognizes its presence as a community
represented by the Toba Association. The association, even with no legal
recognition, was created in 1991 and was a unifying entity negotiating with the
government. Community is not only a level of political organization but also a life
style manifested in the spatial organization of the houses and the use of
common areas (where all children play together and all adults watch them over).
The church, La Iglesia Unida, is also a significant institution bringing people
together, organizing communal activities and keeping links with the Chaco.
Kinship is significant; it connects people in the city as well as maintains ties with
the rural communities that they visit with frequency. She observes that women
travel the most many times the purpose of the trip is to take care of an ill
relative (197). The places they are most in contact with are Quitilipi, Pampa, and
Bo. Toba Resistencia. The women political participation in the neighborhood is
secondary and regarded as "help" to the men. She concludes that there is not a
single identity being produced in the city but a complex subject position in
relation to ethnicity, class, and religion. Thus the city is a locus with which the
tobas relate but not a space with a rigid socializing structure that is imposed
Kay Warren
The authors consider the problems of studying indigenous movements in
Latin America as a tension between academic work, advocacy and
positioning in the politics of representation. They point to the parallel
emergence of indigenous activism and the need to turn from class base
analysis to identity politics, which recognize ethnicity as a particular
dimension. This perspective has articulated with discourses emphasising
positive and common aspects of an indigenous condition, these forms of
essentialism that anthropologists have contributed to shaping have been
articulated in struggles with the nation-state. However, essentialism is also a
limiting force when imposed as a norm that erases heterogeneities. They
claim that there is no sense to making a value over these constructions but
rather to understand their complexities and take into account the particular
historical contexts and the contingencies in which identities are constituted.
If the importance of the roles of the states in the processes of this
conformation is something general across different Latin American countries,
the form of this interaction is never homogeneous. The role of international
agencies and economy has to be considered as shaping the differential
outcomes, as these agencies have their particular agendas and approaches
to the topic, for instance by considering ethnicity as a problem and a right of
the individual. Neoliberal policies of reducing state intervention in some
cases perversely coincide with indigenous claims, however it does also be a
force that further marginalizes and limits the groups possibilities of
autonomy [multiculturalism is not discussed very much here]. Thus the
processes of identification can be better understood in its conjuncture, as
movements combining achievements of self-determination and of state
subordination.
4- Nelson, Diane 1999. A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial
Guatemala. Berkeley: University of California Press.
To analyze the body politic in contemporary Guatemala, Nelson uses the
image of an injured body with a finger deepening the wound. Her analysis
advances from the body politic to the politics of individual bodies which has
as effects the production of subjects with differential class, gender, race and
ethnic positions. The body politics of Guatemala has no unified subject as its
effect but rather fragmented ones. Fluidarity is the conjunctural alliance of
social groups, in simultaneous dimensions. Identity is always incomplete,
never fixed, vulnerable, partial and porous. Fluid connections link social
identities and even escape orthopedic actions. Orthopedic is power directed
to the bodies acting over them and their connection in order to produce a
particular body politic. Orthopedic force recreates the state as an object
detached from the social relations that produce it while veiling this production
(state fetishism). The state is ruined, corrupted and yet still an arena of
struggle, an idea condensed in the image of the piata: if you hit the
government you may get some sweets. State fetishism is simultaneously
challenged in the total recognition of its corruption. Bodies that splatter,
describes the contradictory racialized categories organizing Guatemalan
society. The indigenous claims are feared as a finger in a profound nonhealing wound. She examines how the indigenous are rejected not so much
city are automatically considered indigenous mestizos. In this way each category
has a spatial correlation. Indigenous location is the rural highlands and
indigenous mestizos acquire this category by education and life in the city,
whereas mestizos constitute the general urban population having lost its ties
with indigenous cultural markers. Whites are city dwellers, particularly (but not
only) from the coast, and members of elites with high levels of education. In this
regard the processes of migration have been variably understood as
degeneration first, and as progress and integration latter. Indigenistas generated
a moral economy, in which to be a proper human was called decencia. The
decent indigenous were those who kept their culture alive and controlled their
sexuality; but also: educated white men, who could have indigenous lovers
without affecting their reputation, and white women who controlled their
sexuality. In contestation to this morality, cholos of the urban market develop a
new category: respeto. With it they defended economical independence, access
to education, and defied disciplining actions. Respeto challenges the negative
stigmas directed towards mestizas, however, it reproduces the hegemonic terms
that classify people according to economic position and formal education. It
reproduces marginality by recombining gender, sex, ethnicity, race and
geographical position in different terms.
6- Albo, Xavier 2006. El Alto Vorgine de Una Ciudad. Journal of Latin American
Anthropology Nov, 11 ( 2): 329350.
Albo explores the sense in which Bolivia indigenousness is re-emerging in
the site of the Alto, the satellite city to La Paz and the fastest growing city in
the southern Americas. He considers this city simultaneously as a hinge, inbetween the rural Aymara world and the urban European oriented La Paz. The
Alto is not a different place from La Paz, as both together form a unity in
which La Paz has central infrastructure in El Alto, it needs its population, that
is a constantly present-silent other. El Alto cannot be considered as separated
from the rural communities as the majority of inhabitants are rural
immigrants Aymara that at different stages have migrated because of the
crisis in the rural areas. But also they have been attracted by a better life in
the city. In this, Albo points that there are multiple families doing a dual use
of space having homes both in the communities and the city or living in one
and going back to the other for festivals, meetings, family reasons. The Alto
is also a voragine (vortex): it is a space in the limit of two worlds that distrust
the other and in such field a creative force take place. It is a place that
reinstalls the indigenous presence in Bolivian nationhood. The "new" Aymaras
from the Alto are presenting new forms than before, many young people were
mostly born in the city, do not speak the language and yet they are proud of
and self identify as Aymaras. He does see this youth, who were very actively
engaged in the revolt of 2003 and 2005 as part of a new political force of the
city, as a type of coming of age of a city. The other forces Albo analyzes are
the Juntas Vecinales, that keep some continuity with forms of organization in
the rural areas even while reproducing some patron-client relations with the
state in some instances. Finally, the political organization refers to the
general response of the totality of El Alto population and their demands to
the representatives to take a position and mobilize during the conflict. It is
the maturity of a consciousness based on the colonial experience, a cultural
working class that had a longer experience of exclusion and had a continuous
neighbourhood organization. The first to block the roads as a protest
mechanism are the formerly employed by the state, but the territorial
movements immediately recognize this as part of a common struggle. Basing
her analysis in the heterogeneity of the piquetero movement and on these
two converging lines she sees that there were particular claims made to the
state generating a new form of political actions (from the workers strikes to
the street and road blocking). The people who organized this initial picket to
the national roads "had no other resource to gain visibility other than their
own bodies exposed in the roads" (28). This reconfigures the articulations
between unions, the left, unemployed, and popular sectors. The movement
creates a collective dignity in being unemployed, something that initially was
reserved as a privite stigma. If initially the state was still being recognized as
a legitimate interlocutor, latter some of the sections of the movement have
strong claims for autonomy (Solano). The youth has no connection to the
world of unions, no expectation to access to labor and thus will integrate the
"forces of security", confronting with the police during repression and
demonstrating that the thing to offer in struggle is physical confrontation.
This constitutes a new form of connection of politics and violence in an
association of protest and police struggling to control the street. The
territorial movements then made a shift form the basic demands of state
services, land and housing towards including the unemployed as a
problematic and adopting this new form of protest, and a link to the
piqueteros of the provinces. The neignbourhoos the movement constitutes as
a parallel structure to the Peronist patron-client relations and the Peronist
networks (cfr. Auyero). Even though the interconnection of Peronist and
piquetero movements is inevitable, there is also a turning point in the
monopoly of Peronist organization in the popular neighborhood. If the
surviving groups have been the ones that were able to accept the sate aid
and build from them spaces of relative autonomy through the administration
of social programs, the responsibility of negotiating with the different levels
of state administration also contributed to defer the initial demands in order
to attend some immediate urgencies.
9- Auyero, Javier 2001. - Poor Peoples Politics. Peronist Networks and the
Legacy of Evita. Duke University Press. Auyero offers an alternative analysis
to political clientelism that regards it as 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. He examines the problem
solving networks between problem holders and solvers (brokers) as a means
of creation of an alternative for the subsistence in the socially slums of
Greater Buenos Aires 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 only alternative for accessing necessary
services and goods. Problem solving networks recreate the bases of political
party organization. Brokerage is not something fixed but a pattern of
coherent articulate conduct that occupies the available social spaces and
reenacts the past and therefore it reinscribes it. He also offers a reading on
the gendered dimension on politics in which the constitution of a feminine
field is not only an opening of a sphere for womens participation, but rather
contributes to reinforce forms of subordination. If the shantytown was first a
location of peronist policies and upward mobility, the1990s were the
moments in which the neighborhood stopped being a place of upward and
transformed into a permanent place of survival for the socially and
economically excluded. In this context, an everyday type of internal
violence emerged as a result of the recourse to criminality and drugtraffiquing, and of development of forms of stigma against the immigrants
within the neighborhood, what is linked with 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.
These brokers are mostly women. Auyero claims that they create relations
with their followers by presenting themselves as incarnations of Evita, by
performing her image as the mother of the poor. Thus they work
disinterestly as maternal caregivers for their unprotected children
something assumed as a natural feminine condition, and that operates in a
realm different from politics. Men brokers and political leaders present
themselves as mobile by which they creates a territoriality of it dominium. By
moving, they get in touch with the people by physically getting to them,
transversing the neighborhood, entering the intricate shantytown pathways.
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 brokers performativity. In it they produce their circle of
followers as a family. Women brokers have to work within this parameter:
women comply what men decide. According to Auyero these women perform
Evita not only out of affinity and admiration for Eva, but also because, as Eva
Pern herself found out there are few good roles for women in the public
arena. (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.
10- Guano, Emanuela 2004. "The Denial of Citizenship: 'Barbaric' Buenos Aires
and the Middle-Class Imaginary", City and Society,.16(1): 69-97.
Emanulea Guano in her ethnography of the porteo middle class points to the
production of meaning around the legitimate terms of being porteo in the
face of the economic and political transformations effected by the 1990s
neoliberal policies. The transformation of the economy that resulted in the
increasing unemployment and the impoverishment of the middle classes had
as effects the increased perception of fear, loss and intruition among this
sector. Fear of loosing their property 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 from the "intruders", the urban poor whose population
raised steadily. This need of differentiation was not made just on the basis of
class, but there was a growing claim that the poor invading the city as
immigrants of neighbouring countries and also racialized as non white. Even
though the long tradition of the Peronism of reclaiming the site of the "dark"
"poor" shanty town dwellers as an important part of "the people", and the
centre of a national identity, the middle class representations seem to be
more linked with the discourses and desire of modernization, of becoming
"real first world". Guano associates this with neoliberalism and calls it "to see
modernity from 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 press, construct a
sense of disappearing middle class, along with an invasion of immigrants. It is
for her a reactualization of the civilization/barbarism discourse. In which the
middle class recognizes as the inheritors of a European city only to see its
cluster of slumnines in the cirujas [indigent], the squatter and the insecurity.
In these contexts only the granting of security, more than only possession
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 attempts to avoid the fact that is very close or with no
clear distinction than this other.