For the first-time visitor, a walk around Buenos Aires can be a bit like entering a parallel universe. Argentina's capital is located deep within South America, far from most major cities-11 hours by plane from Chicago, U.S.A., and 14.5 hours from London, England. But it feels much closer. The city's streets are filled with cell phone toting locals decked in the latest U.S. and European fashions. Gleaming skyscrapers tower over grand, Parisian-style boulevards, where sleek, expensive cars cruise through town.

This essay explores how, in the Buenos Aires of neoliberalism, middle-class residents strove to make sense of their own impoverishment and their disenfranchisement by generating a consensus on how this city's modernity was being eroded by the presence of a mestizo lower class. Through an analysis of the discourse that constructed the urban poor as barbaric (i.e., dangerous, polluting, and foreign), I suggest that this representation not only sought to reinforce the fading social difference between the middle-and the lower class, but it also contributed to denying the latter its citizenship in a Buenos Aires that struggled to be modern.

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En los años 1997 y 1998, varios movimientos sociales porteños de dase media se oponian a la reforma de la educación impulsada por el FMI y el gobierno neoliberal de Carlos Menem. En este artículo se analiza como el discurso politíco y social generado pos esos movimientos y parte de la clase media porteńa segufa proponiendo la dicotomia sarmientina de una "civilizatión" blanca y europea como único antidoto a la "barbarie" latinoamericana propulsada por el gobierno neoliberal/peronista, y aparentemente respaldada por los sectores populares mestizos.

After the collapse of its state-subsidized industries, Genoa is taking up a new role as a 'city of culture' capable of attracting tourists and high-tech companies alike. Part of the process of urban renovation entails the transformation of Genoa's streets and piazzas into sites for the consumption of culture. This happens, among other ways, through a proliferation of antique fairs that give chronically under-and unemployed middle-class women an opportunity for self-employment. This essay is an ethnographic exploration of how middle-class women antique dealers draw on their gendered and classed skillsespecially their aesthetic sensibility and their humanistic cultural capital-to stake out a place for themselves in an urban sphere molded by a neoliberal economy of culture.