The Denial of Citizenship: “barbaric” Buenos Aires and the middle‐class imaginary

Abstract

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.

Critical Regionalities: Re-Thinking Regions in CCT

“…Mexico's predominantly mestizo society originated in seventeenth century social processes of syncretism among indigenous and European descendants, as indigenous groups made up the pool of slave labor and occupied the lowest rungs of society. In Argentina, slaves were primarily imported from the African slave trade, and African descendants largely make up the lower classes, while the Buenos Aires middle-class primarily comprises descendants of European immigrants who arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Guano, 2004;Sheinbaum, 2008).…”

“…Buenos Aires and Mexico City have experienced tremendous demographic growth from the latter half of the 1990s, and in both cases this growth is occurring in the outer fringes of the metropolitan area (Sheinbaum, 2008;Thuillier, 2005). Neoliberal policies in Buenos Aires have resulted in rapidly rising unemployment rates with the loss of the local manufacturing sector, and a shrinking middle-class (Guano, 2004). At the same time, between 1995 and 2000 the number of gated communities increased by 350 percent (Thuillier, 2005).…”

“…In response to these processes, elites sought residences set apart, spatially and socially, from the urban poor. As Giglia (2008), Guano (2004), andThuillier (2005) point out, the development of residential enclaves for elites beginning in the mid-twentieth century was premised on desires to maintain or assert class distinction and social status.…”

“…In Buenos Aires, a strong desire for internal social homogeneity is also prevalent. But unlike Mexico City, anxieties of insecurity among gated-community residents in Buenos Aires are profoundly related to a sense of non-white lower classes as racial others threatening the modernity and integrity of the declining middleclass (Guano, 2004).…”

Popular memory, public performance, and demands for citizenship in urban Cochabamba and Buenos Aires: a review

“…Neoliberal global restructuring and attempts to privatize everything from water to education to health care were well under way and even Argentines were migrating to countries like Bolivia and Paraguay-formerly the source of the immigrants they disparaged, pitied, and denied citizenship-to find work themselves (Guano 2004). These trends have only worsened in many ways well into the twenty-first century: as the size of urban areas has vastly expanded; overtaking the overall populations of all rural areas combined; people are poorer and more mobile; and the effects of the twin criminalities of investment banking and drug cartel operations have decreased the quality of health while increasing crime and gun-based violence.…”