Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita

The December 2001 protests highlighted a profound shift in politics, society, and culture in Argentina. The once-powerful labor movement was virtually absent, replaced by the piqueteros and large contingents of urban poor (along with middle-class protesters, irate over the government’s freezing of all bank accounts, the so-called corralito), who relegated the unions and the organized working class to a secondary role. Perhaps this is not surprising given the economic changes of the last quarter century, and especially those of the last decade, with an estimated 40 percent of the population now living below the poverty line (recent government figures suggesting it actually hovers around an astounding 50 percent). Not all Argentinians are living in villas or shantytowns such as the one studied in Javier Auyero’s interesting book, but it is undeniable that the once wealthy nation is now essentially a poor one, or at the very least one in which a shrinking capa of wealthy elites sits over dense enclaves of misery. Certainly anyone interested in understanding contemporary Argentina must come to grips with this growing sector of poverty and its relationship to the economy and the political system, as well as gain some understanding of their culture and identity, forged in this new and hostile social landscape.Auyero’s book functions admirably as an introduction to this neglected sector of Argentine society. He begins with a theoretical chapter on clientelism, making an original contribution to a concept that Latin Americanists have employed since first introduced by Eric Wolf. In insisting that clientelism is invested within a precise cultural content, the author certainly adds complexities to the concept and makes of it a more useful tool in understanding the reciprocal nature of patron-client exchanges. The middle chapters of the book analyze what might be described as the political economy of clientelism and of the “informal problem-solving networks meant to ensure material survival” at a time of rising unemployment (as high as 60 percent in this particular shantytown), declining incomes, and diminishing resources (both those of the community and those of the state) to palliate the effects of the depression.Like most social scientists, Auyero expends an inordinate amount of time employing concepts and inventing a vocabulary to explain familiar practices and common-sense notions; he unfortunately does so at the expense of a more textured historical analysis of the community itself. He does nonetheless provide what is probably the best study to date on the urban poor in Argentina.The book is firmly grounded in the sociological and anthropological literature on urban poverty, though a few titles (such as Jay MacLeod’s sociological classic Ain’t No Making It) are surprisingly absent. His thick description and analysis of puntero politics (which he translates as “broker” but which I think is more accurately conveyed in American English as “ward boss,” a figure whose activities in U.S. cities were not, despite what the author claims, primarily criminal, but rather resembled much of what he describes for Villa Paraíso) are very compelling and informative.The workings of this clientilistic system are also fundamental for understanding the recent protests, since, by all accounts, it was the breakdown of patronage networks which prompted the Peronist punteros to mobilize large contingents of the villeros against the Radical government of Fernando de la Rua in the December 2001 riots. In the final chapters of the book, the author turns to analyzing these practices in the context of a resilient and protean Peronist political culture. Here the results seem to me to be mixed. Though he convincingly describes how the “problem-solving strategies” (patronage of various kinds) are dispensed in a Peronist idiom (especially a gendered one, with Evita serving as a cultural touchstone), the question of a reconfigured Peronist identity in the 1990s is not fully developed. Recent events certainly call into question some of the author’s assertions on the identity issue, such as his claim that among these shantytown “brokers” and villeros there is little trace of the “heretical memory of Peronism,” and only “problem-solving strategies” remain.Though not a work of history, even of recent history, the book is of considerable use and interest for historians as an ethnographic snapshot of a poor urban community; for the most part, it provides a persuasive analysis of contemporary Peronist puntero politics and its cultural meaning. Indeed, for anyone interested in the impact of neoliberal restructuring at the grassroots level and clues to the contemporary crisis in the country, the book deserves to be read.

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