Mjar Lasa 2012 Resisting Exclusion

8/9/2019 Mjar Lasa 2012 Resisting Exclusion

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The weakness of symbolic boundaries:

Resisting exclusion among Montevideossquatters

Mara Jos lvarez Rivadulla. Universidad del Rosario, Bogot

[email protected]

PAPER TO BE PRESENTED AT THE LASA CONFERENCE, San Francisco, May 23-26, 2012

Panel: Poverty in the Southern Cone: Survival, Marginality, or Abandonment?

Abstract

This article explores how squatting changed spatially and symbolically in a neoliberalizing anddemocratizing context: Montevideo, Uruguay, in the 1990s. Suddenly invading a plot, a practiceuntil then mainly restricted to the poorest of the poor, associated with scavenging and extremedeprivation, became a decent alternative for part of the increasingly unstable urban workingclass. A wave of planned land invasions sprang. Contrary to most squatters in third world cities,they were not coming from rural areas. They were previous urban dwellers that, due to structuralchanges such as state retrenchment and precarization of labor characterizing the turn of thecentury in Latin America, were finding it increasingly difficult to survive in the formal city.Based on oral histories with squatters of several neighborhoods and participant observation Ianalyze how they experienced the move to a squatter settlement. I argue that for many it was a

way to resist exclusion, a struggle to belong to the city and protect a social position thatstructural changes had put at risk. This implied engaging in laborious symbolic boundary work todistinguish themselves from cantegriles, the word for the traditional shantytowns, poor andcrowded, and gain their dignity as workers and residents of an ordinary city neighborhood. Yet,there were many limits to their fight in an increasingly fragmented city.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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INTRODUCTION

There are lots of new people. Have you seen that they sold a lot? That brought all sorts of people. Its a

little out of hand, because we didnt want horse carts. Do you remember? Welland now we have plenty.

I know itsdifficult. People take it personal, and its not personal Shirley told me on a winter afternoon

over mate trying to negotiate a structural understanding of her new neighbors needs with clear disgust for

what she considers a failure to become the neighborhood she once dreamt of. Did you see what they did

in the entrance? They made a huge cantegril popular name for traditional, poor and crowded

shantytowns. Thats a problem, because we wanted to keep that entrance without more houses. I mean,

there used to be some people with scarce resources there. But at least they kept everything clean. But then

they left, they sold to others and those sold to others and. Im telling you, this is changing. ()We arenow devoted to regularization. () But people have been with the regularization hope for years. Some

say its a lie. So the majority of the good people [gente bien] are leaving, because, of course! They

dont believe regularization will ever happen. And the other problem is with all the newcomers. There

have been lots of robberies, even during daylight. () The other day, they robbed the soup kitchen. They

made a hole in the wall and they robbed us everything, everything we had in there, even the light bulbs

When I first met Shirley, almost a decade before this conversation, she was the hopeful

president of the neighborhood association of a new squatter settlement located in the outskirts of

a traditional working class neighborhood which had been suffering from de-industrialization. Her

settlement was part of the wave of land invasions that silently but quickly transformed

Montevideo at the intersection of neoliberalism and democratization. Only in the 15 years

between 1985 and 1999 more than 200 new land invasions gave birth to half of the about 400

informal settlements that currently house 10% of the citys population. 1 This happened,

surprisingly, without population growth.

1Own estimations based on a) own data set on squatter settlements with date of origin, and b) the 2011 Househould

Survey for population count.


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Like Shirley, most squatters were coming from working class neighborhoods in the

formal city, unlike the 1960s rural migrants that populated Latin American shantytowns,

including the relatively few, dubbed cantegriles, in Montevideo. Structural changes in the labor

market were behind this urban transformation. Young families like Shirleys, sustained by

increasingly unstable, low paid and informal jobs could not stay, not to mention fulfill the dream

of home ownership, in the formal city. Suddenly, for this structurally downwardly mobile

people, squatting became a decent alternative. Yet, for that, squatting needed to be resignified.

Decent squatting was planned squatting. As surprising as the number of new land

invasions after democratization might be, an equally interesting fact is that many of them were

planned. This type of land invasion, characterized by organizing, seizing plots, demanding and

using political networks was just not possible during dictatorship. It was with the opening of the

political system in 1984 that planned squatting entered the repertoire of the increasingly unstable

urban working class.2

In this article I analyze how planned squatting became a strategy to resist exclusion in

recently democratizing neoliberal Montevideo, and how the effort has been threatened by an

increasingly fragmented city. Organized squatters engaged in a spatial and symbolic fight that

required distinguishing themselves from the poorest of the poor. They worked hard to make their

newly formed neighborhoods look like the ones they used to belong to in the formal city.

Symbolic boundaries built around the categorical distinction between asentamientoand cantegril

were part of this endeavor. Yet, as we see with Shirleys opening vignette, they have been

2About a third of all squatter neighborhoods in the city started as planned land invasions. This article refers mainly

to them.


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difficult to sustain over time in a context of deepening inequality and fragmentation, despite the

more recent countrys economic bonanza.

I base my arguments in extensive fieldwork in Montevideo during 2006 and 2007

conducting oral histories and observations in 25 squatter settlements as well as in previous

participant observation and interviews in three adjacent squatter settlements in 1998 and 1999.3I

first briefly give the reader the context of Montevideo and Uruguays recent structural

transformations at the root of the explosion of land squatting by the end of the twentieth century.

In the second section I show the strenuous boundary work some squatters engaged into in order

to defend the working class position that the labor market had put at risk. The third section

describes two different forces that conspired against those squatters efforts: structural economic

conditions and state and social categorization of squatter settlements as synonyms of poverty and

crime. I conclude with some reflections on the role of culture in the understanding of poverty.

THE END OF THE SWITZERLAND OF LATIN AMERICA

The urban poor have been seduced and abandoned by the promises of inclusion, says

Ruben Kaztman (2001). That metaphor encloses the changing conditions for the lower classes in

the capital cities of the Southern Cone. De-industrialization, state retrenchment and increasing

wage differentials by education have shrank the number of protected, stable and decently paid

jobs particularly for those with low qualifications. Seduced and abandoned refers to those who,

3The broader project is a multi-method attempt to reconstruct the history of land squatting in Montevideo from its

origins in the late 1940s onwards, focused on the relationship between squatters and politics (Alvarez-Rivadulla2009).


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having incorporated expectations of full citizenship and stable jobs, are being expelled towards

the fringes of the city and the labor market.

In their analysis of the free market city, Alejandro Portes and Bryan Roberts, together

with a team of researchers from six Latin American countries, find that the shift in economic

models of development from import substitution to neoliberalism has left significant changes in

patterns of urbanization and in the character of urban life in the region (Portes and Roberts 2005;

Roberts and Portes 2006). They point at a decline in traditional urban primacy (one or few big

primate cities), deterioration of the labor markets with growing unemployment, informality and

inequality and, finally, sustained rises in delinquency (especially robberies and theft). Yet, as

Grimson (2008) reminds us for the case of Buenos Aires neoliberalism does not work in a

vacuum; instead, the new dynamics of border-making generated by it tend to harden limits drawn

by a prior history of segregation" (p. 511).

No image other than the seduced and abandoned could better express the structural

forces behind the wave of land squatting in Montevideo by the end of the twentieth century.

While about 2500 houses were located in squatter settlements in 1984 (Mazzei and Veiga 1985),

and they were about 7000 ten years later (INTEC 1995), that figure had skyrocketed to almost

40.000 in 20044, when the figure more or less stabilized. The relative growth and the relative

weight in the population are of course more telling than the absolute number. For a city with only

a million and a half inhabitants that has had no population growth, having 10% of its population

living in squatter settlements and having that population grow exponentially in about a decade

meant a huge transformation or, to borrow famous Uruguayan sociologist Carlos Filgueiras

metaphor, a hidden (urban) revolution(Filgueira and Fuentes 1996).

4Uruguays Institute of Statistics population count, 2004 (1st phase of the 2010 census).


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In current Montevideo, it does not take scavenging or unemployment to be an informal

urban dweller. Many squatters are indeed informal workers; almost 60% of workers in squatter

settlements worked informally in 2006 and 44.5% did so in 2011, a time of economic recovery,

versus 31% and 19.5% of workers living in the formal city respectively. 5 The instability of

informal jobs is what pushed many outside the formal renting market. Yet, if we compare them

with squatters of the past, they tend to be more educated, work as employees rather than on their

own, and they tend to come, as mentioned, from other neighborhoods in Montevideo, rather than

from the interior of the country. Some even work in stable low paid state jobs, such as the

military.

Table 1 illustrates the demographic changes of Uruguayan squatters as well as compares

squatters with non squatters for 2006. The studies summarized there are not strictly comparable,

yet they do show general patterns and trends. We see the change of squatters profile and yet we

also see that squatters keep being a vulnerable population compared to the average inhabitant of

Montevideo. Two other things stand out. First, as already suggested, having some job and some

education does not guarantee a place in the formal city. And second, for some, moving to a

squatter settlement implied improving their living conditions (45% moved to improve their

previous housing situation). Somewhere around the turn of the century, squatting became a

decent alternative for part of the structurally downwardly mobile urban working class. As I will

develop in the next section, this implied intense boundary work.

5Extended Household Survey of 2006 and Continuous Household Survey of 2011. I have considered informal those

workers that do not make pension contributions.


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Table 1: Studies on squatter settlements, Montevideo 1963-2006, and comparison of squatter settlements

versus formal neighborhoods, Montevideo 2006.

BonEspasandn

(1963)

Baudrn(1979)

Mazzei &Veiga (1985)

INTEC(1995) Alvarez-Rivadulla

Date of the Study 1963 1971 1984 1994 circa 2006

MethodSurvey

40 families

Survey

85 families 6neighborhoods

Survey

524 households

ReplicationMazzei & Veigas

1984 study(unknown N)

National household survey2006 (see notes for

exceptions)

Object "cantegriles"

"barriosmarginales"

(cantegriles as

one subtype ofthem)

"cantegriles""asentamien-tos precarios"and extreme

poverty as asynonyms

"cantegriles" and"asentamientos

precarios"sometimes assynonyms and

sometimes todistinguish twodifferent types

SquatterSettlements

FormalNeighbor-

hoods

Estimate of theUniverse

7000 people -2541 houses,15000 people

7013 houses

133545 people(10% of citypopulation)

35024households*

1325968*

Origin(householdhead born outside

Montevideo)65% 65% 46% 16% **

Age: Residents >11 27.37%young

population35% 34% 28% 14%

Motives

Couldn't affordrent/eviction

37% 47% 30% 25% 17%

To improve 10% 45% *** 38%

Other 63% 53% 60% 30% 45%

Poverty: % familieswith an income less

than 1 minimum

salary

Squatterfamilies have$9 a day on

average ****

33% 45% 17% 7%

People BelowPoverty Line

58.2% 13.6%


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Occu

ation

Work ontheir own

68% 70% 62% (hh) 28% (hh) 36% 25%

Employees 35% (hh) 56% (hh) 63% 69 %

FormalEducation

Without

formalinstruction

38% 15% (pop>6) 2% (hh) 1% (hh)

Incompleteelementaryeducation

38% (pop>11) 51% (hh) 33% (hh) 24% (hh) 14% (hh)

Finishedelementaryeducation

14% (pop>11) 50% (pop >6) 40% (hh) 37 % (hh) 36% (hh) 23% (hh)

Startedsecondaryeducation

0% 5% (pop >6) 11% (hh) 28% (hh) 36% (hh) 42% (hh)

Startedtertiaryeducation

0% 0% 0% 0% 2% (hh) 20% (hh)

Household size 4.5 mean 5.4 mean 51% 5 or more 4.0 mean 2.9 mean

Houses' wallsbuilt with solid

materials (bricksor similar)

7.5% (67% areshacks)

36% 63% 89% 98%

% of households

with piped waterinside the house

Almost none 38% 84% 97%

Sewage:households

connected to thecity sewage

system

7% 21% 80%

Electricity Paying 39% 48% 94%

Hooked 56% 52% 6%

hh stands for household head* Uruguays Institute of Statistics population count, 2004 (1 stphase of the 2010 census)

**Census of selected settlements by PIAI (governments regularization program), 2001 -2002

*** To be able to compare, I have grouped the categories offered by the question mv11 of the the 2006 Househould Survey asfollows: 1-"eviction" and 2-"economic reasons" as "couldn't afford rent/eviction" and 3-"house in bad shape", 4-"get my ownhouse" and 6- "problems of space" as "to improve"****Minimum cost of a basic food basket for a poor family was 20 $/day at the time.


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Popular urban sectors have been suffering a long erosion of their opportunities at least

since the 1970s. Yet, the strokes against their wellbeing only became spatial, visible in the city

after democratization. As I argue elsewhere, it was the increasing electoral competition of the

opening democracy, particularly enhanced by the entrance of the leftist coalition as a third actor

in municipal and national politics, what triggered the wave of land squatting in the 1990s

(Alvarez-Rivadulla 2009). Planned land invasions were just not under the realm of the possible

when the military government liberalized renting prices and expelled the poor from the city

center by demolishing the buildings they were squatting (Benton 1986). Although some

invasions did happen during dictatorship (by accretion, not in an organized way), as we see in

Figure 1, the number of new land invasions peaked around 1990. In Figure 1 we also see the long

term deterioration of real wages in the city.6

6The real wages series is from the Universidad de la Repblica (Uruguay) Economic History program data bank

(1870-2003 series). The land invasions series is my own estimation (Alvarez-Rivadulla 2009).

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

140

160

180

200

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

N land invasions Real wages


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The structure of opportunities available to the urban poor has shrunk in all its

dimensions, market, state and community, since at least the 1970s (Kaztman 1999). Regarding

the labor market, taking 1970 as a starting point, jobs became scarcer and those that do exist are

less stable. This is in part because women doubled their participation in the labor force in the

periodfrom 27.5% in 1970 to 52.5 in 1999 (Kaztman, Filgueira, and Errandonea 2005), but

it is also because many industries closed, the state has reduced its employees by half , and there

is not enough employment generation. Moreover, positions that do open up tend to be unstable

and low paid, especially if targeted to less skilled workers. Salary differentials by education are

increasing (Bucheli and Furtado 2004). Unemployment increased during the 1990s and early2000, affecting particularly the youth and poorly educated. The informal labor market has

increased substantially as well. According to the 2006 household survey, 36.5% of the working

population in 2006 did not have social security (INE 2006).

Regarding the state, the second dimension of the structure of opportunities analyzed by

Kaztman, I have already mentioned its diminishing role as an employer. But its impact among

the urban poor comes also through other avenues such as the educational system, which is unable

to retain many students past the first year of secondary school. This becomes particularly

worrisome when we know that a person needs on average 9 years of education to get an income

above Uruguays poverty line. Finally, regarding the community, socioeconomic residential

segregation has increased in Montevideo in the last decades (Kaztman, Filgueira, and Errandonea

2005). Neighborhoods are increasingly homogeneous in terms of income, occupational status

and education. This is especially problematic for the urban poor who today have fewer resources

in their neighborhoods, from information to role models, which might help in finding a job or

making any attempt at upper mobility.


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The recession period starting in 1999 and epitomized by the banking crisis of 2002 added

a new layer to these long term trends. If the period of growth albeit inequality that characterized

the 1990s had hurt the poor, this new recessive period was even more harmful. Poverty and

unemployment rose to unprecedented levels and household incomes dropped considerably

(Amarante and Arim 2004). A new period of growth coupled with decreasing unemployment and

poverty started in 2005. Yet, something broke in the Montevidean social fabric. And squatter

settlements and stubborn residential segregation are there reminding us of that.7

It is in this context that the intense effort many squatters, particularly organized squatters,

engaged in order to differentiate themselves from the more marginalized squatters and defend

their right to belong to the city can be understood. In the following sections I analyze this effort

and its threats in more detail.

RESISTING EXCLUSION THROUGH SYMBOLIC BOUNDARIES

The idea that personal and group identities are relational and therefore shape themselves

in contrast with others is old in the Social Sciences. We could trace it to Durkheim and Mauss

early thoughts on classification (1963)without forgetting the relevance of Social Psychologists

such as Tajfel (1981) in understanding the relevance of categories and prejudices in the

formation of groups. Yet, these ideas suffered a revival in recent years in the field of

stratification. The role of boundaries between us and them in creating and perpetrating class,

7 Persistent residential segregation has negative consequences. The reduction in poverty in this bonanza times has

not been even across the Montevidean territory. Deprived neighborhoods had not been able to reduce their povertyrates a the same pace as more privileged neighborhoods (Espndola and Leal 2007).


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gender and racial inequalities spiked after the seminal work of Michel Lamont (1994)comparing

the American and the French upper middle classes.

Building on Bourdieus emphasis on the role of taste and lifestyle in structuring

distinctions among classes of people with relatively similar endowments of capitals (Bourdieu

1988), Lamont develops the concept of symbolic boundaries. These are classificatory schemes

people use to categorize reality, separate people into groups and generate feelings of similarity

and group membership that are essential for people to acquire status and monopolize resources

(Lamont and Molnar 2002: 168). They are a precondition, although not a sufficient one, for the

existence of social boundaries, which are objectified forms of social differences manifested in

unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial) and social

opportunities (p. 169).

The concept comes in handy to understand the great effort Montevideos squatters of the

1990 put in order to protect a working class identity that structural transformations in the labor

market had put at risk. For that, they engaged in intense boundary work to distinguish themselves

from those they feared to become or be confused with, the marginal poor. As Norberto, a

squatter leader told me, We first gathered a group of people just like meand he added when I

asked him to explain what he meant by that- we were state employees, workers, I mean, not

marginal people. We all had some activity and the other thing we had in common was that we

couldnt afford rent. These words illustrate the contradiction in which these squatters were.

They wanted to be workers but their income was no longer stable or high enough to pay for a

place in the formal city.


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It is by looking at the class trajectories of the squatters that we understand where these

symbolic boundaries come from. Norberto used to be a state employee who took an early

retirement policy implemented in the early 1990s as part of the state downsizing and

privatization initiatives of the Lacalle presidency (Ramos, Narbondo, and Filgueira 2002). With

his wife, who used to be a textile worker, they now have a small garment informal business in

their house in the squatter settlement. When times are good, they can informally employ one

more person. His case resembles that of many public servants, salaried professionals who started

a petty enterprise in Latin America in the 1990s after being displaced by the adjustment policies

(Portes and Hoffman 2003).

He used to live in the formal city, in a middle class neighborhood. We came in 1990,

1991 he remembersand the crisis was already very complicated and we couldnt afford rent.

We had to leave from where we were, rent something new and get a guarantee and all that. 8And

like so many families that came from different neighborhoods, the idea then was that the way out

of that situation was to occupy a plot and build your own house. Thus, squatting suddenly

entered the repertoire of the increasingly unstable working class. For that, however, squatting

needed to be differentiated from traditional squatting, which these structurally downwardly

mobile workers associated with marginality.

I always make this remark says Luis, a leader of another squatter settlementone of the

biggest differences with cantegriles, is that the generation that occupied here are all workers

8To rent an apartment in Uruguay you need a guarantee which might be a relatives property. Many squatters, often

young families, did not have that guarantee. Also, renting prices had been increasing since a 1974 law thatliberalized the renting market consistent with the monetarist policies implemented by other Southern Cone militaryregimes. Also, in the late 80s and early 90s the price of new renting contracts spiked tremendously.


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[gente de trabajo]. () This cultural element was evident here, mainly in the construction of

houses, right? We could have stayed just with wood and metal sheets. But there was a stronger

bet; we planned the streets and everything else. And that helped to have what we have now,

which looks like a new neighborhood. Of course that vision came from social and political

activists that brought those elements of organization.Pointing not only at the urban quality but

also at the organization of the neighborhood came up repeatedly among my interviewees. Again,

this can be understood analyzing their trajectories, particularly the leaders. Many had

participated in unions, political parties or the cooperative housing movement. They brought that

tradition of organization to the neighborhood and it was part of their identity as workers.

Luis, as many others in my interviews, is using both cultural and socioeconomic

symbolic boundaries to differentiate his neighborhood from a cantegril and to define it as an

ordinary neighborhood. Others also spoke of honesty and hard work to differentiate themselves

from malandros, those that do not have working habits and rob. This interview extract from

Maria and her husband encapsulates what many others told me in a more disperse way.

We were not delinquents and here there were no carts, no horses. I mean, there were no

people of very low resources. We were really hard working people, workers that needed a

house and couldnt pay the rent () We are families of wor-kers [her emphasis] not people

that beg or rob. We are people that like to live well but dont have the means, thats it. But

with dignity, thats the thing. Because Im sure that if you now enter into any of these little

houses, the humblest you can find, Im sure it doesnt stink of dirt, rotten things or animals.

[And her husband added] If you bring a black [negrito] with a cart and a horse.We didnt

want that. We didnt want to live in the dirt, you know?


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These references fall under what Lamont (Lamont 1994; 2002) has called moral

boundaries and resemble the dignity of the working men she found among American and

French working class interviewees. The centrality of work as an identity defining category also

relates to what Newman (1999)found among the black and Latino working poor of Harlem who

compared themselves and feel morally superior to the unemployed. Interestingly, moral, cultural

and socioeconomic boundaries appeared intertwined.

Criticisms to the cash transfer program, Plan de Emergencia, implemented by the

government from 2005 to 2007 are connected with the centrality of work, honesty and effort in

boundary making among squatters. As one woman put it, Uruguayans are lazy; they dont want

to work. They want to earn a lot and do little, and the governmentWe are against the

Emergency Planbecause its promoting more lazinessDont give people money or food. No.

Give them a job. Put a factory. Let them earn their everyday food with dignity. Still, these

strong opinions depended again on the trajectories. Some of my interviewees, the poorest, were

happy for getting the subsidy or disappointed and aggrieved because despite being in need the

state had given the help to someone else.

These boundaries translated into spatial boundaries and exclusionary practices at the

moment of land invasion and neighborhood construction, by establishing formal rules not

allowing scavengers or people with animals such as horses or pigs to settle and by determining

deadlines for starting to build using solid materials to substitute the initial shack. They wanted to

avoid the garbage and dirt associated to catengriles. Illustrating this, an early resident of a

squatter settlement in the middle of a traditionally working class neighborhood of the city told

me:


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We had rules [estatutos] here. As soon as we formed the first neighborhood association, we

made rules. () What we wanted was a working class neighborhood [un barrio obrero], not

a .I dont mean to dismiss anybody, but we didnt want to be a very deprived

neighborhood. We established that after a year of being here, we all had to have at least one

room built of solid materials. Even if it was the bathroom, you know? () We were tryingto find a way for the neighborhood not be marginalized. Fairly poor, but not marginalized.

These initial exclusion of the poorest also meant excluding them of the subsequent access

to public services that the most organized neighborhoods were able to obtain. Yet as we will see

in the following section, the capacity to enforce all these rules in a context of labor instability

and need was a titanic and almost impossible task. Only few neighborhoods with a very strong

organization managed to not violate those initial rules. As we saw with the initial vignette, the

most common scenario was that the initially planned neighborhoods started to become more

crowded and more precarious, that scavenging, horses, garbage, fetid smell, extreme poverty and

everything the initial settlers wanted to avoid was inevitable in a context of structural changes in

the labor market.

THE WEAKNESS OF SYMBOLIC BOUNDARIES

Many forces conspired against the ideal of transforming organized squatter settlements into

traditional working class neighborhoods keeping extreme poverty outside of them. I will refer to

two that I consider crucial: structural economic conditions and state and social categorization of

all informality as squatter settlements or asentamientos.


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Structural economic conditions:

As already explained, the 2002 economic crisis added another layer to the long term economic

forces that had been expelling squatters from the formal city for more than a decade. Poverty and

unemployment skyrocketed. The percentage of people below the poverty line reached a third of

the citys population in 2004 (32%) and unemployment achieved unprecedented levels (17% in

2002).9Although squatters did not raise parallel to these indicators, because of changes in the

political and institutional climate that I analyze elsewhere (Alvarez-Rivadulla 2012 ), the living

conditions on them did suffer from the crisis.10It was after this crisis that Shirleys opening story

took place. Its consequences left a durable urban trace, the precarization of already poor squatter

settlements, even some of those that had made an effort to materialize their symbolic boundaries

against extreme poverty.

Figures 2 and 3 visually illustrate the spatial consequences of this economic crisis adding

to the already mentioned more long term deterioration in the living conditions of squatters in

Montevideo. The first shows an aerial picture of Shirley neighborhood. Limited by one of the

most polluted rivers of the city, which often floods, they had originally forbidden constructions

beyond a boarder road. As evident in the picture, there are now several shacks there as well as in

the neighborhood entrance, not visible in this picture. The second picture shows a new

settlement, bordering Luis one, the one he proudly defined as not having a cantegrilculture.

Visibly much poorer than Luiss neighborhood the settlement appears presided by a grazing

9National Institute of Statistics series.

10Although some already existent squatter settlements became denser after the 2002 crisis, the overall squatting

population did not spike then. According to a study conducted by the National Institute of Statistics, there werealready 120.000 people living in squatter settlements in 1998. That number only rose to 133.546 in 2004 (NationalInstitute of Statistics 2004 population count), and stayed around 130.000 according to a 2008 estimation (Menndez2008). The number of new land invasions did not raise either (Alvarez-Rivadulla 2009). The big spike both in

population and new informal neighborhoods occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s.


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horse used for scavenging. In the back, in turn, the buildings of the once thriving meat

processing plants appear as stubborn phantoms of a time in which this was an industrial working

class area that received immigration from Eastern European countries.

Figure 1: Satellital picture of a squatter settlements whose limits grew beyond planned close to a

polluted river that often floods.


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Figure 2. Accretion land invasion that has grown next to a planned one in El Cerro, Montevideo.

Even before the 2002 crisis, the ideal condition of building solid houses was difficult to

meet and enforce. Unstable jobs and salaries made commitments such as paying light very

difficult, so many are hooked to street lights. Shirleys neighborhood has always wanted to be

regularized. This was the number one demand and dream since I first visited the neighborhood

more than ten years ago. It might, after long, materialize since the neighborhood has been

included in the government upgrading program. This has, however, generated fears among some

residents that they will not be able to maintain the costs of living in the formal city (e.g., taxes,

public services). The working class neighborhood [barrio obrero] organized squatters wanted to

reproduce is difficult to materialize. They are no longer working class.


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State and social categories

Although most of the poor in Montevideo live in the formal city,11 in recent years

asentamientosbecame a synonym of poverty both for focalized state policies and for the general

public. In other words, for the public imaginary poverty became spatialized and equivalent to

urban informality. This process was helped by the incorporation of the term asentamientoas a

state category in the 1990s and its popularization among both squatters and the rest of city

dwellers, aided by the media. Besides the already mentioned economic conditions affecting all

squatters, this homogenizing category eroded the organized squatters attempt to differentiate

themselves from the truly marginalized.

The Uruguayan state considers all informal settlements as asentamientos. This is true

both for counting people producing statistics of how many people live in squatter settlements

(the same statistics I have been using here) and for policy purposes. When the wave of organized

squatter settlements exploded around 1990, there was no clear policy. Until then, most

cantegrilesdid not have public services, as we saw in table 1. Yet, by 2006 84% of households

had water service. Through neighborhood organization, demanding the state, and the use of

political networks, many planned settlements were able to stretch the limits of the city and the

state towards their neighborhoods. A de factoregularization occurred in some settlements, where

the condition of illegality or informality contrasted with the presence of the state through garbage

collection, light, health clinics or even bus lines in a few cases.

The current upgrading and titling policy, financed both by the Inter-American

Development Bank and the Uruguayan government and similar to other programs in the region

11According to the 2011 Household Survey only 30 percent of the citys poor lived in squatter settlements. The

great majority lives in the formal city. Yet, squatter settlements are indeed primarily poor, since almost 60 percent oftheir population has an income beyond the poverty line.


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such as the famous Favela-Bairro in Brazil, uses the term asentamiento for all informal

neighborhoods, regardless of their organization, urban design and level of need. Strategies are

different in dealing with different types of settlement but the term is the same. The name of the

program is in fact Program for the Integration of Asentamientos Irregulares [irregular

settlements].

Interestingly, inhabitants of the traditional city cantegriles, now use the term

asentamiento to refer to their neighborhood interchangeably with cantegrilor the abbreviation

cante (which they do not tend to use contemptuously). The category, originally used by those

who wanted to separate from the poorest of the poor has been appropriated by them, through

state mediation. They are now included in the asentamientos program, they are counted as

asentamientos for census and survey purposes. Therefore, they are asentamiento. Just like

Desrosieres (1998) and other authors of a French tradition (see for instance: Boltanski and

Thevenot 1983)have pointed, state and statistical categories not only describe and name but may

also create facts.

Asentamiento is not only equated with poverty, it has increasingly been associated with

danger and crime. According to a recent survey, more than half (52%) of the city population does

not want to leave nearby a squatter settlement, and 21% would never hire someone that lives in

one.12In addition, recent police intervention in different squatter settlements has reinforced the

stigma in the mass media.

Inspired and advised by those who implemented the cinematographic military police

interventions followed by the Police Pacification Units in Rios favelas, the Minister of the

12Juan Carlos Doyenart, Asentamientos. El 49% no los quiere tener cerca, ltimas Noticias, April 25, 2011.


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Interior said We are going to impede favelization. 13By that he means territories where the

police cannot enter and where the rulers are related to crime, particularly drug trafficking and

robberies. In his declarations and in the selection of areas for these interventions, he equates

crime with urban informality, although he says, with only part of it. We have evaluated that

many thieves find refuge in asentamientos. They are not all of the asentamientos. We know

which ones.14While some neighbors welcome this punitive branch of the state (Wacquant 2001a;

2001b)because they feel threatened by a few criminals in their everyday life, others protested the

use of unneeded force and the consideration of everybody as a suspect. Still others criticized the

stigmatization potential of this kind of intervention transmitted by the media in a context ofincreasing fear of the other, the poor, particularly young poor males.15

Yet, the interesting thing here is the use of asentamientoto name the target places of the

police operation. None of them was in one of the planned invasions for which using the word

asentamiento was part of their boundary work. They were mostly in traditional cantegrilesof the

city and surrounding also traditionally poor neighborhoods.16 Yet, again, poverty and danger

become equated with urban informality.

In sum, many forces conspired against the intense boundary work of those squatters that

wanted to transform their organized settlements into the working class neighborhoods they once

lived in or imagined as desirable. Only a few of them managed to materialize, at least to some

extent, their initial neighborhood ideal. Which ones? Only those with the greatest organizational

13La red 21, Suman polticas sociales a megaoperativos en asentamientos,La Red 21, May 28, 2011.

14En Perspectiva, El Ministerio del Interior evala positivamente los operativos policiales de saturacin,Radio

Espectador, April 20, 2011.15

For a critical perspective on the Interior Ministrys policy see my own entry in a social science discussion blog:Mara Jos lvarez Rivadulla, Megaoperativos con miniresultados,Razones y Personas: repensando Uruguay,May 5, 2011.16

Marconi, Chacarita y Aquiles Lanza (in Malvin Norte), for example, are three of the oldest and poorest squattersettlements of the city, formed by accretion. They date from the 1960s-1970s.


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capacity and political connections, which tended to correspond to relatively better socioeconomic

conditions of the residents.

CONCLUSION

This article has pointed at the way in which structurally downwardly mobile urban poor

resignified squatting as a decent housing strategy at the intersection of neoliberalism and

democratization in the Montevideo of the turn of the century. In so doing it pointed at the world

of symbolic boundaries and exclusionary practices derived from them. Rather than repeating the

main findings in this conclusion I would like to push the argument a little bit further, towards

theoretical understandings of poverty.

Speaking of symbolic boundaries and exclusionary practices takes us to the realm of

culture. The role of culture in the creation or perpetuation of poverty was issue of heated

academic debate among scholars trying to understand precisely the wave of rural migrants

squatting in Latin American cities around the 1960s. On the one hand, modernization theory

with Gino Germani (1968) as its main representative considered migrants shantytowns as

transitory, as one stage in a longer process of change and development. Once these migrants

learned urban values, and once the modernization process was more complete, squatters would

get incorporated into the culture of modernity, and therefore into its institutions, such as the labor

market and the formal housing market. Related to this was Oscar Lewis influential

conceptualization of the culture of poverty, to understand Mexican slums, as a set of values toadapt to harsh economic conditions, such as a feeling of marginality and an incapacity to look

beyond their immediate context, that, once established, were unlikely to change (Lewis 1961;

Lewis and La Farge 1959)


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On the other hand, Jos Nun (1969; 2001) and other structuralist, dependency-theory-

oriented colleagues developed a very different theory. Much more pessimistically, they predicted

that shantytowns were there to stay, because the peripheral form of Latin American capitalism

would never incorporate them. Squatter settlements constituted the housing of a marginal mass,

whose existence was, according to Nun, functional to the whole system. It contributed to low

salaries and therefore to the very unequal form of capitalism of the region. Their existence had

nothing to do with having the wrong culture. More empirically, Janice Perlmans (1976; 2004)

work on the favelas of Rio showed in the 1960s that squatters were not that different from formal

urban dwellers, and that their marginality was just a myth. She claimed that favelados were verymuch integrated into the formal economy and the values of the modern city. In the same vein,

studying the case of Santiago de Chile, Alejandro Portes (1972) examined rationality in the

slum. He challenged the idea that slum dwellers were irrational or different in their value

orientations to the middle classes. 17

In the US context, where this debate is further complicated by cultural conceptions of

race (the use of race and culture interchangeably for example), some relatively recent pieces

encourage us to take culture seriously in our studies of poverty, considering its heterogeneous,

conflictive and changing nature (Bourgois 1995;Lamont and Small 2008;Small and Newman

2001). As Auyero (2011)points out this line of inquiry has a lot to learn from the older debate in

Latin America. In fact, to mention just one example, Newman s (1999) insistence in the

ordinariness and similarities with mainstream values among Harlems working poor, resembles

enormously what Perlman and Portes, among others, were saying thirty years before.

17For a summary of this tradition by some of its main exponents, see Gonzlez de la Rocha et al.(2004). For the

Uruguayan version of the debate, see the different perspectives Bon Espasandn (1963)and Baudrn (1979) hadon the urban poor, the former defending a marginality theory hypothesis and the latter leaning towards a much moreMarxist structuralist one.


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Because cultural understandings of poverty are often tinted by conservative arguments

against welfare policies towards those that supposedly do not want to work, are lazy or

have the wrong habits and values (the same that our squatters were using to distinguish

themselves from the poor they did not want to be), and therefore do not deserve to be helped,

many scholars have abandoned the topic. Others are convinced that culture is a sponge concept,

too difficult to define and operationalize, whereas for some its explanatory power is just meager

in comparison to structural socioeconomic and political factors. Yet, it remains as the white

elephant in the room. Scholars often throw hypotheses related to culture as when Kaztman

(2001) warns us that segregation might become more problematic when it generates subculturesof poverty in homogenously poor neighborhoods. Yet, it is rarely addressed directly.

My attempt here as been to understand the complex relationships between symbolic

boundaries and practices of exclusion, on the one hand, and structural changes in the class

structure on the other. I have also showed variation in this boundary work depending on

individuals social position and, especially, trajectories. I have also pointed at the weaknesses or

limitations of this boundary work in a context of continuous erosion of labor market

opportunities and growing stigmatization of squatters. Others have done this before. Perhaps one

of the best exemplars is Minujin and Kesslers (1995) account of the new poverty in the

Argentina of the 1990s. Still, I argue, we need much more research in this direction.


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INTEC. 1995. "Relevamiento de Asentimientos Irregulares de Montevideo." INTEC MontevideoKaztman, Ruben. 1999. "Activos y Estructura de Oportunidades. Estudios sobre las races de la

vulnerabilidad social en Uruguay. ." Montevideo: PNUD-CEPAL.

Kaztman, Ruben. 2001. "Seducidos y abandonados:el aislamiento social de los pobres urbanos"Revista de la Cepal 75.

Kaztman, Ruben, Fernando Filgueira, and Fernando Errandonea. 2005. "La CiudadFragmentada. Respuesta de los sectores populares urbanos a las transformaciones delmercado y el territorio en Montevideo." in Ciudades Latinoamericanas. Un AnlisisComparativo en el Umbral del Nuevo Siglo, edited by A. Portes, B. Roberts, and A.Grimson. Buenos Aires: Prometeo.

Lamont, Michele. 1994.Money, morals and manners : culture of the French and the Americanupper-middle class. [S.l.]: University of Chicago Press.

Lamont, Michele. 2002. The Dignity of Working Men : morality and the boundaries of race,

class and Immigration. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Lamont, Michle and Mario Small. 2008. "How Culture Matters: Enriching Our Understanding

of Poverty." Pp. 76-102 in The Colors of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic DisparitiesPersist, edited by D. Harris and A. Lin. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Lamont, Michele and Virag Molnar. 2002. "THE STUDY OF BOUNDARIES IN THE SOCIALSCIENCES."Annual Review of Sociology28:167-195.

Lewis, Oscar. 1961. The children of Snchez, autobiography of a Mexican family. New York:Random House.

Lewis, Oscar and Oliver La Farge. 1959.Five families; Mexican case studies in the culture ofpoverty. New York: Basic Books.

Mazzei, Enrique and Danilo Veiga. 1985.Pobreza Urbana en Montevideo. Nueva encuesta en

"cantegriles" (1984): CIESU-Banda Oriental.Menndez, Florentino Jorge. 2008. "Condiciones de vida en Montevideo 2do semestre 2008." inDocumentos Temticos vol. 1. Montevideo: Instituto Nacional de Estadstica.

Minujin, Alberto and Gabriel Kessler. 1995.La nueva pobreza en la Argentina. Buenos Aires,Argentina: Editorial Planeta.

Newman, Katherine S. 1999.No shame in my game : the working poor in the inner city. NewYork: Knopf and the Russell Sage Foundation.

Nun, Jos. 1969. "Superpoblacin relativa, ejrcito industrial de reserva y masa marginal "Revista Latinoamericana de Sociologa5:178-236.

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Mjar Lasa 2012 Resisting Exclusion

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