Everyday banality in a documentary by teenage women: between the trivial and the extreme. Schooling and desiring in contexts of extreme urban poverty

Abstract

In this article, I offer some reflections on a video documentary workshop for students in the first year of middle school. The workshop, which was held in 2008, took place in a school in an area of extreme urban poverty in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, Argentina, specifically in one of the more and more common spaces usually called shantytowns. The students were asked to conceive of, produce and film a documentary video. The only restriction was that the project be about their daily life and not be fictional, because the project was constructed as an opportunity to create, in the context of the school, spaces for thinking about and problematising the world. The workshop itself and its product – a documentary about trash and waste in the neighbourhood – confront us with the fact that the material conditions of existence can never be isolated from desire and the will to live. Doing is always constituted in certain conditions of existence and, returning to Deleuze and Guattari, desire is always close to those conditions. This experience of doing entails the life of subjects, the dynamics of school life but also – and here I am going to speak of what these young women made, in which they express their interests, concerns, desires and aspirations – political statements insofar as an affirmation of life and the flows of desire.

Keywords:

• schooling
• documentary bay teenage women
• extreme urban poverty
• desiring production
• everyday banality

Notes

1. I am referring to several incidents that took place in middle schools in Argentina that received a great deal of public attention, for instance a video on YouTube where students burned a teacher’s hair.

2. While it might be interesting to discuss the dynamics of the workshop itself, that exceeds the scope of this article.

3. In 1978, during the military dictatorship, the decree numbers 21,809 and 21,810, which transferred control of grade schools to the provincial states were passed; and in 1992, Congress passed Law Ley 24,049 which effected the transferal of control of high schools and post‐high school institutions. In neither case were the funds that would enable the provinces to handle the tasks allocated by the national government. These processes constitute a clear example of neo‐liberal educational policies in Latin America in general and Argentina in particular (see, among others, Sader and Gentili 2001).

4. If that might seem obvious, it ceases to be so when, to take an example from educational policy, governmental documents and policies ponder what can be done in schools despite poverty, as if poverty were a variable that could be isolated.

5. The ‘poverty line’ measures whether a home’s income can meet a set of basic nutritional and non‐nutritional needs (clothing, education, health care, etc.) included in what is called the Canasta Básica Total (CBT). Población con Necesidades Básicas Insatisfechas (NBI) refers to that population characterised by one of the following: more than three people living in a room; inhabiting precarious dwellings or tenements that lack toilets with running water; any child of school age (6–12 years) who does not attend school.

6. Although there are differences between the television shows that depict the criminalisation of poverty, we are speaking particularly of news programmes where the images of shantytowns are associated with crime, drug addiction and/or pregnant teens (see, among others, Saintout 2002)

7. One such programme is Policías en acción (Police in Action) that shows actual police operatives.

8. Though it deals with another Third World country, the film Slumdog Millionaire entails the image of someone who strives to get out.

9. We are speaking about statements made in informal conversations where the teachers complain about the students and the impossibility of working with them as well as their descriptions of the students in more formal and in‐depth interviews carried out as part of the research.

10. Moreno is another town in Greater Buenos Aires. To go from Carcova to Moreno, you must take several buses.

11. Carcova, the name of the shantytown where these kids live, is also the name of a very important Argentine painter. One of his famous paintings, Sin pan y sin trabajo (Without Bread and Without Work, 1892) deals with the working class and its life in the then‐incipient shantytowns.

12. This is the term that the teachers used to describes these young women at the beginning of the workshop. Due to limitations of space, here we only make brief reference to these characterisations in order to provide for better understanding of the dynamics of the workshop and what these young women propose in their video.

13. CEAMSE (‘Coordinación Ecológica Área Metropolitana Sociedad Del Estado’) is the leading company in waste transport and disposal, with more than 31 years of experience in this field. Here, the students are referring to the land field where much of the trash produced in the city of Buenos Aires is deposited. Many families go to these land fields looking for food every day.

14. Yamila uses the pronoun you when she seems to be speaking of herself. Two lines later, she does the same thing when speaking of people who are not going to have anything to eat. As with many other families, such people are her grandmother, her uncle, her mother, etc.