‘But this is a park’! The paradox of public space in a Buenos Aires ‘no man's land’

Abstract

Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork, this paper analyzes the occupation of an abandoned park in the south of Buenos Aires by the city's urban poor, delineating the implications of this incident for notions of citizenship in the context of deeply fragmented social rights. While public space has historically been understood as an expression of the universality of rights bearing membership in a political community, I show how this universalism became the object of struggle during a conflict over the park between the local middle class and squatters, many of which were of immigrant origin. The discourses mobilized by various social groups blurred the distinction between citizenship as a set of legal–formal rights versus a project of normative inclusion. While public space is juridically constructed as universal, particularistic claims to these spaces are imbued with increased legitimacy in a context in which social rights – conceived as a set of provisions guaranteed by the state under a regime of liberal citizenship – are unrealizable. By claiming this space for particularistic uses, squatters drew attention to the contradictions embedded in public space's democratic pretensions in a setting in which putatively universal rights are ignored by the state.

Keywords:

• claiming citizenship
• space
• migrants

Acknowledgements

Support for this research was provided by a City University of New York Research and Travel Grant. I am grateful to Sharon Zukin, Bryan Turner, Ryan Centner, Setha Low, Philip Kasinitz and two anonymous reviewers for generous feedback and critical commentary.

Notes

 1. María Girola (2007) notes in her study of a state-built residential complex in the neighborhood of Villa Soldati that residents are not homogenous in class terms but suggests that the majority belong to the lower middle and skilled working class. Those who entered these complexes during the 1970s tended to be middle and lower middle-class public employees. While Girola suggests that these complexes received additional lower income families in recent years, the residents of the superblocks overall remain fairly privileged compared to their neighbors in informal housing and shantytowns. I use the term lower middle class broadly to capture the relational advantage of these groups within the larger neighborhood context.

 2. Data presented in this article are derived from semistructured interviews and informal conversations with residents throughout the city during the incident and its aftermath in December 2010. It also draws upon an analysis of public documents and media texts among Buenos Aires' largest circulation dailies: Clarín, La Nación, and Página12, as well as major television coverage during and after the incident, including C5N, Telefé, and TN.

 3. Marshall (1950/1964) is, of course, the classic in delineating such as thing as ‘liberal’ citizenship. While the institution of social rights is precisely the mechanism through which Marshall proposes to ensure that the equality of political rights constrains the inequality produced by the marketplace (see Turner 2009), in practice this conception has generated a number of tensions. While social rights remain absent in many contexts, constitutional and juridical concepts in democratic settings remain underpinned by this notion of rights bearing membership.

 4. At the local level, the law makes an exception for street vending when it is tied to subsistence in the form of ‘trinket’ or knickknack selling. The ill-defined nature of these goods has rendered the law unenforceable, much to the dismay of ‘formal’ merchants (Novillo 2011).

 5. Gorelik (1998, p. 277) argues that the ‘mythic’ quality of the barrios came into being through a dialectical process of modernization whereby the very institutions and culture that produced the social organization of the barrios were always indexed through a nostalgia for the older, ‘picturesque’, and premodern neighborhood of first-generation immigrants.

 6. In many Latin American countries, the term mestizo refers to the social groups that were descendents of Spanish colonizers and indigenous populations (for a classic account of ‘race’ in Latin America, see Mörner 1967). In Argentina, the term is rarely used, in part, because of an official discourse that stresses Argentina's roots in European immigration. However, as the country industrialized beginning in the 1930s, the city of Buenos Aires and its environs were the site of the large-scale migration of darker skinned migrants from the countryside. Alarmed by the presence of this racialized urban proletariat, much of Buenos Aires' middle and upper class scorned the presence of this social group, dubbed in local parlance cabecitas negras (Ratier 1971) or little black heads.

 7. Both Gorelik (2004) and Garguin (2006) argue that the notion of Buenos Aires being a ‘European’ city emerged precisely as the city's dominant modernity discourse seemed to be called into question by the materialization of migrants from the countryside, beginning in the 1930s. For Gorelik, the apogee of this conception occurred in the 1950s, just when Peronism and its others had quite literately threatened the material and social basis of the comparison.

 8. Compared to Latin American capitals, Buenos Aires' early economic development and mass European immigration meant that the migration of the rural working class created less informal and precarious housing in the city's already dense barrios. Though some informal settlement did take place in the city of Buenos Aires, it was less pronounced than in other major cities of the region (see Holston 2008 in São Paulo; in Mexico City see Varley 1985) and the majority of informal settlement took place in the less dense south of the city and the much larger metropolitan region of Buenos Aires.

 9. The west of the city grew in population from 106,000 in 1904 to 456,000 in 1914, in part, due to the opening of an urban train service (Ferrocarril del oeste) (Braun and Cacciatore 1996, p. 44).

10. As Argentine demographer Susana Torrado (2002) points out, poverty in Argentina has ‘Creole features’ (rasgos criollos). The traditional Hispanic-creole (colonial) social order contained an elite of Hispanic origin along with a mestizo servant and working class. European immigrants, however, came to occupy a new and extremely broad space in between these two classes, producing the Argentine middle classes. The traditional lower class, however, experienced little mobility, creating a type of poverty that came to have distinct ethno-racial meanings.

11. Bolivians have historically experienced significant discrimination in Argentina, particularly given a national imaginary that stresses European immigration as the basis of the modern nation (Grimson and Kessler 2005, Chap. 4). This type of discrimination has been noted in other regional settings as well. For an examination of discrimination against Bolivians in São Paulo, Brazil, see Simai and Baeninger 2011.

12. All translations have been made by the author.

13. Okupas is short for ocupados, ‘occupiers’ or squatters. The use of the letter ‘k’ is a purposeful misspelling that dates to a 2000 television series with the same name that portrayed squatters in Buenos Aires largely as criminals and drug addicts (the use of the ‘k’, however, has its roots in a Spanish social movement).

14. Mercosur is a customs bloc consisting of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, and recently Venezuela as full members.

15. This was not the first time that the presence of Latin American immigrants in Buenos Aires had required the reordering of their social meaning. As Grimson and Kessler (2005, p. 117) point out, the neoliberalizing government of the 1990s sought to manage disquiet about high unemployment and immigration by suggesting that Bolivian immigrants in Argentina were not an example of misgovernment or national decline, but a symbol of Argentina's place in the First World, similar to Turks in Germany or Mexicans in the USA.