Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, UNAM Lugar: México; Año:

ISSN:0185-1918, en prensa

Partner State, Local Community, and Urban Poverty in Argentina: The Provision of

Public Services in a Metropolitan Buenos Aires Shantytown 1

Patricio Besana
Doctorate candidate: UNSAM, CONICET
Silvia Grinberg
Researcher at CONICET and Prof. UNSAM
Ricardo Gutierrez
Researcher at CONICET and Prof. UNSAM

Abstract
While in the better-off sectors of the city public services (such as water, electricity, or
waste collection) are provided through state-owned or private companies, in the poorest
quarters their provision depends a great deal on community organization as well as local
leadership. Based upon the study of a Metropolitan Buenos Aires shantytown, we
contend that both (community organization and local leadership) are two-faced
mechanisms. On the one hand, they express the community efforts to self-manage the
satisfaction of basic needs when both private and state companies fail to provide them.
On the other, they are the channels through which what we call the “partner state”
secures the regulation of poor population without getting directly involved in the
provision of public services. Thereby, in this type of neighborhoods the day-to-day
struggle over the right to the city encounters new forms of state action that are alien to
better-off residents and that the notion of partner state help to grasp.

Resumen

Mientras en los sectores más acomodados de la ciudad los servicios públicos (tal como
la electricidad, el agua potable o la recolección de residuos) son provistos por agencias
del estado o empresas públicas, en los sectores más pobres su provisión depende en gran

1
Brief acknowledgements
Special acknowledgements: Gustavo Curutchet, Martin Matiñan, Eliana Bussi. PICT "Degradación ambiental, pobreza y educación
en la periferia urbana: un estudio transdisciplinario en José León Suárez, Región Metropolitina." and PIP CONICET: Investigadora
responsable La escuela en la periferia metropolitana: escolarización, pobreza y degradación ambiental en José León Suárez (Área
Metropolitana de Buenos Aires) PIP CONICET

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parte de la organización de la comunidad así como de liderazgos locales. En base al

estudio de una villa de la Región Metropolitana de Buenos Aires, sostenemos que
ambos (la organización de la comunidad y el liderazgo local) son mecanismos de dos
caras. Por un lado, expresan los esfuerzos de la comunidad por lograr la satisfacción de
sus necesidades básicas cuando la provisión estatal o privada falla. Por otro lado,
canalizan la regulación de la población pobre por parte de un estado que denominamos
“socio” sin que este se involucre directamente en la provisión de servicios públicos. De
ese modo, en este tipo de barrios la lucha cotidiana por el derecho a la ciudad se
encuentra con nuevas formas de acción estatal que son ajenas a los sectores más
acomodados y que la noción de estado socio ayuda a entender.

Keywords
Partner State – Local Community - Public Services – Shantytown- Urban Poverty –
Right to the City

Palabras clave
Estado socio – Comunidad Local – Servicios Públicos – Villas – Pobreza Urbana –
Derecho a la ciudad

1. Introduction

Over the past several decades, profound processes of urban segmentation and selective
metropolization have taken place around the world (Ciccolella & Mignaqui, 2004).
While some metropolises gain prominence in the command networks of the global
economy, social and spatial fragmentation grows steadily in the heart of urban
territories. In this context, the studies and debates around the cities’ poorest areas have
gained room among social scientists. Prominent in those debates has been the notion of
slum, used to discuss the social and political status as well the stigmatic representation
of the urban poor and their places of residence (Pushpa, 2011). Even though urban
segmentation is present in all metropolitan cities, the notion of slum has been
particularly applied to the study of metropolises in the South.
Whereas many characteristics of the so-called slums are common to most cities in the
South (such as the smell of decaying garbage and sewage, the way houses are

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constructed out of all kinds of stuff, and the tight proximity of houses), the debate on
Latin American slums have focused on issues such as poverty alleviation policies, the
relationship between the urban poor and security policies, the discourse on local
empowerment and entrepreneurship, or the struggles over urban rights, among many
others (Barrientos & Santibáñez, 2009). This article seeks to contribute to this literature
by examining the interaction of slumdwellers and local organizations with the state in
the day-to-day provision of public services.
In Argentina, as elsewhere, the expansion of big cities has taken place within a process
of unplanned and inchoate urban production that brings about the depletion or
insufficiency of public services (Azpiazu, 2010). Running water, sewer, storm drain,
power, waste collection, and transportation networks do not expand at the same pace as
urban demand for them does. This results in environmental and health problems that,
given the processes of selective metropolization, affect the poorest groups within the
urban population in particular. While in the better-off sectors of the city public services
are provided through ‘standard’ channels (i.e. state-owned or private companies), in the
poorest quarters their provision is usually left in the hands of the local community.
Thus, responsibility for the environmental and health problems that are the result of a
lack of essential services is usually charged on the population that suffers them the
most.
In the light of this double shortcoming of state intervention and market access, and
based upon an in-depth research conducted in a Metropolitan Buenos Aires shantytown,
we seek to understand how slumdwellers resolve the problem of access to basic urban
services, and what kind of relationships between them and the state are built during the
process. Away from celebratory approaches to ‘local empowerment’ 2 and leaving aside
those views that emphasize the absence of the state or analyze the state-society
relationship exclusively in terms of clientelism (E.g. Auyero, 2001), we propose the
notion of ‘partner state’ to pinpoint the working dynamics of the regulation of
population(cf. Dean, 1999; Rose, Malley & Valverde, 2006) in peripheric urban
territories.
In our study of slumdwellers’ regular activities we have encountered the manifold
presence of the state. In this article we scrutinize the intimate connection between the

2
For a critique to celebratory approaches of local empowerment and entrepreneurship, cf. McFarlane,
Collin, (2012) “The entrepreneurial slum: civil society, mobility, and the co-production of urban
development”, en Urban Studies. Vol. 49, núm. 1, pp. 2926-2947. Thousand Oaks, SAGE.

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slumdwellers’ strife for livelihood and the practices of the state by focusing on the ways
in which public services are provided in a Metropolitan Buenos Aires shantytown,
which we will call Reconquista 3 after the river basin where it is located. The provision
of public services is crucial in the day to day life of neighborhoods like Reconquista.
Unlike the better-off neighborhoods where public services are somehow taken for
granted, in shantytowns the provision of services such as water, electricity, or waste
collection is an object of constant concern. The lack of and/or the irregular access to
those services is a major source of pollution and related health problems. Slumdwellers
are compelled to self-organize and arrange their daily activities around the need to get
access to those services, which they seek to satisfy with the means at their reach. And in
doing so they must interact with the state in ways that are alien to better-off residents.
In line with the logic of knowledge generation of the grounded theory approach (Holton
& Glaser, 2012), we have come up with the notion of ‘partner state’ in the process of
our fieldwork. In our study, we detect a profusion of community organizations as well
as several local leaders who seek to act as intermediaries between local needs and the
actions of the state. We thus find out that the access to urban services in a periphery
neighborhood depends a great deal on community organization as well as political
leadership and brokerage. Insofar as local efforts need to be complemented by outside
inputs (e.g. running water can only be furnished by the sanitation company), the role of
local leaders is crucial not only to create, mobilize, and connect organizations within the
neighborhood, but also to put them in contact with state agencies. In turn, we observe
that the state, instead of securing the provision of services either by itself or through
market mechanisms, behaves as a ‘partner’ or ‘sponsor’ of local efforts, as we will
explain further in the next section. We contend that community organization and local
leadership are not only mechanisms through which slumdwellers secure the access to
public services but also two central dynamics of the regulation of population by the
partner state. In neighborhoods like Reconquista, the day-to-day struggle over the right
to the city (Lefebvre, 1968; Harvey, 2008) encounters new forms of action that the
notion of partner state helps to grasp. This encounter between the slumdwellers’ agency
and the presence of the state is key to understanding the urbanization logics of areas
that, in Buenos Aires and elsewhere, combines poverty and environmental degradation.

3
Throughout the article, we use fictitious names to refer to the neighborhood, along with its dwellers,
under study. All other geographical references and proper names are real.

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The fieldwork this article is based on was conducted in Reconquista between 2008 and
2013, and entailed observant participation, in-depth interviews with dwellers,
organization leaders and municipal officials, as well as workshops with neighbors,
school teachers and students. From 2010 on, we visited the neighborhood on a weekly
basis in order to meet neighbors and organization members, and also participate in
meetings summoned either by local organizations or by provincial and national state
agencies. Through all these activities we were able to trace back the neighborhood’s
history, to get acquainted with those who participated actively in the neighborhood’s
organizational life, and to observe first-hand the interaction between slumdwellers and
state agents.
Reconquista is part of a municipal district located in the northwestern portion of
Metropolitan Buenos Aires, and forms part of a larger area of so-called informal
settlements (also known as shantytowns or slums – villas miseria) that formed over
marshes and floodplains filled with garbage in the lower Reconquista river basin. It is
therefore one of the many periphery neighborhoods of Metropolitan Buenos Aires that
combine high levels of poverty with high levels of pollution. The metropolitan
expansion of Buenos Aires started at the beginning of the twentieth century. From its
onset, the metropolis has comprised two very distinct territories: the center and the
periphery (Pírez, 2008). The City of Buenos Aires, center of the metropolis, is a federal
district that developed on the basis of typical grid plans, and was almost entirely
equipped with essential public services by the end of the 1920s (Pírez, 2004). The
periphery is made up of the Province of Buenos Aires’ municipal districts that surround
the City, and its expansion accelerated hand in hand with the growth of industrial output
from the 1940s on (Collier & Handlin, 2009). Unlike the City, the periphery has a
constantly shifting border and growing population, has never been planned or managed
as a whole, and exhibits a very unequal (and rather insufficient) provision of essential
public services.
In the past, slums and informal settlements were considered transitory housing
strategies on the part of those who, attracted by the demand for labor and expectations
of social mobility, moved to the metropolis (Cravino et al, 2007). The neoliberal
economic policies implemented from the 1970s on brought about, among other things, a
shrinking of the labor market and a skyrocketing of real estate prices. As a result,
informal settlements have become the predominant and definitive housing alternative

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for popular sectors. The Metropolitan Buenos Aires population living in informal
settlements grew from 4.3 per cent in 1981 up to 10.1 per cent in 2006 (Cravino et al,
2007). The progressive scarcity of vacant land near the City’s administrative and
commercial core, the decreasing purchasing power of popular sectors, and the lack of
cheap social housing policy have pushed new informal settlements onto
environmentally degraded lands with low market value (as is the case of Reconquista).
In what follows, we first set the characteristics of the partner state and present a general
overview of its working in periphery neighborhoods like Reconquista. Then we show in
further detail how community organizations and local leadership work as mechanisms
to secure the provision of public services. In the closing section we resume the
discussion of the connection between those two mechanisms and the partner state in the
light of our research findings.

2. The grounds of the partner state

Two concurrent movements have developed worldwide over the last decades of the 20th
century – globalization and localization. As the crisis of the welfare state and the demise
of its social security functions consolidate, the processes of globalization and the
reemergence of localization develop in tension with one another. From the
governmentality approach, a new logic characterizes the regulation of population in
such a context (Dean, 1999). The governmental rationality is now conceived of in terms
of fragmentation. The narratives of the permanent crisis express just that: the
renouncing of thinking of the rule and the social as a whole. The act of governing
becomes the government of fragments, and the ‘community’ becomes the locus where
the population’s welfare is now to be managed. Yet this does not mean that the state is
losing control over it.
The fragmented city is run by decentralized government, i.e. diverse, diffuse, and
overlapping organizations that become responsible for the life of individuals and
neighborhoods at the lowest level possible. These new forms of decentralized
government combine accountability, autonomy, and entrepreneurship as the
cornerstones of an alleged revitalization of citizenship(Osborne et al, 1999). But this
revitalization of citizenship in a fragmented city does not imply a minimal state or the
absence of the state. Rather, it entails ‘a new role for the political apparatus as merely

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one partner in government, facilitating, enabling, stimulating, shaping, and inciting the
self-governing activities of a multitude of dispersed entities’ (Osborne et al, 1999: 751).
Yet, all the virtues of decentralized urban government find their reversed image in the
‘no-go zones’, where the revitalization of urban citizenship as such is challenged:

This new image of citizenship must be understood in relation to that which

opposes it, a kind of anticitizen that is the constant enticement, and threat, to the
project of citizenship itself. The emergence of the notions of exclusion to
characterise those who previously constituted the social problem group defines
these noncitizens or anticitizens not in terms of substantive characteristics but in
relational terms; that is, it is a question of their distance from the circuits of
inclusion into virtuous citizenship (Osborne et al, 1999:754).

Sometimes, dwellers of no-go zones seem to sense and accept that they are not citizens
as a corollary to their social and urban position and to what they see as their ‘non-
contribution’ to society. Says a young girl interviewed in Reconquista, ‘In the past, I
used to say the same things you do, but you are not from this place. Here it’s different.
Here people don’t pay taxes, and so, there’s no electricity, and nothing works. You
can’t complain if you don’t pay taxes. It’s not the same, you see?’ (Interview with
Claudia, neighbor of Reconquista, 11 August 2010).
Whatever be the way they see themselves, as citizens or not, individuals living in
neighborhoods like Reconquista seek to solve on their own the satisfaction of their basic
needs and even to improve their residence conditions (Holston, 2008) vis-à-vis the
shortcoming of state-run or private-run public services. Thus, through its various
organizations, the community of slumdewellers becomes the locus within which the
lack of essential public services and the concurrent environmental and health problems
are resolved.
Yet again, this does not imply the absence of the state. Nowhere else can the role of the
partner state be perceived at its fullest as in neighborhoods like Reconquista. Even if
they are born to face ‘from the community’ the country’s successive economic crises,
many neighborhood organizations manage to survive once the crisis is over thanks to
their ability to obtain funds from various state programs. Some organizations are born
just because of the availability of state funds – mainly when state programs require the

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participation of a ‘working’ social organization in order to obtain the available funds. In

either case, the state (at any level) works as a partner of the local organizations, as a
‘path opener,’ a sponsor, a propeller of activities that must be developed by and within
the community. The partner state’s actions do not consist of imposing or carrying out its
own programs and projects, but in making the community find their own ones.
If the modern state was originally thought to be above the particular, meant to unify
differences and to give sense and security to common life, with the partner state these
functions are carried out by a number of social organizations with which the state shares
responsibility for certain actions. By choice or by necessity, these organizations shape
themselves into committed subjects and give sustainability to actions that, until a few
decades ago, were entirely the responsibility of the state and, in fact, justified its
existence.
The state’s action consists then in supporting (and financing) individuals and social
organizations in their efforts to solve their problems on their own, recognizing their
possibilities, shortcomings and strengths. Walking through Reconquista and talking to
the neighbors entails running into the state at every turn. In most community activities,
one finds policies (and subsidies) that have the state as partner and guarantor of
solutions to problems for which the state, paradoxically, does not seem to assume
primary responsibility.
It is important to notice that our approach to the partner state does not necessarily
follow Osborne and Rose’s view on the immanence of “anti-citizenship” or “non-
citizenship” in the no-go zones (Osborne et al, 1999). Our approach is rather akin to
Holston’s notion of ‘insurgent citizenship’ (Holston, 2008). Holston’s distinction
between ‘entrenched citizenship’ in the city core and ‘insurgent citizenship’ in the
periphery directs our attention to the specific forms the relation between the state and
society assumes in the periphery neighborhoods (Holston, 2008). Those living in the
urban periphery do so in a variety of conditions of residential irregularity. And it is
precisely there where residents undertake ‘insurgent citizenship’ struggles in order to
offset regimes of inequality that segregate them from the urban center. Dwellers in the
periphery do not express their grievances in the ‘public square,’ and they rarely frame
those grievances as issues of general concern. Rather they express their demands by
acting within the domain of day-to-day life and around needs related to residence
building: housing, property, running water, childcare, security, and so on.

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In Holston’s analysis of Sao Paulo’s periphery neighborhoods, ‘insurgent’ actions

started with the informal occupation of lands and self-construction (Holston, 2009).
From there, informal residents mobilized to demand and secure access to urban public
services. In a similar vein, Reconquista’s dwellers have undertaken on their own the
provision of essential services such as running water, waste collection, the removal of
household effluents, the maintenance of the power grid, the cleaning of streets and
watercourses, primary healthcare, daycare, and food relief. Even if they do not use
citizenship as a rhetorical tool to make claims (as Sao Paulo’s slumdwellers
occasionally did- Holston, 2009), Reconquista’s dwellers have ‘learnt’ the difference
between legality and illegality and started to frame their grievances and actions within
the legality discourse. So much is expressed in the following conversation with a
neighbor who, like many others, does not want to move to a new social housing
compound on the fringe of Reconquista:

Ricardo- And why don’t you want to move?

Marina- What for? Have you seen those houses?! It’s like being in Fuerte Apache
[an infamous social compound]! Look at my place [proudly showing her house
and her patio], I have everything I need here, I won’t move from here! I built this
on my own. When I bought it, all this was a dumpsite, and look now!
Ricardo- All this area was a dumpsite?
Marina- Yes, you had all kinds of garbage here, I was filling the place with debris
and soil.
Ricardo- And you bought the land?
Marina- Yes, I bought it trucho [slung for illegal]. I knew it was trucho, but I
bought it anyway, because I was told that the zone would be improved, so I
bought it.
Ricardo- And who sold it to you?
Marina- I don’t remember, a guy named Laly or something. I have a property title,
and I know it is trucho, but what I want is to regularize my title, I want to pay
municipal taxes, so that I can some time regularize my property title… And now
I’m waiting for the electricity bill, I don’t know what’s going on…
Ricardo- Why? Do you get an electricity bill?

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Marina- Yes, but I haven’t gotten the last bill, I already went to the company to
complain, but they have forgotten again…
Ricardo- So you have a paid service, you pay for the service…
Marina- Yes, I do, and the bill is under my name! I pay for the electricity and all
the taxes that come on the electricity bill (Interview with Marina, neighbor of
Reconquista, 12 July 2010).

Having a bill under their name is central for dwellers in informal settlements because it
is a way of getting a ‘legal’ address and being recognized as a permanent resident. In
searching for a legal property title and a legal address, slumdwellers are simultaneously
acknowledging that they are not ‘entrenched’ citizens but that they could or should be
so if they proceed in the ‘right’ way (as by paying taxes or utility bills).
Thus, our approach to the state presence entails a modified view of the right to the city
that seeks to shed light on the strategies local actors develop to gain access to basic
services in the metropolis’ periphery neighborhoods, where the right to the city becomes
the community’s struggle over basic residence conditions that in other neighborhoods
are secured either by the state or the market. In other words, in the no-go zones
citizenship is not a condition that is taken-for-granted, but the result of the neighbors’
day to day construction of the city in permanent interaction with the partner state. And
community organizations and local leaders play a central role in such a construction.

3. The partner state at work

Some examples from Reconquista provide a general overview of how the partner state
works in periphery neighborhoods. Instead of properly mitigating the high levels of
pollution in streams that surround the neighborhood, the government of the province of
Buenos Aires pays a subsidy to a neighborhood cooperative that ‘cleans’ the streams –
inattentive to any criteria of environmental sustainability. Instead of requiring that the
private company in charge of waste collection in most of the municipal territory extend
its service to Reconquista (and surrounding neighborhoods), the city hall hires a team of
slumdwellers that are supposed to collect the garbage and dump it every weekday into a
huge container located within the neighborhood. The service provided by this team is
much more precarious, inefficient, and criticized than the private service elsewhere;

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neighbors complain that the service is irregular, and that the container (which should be
emptied by the private company periodically) ends up being an (other) uncontrolled
dumpsite. In both cases, if the community service is inefficient and the neighborhood’s
streams and streets remain unclean, authorities tend to blame the neighbors’ lack of
‘culture’ and their ‘inability to self-organize, as our (immigrant) grandparents used to
do’ (Interview with Petrozza, municipal official, 5 May 2011). So puts it a municipal
official interviewed by a group of students from Reconquista and other shantytowns,
along with one of the authors:

‘In my grandparents’ time, people would gather together in sociedades de fomento

(associations for the promotion of neighborhood development) and collect money
to pave and light the streets… The city hall is carrying out paving plans, but I
don’t think that the state must do everything for free… In the past, when a
neighborhood wanted to progress, it would form a sociedad de fomento that
interacted with the city hall… If [slumdwellers] had a neighborhood association
and made an effort, the neighborhood could be improved, as happened with other
neighborhoods. The neighbors have to cooperate, get together and see what share
of the effort they will have to contribute, because neighborhoods have always
grown in that way, on the basis of the complementation between the people and
the state (Interview with Petrozza, municipal official, 5 May 2011).

The provision of drinkable water is another good example of how the state interacts
with local organizations and leaders. As the neighborhood was formed over marshes
filled with all sorts of waste, hardly any well water is available, and the metropolitan
water supply network does not reach houses in Reconquista. Yet a network pipeline
does reach the neighborhood’s ‘Main Street,’ where the water company (at the time a
state-owned company, then privatized and then nationalized again) left an end faucet.
From that moment on, a team of neighbors led by León built a complex web of hoses
through which they manage to bring drinkable water to every house in Reconquista.
With this, they are able to satisfy by themselves a crucial need of day-to-day life. But
they do not get the same state answer as neighbors from wealthier neighborhoods do,
and the resulting water network is improvised and precarious. The state just lets the
neighbors make without worrying about the pollution risks posed by the network of

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hoses, and the water company (regardless of whether it is private or public) does not
charge anyone for the water consumed. This does not imply that the neighbors are
happy with that situation. Many of them would rather pay in order to get regular service.
Water supply in Reconquista brings the importance of individual leadership to the fore.
A long-standing neighborhood leader, León was crucial in getting the water company to
extend the pipeline to the main street, and in mobilizing the neighbors to organize
themselves so that they could spread the hoses throughout the neighborhood. Now that
the network of hoses is at full operation and growing without any control due to the
constant addition of new houses, León is often contacted by neighbors when there is a
major shortage. As we will see in further detail in a following section, he has continued
to work as an intermediary between the neighbors and the water company as well as
other companies.
In these examples, we can see clearly how the state is matched by the community’s
responsibility and the concomitant need for empowering local leaders and
organizations. The following excerpt from an interview with Paco, a cooperative leader,
vividly shows how the need for local empowerment is internalized by the neighborhood
actors:

They [the scavengers] wanted to get into the Coordinación Ecológica Área
Metropolitana Sociedad del Estado (Ecological Coordination Metropolitan Area
Society of the State, CEAMSE) 4 landfill to seek food and stuff, and the police
wouldn’t let them, but they wanted to feed their families. I would tell them,
‘everything entering here is polluted, and once it’s dumped here, it pollutes
everything else.’ ‘Yes’ – they would say – ‘but we have being eating this stuff
since a long time ago.’ And then they would enter the landfill, the police would
force them out onto the road, where they would stop and break cars, and it was
always like that… Once there was another road blockade, and they called me and
the cooperative president, and we showed up to listen to them, and it was a bolsa
de gatos (madhouse) because every neighborhood had its own representative, and
each representative only cared about his neighborhood, and proposed one thing,
and the others proposed something different, and so on. So I said, ‘let’s get out of

4
CEAMSE is the state-owned corporation in charge of managing all the landfills that receive and process
the domestic waste of the entire Metropolitan Buenos Aires. CEAMSE’s major landfills are close to
Reconquista.

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here, this is a bolsa de gatos, and it’s impossible to talk to anyone here’. When
they came to us again in search of help to intermediate with the people from
CEAMSE, I said to them, ‘guys, we are going to have a meeting with CEAMSE,
but there will be only one person who will speak and say how things are. If
everybody speaks, it’ll be a waste of time. If everybody says something different,
CEAMSE will tell you to come back the following week, once you have agreed on
common criteria, so that we can start talking’. Then we went to the meeting, and
the CEAMSE guys were trying to postpone, as much as possible, any agreement
[on the opening of a recycling plant run by the scavengers], and they said to us,
‘well, we need a civil association to be in charge of managing the [social
recycling] plant.’ And I said to them, ‘sure, here you are, here you have our
cooperative, legally recognized as a civil association, and recognized by city hall
as well’ (Interview with Paco, cooperative leader, 4 February 2011).

In the view of this leader, the main problem does not lie in the state’s action (in this case
embodied by the state-owned company CEAMSE), but in the difficulty neighbors and
local organizations have in coming to an agreement and acting together. Once they can
overcome this difficulty, they can get the state to support their initiative – in this case,
the scavengers got CEAMSE’s authorization to run a recycling plant within CEAMSE
premises.
These and other examples show how slumdwellers take direct charge of services that in
less needy quarters are provided by state-owned or private companies. In doing so, they
bring our attention to three important questions: 1) how local leaders and organizations
play a central role in mobilizing and organizing the neighbors, 2) how they strategically
interact with the state (at its different levels) to support the self-management of their
needs, and 3) how slumdwellers, in taking charge of their basic needs, exercise their
right to the city. Far from seeing the neighbors as ‘passive’ recipients of the logic of the
partner state, in what follows, we will stress the ways in which slumdwellers connect to
the partner state through community organizations and local leaders.

4. Multiplicity of community organizations

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Since the early days of Reconquista, organizational life and individual entrepreneurship
have coalesced as mechanisms through which basic needs are satisfied. Upon the 1983
return to democracy, party grassroots organizations (mostly Peronist unidades básicas)
played a central role in what Auyero calls ‘the problerm-solving networks of Peronist
clientelism’ (Auyero, 2001). But something has changed over the last decade.
Community organizations devoted to providing all sorts of services have multiplied and
diversified mainly as a result of the financial incentives provided by new national and
provincial programs. Even though Peronism is still the most extended party
identification in neighborhoods like Reconquista, the emergence of new venues for state
funding have removed party grassroots organizations from their previous privileged
position within the local organizational milieu and fostered the formation of new
‘social’ organizations.
Unlike those of the Peronist unidades básicas, the new social organizations’ activities
are more centered on the improving of livelihood conditions and the provision of
services that are not as easily excludable as the typical goods involved in a clientelist
linkage. Furthermore, in some cases the creation of ‘new’ organizations (sometimes
identified as NGOs by participants and observers) can be seen not only as a mechanism
to satisfy basic needs or provide public services, but also as a way to redirect the kind of
individual entrepreneurship previously embodied in the figure of local party brokers. So
puts it, rather cynically, Tumba, an old party broker transformed into the head of a local
NGO, ‘From the institutional point of view, we have this. Today, all former grassroots
party organizations are NGOs. Why? Because we saw a change coming in the way
politics is done’ (Interview with Tumba, old party broker, 24 October 2010.)
Whatever be the scope of such cynical transformations, the truth is that, as not even one
unidad básica can be seen in Reconquista today, numerous organizations have emerged
out of the confluence of the expectation of getting public and private funds and the
feeling that nobody from ‘outside’ will come to solve the neighborhood’s problems.
This feeling is vividly expressed in many interviewees. Says a 17 year-old boy born and
raised in Reconquista regarding pollution problems, ‘Who is going to solve your
problems if you don’t do it yourself? You have yourself and must take charge… I don’t
trust anyone’ (Interview with Fede, young neighbor of Reconquista, 25 March 2011.)
This feeling of loneliness and mistrust is matched by a sense of responsibility for one’s
own destiny, a ‘take charge’ sense, even when an individual as such can hardly be held

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responsible for pollution or the lack of adequate public services – to say nothing of their
solution.
Within the larger geographical area where Reconquista is located it is possible to
identify three moments at which the creation of community organizations were
propelled. The first two are the crisis conjunctures that actually drove informal
settlements into the area: the hyperinflation crisis of 1989 and the social crisis of 2001-
2002. The third moment is related to the state programs that, from 2003 on, stimulated
the creation of numerous cooperatives. This moment gained momentum with the
Trabajo e Ingreso Social program (Jobs and Social Income Program, popularly known
as the Argentina Works Program), created by the national Social Development Ministry
in August 2009 (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social, 2009.)
The importance of the 1989 crisis is recognized explicitly in the “official history” of the
Red de Organizaciones de Gestión Solidaria (The Solidarity Management Organizations
Network, RED GESOL) a nation-wide network that includes organizations from
Reconquista:

The RED GESOL was born in 1989 with the goal of responding to unemployment
in the communities affected by hyperinflation, the massive closure of factories,
and the beginning of state restructuration and privatization. Its first legal entity
came three years later with the founding of the Solidarity Management and Labor
Mutual Association, the mission of which was (and still is) to generate fair
incomes through self-employment, micro-businesses, and social firms within the
Social Economy and Local Development framework. During the 1990s, after the
Right to a Decent Job, and as the popular sectors’ socioeconomic situation
became worse, RED GESOL was gaining importance in the conquest of other
basic rights (food, housing, health, education, culture, recreation). Today, RED
GESOL comprises over sixty organizations with different organizational profiles
and levels of institutionalization: from community promotion centers to technical
and professional entities. It is federally structured, divided into the north-west,
north-east, center, and Metropolitan Buenos Aires regions (Red Gesol, 2013.)

What, from the perspective of some empowerment discourses, could be seen as an

affirmative proposal from the community is, in the community organizations’

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perspective, the only way of responding to a situation for which they are not responsible
but that affects them profoundly. Self-employment, micro-businesses, and social firms
are the ways they have found to respond to the crisis situation that is challenging their
basic needs and rights.
According to a Reconquista organization’s leader interviewed, the 2001-2002 crisis
appears to have played a similar role:

Our association was born a year and a half before we started here, at some time
between 2001 and 2002. After president De la Rua’s downfall, we organized a
corso (carnival parade) to fund the creation of a soup kitchen and then we created
a civil association to get provincial funds to keep financing the soup kitchen. Then
we organized eight more corsos and donated an ambulance to the neighborhood’s
health center (Interview with Lolo, Reconquista organization’s leader, 11
September 2013.)

Once again, local organizations’ entrepreneurship becomes the way to solve the
pressing problems economic crises bring about. Nevertheless, organizations do not
vanish with the remission of the successive crises. Quite the contrary, the organizations
that emerge with each ensuing crisis accumulate and overlap within the neighborhood.
This process of accumulation increased with the powerful incentives to
‘cooperativization’ that emerged after 2003. 5 During our fieldwork, we constantly ran
into cooperatives funded by the Argentina Works Program (or by similar national or
provincial programs) to handle such tasks as cleaning streets and watercourses, building
sidewalks, and other minor works in the neighborhood. One of the most striking aspects
of this process is that several cooperatives are born as appendixes or extensions of pre-
existent organizations, originally devoted to tasks mainly related to social assistance
(soup kitchens, daycare centers, etc.). This shows how community organizations
strategically resort to available state funds and programs and change their activities to
adapt to the latter’s requirements in order to both survive as organizations and to keep
striving for their right to change their living and residence conditions.

5
The formation of a cooperative has become a requirement to apply for the Argentina Works Program
and other similar national and provincial funds.

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Over the years, the multiplicity of organizations has become a large web of differences
that can only be understood on the basis of the centrality those organizations have for
the community’s survival. Through this, multiple spaces open up where individuals can
meet and decide together what to do in order to get state answers and support for some
of their many demands. This is a sign that those individuals and organizations are not
passively ‘suffering’ their living conditions, but striving to improve them and to get
answers to their initiatives. As Paco (the social recycling plant leader already quoted)
puts it, key is that ‘they start paying some attention to you’:

Yes, this is a social plant managed by our civil association. The plant is six years
old, and we are the first plant working on CEAMSE premises. This plant was
created six years ago when people entered the landfills, the police would kick
them out, threatening them with gunshots, and finally a boy died… you know
how things work, they start to pay attention when that happens… So, we started
to work on this, at the beginning it was a crazy idea of the guy who is speaking
to you right now, because nobody believed in this. Then things began to
improve, and today there are nine social plants within CEAMSE (Interview with
Paco, cooperative leader, 12 March 2011.)

Two central aspects regarding Paco’s reconstruction of the social plant’s trajectory and
his own experience are worth highlighting. The concern for the recognition by the other
(‘that they start paying attention’) is not merely an identity issue; it is related to the
strategic proposal and the concrete need to get access to the funds the other can provide
– in the case of Paco’s social plant and many other organizations, the Argentina Works
Program’s and other national, provincial and municipal programs’ funds that drain into
neighborhoods like Reconquista. Secondly, in many cases the organization’s success is
bound to (if not contingent upon) individual leadership. Paco’s leadership was crucial
not only in getting the other’s attention and approval but also in putting his ‘crazy idea’
into motion, ‘because nobody believed in [it].’ In the end, individual leadership and
brokerage seem to be important tools through which community organizations can
extract resources from the partner state. This is why we will turn to leadership in the
following section.

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5. León, the community’s mayor

In previous decades, party grassroots organizations and local party brokers played a key
role as problem-solvers in neighborhoods like Reconquista. As already seen, the
consolidation of the partner state during the last decade transformed old community
organizations and fostered the profusion of new ones, removing Peronist unidades
básicas from their privileged position. Nonetheless, this transformation has not led to
the disappearance of local political brokers. On the one hand, the new organizations
have come along with new leaders that overlap to the old ones. On the other, the partner
state has affected the old leaders in different ways. Some have lost all influence, others
have transformed into the heads of new-style organizations (such as Tumba), and others
have abandoned the clientelistic logic while still working as intermediaries of the
slumdwellers’ needs (as would be the case of León). In all cases, the main attribute of
surviving and new leaders is their profound knowledge of the neighborhood’s
geography, history and its dwellers; and their ability to contact the right official or agent
when a neighbor approaches them asking for the solution to a concrete problem. Maybe
for that reason, given the profusion of overlapping organizations that sometimes
compete among themselves, when some partner state agent (party actors, state officials
or service company representatives) wants to approach Reconquista, they seek to
identify those key individuals who will allow him to obtain or transmit information or to
provide a given service.
In our study we have found several individuals who act (or attempt to act) as brokers
between the neighbors and outside agents. Paco, for instance, is one such agent, but in
this section we will focus on León, the person mentioned most often and most widely
recognized by the neighbors as a problem-solver. At the beginning of his career León
was a Peronist party broker but he abandoned that many years ago.
León’s history in Reconquista dates back to the 1980s, and it is almost impossible to
walk with him through the neighborhood without him stopping to great and chat with
neighbors. Many of the neighbors who stop him do so because they have a problem they
need to resolve. That is why, in the following conversation, he gladly says that he seems
to be the mayor:

Franco- Lorena, write down León’s number because of…

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Lorena- Yes, right away

Franco- Because of the electric lamps
León- Che, I seem to be the mayor! I’m not the mayor!
Lorena- No, you’re not the mayor, but here you help more than the mayor does.
You are more than the mayor, that’s the truth. Because when there is a power
shortage, we go to León first. And he contacts the company… 6
León- Now there is a water shortage, it is a mess…
Lorena- We go to León because the mayor doesn’t do anything here, he won’t
even replace a lamp
León- Ok, how many do you need?
Lorena- Three
Franco- Three
León- Ok (Interview with León, local leader, 9 April 2012.)

In the early 1990s, as the neighborhood’s population skyrocketed, León played a central
role in the provision of potable water by making the water company extend a network
pipeline into the neighborhood. We have already seen how León and a team of
neighbors built a network of hoses from that pipeline, but it is worth stressing here the
individual nature of that undertaking. It was León who contacted the water company
agents, and took them to the neighborhood to see what he wanted done; and it was also
León who later on had to convince the neighbors to form a work team first to prolong
the pipeline into the main street and then to distribute the hoses throughout the
neighborhood. Recalling how the pipeline network was extended to the main street,
León says:

León- I’ve got strong support from the provincial government… A meeting was
arranged here in the neighborhood… Once I had a proposal for the

6
In another visit to Reconquista we witnessed how León was working with power company agents to fix
a power outage in one of the neighborhood’s sectors, and in another visit he was walking across the
streets with water company agents that had contacted him because they wanted to enter another sector to
build a storm drain. On both occasions we were not with him, so we can affirm that our perception of
those events was not induced by León himself. Another common brokerage task performed by León is to
call the sanitary truck when a cesspool must be emptied: the neighbor would typically contact León and
León would call the sanitation truck. And the reason for this intermediation is simple: the truck does not
dare to enter the neighborhood unless León calls them. In addition to all those brokerage tasks, León
helped build the first public school in Reconquista, and he is currently the head of a civil association that
runs a daycare center.

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neighborhood, I had to represent the whole neighborhood… and this was a

provincial as well as a municipal issue, and the former was run by a party and
the latter by another. But all I cared about was getting the water network built.
So, thanks to that proposal, I was able to get materials, pipes and so on, lots of
materials. I got them from the province. But then everything stopped for a while,
it wasn’t that quick. Two municipal administrations went by, and the new
administration this time round was aligned with the provincial government. And
then I made a formal agreement with the mayor… It was an extraordinary job
indeed! This was in 1992.
Silvia- And how was the job carried out?
León- I started walking the streets and talking to the neighbors, ‘tomorrow I
need your entire block to dig a ditch here, and then we will come by with the
water company workers to install the pipeline’, but in the beginning, it was very
hard! So we got city hall funds to pay for the job, and 20 guys showed up and
signed up for the job. We were supposed to start in February. It was a very hot
day! We started on a Friday. Nobody worked on Saturday and Sunday because it
was weekend, and the water company workers were supposed to come on
Monday. On Monday, the guys came and said to me, ‘León, we won’t work
today, because we want to be paid.’ What could I do?! I hadn’t hired them, the
city hall had. I was just managing the work… it was all politics. But I wanted the
work to get done, so I had to pressure someone so that the guys were paid. And
this was something for the entire neighborhood, it was not for somebody else
outside the neighborhood! And the water company people were coming, and the
ditch was not finished. So I went again, and started talking to the neighbors,
asking them to help me. An 80-year-old man came and told me, ‘León, I’ll
remove the soil if I cannot dig.’ And finally we did it. It wasn’t that easy, I made
it easy (Interview with León, local leader, 29 January 2012.)

León’s absolutely personal relationship with everything he recounts is constant. His use
of the first person is permanent: I did, I went, I talked, etc. At first, this gives a sense of
exaggeration on his part. But we were able to confirm that he actually is a key broker,
who constantly helps solve day to day problems related to services like power, water,
sewage, and so on. Not everybody likes León, and some see him as a minor figure

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because he lacks the backing of an important organization nowadays, but no one denies
the central role he plays as a broker between the neighborhood and the public service
providers.
The relationship of community leaders (either solo players like León or organization
leaders like Paco and Tumba) with state authorities is central. If at first glance one may
have the impression that leaders like Paco, Tumba and León are too prone to feed their
own egos, that is only a small part of the equation. Community leaders are central
figures in resolving conflicts, channeling demands, and regulating the life of the
population of the no-go zones. In his accounts, León recognizes that his collaboration
with a former mayor was crucial for the achievement of his goals:

León- I backed Semino, I worked for him a lot, and I backed him because he
was a man that had gained our movement’s respect (The Peronist Party)…, at
the time it looked like he was going to do a lot… then he had problems…
Patricio- And when is the elementary school from?
León- From that time [early 1990s]…
Patricio- From that time?
León- Sure. Semino helped me buy the property, in that he was present from the
start. He also helped me a lot with the running water. We launched the first stage
of the hose network together, they came with the television, and I said to him,
‘What do I want the television for? I want the water!’ (Interview with León,
local leader, 29 January 2011.)

But what in León’s account appears to be a help from the mayor for his proposal may be
read otherwise: as a relationship instrumental to the mayor’s goals and interests. Put
more broadly, as the ethnographic literature on clientelism used to claim years ago,
León’s individual brokerage can be seen both as an instrument through which the
community obtains resources from the state to improve their residence conditions and as
a means through which the state is able to govern the life of the poor. Yet something has
changed since the early 1990s. Nowadays, León –as several other local leaders- is not
exchanging goods for votes in any noticeable way. The expansion of cooperatives and
the demise of party grassroots organizations (unidades básicas) are indicators of new
forms of state-society relationship that do not directly revolve around electoral

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expectations and exchanges. If the centrality of cooperatives as a means for getting state
funds stands in the near future, perhaps solo players like León will vanish and
organization leaders like Paco and Tumba will gain more prominence – though the
fragmentation of organizations may prevent that from happening, leaving room for León
and new solo players to persist. Whatever the case may be, the main attribute of local
leaders under the partner state lies on their ability to solve day-to-day problems related
to the slumdwellers’ residence conditions, a non-excludable good that can hardly be
pursued (and understood) in merely electoral or clientelistic terms.

6. Closing Remarks

While in better-off neighborhoods the provision of essential urban services are provided
through state-owned or private companies, throughout this article we have shown how
in shantytowns like Reconquista individuals seek to solve the satisfaction of basic needs
and to improve their residence conditions on their own. In order to do so, slumdwellers
count on two complementary mechanisms to get support from the partner state:
community organizations and local leadership.
Community organizations and local leadership are two-faced mechanisms. On the one
hand, they play a fundamental role in the provision of public services and the self-
production of life, expressing the community efforts to self-manage the satisfaction of
basic needs. On the other, they are the channels through which the partner state, by
financing and supporting individuals and organizations in their strife for livelihood,
secures the regulation of population without getting directly involved in the provision of
public services. It is therefore on the basis of those two mechanisms that the spaces for
the choices of life interact with the regulation of population in periphery neighborhoods.
In this context, the actual exercise of citizenship entails a dynamic that demands –both
from institutions and individuals- a constant process of revision and critical reflection.
Neither the partner state nor the slumdwellers conceive of citizenship as an inalienable
status of all individuals. The partner state does not conceive of citizenship as inalienable
when it ‘supports’ the partial and deficient provision of services that are basic for the
development of life in the city. The slumdwellers do not see themselves as full citizens
when they know they lack access to basic services and every time they ‘recognize’ they
live in conditions of residential informality or irregularity. Therefore, citizenship is –

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both for the slumdwellers and the state- a condition that must be built and gained. Our
view thus departs from the celebratory approaches to ‘community empowerment’ at the
same time that we do not endorse the absence-of-the state thesis, nor we share the view
of the immanence of anti-citizenship in no-go zones like Reconquista. The ‘non-
standard’ channels through which the partner state supports local efforts (to secure the
regulation of population) are also mechanisms through which slumdwellers can claim
their right to legally belong to the city.
The non-standard channels we are referring to (community organizations and local
leadership) have only been partially described by the ethnographic literature (especially
that devoted to Peronist clientelism in Argentina) that studies clientelism during the
1990s and early 2000s. The emergence and consolidation of the partner state refers to a
wider phenomenon that we associate with the powerful incentives to ‘cooperativization’
that gained momentum after 2003. As already mentioned, this process downplayed the
importance of old party grassroots organizations and fostered the profusion of new
organizations and leaders focused on the provision of public services and other non-
excludable goods. It is still early to draw definitive conclusions on the future of the old
party leaders and organizations. But it is clear that the current picture is plenty of
overlapping organizations that compete among themselves for different state funds. In
this scenario transformed leaders such as León and Tumba as well as new leaders like
Paco and many others will continue to be instrumental both to the neighborhood and to
the partner state.

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