their money off the poor.
“What were the consequences?” I asked.
Well [she paused], good, because before, no one could buy anything, and we were experiencing needs [pasando necesidades] much worse than before. Imagine, Clarita, entire families sleeping in the same bed. I with my husband and my three children slept in the same bed for years, but when the department stores began to give credit, we could buy a bunk bed and the children slept on top on the second bed and we slept on the lower bed. So, with this credit, families could live with more dignity, a dignified life. They had their stove, their refrigerator.
Yet, as she explained, such resources for a dignified life emerged in conjunction with new visibilities and social controls:
But with all of this, families began to get into debt, and there appeared DICOM [the private credit registry], because the businesspeople realized that the poor were getting into so much debt that they could not pay their quotas. Many people owed three, four, five times their monthly income. One owed in Hites, in Ripley, in Almacenes París. And with light, water, and something to eat, one did not make it to the end of the month. So, with computation, the computer, everything changed, because, for example, you could now be in Puerto Montt in Hites. And they could see in the computer there that you owed in Hites in Santiago. And they say, “You can't take out this TV, because you haven't paid your letras [monthly payments] and you're late.” So now there is more pressure to pay the letras on time, or you have to do everything possible so as to pay the letras on time—work extra hours, look for small temporary work [pololito], whatever thing to not arrive in DICOM.
New temporal forms of surveillance arose with the development of extensive credit reporting systems that meshed the state-mandated credit registry of the Superintendent of Banks and Financial Institutions with the main private company for credit information, DICOM (Center for Information of Commercial Documentation; see Castel 1991).
In 1979, the National Chamber of Commerce and private entrepreneurs had established DICOM, four years after the initiation of the Chicago Boy's structural adjustment plan. Throughout the 1980s, it won public bids to provide private credit information to the Superintendent of Banks and Financial Institutions and made individual contracts with banks and financial institutions. Owned by the U.S.-based company Equifax since 1997, DICOM's database currently contains financial information on persons with a tax identification number and any credit history. This information ranges from a history of bad checks, overdue bills, consolidated debts, reporting registry, to one's credit score (Cowan and De Gregorio 2003).
As Sra. Flora emphasized, DICOM exerted a continual presence in everyday life, in terms of both the material constraints that came with a troubled financial history and the anxieties that being in it, or on the verge of being in it, generated. To be “in DICOM” meant that one could not accede to any form of institutional credit: bank loans, department stores, or state-financed loans for higher education. Further, those in DICOM were often subject to labor discrimination (Raczynski et al. 2002). DICOM was used as a character assessment, a screening for personal responsibility and discipline. And, with access to DICOM's database, employers often conditioned contracts to the worker's status in DICOM.
From 1979 to 1999, when the Senate passed Law 19.628, Protection of Data of Personal Character, popularly known as the “DICOM Law,” one's financial history was not only available to all employers and financial institutions, but it also remained in the DICOM database even when debts had been settled (see Ruiz 2002). The persistence of this history was often called the “debtor's stigma”; it made life chances attenuate, as if one were in an interminable, invisible cage (see La Cuarta 2002; Raczynski et al. 2002). The 1999 DICOM Law was the state's attempt to limit the abuse of this database, but it can also be interpreted as a spur for consumer spending by facilitating access to credit by previously “stigmatized” debtors (Ministerio Secretaria General de la Presidencia 1999).
According to the law, employers could not discriminate on the basis of DICOM information. In addition, individuals who settled their debts would be removed from the DICOM database after three years. Those who did not would remain in DICOM for up to seven years. Nevertheless, even after the requisite number of years in DICOM, the debtor's stigma continued in practice. Many debtors remained in the DICOM database despite having settled debts several years earlier; many employers continued to screen workers through this database. While consumer credit provided access to a dignified life, DICOM's persistent biographical consequences bound this life to feelings of anxiety.
Nevertheless, while DICOM registered individual credit histories, in La Pincoya this biography was experienced as an accounting not of the individual but of the family tied into the home: “We are in DICOM” or “Families are in debt.” This displacement of the DICOM biography from the individual to the family mirrored the fear of repossessions by debt collectors, who inventoried any item of value within the physical boundaries of the home to satisfy the outstanding debts of any family member with that same address. Thus, family members said, “Van a embargar la casa” (They will repossess the house), not only when the house itself was threatened with repossession but also when any individual in the home had reneged on his or her debts. While debt is in the name of an individual, the enforcement of debt through repossession materially implicated the entire home and the relations constituting it.
In his essay “Postscript on Control Societies,” Gilles Deleuze examines the transformation of disciplinary societies based in institutions such as the prison, school, and asylum into societies with open, continuous, and free-floating control through the synergy of the market with new technologies. “A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt,” writes Deleuze. “One thing, it's true, hasn't changed—capitalism still keeps three quarters of humanity in extreme poverty, too poor to have debts and too numerous to be confined: control will have to deal not only with vanishing frontiers, but with mushrooming shantytowns and ghettos (Deleuze 1997, 181). But the expansion of the credit system among families in La Pincoya challenges this homogenous view of the poor, as well as capitalism's supposedly obvious inclusions and exclusions. The mechanisms of control societies are not beyond the extreme poor. Rather, they are precisely the mechanisms through which the materiality and image of “extreme poverty” are destabilized. It is this destabilization of the image that was embodied and absorbed into family relations.
Shadowed by the threat of DICOM and repossession, families in La Pincoya worked to keep up with the temporality of monthly debt payments, what they called manteniendo la imagen (maintaining the image). A common phrase used to describe the work to keep up with payments to department stores, utilities, and banks, maintaining the image conveyed the transient, insecure, and uncertain nature of the dignified life made possible through credit. Is this life a life that I can own, that I can trust? Will it exist tomorrow? This sense of uncertainty pervaded everyday relations. Gossip abounded about those who were aparentando, who projected the markers of material wealth beyond a family's means, and those who were marceros, who wore brand-name clothing even as they struggled to get to the end of the month. Against this uncertainty, families engaged in a work of maintenance to avoid falling into DICOM, to get out of DICOM, or to make debt payments in the face of repossession. Families cut back on food costs, asked neighbors, friends, and extended family members for loans, worked for overtime pay, and took on extra jobs. In this way, the “loaned life,” a fragile existence, was held together through, and often despite, the temporality of credit.
UNBEARABLE VOLUME
For Sra. Flora, this uncertainty knotted together with Florcita's addiction, generating a domestic struggle over time itself. By June 2004, the tension of intimate relations had reached a nearly unbearable volume, like the stereo that Sra. Flora had bought Kevin to calm his nerves and that now blared heavy metal day and night. Kevin and Florcita were consuming pasta base and had become increasingly violent with each other. Once while I had tea with Sra. Flora and Rodrigo, we heard Florcita and Kevin yelling and fighting. The sound of breaking glass and walls being
