with Kevin. Sra. Flora had used a portion of that loan to help pay for their rent. After several months of pasta base use, Florcita had joined another Pentecostal meeting to regulate her addiction. Kevin, on the other hand, continued to consume, but Florcita persisted in a relationship with him. Sra. Flora asked Florcita to move out of the house but made arrangements with the neighbor. She brought food to them each day, and Florcita occasionally stopped by the home but did not stay long. With the move, Sra. Flora and Florcita had, for the moment, crafted a new way to maintain proximity while distancing Kevin from the home. In this way, they forged a new lease on life—in a different style—staking the everyday again in an uncertain future.
Attending to the tensions between waiting and the ongoing demands of debt, scarcity, and multiple kinship obligations reveals how intimate relations of the house are simultaneously constructed, made possible through, and also threatened by the mechanisms of credit. Moving with these relations in time helped me attend to the force of possibility within intimate relations. We might call it a sense of hope that another can reveal a different aspect of herself in time, and the sense of obligation that arises with it. Care-as-waiting relies on that hope, which is actualized within the house as illness and momentary renewal. In the face of disappointment with this hope, such caring can become conditions through which the past of state violence are made available within one's present and within the ordinary itself.
CHAPTER 2
Social Debt, Silent Gift
LOWER THE POINTS
We sat in the living room on a couch covered with thick plastic. Paz's two-year-old daughter, Felicidad, sat in the lap of her grandmother Sra. Ana. As she combed her hands through the child's blond hair, Sra. Ana told me how Paz had begun smoking pasta base again two months earlier. Paz had started intermittent pasta base consumption six years previously. She had stopped consuming when she became pregnant after selling sex to a fifty-year-old neighbor. Paz's return to pasta base had palpable effects within the home. She sold her daughter's formula, received from the local primary care center, as well as the child's diapers.
Sra. Ana was sixty-five years old and widowed. She lived with her two daughters, Paz and Pamela, on a housing site comprised of a two-room house and a provisional shack. Pamela worked in subcontracted office-cleaning, and her husband worked in construction. They had three children and lived in the shack. Sra. Ana worked as a security guard in the women's prison in the municipality of San Joaquín in the southern zone of Santiago. Her other daughter, Paz, had had a number of temporary jobs, the last one working for the municipality in park maintenance, picking up trash in the plazas and parks in the neighborhood.
Woven into these difficulties were Sra. Ana's feelings of shame produced by Paz's thefts from one neighbor's almacén (shop) and another's liquor store and, just recently, from Susana and her husband, Antonio, Sra. Ana's friends across the street. Paz had broken into Susana and Antonio's house while they were visiting relatives on the coast. She passed their DVD player, their son's PlayStation, and Susana's heirloom clocks to a youth in the neighborhood who sold stolen goods in other neighboring poblaciones. The next-door neighbor's son, Miguel, noticed the door open and found Paz lying on the couch asleep. He called the police. She was arrested.
Sra. Ana recounted, “Paz robbed my purse that had 28,000 (USD 46). She is stealing from the neighbors. I don't even want to walk in the street and show my face. The others say, ‘She is the mamá of this girl who walks around robbing.’” Sra. Ana's husband had died of pancreatic cancer eleven years earlier. She commented that, after his death, she thought, “Now we can have a happy family, all tranquil. But, no. One son of mine has been in prison for the past six years for the same porquería [filth]. He walked around robbing, and was jailed for robbery with intimidation. And I say, What mamá has so many bad children? We have a big cartel [media cartel] here in the house. I think I did what I could. I don't know how I failed.”
Sra. Ana apologized “a thousand times” to Susana. She bought another PlayStation for her son on credit, the only item left that they had not been able to recuperate through neighborhood channels. On top of monthly utility bills and food, which she shared with her daughter Pamela, Sra. Ana was paying for replacements for the stolen powdered milk for her granddaughter and monthly quotas on the PlayStation, as well as monthly payments to the neighbors for stolen goods and money. She and Susana usually relied on each other when faced with a “critical moment,” moments when they would not make it to the end of the month. But, in the midst of the gossip over the thefts, she told me that she had “shame” (vergüenza) to ask Susana for a loan.
Sra. Ana applied for a municipal subsidy to offset her water bill, money that she could then use for covering monthly costs of bread. At the time of my visit to her house, she was waiting for a social worker to conduct a household needs assessment, which, she hoped, would provide her with a point score low enough to qualify: “I have to lower the point score” (Tengo que bajar el puntaje). She recounted that, on a visit one year earlier, the social worker had seen three old televisions in her home. None of them worked, she said, “but, the social worker wrote something down on the piece of paper, and I didn't get the point score.” This time, “I heard from friends that if you walk around dirty, make the house dirty—if you look poor, like animal, then they lower your points. This is why I will not shower. I will not shower until after the social worker comes,” she remarked to me defiantly and angrily. She said she was pasando hambre (experiencing hunger) but always made sure that her granddaughter had enough to eat. “How do you bear it?” I asked. She responded, “I grew up with cow's milk. I am strong. At times, I think that God is testing me, but then I think, how long the test. I would never wish this to happen to another person, not even to my worst enemy.”
Sra. Ana's desire to make good on her obligations to her neighbors, her sense of shame in asking a friend for help in the face of a theft that betrayed their intimacy, her experience of hunger, and her resentment of social workers' criteria for need reveal potent frictions between a moral fabric of neighborhood life and official assessments of poverty: between a “living with dignity” that is contingent upon neighborhood relations and their boundaries and the state's criteria for poverty.
In the previous chapter, I explored an “active awaiting” as a mode of care for the mentally ill and the addicted made possible through institutional credit and through domestic relations beyond the home. The availability of credit has also significantly altered the nature of poverty itself, providing access to consumer goods typically outside the low-income monthly budget while extending a temporality of debt payments that may not be matched with stable work and incomes. The very dynamics of economic precariousness generate what men and women call “critical moments,” when temporary work is cut short, wages unpaid, or illness episodes generate more expenditures than can be handled by families.
This quality of economic precariousness has, however, emerged alongside the state's own debt to the poor: the “social debt” to the poor accrued during the Pinochet regime's market reforms, a debt that would be paid through expansion of targeted poverty programs. In this chapter, I bring into focus the critical moment as a way of considering the moral dimensions of poverty in relation to the social debt: what those critical moments reveal about the boundaries of speech and silence tied into a living-with-dignity and the frictions between this living-with-dignity and the visions of the poor embodied in official assessments of need.
EXTREME POVERTY AND THE SOCIAL DEBT
On May 21, 1990, President Patricio Aylwin gave a speech to the National Congress marking the beginning of democratic transition in Chile and outlining the temporal and moral contours of that government's vision of transitional justice. Addressing poverty would be one crucial aspect of reconciliation. “I think that if we want to strengthen national unity, we need to set our eyes on a common future that unites us, more than a past that divides us. Let us leave history to judge that which
