of others. Continuing up the narrow streets, one is greeted by “Hola vecino/a” (Hi, neighbor), or with a wink and “Hola muñecos” (Hi, dolls). Nicknames are constantly used with endearment or cheeky irony: flaca (skinny girl), flaco (skinny guy), guatón (fat guy), negra (black), rusa (russian or blonde), huacha (“orphan,” or “illegitimate child”), volao (someone high on drugs). Or they relate to one's skills or profession: zapatero (shoe repair), joyero (jewelry maker), carpintero (carpenter), semanero (one who sells goods on credit and asks for weekly payments). I was called various names: negra, flaca, chinita, huacha, but also Clarita by friends and tía Clara (Auntie Clara) by their children.
Between 1968 and 1971, the confluence of state housing policy under President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–1970), and popular movements for housing (tomas de terreno), established La Pincoya as a población on the northern periphery of Santiago. The presidential election of Frei Montalva in 1964 set the conditions for La Pincoya's emergence. The Christian Democrat party advanced the slogan “Revolution in Liberty,” based on combining technical expertise, liberal political doctrine, and Christian humanistic values (Smith 1982, 110). This position coincided with the Catholic clergy's growing concern for the poor, voiced in two landmark 1962 pastoral letters, and the state's desire to stem communism. Consistent with this evolving Christian doctrine, the Christian Democrats argued that instead of viewing social reality as a struggle between workers and employers, Chilean society should be understood in terms of a tension between “marginality” and “integration” (Salazar Vergara and Pinto 1999; Scully 1992; Smith 1982).
This theory of marginality was advanced by the Belgian Jesuit Roger Vekemans and the Chilean group DESAL (Centro para el Desarrollo Económica y Social de América Latina) under Vekemans's leadership between 1964 and 1970.4 The theory drew in a selective fashion from Oscar Lewis's “culture of poverty” school, emphasizing the traits of self-perpetuating poverty to the exclusion of Lewis's insistence on fundamental structural change, such as wealth redistribution, to contend with poverty (see Lewis 1966). Thus, the urban masses were associated with a premodern, “traditional,” and rural character. Upon migration to the city, these peripheral urban masses were thrown into a state of psychological anomie and political and participatory apathy. The poor, peripheral urban masses were unable to overcome their situation of marginality. They were passive subjects in need of charity and guidance to become active subjects (Castells 1983; Espinoza 1989; Tironi Barrios 1990).
As Janice Perlman explains, this idea of marginality does not signify a “group of the population that occupies the lower rungs of the social scale. They [the marginals] are actually off such a scale. Marginals have no position in the dominant social system” (Perlman 1979, 119). According to Vekemans and DESAL, those marginals, who are understood as outcasts from the social system, require “integration” into the social system and mainstream political process. Two notions of participation were crucial in understanding the nature of marginality. First, passive—or receptive—participation is that participation entailed in the receiving of material benefits from society. Second, active participation is participation in the mainstream political process. Framing poverty in terms of the duality of marginality and integration casts poverty and institutional responses to it in a specific way, as Perlman critically remarks. “The fight against marginality must, therefore, proceed through the creation of new institutions capable of administering external help to the afflicted population” (p. 121). The afflicted population—the marginals—is viewed as not having a self-organizing capacity. It is the reception of material benefits (from the state or charitable institutions) that allows them to self-organize, but within the framework of mainstream politics and sociality.
The Christian Democrats drew on this theory in their implementation of social programs that would instigate a process of internal integration of the marginals. Christian humanism and a liberal state were jointly advanced through the estado social benefactor, or social-benefactor state. Frei's administration began the process of agrarian reform, expropriated 51 percent of the copper mining industry as a source of national income, and expanded social policies for housing and health to address the growing pauperism in the major cities. Public spending and investment were indicators of the scale of this effort. By 1969, total public investment was 74.8 percent of all investment within the country. By 1970, public spending had reached 46.9 percent of the GDP.
To address the housing crisis and illegal land occupations on the peripheries of Santiago, the Christian Democrats advanced Operación Sitio, a new policy that sought a rapid, technical solution. Inaugurated in 1966 by President Frei, the program consisted of the provision of urbanized housing sites, cooperatives, and self-help projects with governmental support, and promoted a concept of the liberal subject who, with proper state support, would build “houses according to [his] own needs and at [his] own pace” (Castells 1983, 180). Yet, while Operación Sitio parsed land into individual properties, it did not include the installation of sewer systems, electricity, or street pavement, nor did it provide building materials for the construction of houses (see Paley 2001).
As the demands for housing went unmet by Operación Sitio, pobladores (the poor of the city) who were living in overcrowded conditions in neighboring sectors of the city began to organize for tomas de terreno on the northern and southern peripheries of Santiago. Organized into comités sin casa (committees of those without housing), the pobladores occupied the land, setting up tents and carrying wood, basic foodstuffs, and lanterns. Once established, they negotiated with the state for housing (a claim to both rights to land and assistance for building) and the basic infrastructure for urbanization, such as electricity and sewage systems. Pobladores as social and political actors emerged in relation to this struggle for housing during the 1960s. Through state employment, they paved the roads and installed the sewer system and organized to buy materials for houses, all of which was called auto-construcción. Autoconstruction thus implicated collective organizing to build both neighborhoods and individual houses (Márquez 2006). Outside Santiago, in all other major cities, tomas occurred on a massive scale. Between 1969 and 1971, 312 tomas occurred throughout Chile, involving 54,710 families, approximately 250,000 people. By 1970, one in six inhabitants in Santiago was a poblador living in precarious shantytown housing formed through tomas (Garcés 1997, 46–47).
La Pincoya was formed through this combination of Operación Sitio and tomas. Between 1969 and 1970, the Ministry of Housing had assigned 1,152 housing sites on the terrain of La Pincoya. The demand for housing, however, far exceeded these sites, and organized tomas extended the occupation of land to the hills that now establish La Pincoya's northern border. With the election of President Salvador Allende, this occupation of land resulted in the designation of 2,036 housing sites.
While organization for housing offers a rich exploration of the dynamics of popular social movements and political process (Castells 1983), the house as process of auto-construcción within a neighborhood also offers ways of approaching relatedness and the moral in everyday life. As Janet Carsten has aptly remarked, “For many people, kinship is made in and through houses and houses are the social relations of those who inhabit them” (Carsten 2003, 37). Houses as material things are constantly being repaired, renovated, and added onto. In the sector of La Pincoya where I worked, houses were originally built as duplexes, with two houses sharing one wall, each with its own patio. Houses originally built with wood frames, partial brick walls, and corrugated iron roofs are augmented with a second story or improved with drywall and insulation. Mediaguas, provisional wood shacks provided by government organizations and charities, expand the living space and are placed in back of the original house or in the patio. These mediaguas can either be free-standing or connected to the original house via a covered walkway of corrugated iron. Walls may be constructed brick by brick through patient effort when money can be spared. Adult children of the second generation live in the mediaguas with their partners and children while trying to save money to qualify for a state-financed home loan. When inhabited, the mediagua (the building material) is called a pieza, or “room.”
The
