obligations of kinship. People speak of one's casa de sangre (house of blood) as the place of primary intimate relations. Kinship obligations are spoken of as the compromiso con la casa (the commitment to the house) and include helping economically to maintain the house. Women may say with relief and happiness that their children turned out to be caseros/as (home bodies) rather than callejeros (of the street), meaning that these children are not only responsive to their kin but also protected from the unpredictable forces that the world of flesh-and-blood relations constantly mitigate. The autoconstruction of the house, therefore, can also be understood as the process of constructing and achieving relatedness. That process of achieving, however, can also come with the possibility of estrangement and disconnection.
Houses, however, exist within a neighborhood life of multiple relational modes. They are interconnected through intimate kin relations that are most intensely sustained between women—between mothers and their daughters, between sisters, and between friends. Such interconnections form domestic relations that, again, mitigate the forces of economic precariousness. Separate from domestic relations of intimate kin and friends are relations with neighbors, and through neighbors there is a constant circulation of gossip (pelambre).
When I first arrived to La Pincoya in 1999, I met Leticia through a feminist activist in a nongovernmental organization, who picked Leticia's name out of a Rolodex. Leticia had returned to Chile four years earlier after being exiled to Argentina. She told me that to engage in the life of the población I would have to live in the población. She invited me to live with her in her house. Through her daughter, I met Ruby, and through Ruby, I met Susana. These three women introduced me to their intimate kin, friends, and immediate neighbors. I engaged in both participant-observation in daily life—that is, life as lived—and conversations and interviews with women and men who spoke about their relations, their political commitments, and actual conditions of life in the población. As Robert Desjarlais puts it, “The phenomenal and the discursive, life as lived and life as talked about, are like the intertwining strands of a braided rope, each complexly involved in the other, in time” (Desjarlais 2003, 6).
While engaged in everyday activities such as helping to sew, looking after children, doing the laundry, learning how to wire a doorbell or rig an electricity meter, cooking, and going to the feria (outdoor market), I began to appreciate how the dynamics of economic reforms, as well as state violence, were lived in intimate lives. Far from being the place of safety or take-for-granted stability, as Carsten remarks, “the house and domestic families are directly impinged upon by the forces of the state” (Carsten 2003, 50). Rather than thinking of the forces of the state as “impinging” on the house from without, however, we can think of multiple ways in which the state is layered in people's intimate lives, such that houses and domestics are not neatly overlapping. State institutions and economic precariousness are folded into people's intimate relations, commitments, and aspirations. And further, for many of the men and women I came to know, experiences of torture, exile, and disappearance were realities that took shape in their intimate lives, casting doubt on modes of intimacy themselves.
With the golpe on September 11, 1973, history abruptly took a different course. On that day, men and women in La Pincoya saw helicopters and jets fly over the hills surrounding the población. From those same hills, they saw smoke pouring out of the presidential palace, La Moneda, where Salvador Allende had given his last radio address to the nation and then died. Because of the force of social movements, as well as its association with both socialist and communist militants, the población was a threat to the military regime. Rumors circulated that the regime had plans to bomb La Pincoya and, as people said to me, “erase it from the map.” The regime persecuted the población, subjecting it to military sniper fire. Men and boys were rounded up and contained on the soccer field while military officers interrogated them for suspected leftist leanings. Allanamientos, or household raids, were performed in order to search for contraband materials, such as pamphlets, newspapers, and books, and to take men and women into preventive detention. Men were humiliated in front of their families. Relatives and friends were disappeared, politically executed, and tortured. Those who were militants had to live clandestinely or were exiled.
Along with this state violence in the form of repression and terror, the regime advanced a policy of decentralization to fragment political organization and spatially separate the rich from the poor. According to the regime, decentralization would be the foundation of a “protected democracy.” Grassroots organizations would articulate concrete, local demands to the municipality. Thus, the state, freed of political pressure, would be able to fulfill its bureaucratic technical role. Paradoxically, Pinochet decreed “local participation,” instantiating “participation” through authoritarianism. In 1982, he decreed that municipalization would be institutionalized to “juridically organize the direct participation of the community in local government.” He then consolidated this “local governance” into law in 1988 with the Municipal Government Law (Gideon 2001; Greaves 2005, 193). Mayors were appointed, not elected. Political demands thus became tightly circumscribed to geographic location.
In the name of “local governance” and “participation,” the municipalities were now to provide for their own populations in several key areas: primary care and education, transport and public highways, sanitation, sports and recreation, and local planning and development (Gideon 2001, 224). In urban housing policy, erradicaciones (“eradications,” the forced movement of the poor to land of low value) were undertaken to facilitate the free-market regulation of housing supply. Poor and rich were geographically separated, paving the way for social spending targeted to spatial areas (Dockendorff 1990; Espinoza 1989). Thus a decrease in social spending (from 25 percent of GNP in 1971 to 14 percent in 1981) mirrored an increase in the amount of state subsidies given to the extreme poor. In 1970, 37 percent of the income of a poor family was subsidized by the state, in 1988, this subsidy had increased to 57 percent. The subsidies, however, were barely half of what a worker would make at the monthly minimum wage.
The municipality of Huechuraba was formed through this decentralization process. In 1981, Huechuraba came into existence when the larger municipality of Conchalí, in which it had been embedded, was split into two sections. The new Conchalí was the historic lower-middle-class sector with a slightly higher income level. The new municipality of Huechuraba was, at the time of the split, comprised of poblaciones (the working poor) and campamentos (squatter camps). It now includes a burgeoning transnational business sector, called the Ciudad Empresarial. This sector is directly connected by highway to the international airport. With the influx of upper- and upper-middle-class people into Huechuraba came a pervasive rumor that has ebbed and flowed over the years: that there are plans to expropriate the entire neighborhood because of this sector's surge in property values.
In 2008, when I visited Ruby, a developer was trying to make alliances with local social leaders, such as the president of the Junta de Vecinos (Neighborhood Council), in order to gain neighborhood support for his development plan for La Pincoya that he was proposing to the state under its new “Quiero Mi Barrio” (I Love My Neighborhood) community development program. This program consists of forging public-private partnerships in the name of community development. Thus, the state contracts with private companies, selected through a competitive process, who invest in “development.” I happened to be staying with Ruby when the developer visited. He plugged his pen drive into my laptop and showed us the PowerPoint. His plan involved converting La Pincoya into a barrio bohemio (bohemian neighborhood) of discotheques and bars for international clientele, converting the green hills to flower farms to produce blooms that could be sold to the owners of upper-class condos, and creating what he called a “head-hunting agency” (in English) to filter out the “thieves” in La Pincoya and thus find “honest women” who would be able to work as nannies in the condominiums. He explained his plan while eating a homemade sopaipilla and taking tea in Ruby's house with the children and Ruby's husband, Héctor. Afterward, Ruby politely thanked him for stopping by and offered more than a few niceties; but as she came back into the house, she called him a “snake.” Her eldest son offered more colorful prose. Ruby talked
