Work as resistance? Reflections on citizenship, unemployment and political communities. The case of ‘other works’ in the City of Buenos Aires

MARIANO D. PERELMAN

Jaipur, India

Workshop; The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) 16th Annual Cultural Studies Workshop "Workshop is Empire, Nation, Cosmopolitanism".; 2011

The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC)

During the last decades there were strong social, political, economic, cultural transformations in Argentina. These changes modified the imaginaries about urban life, access to the city and the construction of citizenship (closely linked to the formal work relations). Within these processes, the historical imaginary of its city capital, Buenos Aires, as a "white, modern, European and without poverty" city, was questioned.  The actual process (increasing of poverty, “rediscover” of ethnic groups, etc.) question the historical ideal of the Argentinean Nation. My research topics deal with the transformation of works and urban relation in the City of Buenos Aires from an ethnographic point of view. More specifically, I have studied how informal garbage collectors (cirujas or cartoneros) (for doctoral studies) and street vendors (for postdoctoral studies) build these activities as a legitimate way of living. They are people who have been run out of what it have historically been the legitimate modes of social reproduction, access to the city and citizens´ rights. Many of these workers are natives, others are internal migrants (from other provinces) and others are external migrants (especially from bordering countries). The presence of these poor people in the streets show in a paradigmatic way a series of imagery about a more complex- multicultural- multiethnic city, the imaginaries round work, the construction of the notion of citizenship and ways of living, among others. Also, is a paradigmatic place to analyze the approach of "formal and informal", of “legal and illegal” and, while questioning the notion of spatial segregation, it is possible to highlight an additional aspect of these processes by the new interactions between different social sectors that in the same space establish public relations within segregatories policy framework. And if it is true that these contacts generate new conflicts, it is also true that generate new relationships of affinity and closeness between groups. The streets appear as the site of interaction between different projects. The analysis of the interactions, the ways in which different knowledge systems, values, networks of meaning, histories and naming process are expressed allows to account social differences and moral worlds in contact and to see the reinforcing of social hierarchies that operate, with a varying degrees of visibility in all social life. My motivations to participate in this workshop are that I have found in some authors working on the subaltern studies perspective, an invaluable perspective to enrich the investigations on these issues and the possibility of produce changes within these groups. More specifically, I will intend to reflect during the workshop by thinking the social changes as a change from an imagined community (based on a common history related to works relations) and civil society to a political community(based round new form of demand and access to social, cultural, economical, political rights). This requires change the focus of analysis from the usual modes of inquire  these topics form the "grand Histories" about citizenship in Argentina and more specifically on the ways in which groups get access to the right to the city in the context of exclusive processes to a more local perspective. This does not deny the global process but put the focus on the different and local effects that globalization has, because of local histories and local configurations. As I worked in my PhD dissertation there is a fight for the recognition of these people and I believe that it will be important to work (in a theoretical and methodological way) with specialist and students of other latitudes and experts on topics that are so necessary and almost unknown in Argentina. From a perspective that complex the processed I analyze and from the application of different concepts (as political community) I believe that is possible to get a more complex perspective about actual social process and about how local groups appropriate global processes. During the workshop I pretend to show may work and share my reflections about these topics training to learn new theoretical frameworks to complex and combine with my approach (base on local trajectories of investigation). I will especially focus on the new ways that local groups demand and get access to rights and social reproduction in a mega urbanization with its own history. I will analyze social transformations in relation to State transformations, territorial transformations and the way social groups reconstruct the story of citizenship (not from the notion of work/ worker) but from their trajectories. I expect to learn a lot by participating in this workshop, still because there are very few researches that have used these perspectives in the region and even less in my country.