Conclusion: Final Reflections

MARIANA CHAVES; RAUSKY, MARÍA EUGENIA

Living and working in poverty: trajectories of children, youth and adults in Latin America.

Palgrave Macmillan

Año: 2019; p. 179 - 184

The motivation to publish this book was to show how subjects who live in conditions of poverty and social vulnerability face daily lives of work and the difficult task of survival throughout the life courses of childhood, youth and adulthood. The different empirical works were developed during a period which saw a general reduction in the rates of poverty and homelessness in our region, as outlined in the introduction. The neo-liberal government of Mexico and the socialist government of Cuba have remained in power over this period of time, resulting in very different experiences for the inequality of the subjects under study, as seen in chapters 1 to 5. In Argentina and Brazil on the other hand, there have been radical changes in governments while this book was being written: A plethora of measures to extend social rights and subsequently include vast sectors of society was followed in by a change in government which introduced sweeping public spending cuts and the reduction or abolition of measures to redistribute wealth. In both countries there has been an increasing transfer of wealth to the privileged classes and an outflow towards international finance entities. But his had not yet occurred when the field work for this study was being carried out, giving us a more favourable context in which to untangle the relations between poverty and work which reproduce poverty.