A Critical Analysis of the Housing Policies Aimed at the Extremely Poor. The Case of the Social Development Secretariat of Buenos Aires City

MARCHESE, MARIANA CAROLINA

Spanish at Work. Analysing Institutional Discourse Across the Spanish-Speaking World

Palgrave Macmillan

Lugar: Basingstoke; Año: 2011; p. 93 - 110

During the last decade of the 20th century and the first of the 21st century, the situations of extreme poverty have worsen in Argentina. In this context, in the city of Buenos Aires, the housing deficit underwent a massive and significant increase. Though the city administration (GCBA) enforced several programmes and services aimed at channelling and reducing the problems of the population who underwent the said situation, these actions failed to revert their situation leaving them, in many cases, outside the social network. For this reason, from the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, with a qualitative methodology, and in the form of a case study, we linguistically analysed the GCABA´s Social Services Guides published during 2004-2007. The analysis revealed that, as regards the housing problem, these guides have, on one hand, an explicit function: to inform the general public as regards the state policies aimed at the population in poverty situations. On the other hand, they are written using a series of linguistic resources that form discursive strategies which reveal the implicit political function of these texts. The structure of the chapter is as follows: first, we review the situation of state policies related to extreme poverty within the socio-political context of Argentina; then, we describe the main features of the political-state discourse and its relationship to the texts analysed; next, we present the corpus and the theoretical and methodological framework. Finally, we outline the results of the linguistic analysis in three inter-related sections focusing on the textual, discursive, and social practices respectively, and we provide a critical assessment of these results. Based on data analysis, we also offer some conclusions as regards the nature of discourses belonging to the field of the political-state outline of public policies related to extreme poverty.