“When women say enough is enough: the struggle of drinking water in Villa Jardín, Argentina”

ANDÚJAR, ANDREA

Chiang Mai, Tailandia

Workshop; CAPRi International Research Workshop on Gender and Collective Action; 2005

CAPRi- International Food Policy Research Institute

This paper analyzes subaltern women’s involvement in collective actions to obtain a vital resource: drinking water. The case study proposed is based on the experience of Villa Jardín, in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (Argentina). My main hypothesis is that women’s role in guaranteeing the collection and distribution of community resources was the factor that prompted their passage from the domestic to the public space. On the one hand, this jeopardized their own positioning in the sphere of domesticity, but on the other, this passage allowed women to carry out actions that resulted in the reconstruction of the community’s social fabric and the improvement of the quality of life. Thus, women’s social practices provided democratic forms of organization and participation that contributed to the visibilization and empowerment of the organizations that they generated. Villa Jardín is an urban settlement in the province of Buenos Aires, with 60% of its 20,000 inhabitants deprived of their basic needs. Overcrowding, lack of public services and adequate health services, high unemployment levels, among others, are inherent features of the life experience in the neighborhood. However, when deprivation became critical in the late 1980s, a group of neighbors (women and men) organized themselves to design and fight for the installation of the drinking water and sewage network. Working in association with a NGO, the provincial government, and the concessionaire company, Aguas Argentinas S.A, the neighbors of Villa Jardín achieved a successful result, that was also innovative as a social practice. On the one hand, the community was successful in achieving the installation of the network in a time period much shorter than the one originally designed by the concessionaire. On the other, the project’s control and management was left to the community. Particularly, to the women in the community. Thus, for instance, it was women who established the work and organization forms for the project’s management, and it was women who stipulated the participation criteria for all the social actors involved. In fact, they are currently the community referents for the external and internal organizations and institutions of Villa Jardín. Currently, Villa Jardín women monitor the development of similar projects in other settlements of Greater Buenos Aires, and they guarantee the continuity of neighborhood organizing in view of new projects, acting as mediators in neighborhood conflicts. To understand this case, I have analyzed both the reasons that led women to participate in the project, and the ways in which they participated, as well as their scope and limits. Based on a gender analysis of collective memory, the work I present here is mainly based on oral history, with interviews to female and male neighbors of Villa Jardín, members of the company Aguas Argentinas S.A. and of the NGO working inside the neighborhood, and municipal and provincial officials.