La construcción del otro y el discurso de la pobreza Narrativas y experiencias desde la periferia de la ciudad de México

Abstract

Besides the material sources of poverty, it is necessary to understand the symbolic and relational dimensions that contribute to create, maintain, and reproduce deprivation. Based on the ethnographic work carried out in an area of high concentration of poverty in Mexico City’s suburbs, this article aims at dismantling the myths, stereotypes and stigmas of the poor and their locations uttered by the official discourse on poverty. This work examines from a sociological perspective how the most disadvantaged segments coexist, resist and adapt to a dominant discourse that stigmatizes them in a daily and systematic way. Te processes and social mechanisms through which the poor are constructed as the others (the otherness) are explored, as well as their implications for the experience of poverty, social policies and social coexistence. It is also examined how the dominant discourse on poverty, which blames and demonizes the poor, contributes to legitimize, consolidate and reproduce social distances, thus hiding the political and economic nature of inequality, in a context were the latter is basically tolerated.