Poverty as danger

Abstract

Poor urban communities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean have been historically represented as sites of physical and moral danger. In recent years they have been blamed in particular for causing a surge in urban crime. This article explores how such representations are constructed through a process of engagement between many sectors of society. I examine how the general public, the national media and a poor barrio in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) contribute to a discourse that spatializes poverty and crime. I argue that the poor are the victims of a class politics that is played out on designated urban spaces in which they symbolize the economic and political crises of the state and middle-class fears of loss of social status. By marginalizing the poor to bounded, powerless spaces, the middle class retain their moral right to respectability and the possibility of social ascendance.