Researching the Urban Margins: What Can the United States Learn from Latin America and Vice Versa?

Abstract

Over the decade and a half that I have been conducting research on poverty and marginality in Latin America (with a specific focus on Argentina), I have become increasingly aware of the lack of dialogue between scholars working on similar issues north and south of the border. The striking similarities in the ways neoliberal economic policies and political transformations are now affecting the lives of the urban poor throughout the Americas might present a good (and well overdue) opportunity to break down artificial, but well-entrenched, “area-studies” boundaries and to scrutinize the manifold (sometimes similar, sometimes not) processes that are shaping the dynamics of urban relegation throughout the continent. True, ghettoes, inner-cities, favelas, villas, comunas, poblaciones, colonias (to mention a few of the terms used to describe the territories where multiple deprivations accumulate throughout the region) are not the same urban forms. While a few economic, political, and/or demographic dynamics that gave birth to, say, a villa miseria in Buenos Aires and the ghetto in Chicago (such as rapid industrialization and mass migration) may have some resemblances, the differences (racial segregation, housing policies, etc.) are far too important to be ignored. The causes and experiences of destitution in the developed North and the (always) developing South are, indeed, quite varied. And yet, years of field research at the urban margins armed with theoretical tools developed with diverse realities in mind have convinced me that sustained and serious engagement between researchers of urban poverty and/or marginality throughout the Americas can lead to better understandings and explanations of the diverse ways in which neoliberal states and economies bolster social and economic vulnerabilities. What can urban sociologists in the United States take away from reading about current dynamics in the sprawling informal settlements in Latin America? Conversely, what can urban sociologists in Latin America learn from reading about the living conditions in enclaves of urban poverty in the United States and the predicament of their residents? In this brief essay, I highlight a few themes found in both bodies of urban poverty research, which have rarely converged in a fruitful exchange; themes present in one literature that can benefit the other; and one theme that, surprisingly enough, has received little (if no) attention in either the United States or Latin America. In doing so, rather than focus on the substantive similarities in the forms and meanings of dispossession, I draw attention to the ways in which social scientific studies of urban poverty in some places