The Denial of Citizenship: “Barbaric” Buenos Aires and the Middle-Class Imaginary

This paper explores how, in the Buenos Aires of neoliberalism, middle-class residents strove to make sense of their own impoverishment and their disenfranchisement by generating a consensus on how this city’s modernity was being eroded by the presence of a large mestizo lower class. Through an analy...

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Bibliographische Detailangaben
1. VerfasserIn: Guano, Emanuela (Verfasst von)
Medienart: Elektronisch Buch
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: 2004
In:Jahr: 2004
Online-Zugang: Volltext (kostenfrei)
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Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:This paper explores how, in the Buenos Aires of neoliberalism, middle-class residents strove to make sense of their own impoverishment and their disenfranchisement by generating a consensus on how this city’s modernity was being eroded by the presence of a large mestizo lower class. Through an analysis of the discourse that constructed the urban poor as “barbaric” (i.e., dangerous, polluting, and foreign), I suggest that this representation not only sought to reinforce the fading social difference between the middle- and the lower class, but it also contributed to denying the latter its citizenship in a Buenos Aires that struggled to be “modern”