Diverse forms of criminal and interpersonal violence are ravaging the lives of the urban poor in contemporary Latin America. Through a combination of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and survey research in a poor working class neighborhood, a squatter settlement, and a shantytown in metropolitan Buenos Aires (Argentina), this project seeks to a) examine in real time and space the ways in which diverse forms of violence (drug-related, criminal, domestic, and sexual) are experienced by those routinely exposed to them, b) explain the recent increase of daily violence in poor communities in Argentina by scrutinizing the complex causal pathways that lead to "chain of violence," and c) dissect the (individual and collective) strategies that poor residents devise to cope with different kinds of violence. As such, the project joins the recent call made by social scientists to examine the ways in which diverse forms of violence form a continuum and seeks to draw attention to the "peace time crimes" or the "little violences" that define the everyday life in the communities where the urban poor dwell.
In almost every single country of the Latin American sub-continent, there is a palpable contradiction between the persistent and pervasive insecurity and violence that shapes daily life and the peace and equality that, after years of dictatorship and/or civil war, defined democratic promise. This project will lend further ethnographic detail to a trend identified by current scholarship on Latin America: urban violence is besieging many of the new democracies in the region affecting the most disadvantaged populations in disproportionate ways. The project seeks not only to describe the life-threatening effects of different forms of violence currently ravaging daily life in territories of urban relegation, but also to dissect the causal mechanisms behind their increase, and to examine the (individual and collective) strategies poor residents deploy to deal with them. In other words, this project seeks to address the hows, whys, and whats of violence:How is daily violence manifested in poor people's experiences? Why has daily violence grown over the last two decades? And what do residents, both individually and collectively, do about it?
This project will bring together the often dispersed insights that have developed over the past two decades in the study of urban violence. It will seek to develop into a single coherent analysis that understands the ways in which neoliberal transformations, urban poverty, and diverse types of violence are mutually imbricated. In analyzing the relationship between urban poverty and violence, this research will seek to create intellectual bridges among several areas of study that approached police, criminal, sexual, and domestic violence from different perspectives. This work will seek to enrich the discourse in these areas by offering a more comprehensive understanding of urban violence, extend the boundaries of these fields to include relevant dynamics borrowed from the others, and advance the intellectual integration of these fields.
