Auyero, Javier - Poor People's Politics : Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita

Durham [NC], Duke University Press, 2001. orig.cloth. 24x15cm, xiv,257 pp. Some minor rubbing to spine. VG. ¶ Political clientelism" is a term used to characterise the contemporary relationships between political elites and the poor in Latin America in which goods and services are traded for political favours. Javier Auyero critically deploys the notion in "Poor People's Politics" to analyse the political practices of the Peronist Party among shantytown dwellers in contemporary Argentina. Looking closely at the slum-dwellers' informal problem-solving networks that are necessary for material survival and the different meaning of Peronism within these networks, Auyero presents the first ethnography of urban clientelism ever carried out in Argentina. Revealing a deep familiarity with the lives of the urban poor in Villa Paraiso, a stigmatised and destitute shantytown of Buenos Aires, Auyero demonstrates the ways in which local politicians present their vital favors to the poor and how the poor perceive and evaluate these favours. Having penetrated the networks, he describes how they are structured, what is traded, and the particular way in which women facilitate these transactions. Moreover, Auyero proposes that the act of granting favors or giving food in return for votes gives the politicians' acts a performative and symbolic meaning that flavours the relation between problem-solver and problem-holder, while also creating quite different versions of contemporary Peronism. Along the way, Auyero is careful to situate the emergence and consolidation of clientelism in historic, cultural, and economic contexts...." - Publisher's description.

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