Abstract
This article aims to analyse and compare the family’s and community’s reproduction strategies used by migrant households, during the COVID-19 pandemic situation, in the following informal settlements located in Argentina and Chile: Altos de Placilla Nuevo in Valparaíso City (Chile) and Villa 20 in Buenos Aires City (Argentina). Specifically, we propose to address the impact of the pandemic on urban-environmental and precarious economic conditions in two countries of the Global South that have a predominant international migration. From the perspective of subaltern urbanisation and the intersectionality of inequalities, the different modalities of city production in Latin America will be analysed, placing special emphasis on decommodifying practices ‘from below’ and ‘from above’. Among its main findings, structural problems and common strategies of households in both inner-city neighbourhoods facing the pandemic could be glimpsed, thus transcending their specificities in regards to their location, size and government interventions in each country. To carry out this work, a participatory methodology was used that combines qualitative and quantitative procedures.
Introduction
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the main measure was mandatory confinement, closure of non-essential commercial activities and mobility restrictions, which reconfigured representations, practices and uses of public and domestic spaces (Marcus, 2023). In Argentina and Chile, the governmental slogan ‘Stay at Home’ underlined Latin American urban heterogeneity and the vulnerability of the informal inner-city habitat. Confinement, the avoidance of social meeting places and mobility restrictions, especially in public transport, were imposed everywhere, making all sociability toxic (Delgado, 2023: 19).
In Argentina’s inner-city areas, the slogan became ‘Stay in the neighbourhood’. Urban areas were the most affected by the virus, with the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (AMBA, Argentina) accounting for more than 90% of the confirmed cases in the country.
Each country reacted to the emergency in its own way. In Argentina, numerous surveys, diagnoses and reports, especially from public agencies, showed that containment was partially observed in inner-city neighbourhoods due to various urban and economic difficulties. In Chile, research funds were created to focus on the economic, psychological and educational consequences of the pandemic, with few studies on its urban impact (Annes et al., n.d.).
This article analyses family and community reproduction strategies in two populous neighbourhoods of informal origin in the Global South, during the pre-existing housing, economic and food crisis intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, characterised by a high migrant population. We examine the Altos de Placilla Nuevo Settlement in Valparaíso (Chile) formed during the pandemic 1 and the Villa 20 in the southern part of the Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires (CABA, Argentina), one of the oldest and most populated settlements.
Following Eguía (2004), the focus on this type of family reproduction strategies allows us to understand day-to-day practices conditioned by the structural situation. Thus, this article revisits the debate surrounding the notion of “family survival strategies,” first introduced by Duque and Pastrana in Chile in the 1970s. Its use spread throughout Latin America and later in European analyses. Although it highlights the actor’s perspective, it is considered that objective constraints limit the range of strategies adopted by urban poor populations (Najman, 2019; Espín Diaz, 1999). In addition, this article focuses on the decommodified production practices and consumption of urban goods developed mainly by impoverished migrant households. These practices are approached, first, as strategies of family and community reproduction that entail a production (and reproduction) of space, an urban appropriation and ways of inhabiting as lived space (Lefebvre, 1974). Second, they are analysed in relation to family nutrition. Both aspects are studied in the framework of public policies, implicit or explicit (Oszlak, 1991), which can decommodify life in a context of crisis.
The literature on informal settlements in Latin America usually presents them as territories of poverty and marginality (Gago, 2014; Torres and Ruiz-Tagle, 2019). This article seeks to broaden this perspective through the proposal of subaltern urbanisation (Roy, 2011), trying to demonstrate that, in addition to being areas of deprivation, they are also productive territories of resistance to violent accumulation by the state and the market. They are then considered spaces of hope, the seeds of an alternative socialisation to the logic of capital (Harvey, 2007), which derives from the analysis of the relationship between the production of space and networks of mutual aid from the perspective of social decommodification. The application of this theoretical tool, which emerged in the 1970s to examine the contradictions of European welfare states (Offe, 1990), to the Latin American context is proposed as a contribution to a topic under construction.
In summary, this study challenges spatial determinism and culturalist arguments in relation to urban informality, updating research in the context of the pandemic to unveil structural issues with an extended historical development in the region and common strategies in inner-city neighbourhoods, from a comparative perspective.
We used a participatory methodology that combined qualitative and quantitative techniques. The central hypothesis is that, during the pandemic, both territories intensified previous practices of social decommodification, understood as strategies of community and family reproduction.
However, the Argentine case received greater state support from a set of territorialised assistance policies.
In the following, the theoretical foundations and methodological perspective of the article are detailed. Then, historical and socio-demographic references to informal settlements in Argentina and Chile are presented. The analysis of the data is developed in two sections. The first focuses on the practices of decommodification in relation to habitat; and the second is linked to the food crisis experienced in inner-city neighbourhoods during the last pandemic. The conclusions aim to reveal how decommodifying practices played a key role in the subsistence of inner-city neighbourhoods in times of crisis.
Theoretical foundations of Latin American urbanisations
The inner-city neighbourhoods analysed, defined as inner-city neighbourhoods of informal origin (Di Virgilio, 2015), reflect the gap between capitalist housing production and social demand. According to Clichevsky (2003), urban informality involves a dominion aspect based on the lack of property titles (or rental contracts), and on the other hand, it refers to the urbanisation process in terms of non-compliance with the city’s building regulations, resulting in different situations of urban-environmental precariousness (Diaz, 2015).
According to Herzer (2008), inner-city areas participate simultaneously in formal or informal labour and land/housing market activities, which impacts housing and living conditions (Portes and Haller, 2004). In Latin America, the literature highlights labour and housing market segmentation according to migration and gender, characterised by informality and precariousness (Courtis and Pacecca, 2010; Mallimaci and Magliano, 2018). The main difference between the formal and informal economy is related to the way in which it is produced or exchanged as an economic activity that is not regulated by the state, an indicator of which may be the lack of pension contributions. Moreover, precarious work can exist in both formal and informal activities (Portes and Haller, 2004). While urban informality and precariousness are challenges in both the Global South and the Global North, the situation is observed to a greater extent in the capital cities of Africa, Asia and Latin America (Davis, 2006), linked to dependence on the world-system as the subordination of our continent in global capitalism (Katz, 2018). This article examines the experiences of the inhabitants in their territorial transformation through strategies of everyday reproduction.
Analysing Latin American inner-city urbanisations from a social (re)production strategies perspective is connected to the urban dynamic that encompasses the dimensions of ‘habitat’ and ‘inhabiting’. Habitat includes the characteristics of housing and the urban context that refer to the differential opportunities offered by the city. In this direction, it adheres to a broad conception of housing as habitat or environment that is linked to the notion of the Right to the City (Harvey, 2012). This right implies not only access to goods and services but also a creative and participatory agency opposed to commodification.
Territorial configuration is the product of everyday practices that allow social needs to be satisfied (Lefebvre, 1974; Veschambre, 2005). These practices express different ways of inhabiting and of urban appropriation that are part of spatial/territorial (re)production strategies. These strategies have a range of resources (Eguía, 2004) to achieve this end (mutual aid networks, access to social programmes, labour strategies, among others) under structural conditions (Torrado, 1982).
In this article, ‘reproduction strategies’ and ‘production of space’ are linked to family and community practices, without denying other practices and representations from the symbolic and imaginary plane (Lefebvre, 1974). Thus, inhabiting implies the appropriation of space, not as property, but as a way of giving it meaning and ‘one’s own stamp’.
In the Latin American inner-city habitat, a heterogeneity of urban production and consumption modalities can be observed, reflecting a particular territorial configuration and shared knowledge (Jaramillo and Cuervo, 1993; Quijano, 2000). The logic of the (non-mercantile) necessity of city production predominates, which interacts in a complex, contradictory and conflictive way with the logics of the market and the state (Herzer, 2008; Pírez, 2016).
In this context, the decommodification practices of both the state and civil society stand out. As Offe (1990) pointed out, state policies decommodify peoples’ everyday lives by substituting property rights for citizens’ rights. However, in the decommodification coming from civil society, the access to these goods occurs mainly in the framework of solidarity processes organised by the populous sectors in the framework of social (community) production of habitat and family self-construction of housing (Diaz, 2016; Pírez, 2016).
In addition, the intersectional perspective is incorporated to analyse socio-territorial inequalities, considering the multiple social classifications that underlie the reproduction of inequality and relations of oppression (Crenshaw, 1989; Magliano, 2015). In line with Wacquant (2007), stigmatisation is not only social but also territorial by place of residence. From the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000; Segato, 2013), these social classifications, based on race and gender, persist in today’s capitalism, structuring socio-territorial inequalities, made visible in the context of the pandemic.
Presentation and methodological perspective
In order to achieve the research objectives, which are part of a larger project, a two-stage participatory methodology was used, combining qualitative and quantitative techniques. This methodology is relevant to address the issue from a socio-demographic and urban dimension; furthermore, the active participation of residents was key to the feasibility of the study.
In the first stage, primary quantitative data were collected through questionnaires developed together with neighbourhood organisations. The questionnaire included various sections such as socio-demographic characteristics, employment, habitability and access to housing.
A census was conducted at the Chilean settlement in 2020, that is, covering 221 households (582 people). The questionnaire was conducted during five weekends, covering the four sectors of the settlement. Spanish and Kreyol versions were used, with the support of neighbour-translators in the area with the largest Haitian population. In Villa 20, defined as a Bolivian neighbourhood enclave, 2 a survey was applied to 60 households in this community between 2018 and 2019, using non-probabilistic theoretical sampling (according to theoretical saturation). Although not representative of the entirety of Villa 20, each surveyed household represents the typical characteristics of impoverished migrant families from the southern area of CABA, where the city’s villas are concentrated. On these data processed using SPSS, a descriptive analysis was carried out based on a socio-demographic characterisation of the case studies.
In the second stage, a thematic analysis of the subjective dimension was developed through semi-structured in-depth interviews. 3 Table 1 details the socio-demographic profiles of the interviewees, protecting their anonymity with pseudonyms.
Socio-demographic profiles of interviewees.
Source: Own elaboration.
In Villa 20, 15 interviews were conducted between 2020 and 2022, targeting key informants (neighbourhood and public agency referents) as well as migrant residents of Bolivian origin. These interviews were based on a sub-sample of previously surveyed migrant households, complemented by additional contacts obtained through the snowballing technique. It is important to mention that some of the interviews were conducted with people who, although originally living in the massif, at the time of the interview, had already moved into new housing built by law on reurbanization and socio-urban integration of 2016 (Ley de Reurbanización e Integración Sociourbana de 2016). 4
In the Chilean camp, 13 interviews were conducted in 2021, representing women and men of various nationalities, following the demographic ratio evidenced in the quantitative stage. Given that 56% of the total population are migrants, people from Haiti (35.6%), Venezuela (11.3%), Peru (4.1%) and Colombia (3.8%) were included to ensure adequate representation of this heterogeneity.
Historical and socio-demographic references
The development of populous neighbourhoods of informal origin in Argentina and Chile is linked to the Import Substitution Model (1930–1950) and rural-urban migratory flows. Unlike the villas in CABA, which are located in both peripheral and central areas, the Chilean settlements, such as Altos de Placilla Nuevo, are historically located in remote and difficult-to-access areas, such as hills and ravines (Pino and Ojeda, 2013).
Villa 20, one of the oldest in CABA, emerged in the 1940s on peripheral and state-owned land that began to be occupied informally and scattered around housing built by the Eva Perón Foundation for families in transit.
These plots of land, located near the Riachuelo and the Quema del Bajo Flores, presented adverse socio-environmental conditions. During the military dictatorship (1976–1983), the population of Villa 20 decreased drastically due to slum eradication policies. However, with the democratic opening in the 1980s, the villas became populated again, driven by a paradigm of settlement and integration with the support of slum organisations (Cravino, 2007; Di Virgilio, Arqueros Mejica, and Guevara, 2010; Rodríguez and Di Virgilio, 2016). Since 2016, Villa 20 has been undergoing a process of redevelopment and socio-urban integration under Law 5705, which deepened pre-existing inequalities.
In contrast, informal settlements in Chile, known as ‘poblaciones callampa’ (mushroom settlements), emerged in the middle of the last century. These land takeovers, characterised by strong political organisation (Pérez, 2023), were home to 450,000 people in the early 1970s (Hidalgo, 2019). During the dictatorship, the ‘poblaciones callampa’ were harshly repressed and, along with this, a policy of mass housing production in the urban peripheries was implemented (Rodríguez and Sugranyes, 2004), significantly reducing the housing deficit. However, since 2011, slums have reappeared, especially in the Valparaíso region, which currently hosts the largest number of slums in the country (Zenteno-Torres et al., 2023). The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the growth of these settlements (Zenteno-Torres et al., 2022), from 43,000 families in 2019 to 113,000 in 2023 (Déficit Cero and TECHO-Chile, 2024).
According to the data collected, the high cost of rents (40.3%), low income (16.4%) and loss of employment (9.9%) during the pandemic were the main reasons that led families to move to informal slums. These settlements reflect a consolidated form of city production in Chile (Angelcos and Pérez, 2017), although with certain transformations in terms of formation, composition and ownership in contemporary settlements. While the settlements of the past were formed through rapid land takeovers, the current ones are slow occupations, with little social organisation and a greater presence of migrants (Pérez and Palma, 2021). The new settlements are also differentiated by the land on which they are located: while they were mainly installed on public land in the past, nowadays this has diversified, and today, a considerable part of the new slums have been installed on private land, defining different typologies of informal settlements (Déficit Cero and TECHO-Chile, 2024).
Currently, Villa 20 is located in Comuna 8 in the southern part of CABA, defined as a segregated territory with housing and living conditions below the city average. It is the fourth most populated settlement in the city, with 27,990 people and 24% of informal tenant families (IVC, 2016). Since the 1990s, the city's villas have experienced a process of growth and densification, driven by a dynamic informal real estate market. According to the survey conducted, the majority of households in Villa 20 live in self-built housing with brick 5 materials, with 67% informal owners and 30% informal tenants. As part of the redevelopment process, 58% of the dwellings were not subject to demolition or removal.
In contrast, the Altos de Placilla Nuevo settlement is located in an area of high socio-economic contrast in Valparaíso. The Placilla area is an expansion of the Metropolitan Area of Valparaíso (AMV), made up of a traditional popular residential area, social housing complexes, industrial zones and, on the other hand, Curauma, a neighbourhood of high-income real estate expansion. This forms a highly fragmented territory (Mansilla and Fuenzalida, 2010). The settlement is located on the periphery of the industrial zone, in what would be the urban interface, between the forestry plantations and the city. Generating a strong contrast between the traditional features and the real estate industry. Figures 1 and 2 show the locality of the villa and settlement analysed.
Villa 20.
Altos de Placilla Nuevo settlement.
Both case studies are defined as migrant neighbourhoods, which is a shared characteristic of populous neighbourhoods in Chile and Argentina. Villa 20 is mainly composed of households with a family profile (nuclear) that include adults from the Bolivian community, which is concentrated in the southern part of the city and is the second largest migratory flow in Argentina after Paraguay (Census 2022, 2024). Of the total sample, only 33% are women as heads of households (HHPs), who make up single-parent households (90%). Furthermore, households exhibit a strong migratory cohesion according to ethnicity (Aymara or Quechua), department of origin and urban or rural area, with a strong migrant cohesion according to this ‘triple’ belonging that puts the mere ethno-national reference under tension (referring to Bolivianness). A similar process was observed among rural migrants residing in El Alto, Bolivia (Diaz, 2016).
In the Chilean settlement, just over half of the population is migrant (56.8%), including various Latin American nationalities. The most represented nations at the national level are Venezuela, Peru and Haiti; while in the Altos de Placilla settlement, Haitian migration has a greater presence (35.6%), almost tripling the presence of migrants from Venezuela (11.3%). Of the total migrant population present at the settlement, 44.8% are women. The population pyramid between the migrant population and the Chilean population residing in the settlement presents some interesting differences. While in the Chilean population, there is a high presence of children (34.0% are between 0 and 9 years old) and young people (19.1% between 10 and 19 years old); in the migrant population, this proportion is significantly lower (4% and 8% respectively), with the majority of the migrant population being young adults, as 44.2% are between 30 and 39 years of age and 22.4% are between 20 and 29 years. The majority of the settlement’s migrant population arrived in Chile between 2017 (39.8%), 2018 (16.3%) and 2019 (10.6%).
Demercantilising practices in relation to habitat
In this section, we explore how family and community reproduction strategies during the pandemic are linked to habitat conditions and urban dynamics in two inner-city neighbourhoods. We also analyse how state policy in each country acted as a resource to sustain these strategies.
Despite the differences in age, both inner-city neighbourhoods faced the pandemic in precarious urban and environmental conditions. The irregular supply of drinking water and electricity, with low pressure and frequent outages, negatively impacted households’ quality of life, in a context where ‘washing hands’ was crucial to prevent infection. Lidia, a migrant from Villa 20, says that ‘for example, we don’t have water in the villa (. . .), if you don’t get water, you’re left without it all day . . . and sometimes the electricity is cut off too’. Meanwhile, Esteban, a resident of the Chilean settlement, comments that he had to go to the houses in the nearby neighbourhood to ask for water and ‘walk for blocks uphill and this is a hill . . . so it was walking for blocks with a bottle of water on your shoulder, it was terrible’.
In Villa 20, urban-environmental problems prior to the pandemic included fires due to precarious electrical installations and the use of gas cylinders. The sewage network connected to the pluvial network caused collapses and flooding. Meanwhile, in the Chilean settlement, the lack of sewage and drinking water were considered the most urgent problems, with septic tanks built by the inhabitants at risk of collapsing in times of rain.
These urban-environmental conditions and irregular access to public services reflect a strategy of reproduction of the low-income sectors in the face of state neglect. In other words, the community and family practice of decommodifying certain services and urban goods commodified in the formal city shows how the inhabitants manage the precariousness of their housing conditions. The pandemic brought to light the structural problems of populous neighbourhoods of informal origin, regardless of their location.
As noted, the Chilean settlement emerged in pandemic, and decommodification practices were expressed in solidarity among families to build houses and provide services such as water and electricity. At first, without state support, neighbours organised themselves to beg for water cans from nearby houses and then set up informal drinking water networks. However, due to the settlement’s topography, water distribution was unequal. Residents in higher areas received less water, especially during peak hours:
The water may not arrive one day, because you know from where the water is taken, everyone is using it, so those who are lower down always have water (. . .) [at times when] more water is used, those of us who are higher up don’t get it. (Dora, Altos-de-Placilla, 2019).
For migrants, building houses and obtaining basic services depended mainly on their own savings and loans from family and friends. Mutual aid and solidarity networks were central to these reproductive strategies, which transformed the territory. Although construction usually involved the nuclear family, it was often a collaborative process between different families, with the exchange of tools and knowledge. Rosi, a Peruvian migrant in the Chilean settlement, recounts how her compatriots and neighbours helped them to install the roof of her house.
In contrast, in Villa 20 of Buenos Aires, these decommodification practices in relation to the construction of housing and public services precede the pandemic, linked to migratory flows that arrived in Argentina at different historical moments, first internally and then from neighbouring countries and Peru. 6 For example, Bolivian migrants who arrived around 2003 installed their own electricity and sewage networks, adapting to the precarious conditions of the neighbourhood:
I came here to Argentina in 2003 (. . .)
And when did you arrive here in Villa 20? do you remember more or less?
I don’t remember, but more or less around 2007 (. . .)
Did you have electricity in that little house in the 20?
Yes
Did you have a sewage system?
Yes we did, in the case of the sewage system we had to lay the pipe ourselves.
And where did the sewage network go? Did you have access to drinking water from any network?
Yes, we also had to install it ourselves.
And where did the water supply come into the house, anywhere in particular?
Yes, we had specific places . . . then we started to bring everything here into the house. For bathing and so on . . . for washing (. . .) Of course, later when we started to build we made our own networks . . . the shower, the kitchen (. . .) Yes, we did the same with the electricity, we know the techniques and what you have to know (. . .) Yes, we did it . . . we had to do everything and those who didn’t know had to learn (. . .) (Interview with Victor, Villa 20, 2022).
The pandemic only made visible and deepened the precarious urban housing conditions in this 90-year-old settlement. Irregular access to water, both in Villa 20 and in the Chilean settlement, with frequent water outages, became a daily survival practice during the pandemic, exposing the inhabitants to the disease.
In Villa 20, neighbourhood organisation to access water manifested itself through the mobilisation of residents by block, particularly led by migrant women, towards the city’s Ministry of Human Development and Habitat (MDHyH). This neighbourhood organisation, which has a history that predates the pandemic, demanded the provision of water in a decommercialised manner through water tankers. However, this provision of water drives an daily movement that was maintained during the pandemic within the framework of the slogan ‘Stay in the neighbourhood’. The following quotation illustrates neighbourhood organisation:
The tanker delivers water free of charge and passes by when they go to complain (. . .). The complaint is made by block. All the neighbours get together to complain (. . .). Almost the whole village is managed like this: (. . .) We take the water from the tanker and put it in the tank. Sometimes during the day there is no pressure, there is no water (Rosario, Villa 20, 2020).
The prominence of migrant women was also evident in the Chilean settlement during the pandemic. These women took on leadership roles in community organisation and the construction of community spaces, such as a neighbourhood centre and a football field. As Yohani (Altos-de-Placilla) mentions, lunch sales were held to raise funds to fix the streets and build the neighbourhood centre. For its construction, women were in charge of quoting and buying the materials, taking on tasks that were traditionally assigned to men. These common spaces have become so important that even Priscilla says that they are now the community meeting places for celebrating the new year.
This division of labour was especially noticeable among Haitian families, which tend to have a more traditional structure. From an intersectional perspective, the role of migrant women in connection with the habitat may challenge certain social classifications which underlie oppressive and dominating relationships, in terms of production and reproduction; but at the same time, it reinforces them, as women remain primarily responsible for community and care tasks, historically assigned according to gender.
In Chile, unlike Argentina, the state developed an implicit housing policy to mitigate the effects of the pandemic by enabling the withdrawal of 10% of pension funds. This measure mainly benefitted the active population in formal employment, excluding a large percentage of the migrant population, which has a high rate of informal employment and unemployment given the labour segmentation indicated. As a result, in the Chilean settlement, it was mainly Chilean inhabitants who were able to access these funds, which allowed them to advance in the construction of their houses. For example, Tomás reported that thanks to the 10% withdrawal, he was able to insulate his house from the cold and spend a more sheltered winter, while Paola used the money to finance irregular connections to basic services. Daniel, on the other hand, recounted how his construction progressed gradually as he got more money from the withdrawal, although these funds were quickly exhausted.
Thus, although the Chilean state’s decommodification policy reinforced the existing inequality and discrimination between the native population and racialised migrants, at the same time, it provided the material conditions for the self-construction of housing in the inner-city neighbourhoods of the Chilean population, constituting an implicit housing policy.
In summary, although the processes in the two case studies differ, both reveal a territorial configuration that transforms spaces and expresses ways of inhabiting and resisting in the face of the ineffectiveness and slowness of state policies to address structural or contextual problems, which the pandemic made visible and deepened. These processes also put gender roles relating to habitat under tension, highlighting how migrant women have assumed a fundamental role in urban management and community reproduction in highly precarious contexts.
Decommodification practices around the food crisis
This section explores family and community reproduction strategies around food during the pandemic, considering the family labour situations and the policies implemented in Argentina and Chile. In both countries, most of the population in inner-city neighbourhoods of informal origin work in informal and precarious jobs (IVC, 2016; Tapia et al., 2021), with labour segmentation accentuated by migration status, 7 gender and place of residence. Women, especially migrant women living in low-income neighbourhoods, have much lower employment rates than men – even compared to women living in formal neighbourhoods – which shows how inequalities are configured in an intersectional manner (Lepore, 2014) and lead to socio-territorial stigmatisation. The pandemic exacerbated these inequalities, leading to an increase in unemployment, especially among young women and migrants (Montt et al., 2020); although it should be noted that these inner-city neighbourhoods also concentrate an unemployed working population, with a strong presence of structural unemployment (IVC, 2016; Servicio Jesuita Migrante, 2023). In the pandemic, this situation led to a deepening of a pre-existing economic and food crisis in the inner-city neighbourhoods of both countries; a food emergency in Argentina has had the status of a law for more than 20 years.
In this context, pre-existing decommodification practices were reactivated. In Argentina, bartering – which had had its peak in the 2001 crisis – re-emerged as a community strategy, using social networks to exchange food and essential goods between different villas. For example, Ximena explained,
Barter exchange (. . .) you see, for example in the dining hall they give you biscuits, you exchange the biscuit for a nappy, or for sugar (. . .). They made groups on WhatsApp and there, you bartered (. . .) Yes, Villa 20, yes, it was from Bajo Flores, from Liniers.
These strategies ‘from below’ coexisted with decommodification policies implemented by the local government. The IVC, the body executing the redevelopment policy in Villa 20, created an COVID-19 Emergency Committee where health protocols were agreed upon and, as an IVC official pointed out (2020), ‘food and cleaning kits do not reach 100 percent of the families, a scoring logic was set up to establish priorities (. . .)’ with local representatives and organisations also active in the current redevelopment process.
In addition, food rations in community kitchens were increased, although only 36% of these kitchens are recognised by the local government. However, due to pandemic restrictions, community kitchen users could not use the community space provided but could only collect their meals with their respective masks, queuing in the street and/or on the sidewalk.
However, these decommodification policies came under tension with the commodified way in which the government acquired food rations, through concessionary companies denounced for cost overruns and poor nutritional quality. In this way, as Offe (1990) suggests, decommodification of life is not total, that is, it can take place at the consumption/circulation level and not necessarily at the production level.
In summary, in each of these policies, it was mainly community organisations, and especially migrant women, who managed the community kitchens and distributed the food. In this way, the role of migrant women in care tasks, whose practices extend from the domestic to the neighbourhood, stands out again, as part of social decommodification practices from ‘below’. Although these practices are not something new brought about by the pandemic, they became widespread in the framework of the described policies implemented. A neighbourhood leader stated that ‘earning one’s daily bread in normal economic conditions is already difficult, but in the context of the pandemic, the community kitchens cannot cope with so much demand’.
In Chile, the food security policy during the pandemic implemented a decommodification practice that sought a universal delivery of food boxes, reaching 82% of families in registered camps (TECHO and PUC, 2021). However, the food crisis was mainly managed through mutual solidarity, with self-managed community kitchens, without state support. Although the studied settlement did not benefit from food boxes or develop community kitchens, partly because of their recent formation, they did receive support from community kitchens in neighbouring areas. The community kitchens set up in the adjacent neighbourhoods saw the settlement grow and extended their deliveries in the territory, spreading their activities throughout the settlement. In their words:
When my mum told me ‘I’m not going to be able to go out to sell cheese anymore’. ‘OK, I’m going to go and talk to the soup kitchen’ I said, and I went to talk to a lady so that they would help us (. . .). Then I got soup kitchens that brought us food every day (. . .) (Yohani, Altos-de-Placilla, 2022).
The community kitchens in Chile have a long tradition there, as a form of collective and self-managed organisation (Hiner, 2011). Thus, while the community kitchens in Argentina received direct support from the state, the ones in Chile functioned through self-management for the provision of food. In both countries, the pandemic highlighted the importance of cash transfers as a top-down decommodification policy. In Argentina, the Ingreso Familiar de Emergencia (IFE; Emergency Family Income), a USD 36 voucher that was transferred three times during 2020 to the most vulnerable population, was added to previous benefits such as the Asignación Universal por Hijo (Universal Child Allowance) and the Tarjeta Alimentaria (Food Card). But access was limited, more than 80% of impoverished migrant families did not receive this income. In Chile, the COVID-19 voucher, which offered a one-time payment of US$80 for households in the most vulnerable 60%, and the IFE voucher for households with informal jobs for three months, benefitted less than 25% of migrant families. In both cases, there were various administrative obstacles related to the lack of ID cards (Gavazzo and Penchaszadeh, 2020; TECHO and PUC, 2021), among other reasons. Pedro from the Chilean settlement noted: ‘(. . .) Neither my wife nor I have documents, so what we do here is that she and I put our chests out and work for them (. . .)’. Furthermore, it can be linked to labour informality and the little time available to carry out paperwork. Rosario (Villa 20) said during the pandemic that ‘most of my neighbours are self-employed or work on the black and now they can’t go to work (. . .) they don’t have time to do the paperwork’.
In short, the food strategies developed by migrant households transform territories and re-appropriate common spaces (such as the street and the pavement). In Argentina, the territorialised food security policy shows greater state intervention in inner-city neighbourhoods, although not without contradictions and limitations; while in Chile, mutual solidarity predominated in the absence of direct state support, occupying public spaces and reconverting the land into housing and living spaces. Both cases reflect decommodification practices that, although limited, were essential for survival during the crisis.
Conclusion
This article examined the impact of the pandemic on migrant households in inner-city neighbourhoods of informal origin in two countries of the Global South, using an approach based on reproductive strategies and everyday practices of spatial production, through a mixed participatory methodology. In a context of uncertainty and multiple crises, a variety of decommodified community strategies emerged, which fell mainly on migrant, racialised and poor women, who took on an overload of care tasks, invisible and unpaid work. Inter-neighbourhood solidarity and solidarity between different migrant collectives were highlighted, as evidenced in the bartering between villas in Buenos Aires and the role of soup kitchens in Chile. In both cases, these practices went beyond the family cohesion described earlier and reactivated previous crisis strategies.
In CABA, the villas were the object of various assistance policies which, although insufficient, are decommodification practices articulated as governmental efforts with neighbourhood organisations to alleviate the economic and food crisis. In Chile, on the other hand, public policies were generalised, without a territorial focus on the settlements, which contributed to the rapid increase of new informal settlements (Déficit Cero and TECHO-Chile, 2024). The settlement studied in Chile did not receive specific state support, and migrant households’ strategies relied on solidarity networks, both internally and with other more established neighbourhoods. Unlike in Argentina, where some community kitchens receive state support, in Chile, resources came from self-management and private donations.
It is worth reflecting on the impact of the withdrawal of pension funds in Chile, a policy that benefitted impoverished citizens but excluded migrant households. The role of migrant women in both nations was key to reproductive strategies at the community level, standing out as an extension of family care tasks, but also showing tensions with traditional gender classifications, as in the case of Haitian families in Chile. These community practices are indicators of deepening of latent decommodification strategies in inner-city neighbourhoods during the pandemic in a context of scarce (to a greater or lesser extent) institutional support.
Following Federici (2010), it can be proposed that this situation puts the premises of capitalist modernity associated to the division between the public and the private in a state of tension, that is, between work and home or between productive and reproductive tasks, respectively. Finally, it is urgent to look more deeply into the different forms of discrimination suffered by the migrant population by the state (Chilean and Argentinean) in terms of access to state assistance and the necessary documentation. This enquiry includes an analysis of the production and reproduction of socio-territorial inequalities from an intersectional perspective, which is also expressed in the time deficit suffered by migrants and, in particular, by migrant women, given their working conditions and the overload of care tasks. These two elements are indicators present in the analysis that deserve to be explored in greater depth in future approaches.
Historically, populous settlements in Latin America have been dynamic, embracing demographic transformations, such as population growth due to migration. More recently, they have shown a proliferation of strategies and practices that reflect previous experiences and shared knowledge, oriented towards confronting the socio-sanitary crisis associated with COVID-19. The dynamics that occur within them deserve greater attention from policymakers from a perspective that is oriented towards the search for the ‘Right to the City’, as they would allow for the institutional resolution of certain contingent and emerging problems that housing policy does not usually address.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the interviewees who took part in this study. We are also grateful for the comments and suggestions made by the evaluators of this article, which have allowed us to deepen and clarify some of the issues raised.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Argentina – Agencia Nacional de Promoción de la Investigación, el Desarrollo Tecnológico y la Innovación- Proyectos de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (PICT 2019-00416): Movilidad, pobreza y hábitat popular. Dinámicas urbanas y laborales plurilocales de las familias migrantes en la Villa 20 y en el Playón Chacarita de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires en el marco de las políticas locales de reurbanización. Chile – ANID Fortalecimiento de Programas de Doctorado (Strengthening of Doctoral Programmes). Convocatoria (call) 2022 Folio 86220041 / ANID Fondecyt Iniciación Nº 11250556 (Fondecyt initiation).
