This accepted manuscript should be consulted in its

published version:

Stephen Buttes. “Shantytown Vistas and Immigrant

Voices: Bernardo Verbitsky, Kenneth Kemble and

the Art of Overcoming Peronism.” Revista de

Estudios Hispánicos 47 (2013): 267-290.

doi:10.1353/rvs.2013.0035

Direct link: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/510074

2

Shantytown Vistas and Immigrant Voices:

Bernardo Verbitsky, Kenneth Kemble and the Art of Overcoming Peronism

Este ensayo propone leer Villa Miseria también es América (1957) de Bernardo Verbitsky como

una propuesta para superar el binario político-afectivo de la revolución anti-peronista de la

década del 1950. En primer lugar, el ensayo argumenta que el personaje José Rodríguez,

estudiante de izquierda torturado por el régimen peronista, puede entenderse como un retrato del

artista comprometido. Luego, se establecen conexiones entre los intereses estéticos de este

personaje y los del movimiento de vanguardia informalista, haciendo hincapié en la serie de

collages Paisajes suburbanos (1958-61) de Kenneth Kemble. Al comparar los materiales que

componen los paisajes villeros que produce Kemble y los materiales que le interesan al

personaje, el ensayo afirma que Verbitsky privilegia los nuevos materiales culturales producidos

en la villa mediante las interacciones fragmentadas entre una comunidad de inmigrantes

paraguayos, hablantes del guaraní, y los migrantes argentinos hispanohablantes en la villa. La

presentación de estos nuevos materiales obliga a que los espectadores y los lectores superen su

tendencia a entender las villas miseria y los sectores populares dentro del “régimen emocional”

del (anti)peronismo y que interpreten en cambio esas mismas realidades mediante nuevas

categorías culturales que emergen de la nueva economía global de la Guerra Fría.

anti-peronismo, Bernardo Verbitsky, Kenneth Kemble, villa miseria, pobreza, realismo,

informalismo, vanguardia, afecto, nación, Paraguay, guaraní

anti-Peronism, Bernardo Verbitsky, Kenneth Kemble, shantytowns, poverty, Realism,

Informalism, avant-garde, affect, nation, Paraguay, Guaraní

3

Since the implementation of neoliberal economic reforms and the subsequent peso

devaluation crisis of late 2001, Argentina has seen the population of its villas miseria, or

shantytowns, increase dramatically.1 As these building blocks of our slum planet have continued

to stack up and out irregularly in what Beatriz Sarlo has called “una ordenanza municipal

cubista” (72), there has been no dearth of literary and cultural production depicting the new poor

populating these new neighborhoods. As scholars have convincingly made the case for studying

novel aspects to both the realities of urban poverty under late capitalism and the aesthetic modes

representing them, the growth of contemporary poverty studies has also led scholars to examine

more deeply the historical tropes and vocabularies of poverty’s past. Indeed, appearing alongside

the past decade of articles, chapters and books analyzing Argentina’s newest shantytown novels

has been a scholarship on the foundational texts of the country’s poverty aesthetics.2

This essay addresses perhaps the most famous of those “foundational fictions,” Bernardo

Verbitsky’s 1957 novel Villa Miseria también es América, a text that is often credited with

having given Argentine shantytowns their localized name.3 Verbitsky’s novel narrates the

struggles of a group of migrants from Argentina’s poor, rural Northern provinces and,

importantly for the argument I will make below, immigrants from Paraguay living in a villa

miseria in Greater Buenos Aires. Recent critical assessment of Verbitsky’s aesthetic approach

has generally fallen into one of two categories. On the one hand, some critics such as Laura

Podalsky argue that Verbitsky’s novel is “undermined by its dependence on residual political and

formalistic conventions” and note that as modernist novels of the 1960s crafted a “new

relationship between the reader and the narrative world,” Villa Miseria’s “claim to represent the

objective truth” made it “a relic” almost as soon as it was published (83-84).4 Other scholars,

however, embrace the novel’s pertinence to contemporary urban realities in Buenos Aires and

4

praise it as what Pedro Orgambide has described as a compilation of “señales premonitorias del .

. . aquí y ahora de este país en crisis,” a nexus of prescient social content and literary

achievement that make it “un hecho singular en nuestra literatura” (7).5 What this essay argues,

building on and questioning these recent re-evaluations of Verbitsky’s work, is that by

understanding the tensions between these two critical accounts, that is, by examining the novel’s

depiction of the Peronist past but also the creative energies of the villa’s immigrant community,

it is possible to read Verbitsky’s novel not only as a product of the anti-Peronist political and

cultural revolution of the late 1950s but also, and more importantly, as proposing a solution to

the period’s virulent political binaries.6

To this end, the essay will historically situate the text by first re-considering Verbitsky’s

aesthetic strategies through the lens of the novel’s thematization of the politically-committed

artist of the period, paying particular attention to the novel’s engagement with a major avant-

garde artistic approach gaining prominence in the late 1950s: Informalist visual art. Second, it

will examine the ways in which the novel frames the success of this aesthetic approach (which

can be understood as aesthetic modernization) as reliant upon the creative capacities of the

shantytown community. The paradoxical relationship the novel develops between representing

“la miseria” (Verbitsky 188) and harnessing the creative energies of the villas makes the broader

dialogues regarding aesthetics, national identity and modernity in post-Peronist Argentina central

to understanding the novel. Indeed, as I will show, the novel’s concern with these

representational strategies leads to a foregrounding not of the transformational potential of the

internationalist, class-based Socialist project highlighted by many scholarly accounts of the novel

but rather the transformational interactions between the Guaraní-speaking and Spanish-speaking

5

inhabitants of the villa, a collaborative “cultura de la pobreza” that emerges as the foundation of

an alternative, de-Peronized national popular subject (Orgambide 8).7

Tortured Collector: Verbitsky’s Portrait of the Anti-Peronist Artist

Though published in Buenos Aires in 1957, Verbitsky’s novel begins its central action in

1954, the waning days of Juan Domingo Perón’s administration (1946-1955), to draw a contrast

between shantytown life under Perón and the period following the Revolución Libertadora, the

military coup that toppled Perón’s government in 1955. Perón’s decade in power was

characterized by its “brusca incorporación de los sectores populares a ámbitos visibles,

anteriormente vedados” (Romero 118). This new visibility, of course, is most often associated

with the figure of the descamisado, the iconic participant in Peronist populism who arrived to the

city from the countryside to work in the city’s growing manufacturing industries. These new,

mostly mestizo urban residents benefited from the state’s generous social spending and filled the

stores, stadiums, theaters, parks and plazas of an expanding and prosperous capital city.

However, after the Navy’s bombing of the Plaza de Mayo in June 1955 and Perón’s exit from the

country later that year, the country’s liberal intellectuals, university students and middle and

upper classes, who vehemently opposed Perón during his administration, entered into what María

Estela Spinelli has called a state of “euforia antiperonista” as the military governments of the

Revolución Libertadora sought to end this populist participation and visibility (193). They

slashed social spending, joined the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, proscribed

the Peronist Party, engaged in onerous censorship of the popular press and brutally repressed the

labor movement. These actions of anti-Peronist “euforia,” as Luis Alberto Romero notes,

cemented a social division along the lines of an emotional identification with or against

6

Peronism: “[L]a indisoluble identificación de los trabajadores con el peronismo, fuerte antes de

1955, [fue] definitivamente sellada después de esa fecha” (135).8

In spite of these affective ties, the contrast that Verbitsky draws between the periods in

his novel is not that the anti-popular measures taken by the post-Peronist military governments

reduced the visibility of his shantytown dwellers but rather that Perón’s populist government had

done so. Indeed, life in the shantytown during Perón’s administration is described in the novel as

an “etapa de . . . existencia vergonzante y secreta ” while the years following the Revolución

Libertadora were a period in which the inhabitants of the shantytown “de pronto ‘existían’

públicamente” (187). Argentine history is no doubt filled with contradictions such as these, but it

is nevertheless striking, and important to ask, why a text like Villa Miseria comes as reaction to

Peronism. Indeed, why does Verbitsky characterize a period of intense repression of the popular

sectors as a propitious moment for examining the realities of the urban poor living in the city’s

villas miseria? Or, to put the question slightly differently, why was making urban poverty visible

compatible with anti-Peronism?

As I’ve noted, Peronist populism achieved unparalleled success in developing affective

ties of identification between its state apparatus and the mostly mestizo popular sectors who were

its supporters and intended beneficiaries. Yet, in the second half of Perón’s administration, the

focus of the government was less on the expansion of the social sphere and more on the

organization and direction of Argentina’s new populist national culture. This shift in emphasis

from inclusion to organization, as Ernesto Laclau notes, was mirrored by a changing symbolic

imaginary in the latter years of Peronism in which the “descamisado . . . tended to disappear, to

be replaced by the image of the ‘organized community’” (214). This took shape in the publishing

of attractive photographic promises of monoblockes ‘multi-family housing units’ and single

7

family units that would house working class families in modern planned urban communities like

the famous Ciudad Evita.9 However, as the Argentine economy entered into crisis in 1949 as it

began to feel the effects of the post-World War II re-organization of the global financial system,

the government found itself unable to build housing at a rate that would meet the demand of new

immigrants to the city. Thus the Peronist promise of monoblockes met its material contradiction

in the realities of the villas miseria, which the populist government could not eliminate or

ameliorate because of its position on the margins of the new Cold War capitalist economy.10

Verbitsky’s novel articulates this dual phenomenon of unfulfilled populist promises and

global economic realities in at least two ways. First, the novel attempts to situate Argentine

social realities in the frame of the shifting international economic relations of the Cold War by

foregrounding the importance of the villa’s community of Paraguayan immigrants. It relates in

detail very early in the novel the arrival of Galeano and his family (all former agricultural

laborers) who join a large community of Paraguayan immigrants who fled the disastrous effects

that the conclusion of the Korean War carried for Paraguay’s economy.11 Perhaps more

importantly, Verbitsky chooses to make his novelistic voice of Socialism the Guaraní-speaking

organizer Fabián. Yet, while the novel maintains the importance of the presence of the

Paraguayan community in the shantytown, Villa Miseria does not lose its focus on the limits of

the nation’s populist promises. Indeed, Verbitsky tracks the disillusionment of some of the

shantytown’s Argentine inhabitants who begin the novel expressing their dreams of moving into

monoblockes only to find those dreams transformed into bitter complaints in the middle of the

novel as Perón’s government built muros ‘walls’ to hide their neighborhood from street view.

The emphasis Verbitsky’s novel places on the construction of muros rather than

monoblockes has often drawn the interest of critics, given that it links the novel to a broader

8

tradition of anti-Peronist cultural production in which “[s]hantytowns were portrayed as the

ultimate example of the failure of Peronist populism during the 50s . . . ” (Auyero and Swistun

22). The Paraguayan immigrant community, on the other hand, has received less critical attention

and has generally been treated as incidental to Verbitsky’s commitment to Socialism. However,

what becomes clear as the novel progresses is that the novel can be read as not only interested in

articulating the economic failures of the past but also in exploring the ways in which Fabián’s

organizing of the cultural interactions in the villa might be understood in the terms of an

aesthetic model, “[una] maquette embarrada de otra capital de la República” (52), which evokes

a creative path towards a post-Peronist (and de-Peronized) future. In this way, the novel

constructs a link between the technologies of representation that took the villa as their object of

interest and the “voces diversas” that would replace the Peronist “monólogo” after the

Revolución Libertadora (186). Indeed, the novel not only stages the ways in which the villa’s

“existencia vergonzante y secreta” becomes publicly known but also the centrality of the diverse

identities of those who would create the materials from which the image of the post-Peronist

nation might be constructed (187): “[L]os paraguayos” and “los argentinos que . . . rechazaban y

discutían [la voz de Perón]” (186).

As mentioned above, Verbitsky’s novel focuses on the ways in which Fabián’s

organization of the newly arrived Paraguayans and the disillusioned Argentines might be

understood as a “maquette embarrada” of an alternative capital city has most often been treated

as an instance of the novelist’s Socialist positions without a consideration of the aesthetic

language used to describe the villa (52). This may be attributed in part to the fact that it is not

Fabián himself who recognizes the aesthetic aspects of his organizational efforts. These emerge

instead through the description of Fabián’s work by one of the novel’s anti-Peronist Argentine

9

voices: José Rodríguez, a leftist middle-class student who, having participated in a strike by

workers in an anti-Peronist labor union, was subjected to electric torture with the picana by the

Peronist police force and was left for dead in a ditch off la Avenida General Paz near Villa

Miseria.12 Living in the shantytown and developing a close relationship with Fabián and other

members of the community, Rodríguez, who is usually referred to by his nickname El

Espantapájaros ‘the Scarecrow,’ undergoes a transformation as he emerges as an artist with a

political commitment to depict life in Villa Miseria.

At first glance, however, the novel’s description of Rodríguez doesn't feel like a portrait

of an artist, but rather the story of “[un] loco” (62), a sort of ciruja-flâneur who seems to be

driven by the irrational impulses of madness as he periodically leaves the villa to wander the city

in the rain.13 It becomes clear, however, that there is a logic structuring his seemingly aimless

strolls. Indeed, guiding himself by “indicios,” “referencias mínimas,” “la suerte” and “el

instinto” (61), he discovers the existence of at least a dozen villas miseria, which, as he notes,

“se ofrecía[n] como para una foto” (62).14 As Rodríguez begins mentally compiling “una lista”

of the locations of these villas (61), he gains a sense of mission that takes shape in his desire to

make their “existencia . . . secreta” (187) publicly known through a collection of these camera-

ready neighborhoods:

No quería otra cosa que continuar en el subsuelo de la existencia y su única

ocupación posible, para la que sin duda nació, era la de coleccionar los barrios de

las latas. Los había encontrado hasta en pleno centro de la ciudad. Cerca de

Constitución, en Garay, entre Chacabuco y Perú; en el corazón de Belgrano yendo

por la calle Sucre; sobre la General Paz, dentro de la Capital, a pocas cuadras de

Rivadavia. ¿Acaso hubiera sospechado jamás la existencia de tales lugares? Y

10

hallarlos y reunirlos, era su nueva felicidad secreta, y no pensaba renunciar a ella.

(98)

Described as this collector who discovers a secret happiness in to finding certain objects and

gathering them together to show to others, we see Rodríguez, the tortured “genio de la Basura”

(64), convert his mania into a method of making artworks, a process geared toward collecting

these neighborhoods made of discarded building materials and organizing them for later display

so that, as he puts it, “esto se hará público algún día” (63). As his mission to make his collection

public emerges, it becomes clear that Rodríguez is not simply a maniacal collector but rather an

artist who will organize the memories, stories and materials he gathers from Fabián, the

Paraguyan immigrants and Argentine migrants into a “maquette,” an aesthetically constructed

model of an alternative and future Buenos Aires.

However, if the aesthetic motivations behind his wanderings among the villas miseria

become clear as the novel progresses, why compiling this collection of the city’s secrets should

also produce his happiness remains more elusive. Indeed, given that what he finds when he finds

Villa Miseria is that “la humillación que le habían causado a él aplicándole la picana a los

genitales era la misma que soportaba esa gente diariamente” (97), it seems highly strange for him

to claim that a collection of shantytowns would make him happy. If it is in fact true that the

experience of living in a shantytown is equivalent to his experiences as a victim of the Peronist

state’s violence, then the question we began with—why was representing poverty compatible

with anti-Peronism?—is doubled by another, perhaps more curious one: why does his collection

of the humiliation and misery produced by poverty make him happy? Or, to put the question in a

more general form, why would artworks made from poverty make anyone happy?

11

Kemble’s Collaged Landscapes and Rodríguez’s Collected Voices

This puzzling question, which is central to understanding Verbitsky’s novel, is one that

also must have circulated amid conversation in the cafés of the elegant Retiro neighborhood in

Buenos Aires as members of the city’s elite left the Lirolay and Pizarro art galleries after viewing

works created by another shantytown collector: the Informalist artist Kenneth Kemble. Like

Verbitsky, who spent months in the villas gathering the material that would form the basis of his

novel, Kemble also would have been a familiar figure in the shantytowns of the late 1950s.

Spending three years (1956-59) collecting pieces of rusty sheet metal, burlap, old wood,

fragments of cans, wires, blankets and other various materials from Córdoba’s villas miseria,

Kemble, like Rodríguez, sought to make public the existence of these neighborhoods by

displaying his collection of shantytown materials in the form of artworks “inspirado[s] en las

viviendas construidas con esos mismos materiales, tan tristemente abundantes en la extensión de

nuestro país” (Kemble, La gran ruptura 182). By briefly digressing, then, to examine the works

Kemble created from his collection of shantytown materials, the origins of Rodríguez’s aesthetic

euphoria in the materials made by the Paraguayan immigrant community will become clear.

Creating a series of collages called Paisajes suburbanos, Kemble aimed to organize his

shantytown collection on the model of Spanish and Italian practitioners of Informalism who

sought to renew avant-garde art by taking up new, non-traditional media and by returning to the

Cubist and Dadist techniques of collage and montage.15 Though the content of Kemble’s collages

might have paired them with the successful anti-Peronist shantytown works appearing in movie

theaters and bookstores, his collections were initially rejected by all of the city’s prestigious art

galleries because he had made use of “estos materiales tan desgradables en vez del óleo” and

12

because however interesting the pieces may be “Buenos Aires no está todavía madura para tales

cosas” (Kemble 182).

This sentiment emerged from what must have seemed a contradiction: abstract art

constructed with the newest, modern European artistic techniques and yet made with these

“materiales . . . desagradables” (182), which carried a trace of their use by shantytown dwellers

who, in the minds of his middle and upper class viewers, were still associated with Peronist

populism. If the shantytowns were embraced as a contradiction to the country’s populist past,

their centrality to Kemble’s project of aesthetic modernization, that is, their presence at the

center of Argentina’s future was most certainly unwelcome. Indeed, far from making his viewers

happy, these collages had the effect of producing “asociaciones desagradables” (182). Yet, as

Kemble explains in the catalogue accompanying his second gallery show, his intention in using

these materials wasn’t to evoke anger or disgust over the misery and humiliation of poverty that

they called to mind but rather to make art out of them. In plastering pieces of an sheet metal or

old wood into a geometric collage as he does in Paisaje suburbano II (1958) or Paisaje

suburbano (1961), Kemble emphasizes that his is an aesthetic project: “[L]o único que estaba

haciendo era mostrar la belleza de elementos humildes en un arte figurativo por excelencia,

producto de nuestra tierra” (182).16

In converting “elementos muy humildes” into these modern figurations of national beauty

(182), Kemble sought to defeat the “asociaciones desagradables” they seemed to evoke. Rather

than seeing these collections as simply a pile of ruined and discarded objects that make the

viewer “sadly” aware that these neighborhoods were “abundant” throughout the country, Kemble

sought to create viewers who could instead “ver pintura” ‘see art’ and thereby see in these

pictures of urban poverty that beauty can be made from the humble (182), that art can be made

13

from discarded found objects, and that a “universal and contemporary language” (qtd. in Giunta:

115, italics in original) can emerge from the elements one finds in the provincial slums of

Córdoba. By interpreting modern art rather than responding to the disagreeable affect of objects

evoking Peronist associations, Kemble hoped these collages would not only “create a new public

capable of appreciating modern art” but would also make Buenos Aires itself “an international

artistic center” (Giunta 69).

Seen in this way, Kemble’s goal of an internationalist redesign of the capital—which is

predicated upon being able to see the aesthetic potential of the “elementos humildes” he found

and organized for public display in his collaged collections of shantytowns (Kemble 182)—can

be paired with Rodríguez’s own vision of a “maquette embarrada” of an alternative capital city

(Verbitsky 52), an image that emerges from his mission to find, order and make public the

country’s sheet metal neighborhoods. Indeed, as we will see, Rodríguez’s collection has much in

common with Kemble’s collections of sheet metal and wood that create a “new public” capable

of overcoming the anti-Peronist feelings and emotions those materials evoked (Giunta 69).

However, it is important to note that critics have traditionally drawn a distinction between

Kemble’s Informalist concern with new materials that would modernize the national art scene

and Verbitsky’s interest in the poverty of the villas miseria and the social problems associated

with it. Indeed, as art historian Andrea Giunta has argued, because Kemble’s “principal concern

was with materials more than with the theme itself” the distinction that emerges between

Verbitsky and Kemble “is the distance between the fragment and the complete narration” (88-

89).17 In other words, in Giunta’s reading, Kemble’s collages are divested of political and social

content: viewers need simply see a geometrically constructed collage of sheet metal and wood,

images that allude and provide solutions to problems at the level of aesthetic form. Verbitsky’s

14

novel, on the other hand, is committed to representing the detailed realities of the villa and its

residents’s coping strategies: “[T]he forms of organization, solidarity, conditions of subsistence,

and the irreparable social consequences” (Giunta 88).

Giunta’s distinction between the “fragment” and the “complete narration” seems to be

suggested by the final image of the villa that Rodríguez gathers for his collection as he is leaving

the neighborhood to return home at the end of the novel. Though in this scene he likens the vista

of the villa to “un cuadro cubista” (Verbitsky 229), an aesthetic language that dialogues with

Informalism’s neo-Cubist practice, Rodríguez signals that his collection might remain

incomplete if he incorporated only those materials which would constitute something like

Kemble’s collages:

Las casillas sobresalían aquí irregularmente, hasta cerrar la perspectiva con el

amontonamiento de sus aristas, como en un cuadro cubista. Pero la geometría

cubista es escueta y estricta y este aborto de calle con sus charcos, y sus

desperdicios, embanderada de ropa tendida, estaba además repleta de chicos,

algunos desnuditos, de gente que formaba en la cola de la bomba, de los que

tomaban mate en la puerta de su casa y parecían estar en medio de la desordenada

multitud. Más adelante el barrio esparcíase, chato pero abierto. Una casilla muy

bien construida, con un porche interior que daba a la calle, tenía delante un

maloliente charco verdoso, es decir, anterior a la última lluvia. Paradas en su

borde, dos mujeres conversaban sin fijarse en este contorno lagunero. Linda

Venecia del barrial. (229)

As Rodríguez’s description makes clear, a geometric organization of the shantytown’s building

materials alone—rags, burlap, sheet metal and wood—fails to give expression to the

15

“desordenada multitud” (229) of children, gossiping women and old men sipping mate. In other

words, while Kemble’s project is motivated by the possibility of seeing modern art instead of

objects with traces of Peronist identification, what motivates Rodríguez is the possibility of

collecting the details of the political, social and economic conflicts expressed by those disordered

voices: the global shift in cotton prices that devastated farm work in Paraguay, which some

discuss over mate; the peril posed to the neighborhood by persistent flooding and the planned

response to be carried out by the villeros’s democratically organized neighborhood commission,

which might enter the conversation with the gossiping women; or the ways that the young

children satiate their hunger not by filling their stomachs but rather by sucking on stale bread and

cling-stone fruits since their families were economically unable to provide a more substantial

meal.

And yet, while Rodríguez’s collection is constituted of these details of economic and

social conflicts that exceed a concern with simply gathering new materials, his collection, like

Kemble’s, requires viewers to move beyond the political divisions that were created by

opposition to or support of the “‘emotional regime’ of Peronism” (Seveso 244), emotions that

these shantytown materials would no doubt evoke given Rodríguez’s stated link between seeing

these neighborhoods and being reminded of the pain and humiliation associated with the Peronist

state’s treatment of its opposition. Indeed, in his collection of villas miseria “[se] [p]erdía sentido

el matiz político que transitoriamente podía dividirlos. En la realidad, tal como la estaba

viviendo, la gente triunfa sobre la suciedad, sobre la sordidez, sobre todas las formas de lo

miserable” (230). Rodríguez, in other words, sought shantytown materials that, like the sheet

metal and wood of Kemble’s collages, would require anti-Peronist viewers of the middle and

upper classes to overcome the “matiz político” (230) that could emerge from their associations of

16

the urban poor with Peronism but at the same time would maintain the detailed presence of the

economic and social conflicts that constitute shantytown life.

As mentioned previously, the solution to this conundrum lies in the creative capacity of

the villa’s community of Paraguayan immigrants. As Verbitsky’s novel makes clear, the

Guaraní-speaking inhabitants of the villa not only transform shantytown objects, such as sheet

metal and wood, into dwellings that inspire both Kemble and Rodríguez, but they also effect a

transformation of the Spanish-speaking Argentine migrants. Indeed, if the internationalization

(or, given the title of the novel, Americanization) of the villa is foregrounded from the first pages

of the text in order to highlight that urban poverty is the result of both the structural nature of the

new Cold War capitalist economy and the failure of Peronist populism, what becomes clear is

that Verbitsky’s novel, through Rodríguez’s aesthetic engagement, can be read as committed to

linking that economic condition to specific embodiments. “[N]o hablemos sólo de sistemas,”

Rodríguez says as he is leaving the villa to return to “su mundo de antes” (229): “El sistema se

encarna en seres humanos” (230).

This internal materialization of impoverishment in the bodies and voices that exceed the

geometric organization of the Informalist collage is also externalized in the ways in which the

Paraguayan inhabitants of the villa re-shape the local language and culture. The Guaraní-

speaking immigrants produce a sort of linguistic evidence of this system as Spanish is literally

transformed by Paraguayan bodies:

[L]o articulaban confusamente, como si tuvieran todos . . . la boca llena de

piedras. Su castellano era monosilábico, y les brotaba sin fluidez como si

arrojaran intermitentemente, más que palabras, esquirlas de quebracho. No porque

17

el guaraní fuese duro, sino porque así transformaban el castellano en su garganta,

instrumento de un solo registro. (209)

The materiality of these monosyllables—these words that were more like stones and shards of

wood—emerge as the basis of Rodríguez’s collection, objects that register the realities of poverty

in their every detail but at the same time, like the wood and metal in Kemble’s collages, must be

understood beyond the affective limits of Peronism.

Organizing his collection of these words made wood and stone by Guaraní-speaking

throats and mouths, he can overcome the violence that had been unleashed on his body by the

Peronist state by constructing his “maquette” of an alternative capital city with materials that

emerge not from the Argentine descamisado but rather the Paraguayan “[p]uynandí [sic]”

‘barefoot revolutionaries’ (52).18 Seeing “todos hablando en guaraní animadamente,”

“[Rodríguez] sonrió” (208), providing an answer to the questions we’ve been pursuing in this

essay. Making artworks from poverty makes him happy because, as he puts it, these words of

wood “le parecía[n] el camino más seguro para internarse en alguna verdad americana a la que

de otro modo fuera tal vez imposible llegar” (208). In short, Rodríguez’s aesthetic euphoria

emerges from the shantytown’s American truth that shows that the country is part of a broader

international economic system. In this way, the representation of poverty provides the condition

of possibility for constructing a creative path towards a post-Peronist (and de-Peronized) future,

an artwork that supersedes the binary of Peronism and anti-Peronism: “[una] maquette

embarrada de otra capital de la República, porque Villa Miseria es Villa Trabajo, y Villa Trabajo

es la capital de cualquier país de la tierra” (52).

18

Crafting a Culture of Poverty

Seen in this way, Rodríguez’s aesthetic model situates a curious paradox at the center of

the novel. On the one hand, his collected collage is constructed from the details of immigrant

lives, from the misery emerging from the voices recounting the universal story of the global

capitalist system. On the other hand, however, Rodríguez highlights the centrality of the

particularities of those Guaraní voices, their creational transformations of Spanish and the

material access these provide to an American truth that would remain unavailable through an

examination of class structures alone. In other words, the novel is deeply concerned with whether

what Rodríguez’s collection makes public is the misery and humiliation of poverty or the villas’s

creative capacities, with whether his collection should be seen as an interchangeable instance of

international processes of exploitation or whether the villas are portrayed as a local and unique

situation of solidarity emerging from the particularities of the Argentine national situation. This

conundrum finds its explanation in the ways in which Fabián’s political organization of the

villeros dovetails with Rodríguez’s aesthetic project.

As the novel’s voice of Socialism, Fabián consistently attempts to articulate the structural

nature of the capitalist system: “Los salteños van a Buenos Aires, los indios y los bolivianos

ocupan el lugar de los salteños. . . . Nada se movería sin ellos…o sin nosotros” (216). In this

way, the novel spends a great deal of time exploring how Fabián attempts to rearticulate the

Argentine residents’s misinterpretations and misplaced complaints within this international

capitalist context. For example, Argentine racism—e.g. “[l]os salteños decían que los bolivianos

no se bañaban y que olían mal por el sudor y la coca”—is replaced by a class explanation: “Los

bolivianos serán sucios, pero en aquellos pagos nadie se pasa de limpio” (215). Their nostalgia

for an agriculturally based oligarchic order—e.g. “en Urundel [yo vivía en] casa de madera, tenía

19

piso. Y había patio y fondo, y en el fondo frutales, una parra”—is replaced by public health

realities: “[P]ero sus chicos se enferman de paludismo en Salta” (221-22). And their isolationist

individualism—e.g. “Cada uno puede atender a lo suyo ¿No les parece?”—is replaced with

collective improvements to the neighborhood: “[E]l trabajo en común, en equipo y con

conciencia de que formaban una comunidad, era lo único que podía salvarlos” (17). These

collective improvements imply a remaking of the shantytown landscape by “[r]ellenando los

bajos” and “quemando la basura” and are posed as the shantytown’s salvation by developing a

sense of solidarity (20).

His strategies for constructing this solidarity, however, lie elsewhere than a traditional

Marxist vocabulary of class struggle or a revolutionary seizure of the means of production. For

example, when Benítez—a reactionary Argentine villero who rejects “la presencia de Fabián y

sus ideas” (17)—challenges the push for collective improvements to the neighborhood by

accusing Fabián of working for the owner of the land where the villa had been constructed,

Fabián defuses the situation by allowing his close friend and collaborator, Ramos, another

Paraguayan immigrant, to dismiss Benítez’s complaints by asserting that, “Si esto piensa de…—

iba a decir ‘de un compañero’, pero como hablaba con lentitud tuvo tiempo de decir…—de

nosotros, es mejor que no colabore” (19). Ramos’s explicit suppression of an appeal to a leftist

political identification in favor of the vague “nosotros” is a strategy often repeated by Fabián

himself in his organizational efforts. Indeed, in noting that he believes that “hablando se entiende

la gente” and that through conversation and the construction of the neighborhood “lo hacemos

nuestro, al lugar” (19-20), Fabián asserts that the focus of villeros’s attention should not be

“alguna base juridical de posesión sino . . . [definir y proponer] una actitud a que lo impulsaba su

modo natural de ser. Tenía confianza en ese y en todo trabajo que pudieran realizar juntos” (20).

20

By focusing on the creation of community from “su modo natural de ser,” which leads them to

work together, rather than critiquing the structures of ownership and their juridical basis (20),

Fabián makes it clear that solidarity will not be formed by fomenting class antagonisms but

rather through creating a space that fosters intercultural understanding among the poor, or, as

Fabián puts it, “[una] conciencia de que formaban una comunidad” (17, my emphasis).

In the Americanized villa, traditional national enmities—“aquella guerra [de 1870] que

nosotros [los paraguayos] seguimos recordando. . . . ,” a war that devastated Paraguay and left

both countries with the legacy of chauvinistic nationalism—have given way to solidarity as

community forms over a common set of images, stories and experiences like, for example,

“[cuando] hablaban con elogio de los cracks que de Asunción trajo Boca, y alguno más viejo

recordaba . . . su primera presentación en un campeonato sudamericano cuando ganaron a los

uruguayos. . . .” (51). As the migrants and immigrants share these memories and narrate to each

other their experiences of poverty and exploitation, the Paraguayan immigrants come to

recognize that “los argentinos entre quienes trabajaban no les habían mostrado nunca enemistad,

ni les habían hecho sentir que los consideraban, no ya enemigos, ni siquiera extranjeros” (51).

National and political divisions, which might have prevented community formation and at times

make the unity of the community a difficult goal to achieve, are overcome through the

construction of the neighborhood, communal dialogue and the development of a democratic

council as a way of making collective decisions. Overcoming old national enmities in order to

produce a multi-national, multilingual, democratic community is at the center of Fabián’s

project: “No basta nacer en el mismo suelo [porque] [h]ay algo distinto que une o separa a los

hombres” (52).

21

At the same time, however, it is important to note, that in the novel this “algo distinto,”

i.e. class, does not eliminate national differences. Rather, recognizing the commonalities of

poverty makes it possible to create a space for interaction and dialogue in which intercultural

understanding leads to recognizing, accentuating and appreciating the differences between the

various groups, fostering an affirmation, rather than elimination, of cultural difference. Indeed, in

recognizing that whether one is from Argentina or from Paraguay every inhabitant of the villa

faces poverty, it becomes clear that the only thing distinguishing one resident from another is

culture (e.g. music from Salta that the Argentine migrant Godoy identifies “orgullosamente” (52)

to those from Paraguay or food preparations from Paraguay taught to Argentine women by an

immigrant named Elba (123). In short, the differences between the various groups in the villa are

divested of conflict, marking the difference between Paraguayan and Argentine as simply that

“unos toman el mate dulce y otros amargo, nada más” (52). These differences, the recognition of

which is made possible by articulating class structures and opening a space for intercultural

dialogue rather than international conflict, lead the inhabitants of the villa to recount their stories

to each other and compare their preferences and experiences. And it is precisely these cultural

differences that interest a collector like Rodríguez, who listens to their conversations in the

background.

Rodríguez’s aesthetic project, which is predicated upon collecting the differences and

details of the shantytowns, produces the comparison, and therefore distinction, between

Argentina and Paraguay as crucially important for the novel. For example, following Fabián’s

previously cited explanation of capitalism, in which Bolivian workers arrive in Salta’s sugar cane

fields to replace Argentine workers who migrate to Buenos Aires, Rodríguez acknowledges the

explanation but then asks: “Éste es nuestro país . . . y el de ustedes, Fabián, ¿cómo es? ¿Y por

22

qué dicen que la tierra del Paraguay es roja? ¿Cómo es de roja?” (217). Fabián responds not by

asserting his Communist beliefs, as the reference to the color red might suggest, nor does he

explore the similarities between the countries by comparing, say, the lumber camps of Paraguay

to Argentina’s sugar cane fields. Rather, he narrates what he calls “la tragedia de un pueblo:” the

brutality, mutilations and other atrocities he witnessed as a Communist during their uprising in

the Paraguayan Civil War (1947). Summing up his detailed account of hunger, of young girls

forced into prostitution by their mothers in order to feed the family, of the decapitated bodies of

young male revolutionaries put on display by the government, he ends his narration by noting

that, “[d]espués de todo esto . . . ha de ser más fácil comprender cómo es el color rojo de la tierra

paraguaya, U-uí Pytá, tierra colorada” (219).

This expression of hunger, exploitation and violence, that is, of Paraguay’s national

tragedy into the Guaraní words “U-uí Pytá,” ‘red earth’ links back to Rodríguez’s desire to

construct a maquette of an alternative and future Buenos Aires from elements adapted from the

Paraguayan poor who exceed the associations of Peronist populism.19 Seen in this way,

Rodríguez’s collection—comprised of lists of shantytown locations, camera-ready images, words

of wood and stone and earth—emerges as a collage of fragmented new materials. Rather than

something like the “complete narration” mentioned by Giunta or the “objective truth” suggested

by Podalsky, these fragments of American truth and Paraguayan reality are meant to interrupt

and draw attention to the fictionality of both Peronist and anti-Peronist discourses about the villa

miseria and as such require viewers and readers to see beyond Peronist possibility: to see a

model for an alternative national popular project.

23

With this explanation, Rodríguez’s aesthetic project finally comes into view. What he

(and Verbitsky) imagine is a collection of shantytowns in which each sheet metal neighborhood

would be a province of a continent or civilization of the poor:

[P]odía ahora agregar todo el Paraguay a su colección de barrios de las latas, que

sumados constituían un continente, una civilización. ¿Y por qué no Bolivia? Y

habría que seguir explorando hacia el norte, rumbo a uno y otro océano. Paraguay

era apenas un sector de ese mundo, una provincia del gran imperio de los ranchos.

América sube airosa en el cemento y se hunde en todas las formas de la tapera y

la cueva. (211)

In other words, these provincial articulations of poverty come to be understood as different

(national) cultural expressions, a patria grande de la pobreza. Indeed, in acknowledging that this

“maquette emabarrada” is constructed from “a fragment of that other world” (Gorelik 68), some

critics have understood Verbitsky as “setting for ‘European Buenos Aires’ an American goal”

(62). As we’ve seen throughout this essay, however, the reality fragments of Paraguayan culture

do not function as a way to understand “todo el Paraguay” nor do they present it as an American

model that should be emulated. Indeed, as Fabián points out “[a]cá no pueden comprenderlo”

(211). Rather, the villa is framed as a de-Peronizing space, productive of new democratic cultural

materials that could be constructed to supersede the affective political binary of Peronism and

anti-Peronism as the villa is renewed with “una correntada de cabecitas negras,” with “el

permanente aluvión desde el norte ” (254, 255).20

Notes

24

1 As Javier Auyero and Débora Alejandra Swistun note,

[f]rom 2001 to 2006, the number of people living in slums, shantytowns and

squatter settlements in Greater Buenos Aires almost doubled, rising from fewer

than 639,000 to more than 1.14 million. In the same time frame, the number of

settlements rose from less than four hundred to a thousand. According to [María

Cristina] Cravino’s [2007] estimates, 10 percent of the population of the Greater

Buenos Aires metropolitan area now lives in informal settlements. (23)

2 For scholars explaining novel aspects of contemporary realities of poverty, see, for example,

Denning, Davis, and Auyero and Swistun. For critics dealing with new aesthetic modes

representing villas miseria, see, for example, Niebylski, Bilbija, Horne, Dufays and Noemí. See

Forcadell’s thesis for an analysis of the changes in (and persistence of) the tropes surrounding

the depiction of the poor in twentieth-century Argentine cultural and literary production.

3 For a discussion of Verbitsky’s claim to the term, see Escardó (225).

4 For the best examples of criticism in this vein, see in addition to Podalsky, Perilli and Viñas.

5 For the best examples of criticism in this vein see in addition to Orgambide, Tissera and

Gorelik.

6 This essay seeks to build, in particular, on important recent studies such as Forcadell, Giunta,

Gorelik, Perilli, Podalsky and Tissera.

7 Orgambide borrows the term “cultura de la pobreza” from anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s work

with poor families in Mexico City during the 1950s and 1960s. Lewis published his first findings

on the “culture of poverty” in Five Families and later elaborated the study in the (in)famous The

Children of Sánchez (1961). Lewis’s work is being re-examined by contemporary

25

anthropologists and historians. See Rosemblatt for a history of the term’s reception and Gorelik

for its relationship to urban development in an inter-American context.

8 As César Seveso has noted, this identification both with and against Peronism was structured

by affect, or what he calls, “emotional cultures of political actions” (241). Verbitsky’s novel, I

argue here, can be read as an attempt to overcome these affective identifications by imagining

the creation of an artwork that incorporated fragments of Paraguayan culture, which both

transformed local Argentine culture and would require his viewers to see a culture that exceeded

the limits of the Peronist/anti-Peronist binary.

9 Ciudad Evita is a suburb of Buenos Aires that was constructed and opened in 1947. It

incorporated not only housing for working-class families but also churches, schools and

hospitals.. In Perón’s second Plan de Gobierno (1950), images of the housing units and the

organization of neighborhoods are prominently displayed, a point taken up by critics such as

Lucas Demare in his famous anti-Peronist film Detrás de un largo muro.

10 As the global capitalist economy was re-configured, re-ordered and rebooted in the years

following World War II with the creation of the Bretton Woods system (1944), the Justicialist

third way was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as a viable alternative to capitalism.

Perón shifted away from the social policies of his first five years to policies that were more

amenable to the new global capitalist system. See Romero (124) and Brennan and Rougier (61)

for a detailed discussion.

11 Galeano explains how the Korean War increased speculation on cotton prices and how the

government encouraged farmers to plant as much as possible. The Armistice was signed, and

prices plummeted, leaving many in debt or unpaid for their labor. According to the novel, almost

25% of the Paraguayan population was living in Argentina in the early 1950s.

26

12 According to Graciela Tissera, the figure of Espantapájaros is based on “el caso Bravo,” the

forced disappearance of a Communist student by the Peronist government in 1951, a student who

later re-appeared, claiming to have been tortured by the Peronist police force (212). The picana

is a modified cattle prod that is charged with high levels of electricity in order to torture subjects of

interrogations, and it was widely used throughout the Southern Cone and Andean regions during

the various military dictatorships from the 1930s through the 1980s. The picana was also widely

used in the villas miseria as a device to control vermin infestations, hence the women’s nightly

patrols that Rubén Benítez depicts in his novel Ladrones de luz (1959). For a discussion of the

relationship between discourses of anti-torture, human rights and neoliberalism, see DiStefano.

13 Flâneur has become a well-worn term in urban theory which refers to one who exists within

the city but strolls with enough distance to be attuned to aesthetic and social insights. Ciruja is

the older of two Argentine terms for trash or rubbish pickers. Upon Rodríguez’s arrival to Villa

Miseria, “[él] [s]e imaginaba su horroroso aspecto. Debía parecer el arquetipo de los cirujas, el

espíritu de la Quema, el barbudo genio de la Basura” (64). There is also a burgeoning literature

around the newer term for the post-2001 urban trash- or cardboard-picker, the cartonero. For this

latter phenomenon, see Bilbija.

14 Forcadell is the only other critic to note Rodríguez’s attention to photography. She doesn’t

pursue, however, the ways in which Rodríguez’s aesthetic thinking influences the text. She

instead sees Rodríguez as erasing the villero from the scene (53), something that, in her reading,

will be remedied by the hero journalists arriving to the villa after the Revolution. As we will see,

however, far from erasing the shantytown inhabitants from the picture, the Paraguayan

immigrants are the only thing that interest Rodríguez as he gathers the stories and voices that

create the materials that form the basis of his collection.

27

15 Emerging in Spain and Italy in response to both the stylized realisms of Fascism and the

predominance of Surrealism during the 1930s and 1940s, Informalism returned to the gestures of

Cubism and Dadaism by finding new materials for creating art. They take up non-traditional

media such as rags, mops, burlap, plastic, metal, or simply empty space. The two most famous

practitioners of Informalism were the Italian artist Alberto Burri and the Catalan artist Antoni

Tápies. In Argentina, besides Kemble’s experiments with metal, wood and trash, we can look to

Alberto Greco’s “Vivo-Ditos” in which he would draw a chalk circle on a sidewalk around

himself or someone else, and everything outside the circle was part of the work of art

(Katzenstein 38-55). See Jachec for a discussion of the tenuous relationship Informalism had

with Fascism and the “communisms” of post-war Italy. See López Anaya for a discussion of

Informalism in Argentina.

16 An image of Paisaje suburbano II can be seen at Kenneth Kemble’s web page.

17 The distinction Giunta draws is between the poverty collages created by Antonio Berni and those

created by Kemble. But in her reading she understands Verbitsky’s novel as an extension of Berni’s

visual works in which “[t]he word and the image operated simultaneously in this exploration of

the new conditions of a transformed Argentina” (88). She talks about them jointly in this

paragraph, and she implies that her reading of Berni and her reading of Verbitsky function

simultaneously as a single reading of a certain kind of poverty text. Her gesture of pairing Berni

and Verbitsky is repeated by one of Verbitsky’s most important critics, Laura Podalsky. As she

notes, Berni’s famous La gran tentación works as a recreation of “the scene in Verbitsky’s Villa

Miseria where Paula and her mother stand in front of the new stores on Avenida General Paz

stocked with new domestic appliances. . . .” Both works, she argues, “question[] who the

beneficiaries of ascendant consumerism really are” (111). I question the notion of the “complete

28

narration” and the “objective truth” cited by these critics by drawing attention to the fragments of

Guaraní that are incidental to the ongoing plot of the novel but at the same time fundamental to

understanding the composition of the culture of the Argentine popular sectors. I argue that, like

Kemble’s collages, Verbitsky’s novel proposes an imaginary in which his readers would be

required to move beyond Peronist affective identifications.

18 As Fabián explains, “Puynandí viene a ser el descamisado de ustedes. Quiere decir descalzo,

que así va toda la gente allá” (52).

19 This exchange appears throughout the text as Rodríguez collects the sounds of Guaraní, which

Verbitsky transcribes into written words (e.g. “puynandí” [52], “icaú” [59], “acüjüyé” [59],

“aloja” [211], “quibebe” [123], “U-uí Pytá” [219], etc.), along with the approximated

explanation of these terms in a Spanish.

20 I would like to express my thanks to Dianna Niebylski, Patrick O’Connor, Eugenio DiStefano

and Emilio Sauri,who read many early versions of this essay and provided invaluable feedback. .

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