Uncertain Citizenship. Megan Ryburn

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СКАЧАТЬ Arica, the woman in front of me in the customs queue, who was dressed de pollera (wearing Aymara or Quechua indigenous dress), was made to unpack all of the belongings she was carrying in her aguayo (woven cloth used to carry items) and zippered, blue-and-white-striped plastic bag. My equally large backpack passed unremarked. Of course this could have been an anomaly, the whim of the customs officer on that particular day. This seems unlikely, however, given that many participants in my research, particularly those in Arica and especially those who identified as indigenous and had lower levels of education, had experienced discrimination at the border. Sometimes this was relatively low-key—such as being subjected to more searches—but sometimes it resulted in being prohibited entry into Chile. Migrant organizations in the region confirmed that this type of discrimination and arbitrary decision making is a reality at the Chungará border, and at times people become stranded as they try to cross into Chile, sometimes struggling to cope with the altitude and relative lack of services.

      Kevin, age forty-eight, an Aymara Bolivian who has lived in Arica for twenty-three years and has Chilean permanent residency, narrated to me a recent experience of crossing the border:

      Of the forty-five or so who were on the bus, at least ten to fifteen returned. They said to you, “Well, and where are you going?”

      “Arica,” you replied.

      “To do what?” It was enough to hesitate about something, turn around, and they made you go back, even if you had money [i.e., could prove financial solvency].

      And you know that those who speak Aymara, most of us are from the countryside, and, how can I say this, sometimes they don’t express themselves well. They don’t explain themselves properly…. And well, last week I was crossing and they say, they ask me, “Where are you going?”

      “To Arica,” I replied.

      “To do what?”

      “My family’s there.”

      “How long have you lived there?”

      They start to ask you things.

      The prickly relations between Chile and Bolivia—the product of the old and still unhealed wounds of the War of the Pacific—impact the lives of ordinary people who set out to cross the border at Chungará. Deeply engrained discrimination toward indigenous peoples means that greater barriers to entry may be faced by some than by others. This literal borderland in the upper reaches of the Andes is, then, a place of tensions and exclusions, a place of uncertainty. The places subsequently discussed are in many ways figurative borderlands. They are there and not-there, hidden in plain sight, on the margins; they too are pervaded by tensions and exclusions, which at least in part are the product of histories of discrimination.

      THE MIGRANT CITÉ, SANTIAGO

      The term cité has more than one meaning in modern Santiago. When it first came into use in the late nineteenth century, it referred to the housing created for the urban working class, generally by the philanthropic arm of a business for its workers or through Catholic Church funding.¹³ A cité typically consisted of two rows of small, terraced houses facing each other across a narrow passageway, which served as a communal outdoor space for the inhabitants of the houses. Each house had its own toilet, washing, and cooking facilities. This was in contrast to the conventillos, which were simply rooms off an outdoor passageway or courtyard with shared facilities.¹⁴

      There is now a certain romanticizing of the old cité and the notion of community life that it seemed to promote. Indeed, in parts of downtown Santiago, such as Barrios Yungay and Brasil, the old cités—which were constructed up until about the 1950s—are undergoing a process of gentrification, with campaigns to save and restore them. The conventillos, on the other hand, have been to a considerable degree expunged from public memory. The places in which the migrants with whom I worked were living have far more in common with the old conventillos than with the cités. In popular parlance, however, these migrant dwellings are also referred to as cités, perhaps to veil their unhappy reality.

      To be consistent with the language of home and housing used in Santiago but also recognize the stark contrast between the traditional cité and the residences discussed here, I refer to the latter as migrant cités. Almost half of the forty migrants whom I interviewed in-depth in Santiago lived in such places, compelled to do so by the multiple difficulties migrants face when trying to rent on the private market, not least discrimination by landlords (see chapter 5). They were men and women from various departamentos of Bolivia. A few identified as Quechua or Aymara, and others referred to having Quechua- or Aymara-speaking family. The majority had finished secondary school but had no further education.

      A typical migrant cité consists of several rooms—around ten—off a central passageway, which is sometimes covered by a roof but quite often exposed. The façades of the houses look bare but reasonably maintained, and from the street their size gives the impression that each house must be occupied by one family. However, this belies the reality in whole blocks in downtown Santiago comunas. The rooms in these migrant cités are not normally single occupant; rather, they are shared among couples, families, or sometimes nonfamily groups. There is often serious overcrowding, as well as constant movement of people, as the extract from the interview with Diana at the beginning of this chapter indicates.¹⁵ She had already moved through various similar places, including the sweatshops and villas miserias of Buenos Aires. Diana eloquently sketched how it felt to live in a place like that: it was to be “amontonados, como ratitas” (“piled on top of each other, like little rats”). Her most dearly held dream was to be able to one day build a little house on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, where she was from, and finally have space and security.

      Not only are conditions crowded in migrant cités; basic needs go largely unmet. Diego, age twenty-one, also from Santa Cruz and working in construction, shared with three other men a room that was two by three meters square. When he first arrived, he wore all his clothes while sleeping and lay on several sheets of cardboard, as he could not afford bedding or a mattress. For Rosa, twenty-nine and from Sucre, one of the worst aspects of living in a migrant cité was sharing a bathroom with ten other people and having no hot water. This was especially difficult as she tried to care for her newborn baby.

      Temperatures in Santiago can drop to several degrees below zero in the winter, making a lack of hot water even more unpleasant at this time of year. Furthermore, migrant cités are unheated and frequently have ill-fitting roofs that let in wind and rain. Cristina, age thirty-seven, who like Diana had lived in other marginal places, including on the streets in Cochabamba, Bolivia, described the winter conditions in her migrant cité (see the bathroom and kitchen facilities in figures 1 and 2):

FIGURE 1. Bathroom, Cristina’s migrant cité, Recoleta, Santiago, 2013. Photo by author.

FIGURE 2. Cooking facilities, Cristina’s migrant cite, Recoleta, Santiago, 2013. Photo by author.

Megan:	And are there leaks?
Cristina:	Water, yes. Actually, the roof fell in and ever since, every year I’ve been saying [to the landlord], “Don Guillermo, please fix the roof because it’s letting in water.”
Megan:	Of course. [Indicating ceiling] Well, there are also exposed cables, so it could be dangerous.
Cristina:	“Yes,” he says, “let’s СКАЧАТЬ В начало < 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 > В конец