The Heterogeneous Nature of Urban Poor Families

Rodrigo Salcedo and Alejandra Rasse Universidad Cat olica del Maule

This paper addresses the scholarly debate on cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity of urban poor families. While authors such as Lewis (1959) or Wacquant (2000; 2001) claim that structural disadvantages are linked to a particular type of identity or culture, others such as Hannerz (1969), Anderson (1999; 2002), or Portes (Portes and Manning, 1986; Portes and Jensen, 1989) believe that it is possible to find different behaviors, expectations, decision-making processes, and outcomes among people living in seemingly identical structural conditions (Small et al., 2010). Using Santiago, Chile, as a case study, we differentiate five different cultures or identities among the poor. Those identities seem to be the product of different historical and political circumstances, as well as of different types of public policies. The paper ends with a discussion of the need for poverty reduction policies to consider these differences among the poor.

INTRODUCTION
Scholars working on poverty in the United States have been divided over the years between those who believe the poor are a culturally homogeneous group (Lewis, 1959, 1966; Wacquant, 2000, 2001), and those who claim it is possible to distinguish sub-cultures even in the most marginalized areas (Hannerz, 1969; Portes and Manning, 1986; Portes and Jensen, 1989; Anderson, 1990, 1999; Small et al. 2010). In Chile, the same debate can be observed. While some authors (Vekemans et al., 1969; Castells, 1973; SUR, 1987a, 1987b) argue that the poor are a homogeneous group, others (Portes, 1971; Vandershueren, 1971; Sabatini, 1995; Mart nez and Palacios, 1996; Marquez, 2002; 2003; 2004; Salcedo para la Superaci et al., 2009; Fundacion on de la Pobreza, 2010) argue in favor of the idea of the poor as culturally diverse. Using qualitative data collected in the past five years, and taking the city of Santiago as a case study, this paper proposes a five-fold cultural typology of the urban poor. Drawing upon previous classifications of the poor, the typology is based upon three variables: the repertoire of available strategies for social integration, narratives of upward social mobility, and narratives regarding future expectations. Based on the typology, it is argued that the various sub cultures identified are linked to different historical and political
Correspondence

should be addressed to Rodrigo Salcedo, Dean, College of Social and Economic Sciences, Universidad Catolica del Maule, Av. San Miguel 3605, Talca, Republica de Chile; rsalcedo@ucm.cl

City & Community 11:1 March 2012 doi: 10.1111/j.1540-6040.2011.01385.x C 2012 American Sociological Association, 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005

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circumstances, as well as to different cycles of poverty reduction policies and urban contexts. This connection between structural factors and culture offers interesting possibilities for further comparisons between countries. In addition, it opens up an important debate regarding how universal a poverty reduction policy might be, and the extent to which a policy may affect the values and expectations of beneficiaries.

THE URBAN POVERTY DEBATE IN THE UNITED STATES

For most scholars, poverty has structural roots. The economic conditions of society at large, as well as the ways in which different families are integrated into the system, account for the disadvantaged conditions in which poor people live over generations. However, since the 1960s culture has also been included either as an additional, explanatory variable, or as an intervening variable able to amplify or reduce the impact of structural factors. The main debate has concentrated on the degree to which similar structural conditions generate a homogeneous culture among the poor; or to the contrary, if differences and sub-cultures can be found. The first to speak of the poor as a culturally homogeneous group was Oscar Lewis. Lewiss (1959; 1966) culture of poverty perspective maintains that people living in poverty develop values, attitudes, and behaviors that are different from those of the rest of the population. For Lewis, such differences represent a cultural strategy used to face a history of personal and collective failures and the lack of opportunities experienced on a daily basis. While attitudes such as pessimism and hopelessness may help individuals to deal with the frustrations stemming from an unequal society, at the same time they make poor families more prone to social maladies such as teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. In our study of Santiago, we find some but not all of the poor are fatalistic, pessimistic, or unhopeful. Lewis work, and the culture of poverty approach as a whole, was highly criticized. The idea of a culture of poverty was equated with cultural determinism, and made it possible for conservatives to lay the blame on the poor for their condition (Small et al., 2010). Different authors in the 1990s and 2000s have taken some of the points made by Lewis and applied them not to the poor as a whole, but rather to the African American ghettos of the large American metropolis. Wilson (1987, 1996), for example, argued that poverty is accentuated by cultural and spatial factors that stem from structural conditions. He believed that the ultimate cause for the formation of the contemporary African American ghetto was the transformation of the industrial economy into a service economy. Such a model makes employment of the uneducated more precarious and reduces the number of available jobs. In addition, the departure of African American middle class families from the ghetto eliminated social diversity and reduced the possibility for ghetto youth to find successful role models. These factors led to a change in the values and attitudes of poor African Americans, in addition to dismantling traditional families and making gang life or the drug economy a valuable (and probably the only) model for economic success within the ghetto. Since it is difficult for most poor families to leave the ghetto, spatial enclosure consolidates and naturalizes the structural conditions.

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Wacquant (2000, 2001, 2007) describes American ghettos as (1) compulsory spaces the inhabitants are unable to leave; (2) neighborhoods in which economic exclusion, territorial stigmas, and the drug economy are combined, generating a vicious cycle of violence; and (3) spaces in which the State is present only through repressive policies, abandoning any protective or service-providing role. In these neighborhoods, Wacquant (2000, 2001) argues, the poor become a homogeneous group that differs in their values and behaviors from the rest of society. He explicitly links State public policies (or the lack of them) with a particular cultural identity, one that is similar to that described by Lewis (1959, 1966). On the other side of the culture of poverty argument are those authors who believe that even within identical structural living conditions, cultural differences may arise. For example, scholars who have underlined this kind of diversity analyze immigrant enclaves. Even though urban areas in which immigrants live can be statistically characterized as areas of concentrated poverty, the daily living conditions in these areas are completely different from those described in the ghetto. According to Portes and Manning (1986), immigrant enclaves are territories in which it is possible to obtain work contacts and to establish small, informal businesses. In sum, such enclaves generate fertile space for informal social networking and markets and for the appearance of an entrepreneurial minority (Portes and Jensen, 1989). Moreover, Portes et al. (2002) discuss the transnational character of this entrepreneurial minority which emerges from the mobilization of resources in both the receiving country and the country of origin. Without denying the existence of an entrepreneurial minority in territories where immigrants are over-represented, Waldinger (1989) questions the idea that self-employment and networks arise solely from the ethnic solidarity networks that residents build. According to this author, the development of ethnic businesses is linked to a broader complex of interacting factors (p. 69), including cultural predispositions in certain immigrant groups, the opportunity structure of the territories that they inhabit, or the percentage of residents with the same ethnic background living in the area. From a different perspective, Young (2007) has also criticized the idea of the poor as a homogeneous group. He argues that the border between exclusion and integration is not as clear as most studies show. In reality there are continuities, such as families and groups moving from exclusion to integration and vice versa. Small (2007) adds to the critique, arguing that since there are differences between neighborhoods in terms of access to resources, transportation, gang penetration, police presence, and other conditions, it is very difficult to consider all such neighborhoods as homogeneous ghettos. Moreover, Small et al. (2010) acknowledge the fact that there is significant variation in behavior, decision-making and outcomes among people living in seemingly identical structural conditions (p. 4). While recent literature acknowledges heterogeneity of the poor and some typologies distinguish specific logics of action (Fosse, 2010), there have been very few attempts at generating descriptions of the multiple cultures that coexist in poor neighborhoods. The few exceptions are the classic Hannerz (1969) study, which argues that a ghetto culture and a mainstream culture coexist in impoverished areas, and Anderson (1999), who distinguished between a decent culture (similar to what is considered mainstream culture) and a street culture. Anderson (2002) also argues that both cultures act as codes for public behavior, and thus it is common for the same individual resident to

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move from one to the other according to specific circumstances, in a practice known as code-switching.

URBAN POVERTY DEBATE IN CHILE (19702010)

Like their U.S. counterparts, Chilean scholars have also been divided since the late 1960s between those who see the poor as a homogeneous group and those who argue that the poor are culturally heterogeneous. This debate has been related to the political and policy developments within Chile and, though it is hard to generalize, in the rest of Latin America as well. The debate on poverty during the late 1960s and early 1970s emerged in the context of the Cold War. While the Kennedy and Johnson administrations encouraged various countries to enact structural reforms within the capitalist framework, several leftist governments throughout the continent attempted revolutionary transformations. All of the latter governments were, in the end, overthrown and replaced in the mid 1970s by U.S. supported military dictatorships. In terms of poverty reduction policies in Chile, both the Frei (19641970) and Allende (19701973) governments encouraged social organizing, and favored the organized poor as social policy beneficiaries. While housing for the poor was provided to individual families as private property, most of these families were part of organized groups that seized private lands on the outskirts of the city. Among those Chilean scholars who viewed the poor as a homogeneous group, there was a clear distinction between those for whom the poor were a highly apathetic and dependent group, along the same lines as the culture of poverty theorists, and others for whom the poor were a well-organized group with a clear class-consciousness. An example of the former group is Vekemans et al. (1969), who conceptualized the Chilean urban poor as a marginalized group unable to create their own organizations and the necessary conditions for upward social mobility. An example of the latter is Castells (1973), who argued that the structural conditions of Chilean society had created the possibility for the organization and social cohesion of the poor, as well as for the appearance of a clear class-consciousness. While the former authors were ideologically linked to the Chilean Christian Democratic Party, a centrist and reformist party committed to President Kennedys Alliance for Progress and the Frei administration, Castells, who arrived in Chile in the early 1970s, immediately became involved with the leftist project of the Allende government. Differences also existed among those who saw the poor in Chile as a heterogeneous group, but their classifications tended to reflect a political agenda. Portes (1971) produced the first typology of urban poor families, distinguishing between slum culture and that of the squatter settlements. While slum residents conform to the culture of poverty paradigm, and are thus disorganized and fatalistic, those who have organized to seize land and live in illegal settlements tend to form solidarity networks and social capital. Generating a different typology from a distinctly Marxist perspective, Vandershueren (1971) maintained that the different positions the Chilean urban poor occupy in the productive process, along with their income levels, divide them into four distinguishable groups: (1) low-income formal workers, (2) well-paid and either unionized or territorially organized workers, (3) the lumpen proletariat defined as low-income informal workers, and 97

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(4) workers in the informal economy who receive higher salaries than the rest. Clearly conveying the authors own political commitment, both typologies make a clear distinction between the culture of those poor people who are organized or politically involved with more possibilities of overcoming poverty, and the culture of the isolated or politically uncommitted poor. In 1973, a military coup overthrew President Allendes democratically elected government, replacing it with a right wing dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet (19731990). The organized poor were no longer a political actor. Neoliberal reforms changed public policies dramatically. Education, housing, or healthcare were no longer social rights, and became merely commodities to be individually bought and sold in the free market. For example, housing policies since 1980 had been based on a demand side subsidy (voucher) that allows a poor family to purchase a house in the private market, complementing initial savings and the voucher with a State-insured bank loan. The construction process, and the way in which the neighborhood is shaped, fell completely into private hands. In addition, the determination of which residents will live in the neighborhood ends up being completely random, with no consideration of previously existing social networks. Throughout the dictatorship, the common view of scholars both on the left and on the right was that the poor were a culturally homogeneous group. Scholars on the political left who were not killed or exiled were at least displaced from traditional educational institutions. Without any influence over the countrys socio-economic transformation, they mainly joined foreign financed NGOs to research political and economic conditions. For instance, SUR was comprised of a group of former scholars and political activists involved in the struggle against the dictatorship. Their journal Proposiciones (Propositions) described the urban poor as a group that had been negatively affected by the dictatorships neoliberal policies, but whose struggle and organizational capacities had made them able to resist and confront the hardships in their lives (e.g., SUR Proposiciones No 13; SUR Proposiciones No 14, etc.). On the other side of the political spectrum, policy makers working for the Pinochet regime (1) did not understand the poor as a social group, but rather as individuals in need; and (2) viewed all these individuals as disorganized, apathetic, and dependent on the state. As with most other Latin American countries that had been immersed in dictatorships, Chile returned to democracy in 1990. In 1989, the Chilean dictatorship was defeated in a plebiscite and democratic elections were held. From 1990 to 2009, the government was in the hands of the Concertaci on de Partidos por la Democracia, a left-of-center alliance of Christian Democrats, Socialists, and various Social Democratic and SocialLiberal groups. While some minor changes were enacted, and public spending on social goods was dramatically increased, the fundamental neoliberal reforms were left untouched. Throughout this period, most urban scholarship was devoted to the analysis and questioning of the effects of Chilean demand-side housing policies (e.g., Ducci, 2000; Sabatini et al., 2001; Skewes, 2001; Tironi, 2003; Rodr guez and Sugranyes, 2005, etc.). Very little attention was devoted to the everyday lives of the poor, their values, expectations, or their possible cultural differences. Today almost every Chilean poverty scholar agrees that the poor are heterogeneous. While many scholars have correctly made distinctions or described some group among the poor, they have either missed or denied the existence of other culturally different groups or not considered those groups in their analysis. Some analysts of Chilean poverty use 98

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classifications that greatly resemble those of Hannerz (1969) or Anderson (1999). For example, Mart nez and Palacios (1996) discuss a cultural fissure among the poor borrowing Andersons (1999) categories. They maintain that while there are traces of a culture of poverty among the poor, a new culture of decency is also appearing that is culturally individualistic and oriented towards work and social mobility. Our study draws upon a central distinction between the individualistic and collectivistic poor. Sabatini (1995) has argued that among the female urban poor there are two antagonistic cultural tendencies. On the one hand, there is a heavy degree of individualism, which has a demobilizing and isolating effect. On the other hand, there is a strong sense of community that pushes them towards collective action. While the description of the organized poor and their cultural and psychological motivations are similar to those developed in the 1970s and 1980s, the individualistic poor appears to replace the apathetic and dependent poor found in past scholarship. This tension between individualism and collective action appears in our own previous work (Salcedo et al. 2009; Salcedo 2010). We argue that traditional lower-class culture (with strong family ties and the existence of nonfunctional networks) is being replaced by a culture of individualism (lack of community control over territory, privatization of everyday life, and appearance of symbols of status and differentiation). These cultures give rise to different projects for social mobility. Studies by M arquez (2002; 2003; 2004) of neighborhood identities emphasize both the tension between individualistic and communitarian tendencies (2003), as well as the variety of integration strategies that poor families use and accept in complex societies (2004). As Robert Merton (1938) long ago noted, integration strategies are not restricted to socially accepted or socially legitimized pathways (work, education, consumption, etc.), but also include alternatives such as crime or passive participation in the drug economy. Families combinations of different strategies tend to be related to the sources of symbolic or material support in their integration projects. Among those institutions supporting integration are the local and national State, the formal economic system, and informal economic networks including both legal small commerce and production and illegal activities. para la superaci The Fundacion on de la pobreza (2010) developed a similar three-way categorization of urban poor families as dependent, hard working, and counter-cultural. Unfortunately, this NGO report does not situate the findings in the context of the larger debate on poverty, making it difficult to interpret the results, but we shall draw upon this category of dependent poverty. In addition to individualistic and collectivist mobility projects of the poor, current Latin American debates on urban poverty emphasize the spatial structure of opportunities. Sabatini and colleagues (2006; Sabatini and Salcedo, 2007) have argued that the localization of the poor in the city generates cultural and lifestyle differences among them. They distinguish between poor households living in segregated poor areas and those in areas in which wealthy or middle class residents are arriving, attracting local opportunities that may change the daily life and economic situations of the poorest neighbors. In contrast, segregated areas cannot attract opportunities such as commerce, services, and jobs and slowly deteriorate in both social and urban terms. In this paper, we also contend that the cultural differences found among the poor and thus the typology we generate are related to different urban dynamics. The material and symbolic opportunities available in different locations, the segregation pattern 99

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of the city, as well as the impact of housing policies aimed at creating a class of poor proprietors, have had an impact on how families experience their everyday life, their strategies, their perception of self-efficacy, and the way they make decisions. Residential segregation of neighborhoods, schools and workplaces contribute to the social isolation of the poor and sap their social capital, diminishing opportunities and weakening their public voice (Kaztman 2001). The degree to which different poor families experience these types of spatial segmentation has a differential effect on their values and expectations for the future, generating diversity among the urban poor. In sum, urban poverty emerges from a complex interaction between characteristics of the structure of opportunities in society and each familys access to resources (Kaztman, 2001; Kaztman and Retamoso, 2006; Sarav , 2006). This perspective replaces the static notion of poverty with the more dynamic idea of vulnerability. It also argues that residing in a good location of the city is an important resource to access social opportunities and overcome precarious situations.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF CHILEAN SOCIETY (19902010)

The impact of Chilean policies on domestic living conditions is relevant not only for Chilean scholars, but for all scholars of urban poverty. Chiles economic growth over the last twenty years made it a model for the governments of developed countries as well as financial institutions such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. Chilean public policies are not only imitated throughout the world, but also criticized (Collins and Lear 1995). The most significant changes that have taken place seem to be the following: CHILES MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION: FROM UNDER-DEVELOPMENT TO THE IN-BETWEEN ZONE Starting in 1988, Chile began an impressive process of economic growth. Throughout the following decades the countrys GDP per capita rose from around US$5,000 to around US$14,000, and poverty was reduced from 40 percent to just 15.7 percent (INE 2010). Despite this success, inequality has remained high. Along with economic growth, the left-of-center governments of the 1990s and 2000s were able to dramatically transform the housing stock as well as educational opportunities available to Chileans. In terms of housing, there were over 1.5 million Chileans living in precarious or illegal settlements (roughly 10 percent of the countrys population) in 1990, but today there are less than 100,000 people living in such conditions (CIS 2007). Due to governmental housing programs, 80 percent of the poor are now homeowners. This policy is being replicated in countries such as South Africa, Indonesia, Costa Rica, and Colombia (Gilbert 2002; 2004. Ferguson and Navarrete 2003). Regarding education, in the mid 1990s Chile universalized high school coverage, and in 2000 President Ricardo Lagos declared mandatory high school attendance. In addition, college education has been democratized, and access to post-secondary education today is similar to that in developed countries. However, what most transformed the life experience of middle and lower income families was the radical expansion of access to credit. Since the late 1980s,

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department stores began issuing their own credit cards, an example followed in the 1990s by large supermarket chains. Today over 8 million department store credit cards have been issued in Chile, reaching all sectors of society, including the poor. In recent years, Chilean retail chains have exported the model of democratized credit to those countries in which they also operate, especially Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina (Bianchi 2009).

NEW VALUES AND EXPECTATIONS: FROM CULTURAL HOMOGENEITY TO DIVERSITY AND CONFLICT In the last twenty years, economic expansion dramatically increased the number of middle class families. Poverty reduction generated a new aspiring middle class (Tironi 1999), a group with roots, relatives, and a past based in poverty, but with middle class purchasing power and the capacity to access private health, education, and housing. While still vulnerable to poverty, they make conscious efforts to legitimize their new middle class status and to differentiate themselves from the poor. This contradiction between origins and current status creates a tension between ones original identity and ones desired, recognizable status (M endez 2009). At the same time, and following international tendencies, the elite and part of the middle class have become culturally and aesthetically more sophisticated, liberal, and fond of global urban lifestyles. Some of these groups have migrated back to downtown or quasicentral areas in a process that, if not gentrifying, is at least regenerating older neighborhoods (Contreras 2005; Rubio 2009; Matus 2010). Along with this liberalization, there has been a conservative reaction expressed in the growth of various conservative catholic movements (Thumala 2008) and in the self-segregation of elite groups in traditionally upper class areas or in gated communities located in other parts of the city (Salcedo and Torres 2004; Sabatini and Salcedo 2007). Despite the conservative reaction, Chilean society as whole has become more liberal and individualistic. Legally, divorce has finally been accepted, and media censorship has ended. In terms of accepted social practices, the numbers of marriages and general fertility rates have dropped sharply since 1990, and community life and social participation in neighborhoods have either decreased or changed focus. This liberalization process is related to the penetration of transnational culture, via the international mass media. Possession of products advertised in the media becomes a symbol of social status, age, and lifestyle. Among the poor sectors, sneakers or technological gadgets are the preferred means of achieving such status (Salcedo et al. 2009). However, mass media have not only transmitted the hegemonic cultural codes of global capitalist society, aimed at social integration through the market economy. In addition, it transmitted subordinate or nonlegitimate cultures and values. Particularly relevant in the context of the Chilean urban poor is the assimilation of ethical and aesthetic values of the Mexican narco culture and American gangsta rap identity (Ganter 2010). While not as dramatic as in other Latin American countries, throughout Santiago drug-related crime and violence is on the rise. Our research found more or less formal youth gangs are taking over streets, parks, and other public spaces, spreading fear and encouraging strategies to avoid becoming a victim of crime.

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SPATIAL TRANSFORMATION IN CHILEAN CITIES: DECREASING DISTANCE, BUILDING WALLS Despite an important increase in international immigration and a migration of indigenous Mapuche groups from the south, Santiago remains highly homogeneous, with an indigenous population of only 3.2 percent, and a population of foreign-born individuals of just 3 percent (INE 2010). Social class differences determine urban identities and the patterns of segregation related to such identities throughout the city of Santiago. From the 1930s, when the elite moved out of downtown, up to the 1980s, the spatial pattern of Santiago was highly segregated by class; the elite was concentrated in a cone-shaped area starting from downtown and moving towards the northeastern periphery. The poor lived in segregated areas in the northwest and south of the city, and the middle classes, the least segregated group, occupied the central and quasi-central areas (Sabatini et al. 2001). Since the end of the 1980s, elite and upper-middle class families have dispersed, reducing the scale of spatial residential segregation and increasing the number of socially heterogeneous areas (Sabatini and Salcedo 2007, 2010). Along with the dispersion of the elites, there has been a dispersion of such artifacts of modernity as shopping centers, private healthcare facilities, private schools, and gas stations. The presence of such amenities makes almost any area of the city valuable and a potential destination for middle or upper-class families (Sabatini and Salcedo 2007, 2010). While the dispersion of the elites has not generated any sort of community integration between old (poor) and new (wealthy) residents, it has been successful in generating functional and/or market integration for the urban poor: There are more jobs and business opportunities available, municipal services are better, and police surveillance is more efficient (Salcedo and Torres 2004, Sabatini and Salcedo 2007). At the same time, spatial closeness has provided the poor living in mixed areas with role models to be imitated both on ethical and aesthetical levels (Salcedo and Torres 2004). But not all of the effects of elite and middle class dispersion have been positive. Since more widespread areas have recently become desirable, there has been a substantial increase in land values throughout the city (Sabatini and Salcedo 2010). The only land now available for affordable housing or government-subsidized housing projects is located either outside the city limits, or in places where the accumulation of poverty and social maladies makes it impossible for the market to transform them into attractive neighborhoods for the middle class. Thus, new subsidized housing projects tend to be concentrated in already ghettoized areas or in semi-rural zones, both totally separated from modernity and its artifacts. This trend has created two types of poor areas: those located close to the middle classes where there tends to be more opportunities, and those located far from such opportunities (Sabatini and Salcedo 2010). This duality has transformed the expectations of the Chilean urban poor. While 20 years ago their dreams and struggles were based on obtaining some kind of basic housing unit, hopefully as a homeowner, today their expectations are to move into a well-located house (Salcedo 2010). Following Chilean trends, the dispersion of elites and its socio-spatial consequences have been observed in other Latin American cities since the late 1990s. New gated communities and other housing complexes arose in traditionally lower income or semi-rural areas in Buenos Aires, Lima, and Bogota. In general, scholarly opinions 102

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regarding the process of elite dispersion in these cities has been mostly negative (e.g., on Argentina, see Svampa 2001; Roitman 2005). For example, fear of crime and the security regimes employed by the wealthy are said to perpetrate a kind of symbolic violence against poorer residents that impedes the development of functional or social ties (Janoschka 2002).

METHODS
In light of these changes in social and spatial structure, the remainder of this paper presents a qualitatively constructed typology of the urban poor in Santiago, Chile, and considers possible relationships between the categories obtained and different structural conditions, historical and political circumstances, and cycles of poverty reduction policies. The typology was developed through a review of data and the conclusions of several research projects conducted from 2002 to 2010 at the Institute for Urban and Territo rial Studies at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile in Santiago. Much of the data we analyze were collected in the course of the World Bank financed study of Neighborhoods in crisis and successful neighborhoods produced by social housing policy in Chile (20062008). This barrios study was conducted in eight social housing neighborhoods and Talca) that varied by degree located in three Chilean cities (Santiago, Concepcion, of socioeconomic segregation of the poor from more affluent households. This study collected data from a census of 1800 respondents; 16 focus groups among residents of the eight neighborhoods; 40 interviews with key actors (police officers, priests, nurses, community leaders, and teachers) who provided outsiders perspective on the residents; and three months of ethnographic work in three different neighborhoods (one highly segregated, one including middle classes in the surrounding area, and one surrounded by wealthy neighbors) by three graduate students who produced more than 300 pages of field notes and more than 1000 pictures. In addition, as part of our study of The last slum: Moving from illegal settlements to homeownership in Chile (20092010), we conducted six focus groups with people who had been recently moved from one of the last Santiago shantytowns to subsidized housing complexes (in which they own the housing unit) in Pe nalol en Municipality, one of the most socially diverse areas in the city of Santiago (20 percent under the poverty line; 20 percent elites; and the rest, middle class groups). The focus group participants were recruited through a random sample of housing units. The focus groups were videotaped, and the conversations and discourses were qualitatively analyzed (for details, see Salcedo 2010, p. 99). Finally, we draw with permission upon secondary data from the findings of various M.A. theses (e.g., Garc a 2007; Lunecke 2008) and one Ph.D. dissertation (Ganter 2010) supervised by the authors of this study. The material from both projects is available from the authors. Although none of these studies dealt specifically with a description and detailed cultural analysis of the urban poor, they demonstrated the variety of situations of what we broadly refer to as urban poverty. Taken as a whole, these studies allowed us to compare situations, experiences, and identities of the Santiago poor. The data were analyzed by identifying the main cultural differences between households. First, the barrios material (from Neighborhoods in crisis) was codified through free and tree nodes (using the software NVivo), creating axial codes. These axial codes were related to different issues, 103

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some indicating cultural differences among the participant subjects. Reviewing those codes in light of the relevant national and international literature enable us to identify such differences. We identified three variables that were able to organize conceptually the cultural differences in values, narratives, and repertoires (Small et al. 2010; p. 10): (a) Narratives about expectations toward the future (optimistic / pessimistic), such as reported by Oscar Lewis and other scholars who talk about the fatalistic or pessimistic poor. (b) The repertoire of available strategies for social mobility (state dependence, naturalization of illegalities, and effort and hard work), drawing upon the integration strategies in Marquez (2004). (c) Narratives about projects for upward social mobility, relying upon Chilean scholars who have suggested tension between a communitarian tendency and a more individualistic one (Sabatini 1995; Mart nez and Palacios 1996; Salcedo et al. 2009).1 These classification variables were then checked against the data from The last slum study and the two theses and the dissertation for applicability, reliability, and refinement.

A TYPOLOGY OF POVERTY IN CONTEMPORARY SANTIAGO, CHILE

The data showed an enormous diversity in experiences, values, expectations, and lifestyles among the urban poor. Rather than merely describe all of these differing situations, it was decided to classify them into a finite number of poverty types based upon three analytic variables: (1) the repertoire of available strategies for social integration; (2) the narratives of poor residents regarding their projected upward social mobility; and (3) the expectations they have for the future.

THE REPERTOIRE OF AVAILABLE STRATEGIES FOR SOCIAL INTEGRATION Given labor market transformations increasing informality, sub-contracting, and selfemployment, many question the idea that it is still possible to overcome poverty by working in the formal (and ideally unionized) sector (see Shipler 2004). According to recent data, over 70 percent of Chileans living under the poverty line actually work, and the majority of them do so in the formal economy (INE 2010). Today in Chile, integration into society, building a social status, and legitimizing ones social practices and lifestyles are largely related to the consumption of certain goods and services (from housing and plasma TV sets, to private healthcare and education). The big question for the urban poor is how to access such consumption from the repertoire of strategies available. For some families, the only available strategy seems to be a connection to the social protection network of the State. For others, consumption is only possible through the naturalization and legitimization of illegal or semi-legal activities. Finally, for a third group, hard work and a culture of decency (Martinez and Palacios 1996) is seen 104

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as the only valid strategy. These three different strategies rest upon different structures of opportunities, imply access to different social networks, and reflect differing uses of the city and neighborhood. NARRATIVES OF UPWARD SOCIAL MOBILITY In the context of upward mobility as experienced in Chile, the way of attaining such mobility becomes a central aspect of identity. The range of discernable mobility projects among all interviewed families was reduced to three. There were very few families that did not have any discernable project. These families, the poorest of those interviewed, were completely concentrated on generating the material means necessary for their daily survival. They did not possess the personal capital (education, networks, etc.), the resources, or the time needed to be able to think ahead, make plans, or generate future strategies. For a second group of families, upward mobility was seen as an individual or family project in which the family assets and resources are mobilized without considering community needs or resources. These families considered themselves to be different from their neighbors, either in terms of their willingness to sacrifice and work hard, or in terms of the cultural capital or education they possessed. Finally, for a third group of families, the project of upward mobility is essentially a collective one related to the communitys capacity for organization and participation, and to the constitution of solidarity networks among neighbors. Collective projects were based on the belief that all families in the neighborhood face the same constraints and experience the same kinds of problems, and thus only organization and common struggle can help them to overcome their current situation. NARRATIVES OF EXPECTATIONS FOR THE FUTURE One of the most defining aspects of poor families identities is the narrative they recount of their expectations for the future. The difference in expectations shows the autonomy individuals possess in their response to the received structure of domination (MacLeod 2009, p. 149). While the large majority of families today acknowledge that they are materially better off than in the past, the expectations they have for the future are not as homogeneous. We distinguish between two types of narratives: optimistic and pessimistic. The optimistic narrative states that in the future the heads of the family or their children will be able to improve their material conditions and overcome poverty. The pessimistic perspective is the belief that the family will remain in its current situation, given the lack of individual or collective efficacy (Sampson 2004). When these three variables are placed in a matrix, it produces a typology of eighteen categories of urban poor families. However, once applied to the concrete empirical data, empty cells appeared. For example, there were no collective projects among pessimistic families. The data ultimately generated a classification with five types of urban poor households: organized, dependent, ghettoized, hopeless, and moyenized (as shown in Table 1). Before characterizing these five types of urban poor families, two clarifications are necessary. First, any categorization is a simplified model of reality. Thus, because all families display contradictions and confront changes over time, the five groups developed can be seen as ideal types rather than accurate representations of particular families. Second, 105

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Table 1. A Typology of Poverty in Santiago, Chile

Narratives about the expectations toward the future Optimistic Narratives about the upward mobility project No project for social mobility Repertoire of available strategies for social Clientelism Naturalization of illegalities Culture of decency Ghettoized Moyenized Organized Individual project Collective project Pessimistic Narratives about the upward mobility project No project for social mobility Individual project Collective project

Dependent Unhopeful

in some places, one of the described groups may represent the majority of residents, or constitute the hegemonic identity, but most types of families lived in almost all the places studied. Thus, as Schnell and Yoav (2001) argue, different groups assign different meanings and uses to the spaces in which they live their daily lives and so, conflicting narratives may coexist in the same territory. 1. Organized poverty Woman A: I dont know if my neighbors agree, but I think that participating was an obligation. There [in the informal settlement where they lived] they rang your bell and you had to go to a meeting, to a march, whatever time it was. It was an obligation, a commitment, more than Florcita, please come to a meeting. Here we can have some free time, there we couldnt. Woman B: There, if you didnt go to a march when it was needed, the leaders would punish you. Woman A: They shut down your electricity . . . Focus Group in Pe nalol en municipality (Salcedo 2010) As a community we have obtained many things, public lighting; the arrival of public transportation . . . . Interview in Pudahuel Municipality (Garc a 2007 ) In the settlement we even expelled people because they were on drugs. There were delinquents, but in general we were able to eliminate crime in the settlement. Focus Group in Pe nalol en municipality (Salcedo 2010) By organized poverty, we mean the descriptions and idealizations of the urban poor made by various scholars working in Chile from the late 1960s to the 1980s (Castells 1973; Proposiciones 13 1987). These families place community organizations, usually territorially based, at the center of their mobility projects, and the local and national State as the actor with which they negotiate their demands. They see the State not in paternalistic terms (as a provider of goods in exchange for loyalty), but as the guarantor of social rights. They are optimistic about the future, believing that if they work together 106

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and maintain solidarity and cooperation, they will be able to overcome poverty and improve their living conditions, especially in terms of housing, education, health, and the provision of municipal services. In addition, many of them place a symbolic boundary (Lamont and Fournier 1992) between themselves and other urban poor groups: while they believe in hard work and solidarity, the rest are supposedly trapped either in individualism or in a culture of crime. The organized poor see the collective strategies they use as instruments not just to obtain goods and services, but also to maintain their neighborhoods free of crime and other behaviors they find undesirable (violence against woman, alcoholism, etc.). In the city of Santiago, this type of household is concentrated in three different spatial contexts. First, they live in some of the few remaining illegal or informal settlements, where community organizing is the source of internal order, the provision of services, and the possibility of obtaining subsidized housing in the future. Organization is the only way to satisfy both their daily needs (such as drinking water or electricity) and their longterm expectations of consumption (having a house, living in a nice neighborhood, etc.). Second, this type of poverty is found in neighborhoods once linked to organized land seizures and supported by political parties in the 1960s and 1970s. After a group of families seized the land, there were different governmental programs aimed at regularizing the property, either building a housing unit for the group or supporting these families in the process of building their own homes. The mutual support among community members during the land seizure and self-construction, the solidarity networks generated to confront poverty, unemployment, and repression during the military regime, and in certain cases the organization of neighbors to oppose NIMBYs or changes in municipal zoning codes in more recent years, have all allowed residents to maintain a collective identity and an organizational capacity. In some emblematic cases, neighbors have created groups aimed at preserving the history and identity of the neighborhood through publications, mural paintings, radio or TV programs, and other such activities (e.g., Grupo identidad y memoria popular 2008). Today these neighborhoods are inhabited by older residents along with their children who have been unable to obtain a house elsewhere. However, organizing (and especially organizational leadership) is mostly restricted to the older, original members of the community. The fact that the organized poor and its leadership are adults in their 50s or 60s is a clear sign that this group, if not disappearing, is at least declining in Chile. Finally, some organized urban poor families are scattered throughout the city, but participate in trans-local organizations such as ANDHA Chile (National Association of Subsidized Housing Debtors), which collectively seeks the cancellation of their mortgage debts and generates solidarity networks that serve other needs in the process. We hypothesize that the diminished relevance of organizing and other collective strategies for social mobility and thus the reduction in numbers of the organized poor is related to four different factors: (1) the shift in public policy orientations, from those of the 1960s and early 1970s that valued organization and the creation of social networks, to those enacted from the 1980s and beyond, which are individually based; (2) the socio-cultural transformation of Chilean society towards more individualistic values and privatized daily life (Salcedo 2010); (3) the significant improvements in the quality of life of the urban poor during the past two decades, which has decreased the need for solidarity and common struggles; and (4) the lack of collective efficacy regarding traditional organizations (Sampson 2004) such as Juntas de Vecinos, the legal name for neighborhood associations. 107

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2. Dependent poverty People living in this building come from a shantytown, and generally everything is given to shantytown people. The municipality and the government give them stuff and they are not used to spending money out of their pockets. . . Interview in Concepci on Municipality (Sabatini, Salcedo, and Wormald, unpublished data) People have become lazy. We have a free dining room service on Saturdays, because that is when the school doesnt supply food for the children. And many people come, but not just kids. People are used to it. . . some of them are people that are perfectly able to work. But it is easier to receive what is given. Priest in Concepci on Municipality (Sabatini, Salcedo, and Wormald, unpublished data) People have lost the notion of self-management; today if a project doesnt come here offering something, people dont get involved. . . . People got used to receiving things. . . Interview in Santa Adriana project (Lunecke 2008) This group of families is totally dependent on and oriented towards obtaining benefits from the national State or local government. These families have acquired their current social position as recipients of social programs and benefits, and they do not plan on changing their strategy in order to attain upward social mobility in the future. On the whole, despite the fact that they acknowledge having better living conditions than in the past, they tend to be pessimistic about the future and their possibilities for overcoming their precarious situation. While they do feel that the State is able to provide them with enough benefits to maintain a minimum standard of living, they believe it is impossible to satisfy some of their most coveted needs, such as a safe neighborhood or permanent employment. Where specific political representatives (aldermen, party members, etc.) manage programs, this group of families develops relationships that are not only functional, but also based on loyalty and gratitude towards whoever is providing the benefit. This represents a phenomenon Auyero (2001) describes extensively for the case of Argentina. Dependent poverty is related to paternalistic policies aimed not at the future development of recipients, but at merely providing them with money and other presently needed resources. The criticism of such policies and programs has been a constant both in Chilean and in the international literature and on both sides of the political spectrum. The criticism has led to changes that several countries have made in their policies towards the poor. The criticism can also be heard among the poor themselves. Dependent families are usually stigmatized by their neighbors and described as lazy or people with bad habits. In a society in which effort is a core value, the passive attitude of these families is broadly condemned. Dependent families tend to inhabit subsidized housing projects built during and after the 1980s. These are poor families who received their homes as a result of a State subsidy, usually complemented with a governmentally ensured bank loan. In most cases, the various families arriving in their new neighborhoods had never met before and were not members of organized groups. New housing units tended to be located in the urban periphery far from urban centers and within neighborhoods lacking basic infrastructure and opportunities. The functional and urban integration of such neighborhoods 108

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into the citys structure of opportunities is precarious, and thus these families need for State aid continues long after the initial provision of the housing unit. In addition, such families have been unable to increase their assets and resources or create collective networks of support, making dependency on local or national government a constant over time. This type of poverty is not as prevalent in Chile as it is in other Latin American countries such as Argentina (Auyero 2001), or as it probably was in the United States at the time of the urban political machine. The dependent poor in Buenos Aires rely heavily upon the social protection network and patronage offered by the Peronist (Justicialista) party. In contrast, Chiles neoliberal reforms of the 1980s reduced the overall size of the State, making it difficult for the state apparatus to act as a direct patron and job provider. In addition, there are fewer discretionary policies in Chile, leaving little room for local political authorities to favor specific families and reducing clientelism. In Buenos Aires, the dependent poor acting in the name of the party sometimes end up naturalizing illegal activities (beatings, blockades), adopting certain characteristics of the ghettoized. 3. Ghettoized poverty It is better not to mess with the drug dealers. In any case, they do not sell drugs inside the project. Besides, they have helped a lot of people around here. Any problems, any need, they are the first to offer help. And besides, the problems are between drug dealers. . .they do not bother people. Interview in La Legua project (Ganter 2010) Here at night, each gang takes their. . . part of the square; other gangs take theirs, and so on. . . Focus Group in Bajos de Mena Area (Salcedo, Rasse, and Hermansen 2007) Then they saw that it [drug dealing] was a better business, and I dont know if they created intentional networks, but in the end it became a family business. In the end, the uncle, the sister, the whole family lived off of it. . . then they got their nephews involved, and after that the networks became family-based, and I think that was the base. It was family income, and they realized that not just one family could live off of that business, but other families too. Interview in Santa Adriana project (Lunecke 2008) A third type of poverty in Chile highly resembles Wacquants (2000, 2001) description of the American ghetto and the living conditions that families living there have to endure. For this reason, we refer to it as ghettoized poverty. Among ghettoized poor households, mainstream values and expectations tend to dissolve, and a new set of values is created. Integration into society at large is based solely on the consumption of goods and services resulting from illegal or semi legal activities (ranging from drug dealing to stealing electric wire) that are totally accepted and naturalized by the entire neighborhood. The sources of social prestige and status, especially for children and teenagers, are also related to the possession of certain goods (e.g., sneakers, pure-bred dogs, etc.) that more integrated poor families usually consider superfluous. The ghettoized poor also establish a 109

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symbolic boundary between themselves and other urban poor. While they see themselves as vivos (those who are able to really take advantage of all opportunities), the rest are referred to as giles (those who work too much for too little). The mobility projects of these families may be individual, such as street vending or minor thefts, or collective, especially in the form of street gangs. In the case of collective projects, these are built in many cases upon the remnants of past experiences of organized poverty. Social capital is now devoted to criminal activities due to the sense that more traditional struggles for mobility lack efficacy (Lunecke 2008). These families have an optimistic view of the future based on their expectation of overcoming poverty through their participation in illegal activities. It is common to hear stories about teenagers who enter the criminal world in order to help their parents or who maintain their own families with small children that way. Despite the fact that the means of gaining access to consumption are different from those used by society at large, the social values of such groups tend to be traditional and even conservative: based on loyalty to the group, maintaining the family, or moving up to a middle class income and lifestyle. Territorially these groups are located in two different spaces: either subsidized housing projects created during the 1980s and 1990s and located in the urban periphery with no previous history of social organization, or older projects located in more central areas in which the importance of social organization is decreasing or is becoming a form of negative social capital. The increase in drug consumption, crime, and violence in the urban periphery since the 1990s is a clear indicator that ghettoized poverty is growing. This is probably because of the retreat of the State, as Wacquant argues, but also because of the individualistic emphasis of policies implemented since the 1980s, and the retreat of other social actors that had been very involved with the urban poor from the 1960s to the 1980s, such as leftof-center political parties or the Catholic church. Homeownership in itself is not enough to help families overcome poverty, especially if neighborhoods become dilapidated and mistrust and fear of others become the norm. 4. Unhopeful poverty Im a socially resentful person. When the government made these houses, they made them for animals, not for us. Hard working people live here, there are families struggling to keep their sons and daughters off of drugs. But crime and drug dealing is eating us alive, it is killing us. Focus Group in Bajos de Mena area (Sabatini, Salcedo, and Wormald, unpublished data) Do you know what it was like arriving here? Getting to know the kids, spending years here, and then one day somebody woke me up to tell me that my friend had been shot because he was in the drug business, or that Hans was completely burnt up because he was trying to steal electric cables . . . . Focus Group in Bajos de Mena area (Sabatini, Salcedo, and Wormald, unpublished data) Woman A: . . .You have to put bars everywhere, gates, make the fences higher, all those kinds of measures. Woman B: They have put fences in at the bottom of the stairs. 110

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Woman C: Its like we are in jail: you leave the building, a fence. You climb the stairs, a fence. You come inside, a fence. You go to the other building, a fence. You climb the stairs, a fence. Back here, a fence. Focus Group in Bajos de Mena Area (Salcedo, Rasse, and Hermansen 2007) What we call unhopeful poverty is the other face of ghettoized poverty and thus, is probably also increasing among Santiagos urban poor. Usually both types share common territories and spaces. While ghettoized families attempt to carry out a social mobility project based on illegal activities, unhopeful families suffer the violence of their striving neighbors and stigmatization of the territories that both kinds of families inhabit. Some of these families once had a project for social mobility, and some probably still persist in pursuing such a project (often based on hard work or minor inclusion in the illegal or informal economy). However, repeated personal failure, the stigmatization of the places in which they live, mistrust of neighbors, lack of any kind of organization, and the failure of government-led interventions have made them pessimistic about their ability to overcome their current situation. Similar to Mertons retreatism and Lewiss fatalism, these families do not have any hope for the improvement of their neighborhoods or their personal situations. They end up losing faith in their own abilities and in the ability of the State to control the territory in which they live. In the end, they only want to get out of the place where they live. Moreover, such families feel that any place they would eventually come to inhabit would end up being no different from the neighborhood in which they currently live. These expectations are related to a life story in which the setting has always been the same: people in subsidized housing projects trying to overcome poverty while struggling against violence and crime. These families commonly say that they are suffering from depression, they will be unable to get a better job, and the only way of keeping their kids out of the drug world is to keep them cooped up either at school or in the house. Their expectations for their kids are also low, because they have seen that finishing high school does not guarantee getting a better job. In their experience, having a high school degree today is basically equivalent to having no education at all. This makes it more difficult to keep their children in school, because they see no difference between finishing (as there would be no chance for continued education) or dropping out. These families obtain their resources from working in the formal or informal market. However, they need the State and state subsidies in order to complement their income. In many cases they do odd jobs for those who are involved in the drug business, such as cooking, washing clothes, or looking after their children. Since drug lords are the omnipresent role models within these areas, there is a strong temptation to abandon any kind of mobility project that is not based on incorporation into the criminal world. 5. Moyenized poverty You have to consider that people in the Bosque de la Villa project are from the lower-middle class, and the rest are emergent. . . . They are people on their way to becoming emergent middle class. Focus Group in the Las Condes municipality (Sabatini, Salcedo, and Wormald, unpublished data) 111

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My goal was to take the tests and get into college. . .always, since I was a kid. In fact, my parents told me to switch to a technical school, learn a trade, start working, and then try to study. But I went to a regular high school. Interview in Bajos de Mena area (Sabatini, Salcedo, and Wormald, unpublished data) I think people, now that they have a little more money, put their children in private schools, some of them. Now there are many school transport services 2 , and some time ago there werent any. Interview in Santa Adriana project (Lunecke 2008) Here we are close to everything: We have supermarkets, a mall, healthcare facilities, a police station. . . .It is a very good location. Interview Pe nalol en Municipality (Salcedo 2010) The term moyenized comes from Oberti and Preteceille (2004), who described the situation of certain urban poor families in Brazil that, despite being poor, possess expectations and values, and behave like middle class families. In the case of Chile, there is a group of poor families that have achieved a more successful degree of integration into society at large, due either to their location in urban areas with more economic opportunities or to better strategies of mobilizing their personal assets. While such families do not usually live under the official poverty line, they are in a state of total economic vulnerability as they are completely dependent on the labor market. They cannot afford to get ill or lose a job. These families possess a highly individualistic project of upward social mobility, based solely on taking advantage of market opportunities as prescribed by the individualistic approach of Chilean poverty reduction and housing policies since the 1980s. Such families do not want to use State subsidies or services (education or health) both because of their poor quality and because of the need to differentiate themselves symbolically from the rest of the urban poor. Additionally, the individualistic approach of these families is related to the judgments they make regarding their neighbors and themselves. They typically find that the situations, characteristics, and interests of the families in the neighborhood are so diverse that it is almost impossible to imagine any collective strategies to work with them. Instead, moyenized families tend to make a direct association between individual effort and goals attained, so they think that all the families that have made no progress since their arrival to the neighborhood are not making enough of an effort. They do not acknowledge how much the State (through educational and housing vouchers) has had a central role in their progress, or how the characteristics of their household (number of family members able to work, number of children, etc.) have made it possible for them to overcome poverty. Despite the importance the moyenized poor attribute to paying for social goods such as education and healthcare as a status symbol, their current economic situation does not allow them to be completely independent of the State. In one way or another, they still need the protective network of the welfare state. They may have acquired their house through a government program, or their kids attend a public school, or a private school that is publicly subsidized, and if they get really sick they end up in a public hospital. 112

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Given the fact they have been successful in embarking on a process of upward social mobility, they are optimistic about the future. They believe that either they or their children will be able to definitively join the Chilean middle class. While they cannot consume as many goods as a middle class family, they identify themselves with certain middle class values, such as the importance of hard work, education, and family stability. A common discourse is that if you work hard and care for your children, you will always be able to succeed. They are the ones who work, make sacrifices, and behave as normal families, while the rest are condemned to poverty because of their own poor choices and failures. Moyenized families are located in poor areas throughout the city. However, they tend to be more numerous and concentrated in poor areas located in upper- or middle-income municipalities, or else in lower or middle class municipalities in which wealthy neighbors are moving in, thus creating border situations which have created new opportunities for social integration (Sabatini and Salcedo 2010). As they live in these wealthy municipalities, they tend to identify symbolically with the rest of the municipal population and not with the urban poor in general. When they do live in poor municipalities, they establish symbolic boundaries with their neighbors. Their hard work ethic is so strong that they are unable to see how the urban context in which they live, in contrast to more deteriorated urban areas, may have helped them to obtain what they have. This type of family is also increasing in number for three reasons: (1) the general context of Chilean progress has provided many neighborhoods with enough success stories and role models for families to imitate; (2) for those families who obtained a subsidized housing unit in a socially mixed territory, homeownership has provided not only a financial asset that they can utilize, but also an urban environment that aids in their upward mobility; and finally, (3) all municipalities, except those inhabited only by poor residents, have generated programs to support their poorer residents. In the case of wealthy municipalities, this leads to employment opportunities, police patrolling, cultural activities, and so on. In the case of Chile, housing may become either a source of marginalization and suffering, contributing to the formation of a ghettoized or unhopeful culture, or a trampoline for material progress. The difference depends on location and neighborhood quality.

DISCUSSION
The Chilean urban poor today are widely diverse, both in terms of culture and family identity, and in the patterns of structural inclusion or exclusion in society at large. At least in terms of identity, the idea of the poor as a homogeneous group or even the notion that mainstream or decent values coexist with street or ghetto values seems too simplistic to explain the effects of neoliberal restructuring of Chilean society. Indeed, these understandings are probably too simplistic to explain the urban poor in any advanced society. The current situation of the urban poor in Santiago is partly the consequence of an accumulation of historical and political circumstances, as well as the policies corresponding to those periods. Since the 1960s the country has moved from left-of-center policies encouraging organization of the poor, to a neoliberal restructuring based on individualistic policies, and finally to a more socially sensible neoliberal scheme in which community and organization are re-introduced as aspects to be considered, but only as secondary 113

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concerns. Each of these periods has generated a specific set of inequalities, and has contributed to consolidating specific values and expectations among the urban poor. The end result is a wide variety of families, identities, strategies, and values that can be found in poor neighborhoods. Moreover, the urban poor are not confined to predominantly poor neighborhoods. The relationship between cultural patterns and urban dynamics gives rise to different groups among the urban poor based upon neighborhood characteristics. Therefore, this paper proposed a more nuanced classification to understand urban poverty in Chile in its full richness. This is not only for academic reasons, but also because it is a way of improving and targeting public policies aimed at fighting poverty (Small et al. 2010). Drawing upon the scholarly literature, we sought measurable variables to describe existing differences among the urban poor of Chile. We do not assume, as was done in early studies, that the poor share a proclivity to organizing and working together. Nor are poor families always positively valued by other poor families; some have adopted middle class values and are trying to differentiate themselves from the stereotype of being poor. Once poor families break through the barrier of everyday survival and have some spare budget for additional consumption, they do not always choose socially preferred, legitimate options or collective mobility strategies. In the end, we identified three classificatory variables that have been relatively common in the study of urban poverty: (a) narratives regarding expectations for the future, (b) the nature of individual or family mobility projects, and (c) the repertoire of available strategies for social mobility. Using these variables, we constructed a five-group typology of poor families in terms of their discourses, attitudes, values, and behaviors. This categorization is ample enough to capture the most relevant distinctions, and limited enough to be manageable and practical. This typology, and the variety of life situations that were uncovered, represent a challenge for Chilean public policies, and one that is probably faced by policy makers in other countries as well. Generally, policies and the solutions they provide for poor or vulnerable families tend to be standardized and homogeneous, while in reality the recipients of these benefits are completely differentiated from one another. It thus becomes necessary to consider the symbolic and structural differences between different kinds of urban poor, and design more specific types of solutions. Such solutions would consider the real capacities, desires, and expectations of those living in poverty. In this way, for example, policies requiring organizational skills or an entrepreneurial spirit need to target families that will take full advantage of them, and not the poor population as a whole. The government has to consider that even if it invests in the improvement of public schools, there are going to be groups of families (moyenized) that are simply not going to send their kids to these schools, due to their desire for distinction and differentiation from other social groups. Based on the typology in this study, the most logical next steps would be to quantify the number of families associated with each category, and then to classify urban polices aimed at fighting poverty according to the values and behaviors they require from the participant populations in order to be effective. In any case, if we assume that sub-cultures are related to structural conditions, we may be able to predict that certain groups will increase in number towards the future (ghettoized, unhopeful, and moyenized) while others will diminish (dependent, organized). Since the Chilean State is no longer an actor with which the organized poor can negotiate, nor a source of direct patronage, jobs, or other benefits, families aiming to improve their living conditions or integrate 114

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into society at large will be compelled to drift away from collective strategies. This, in turn, would imply a change in their expectations and values regarding the state, their neighbors, or even society at large. Notes
1

Salcedo et al. (2009) defined the new individualistic poor with six characteristics: (1) the appearance of an

individualistic life project, which is not dependent on the state or the organized community, a project that most times includes home improvements, buying an automobile, or sending children to college; (2) the confidence placed on private ownership and education as vehicles of social upward mobility; (3) the belief in the entitlement to certain social rights, such as quality education, police protection, and so on; (4) the privatization of daily life, with decreasing social contacts with neighbors and the use of public spaces; (5) the emergence of issues of status and comparisons between neighbors; and (6) the formation of a new identity rooted in consumption patterns (see Salcedo 2010, p. 99). 2 In Chile, school transport is a private service one must pay for.

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La naturaleza heterog enea de las familias pobres urbanas (Rodrigo Salcedo & Alejandra Rasse) Resumen Este art culo aborda el debate acad emico sobre la homogeneidad o heterogeneidad cultural de las familias pobres urbanas. Mientras autores como Lewis (1959) o Wacquant (2000; 2001) plantean que las desventajas estructurales est an asociadas con un tipo particular de identidad o de cultura, otros como Hannerz (1969), Anderson (1999; 2002) o Portes (Portes y Manning, 1986; Portes y Jensen, 1989) consideran que es posible encontrar conductas, expectativas, procesos de toma de decisiones y resultados diferentes entre personas que viven en condiciones estructurales aparentemente id enticas. A partir del estudio de caso de Santiago, Chile diferenciamos entre cinco culturas o identidades distintas entre las personas pobres. Dichas identidades parecen ser el producto de circunstancias hist oricas y pol ticas diferentes al igual que pol ticas publicas diferenciadas. sobre la necesidad de que las pol El art culo finaliza con una discusion ticas de reduccion de la pobreza consideren estas diferencias entre los pobres.

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