Life in Debt. Clara Han
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moments when the whole of their existence is called into question. Experiences of such moments are not normless. Rather, they are experiments with life. This normative relation to life, for example, is revealed in the improvisations that people engage in to mitigate and normalize pains and distress and the moments when these pains are problematized in everyday life (see Das and Das 2006; Garcia 2010; Fullwiley 2011).
Through the process of writing this ethnography, I began to further appreciate the experiments with life that were in my field notes, my interviews, and my ongoing relationships with family and friends in La Pincoya. Desires to care for kin with addiction to pasta base and with chronic mental illness are enmeshed in economic pressures such that the experience of care could pass a threshold and become an experience of one's limit. Everyday aches and pains from unstable work and pervasive indebtedness are treated with a local formulary of anti-inflammatories, vitamins, and sometimes antidepressants. To a large extent, these aches and pains are normalized and taken as part and parcel of the bodily experience of living. I began to appreciate the significance of boundaries: experiences of poverty in La Pincoya call for an acknowledgement of the delicate concealment of both need and assistance that occur during moments of economic scarcity. And, I learned to pay attention to experiments with genre in the efforts to make the self intelligible to others, to present the self to others and to be received by them. Reworking the conventions of the testimonio genre, for example, was one way of making the self present to others, but also a way to withhold the violations of life so that one's children may live normal lives.
If this book expresses a wariness of the fixity of certain critiques, it is because of this engagement with the lives of others. I am wary of a diagnosis of social fragmentation and individualism that relies on a representation of a relational past. I am also wary of a critique of this diagnosis that takes the continued presence of intimate relations as a given. Both assert fixed normative imaginaries of what an individual is and what is expected of intimate relations. To counter dominant imaginaries of the atomized individual and discourses of “self-responsibility”—whether they be of drug addiction, mental illness, or consumer desires—by asserting a fundamental human interdependency based on intimate affects of care and love may eclipse the very boundaries of specific relational modes, the uncertainty in relationships, and the problem of separateness.
Understanding the normative as experiments with life and with self-making allows for the often subtle and fragile ways in which health, or more broadly, a sense of well-being, is momentarily achieved. In the delicate task of responding to others and discovering one's finiteness amid difficult circumstances, life and death are not opposed but rather sketched into each other in different ways at specific moments in a life. I imagine the chapters of this book as leaning on each other. Each chapter takes up specific concerns; the chapters' conversation with each other may further enrich them from within. The challenge for me was to consider both the singularity of a life and the availability of social conventions and genres in which life takes shape, in which the self presents itself to another (Butler 2005). Thus, my writing offers no grand diagnosis, but instead the hope that we might be attentive to the difficulties and achievements of being in another's present.
CHAPTER 1
Symptoms of Another Life
A TIME OF PURE NERVES
“Pure nerves.” Sra. Flora crumbled a soda cracker in her hands. It was the afternoon of Easter 2004 in La Pincoya. She had invited me to help her prepare an elaborate Easter lunch for her extended family. But the festive plans had abruptly dissolved with the news that her partner, Rodrigo, had lost his job in a textile factory where he had worked for the past twenty-five years. Instead, bites of homemade bread and sips of sugared tea mingled with stifled conversation.
Sra. Flora, Rodrigo, tío Ricardo, and Sra. Flora's daughters and grandchildren lived together in a two-story house that was a process of autoconstruction. First-floor brick rooms joined others of corrugated iron insulated with drywall. Above them, wood beams and iron sheets made a second floor. Outside, a gate of blue-painted iron bars and sheeting bounded the front patio. As part of the toma (land seizure) of 1970 that gave rise to La Pincoya, Sra. Flora and her former husband arrived on this plot of land with little more than a tent. They first built their home with materials scavenged from construction sites.
After her separation from her husband in the late 1970s, Sra. Flora and her new partner, Rodrigo, continued to build and furnish the home through bank loans and department store credit. Her daughters Carmen and Sonia, both single and in their midthirties lived on the second floor, each with two children. Separated by a thin wall was tío Ricardo's small room. On the first floor, Sra. Flora's twenty-five-year-old daughter, Valentina, shared a room with twenty-four-year-old Margarita, an adopted niece with cerebral palsy. And in a room abutting that of Sra. Flora and Rodrigo, her thirty-year-old daughter, Florcita, lived with her partner, Kevin, and their two children.
Rodrigo's job loss had rippled through family relations. Carmen and Sonia worked in unstable jobs that often changed month to month: office cleaning, stocking supermarket shelves, selling pirated CDs. They would have to take on extra hours to pay the utility bills and the monthly quotas on debts until Rodrigo could find another job, but they faced the prospect with a mixture of resignation and frustration. The affects of working overtime also intensified anger toward Florcita and Kevin, who had begun to drink hard liquor again, stealing and selling household foodstuffs to purchase pisco (hard liquor). Florcita was in danger of losing her job as a teacher's aide. Kevin, just released from a one-month psychiatric internment for addiction to pasta base (cocaine base paste) and for manic depression, paced the house nervously and angrily all day long. In a confrontation between the three sisters shortly before I arrived, Sra. Flora had stepped in to defend Florcita. “You always paint her as the bad one in the movie,” she said. Carmen and Sonia had walked out. Shortly after, Florcita left the house with Kevin and the children.
As Sra. Flora recounted the details of the argument to me that Easter, she crumbled cracker after cracker between her fingers. Rodrigo sighed heavily and went to the door to smoke a cigarette. The tensions, she said, were “eating my nerves.” She pointed to a framed black-and-white photo hanging on the wall behind me. The photo was taken before she moved to Santiago in the early 1960s. With long, curly dark hair and a white apron tied around her slim waist, she stood smiling behind a table stacked with homemade bread. Comparing her body then and now, she said, “Todo esto”—the economic precariousness, the debts, the smoldering frustration with Florcita—”it makes me fat. If I eat, it's like I'm eating double.” Protecting Florcita wove into the ongoing household economic pressures, and Sra. Flora embodied all this, literally speaking, through her nerves.
Sra. Flora's eaten nerves speak to intersecting dynamics of care, illness, and economic indebtedness within the domestic (see Arriagada 2010; Valdés et al. 2005; X. Valdés 2007). What are temporal and moral textures of this care? Let us move in time with Sra. Flora and her intimate relations. Can this movement in time attune us to care as a kind of “active awaiting” (Cavell 2005, 136)?1 By this phrase, I mean a patience for the possible, which draws on the hope that relations could change with time. In this chapter, I consider how this “active awaiting” draws on a wider network of dependencies that provide the temporal and material resources for this care. Waiting reveals how domestic relations with neighbors and institutions of credit both mesh with and create cuts in intimate relations. It helps us flesh out the problem of responsibility for and to kin.
“TODAY, ALL OF US ARE SUBJECTS OF CREDIT”
In June 2005, the Chilean Central Bank published its Report on Financial Stability for the Second Semester of 2005. Charting the expansive progression of the Chilean economy, the report states in its principal summary: “This positive economic situation has ushered in a greater dynamic of consumption and investment during the present year. The interest rates continue stimulating the expansion of credit. The debt of households continues increasing at elevated rates, rates that are greater than the growth of their incomes” (Banco Central de Chile 2005, 7). Between September 2004 and September 2005, the level of household indebtedness from mortgages increased 17 percent and the level of indebtedness tied to department stores and bank loans increased by 21 percent. Meanwhile,