Life in Debt. Clara Han
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to credit by previously “stigmatized” debtors (Ministerio Secretaria General de la Presidencia 1999).
According to the law, employers could not discriminate on the basis of DICOM information. In addition, individuals who settled their debts would be removed from the DICOM database after three years. Those who did not would remain in DICOM for up to seven years. Nevertheless, even after the requisite number of years in DICOM, the debtor's stigma continued in practice. Many debtors remained in the DICOM database despite having settled debts several years earlier; many employers continued to screen workers through this database. While consumer credit provided access to a dignified life, DICOM's persistent biographical consequences bound this life to feelings of anxiety.
Nevertheless, while DICOM registered individual credit histories, in La Pincoya this biography was experienced as an accounting not of the individual but of the family tied into the home: “We are in DICOM” or “Families are in debt.” This displacement of the DICOM biography from the individual to the family mirrored the fear of repossessions by debt collectors, who inventoried any item of value within the physical boundaries of the home to satisfy the outstanding debts of any family member with that same address. Thus, family members said, “Van a embargar la casa” (They will repossess the house), not only when the house itself was threatened with repossession but also when any individual in the home had reneged on his or her debts. While debt is in the name of an individual, the enforcement of debt through repossession materially implicated the entire home and the relations constituting it.
In his essay “Postscript on Control Societies,” Gilles Deleuze examines the transformation of disciplinary societies based in institutions such as the prison, school, and asylum into societies with open, continuous, and free-floating control through the synergy of the market with new technologies. “A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt,” writes Deleuze. “One thing, it's true, hasn't changed—capitalism still keeps three quarters of humanity in extreme poverty, too poor to have debts and too numerous to be confined: control will have to deal not only with vanishing frontiers, but with mushrooming shantytowns and ghettos (Deleuze 1997, 181). But the expansion of the credit system among families in La Pincoya challenges this homogenous view of the poor, as well as capitalism's supposedly obvious inclusions and exclusions. The mechanisms of control societies are not beyond the extreme poor. Rather, they are precisely the mechanisms through which the materiality and image of “extreme poverty” are destabilized. It is this destabilization of the image that was embodied and absorbed into family relations.
Shadowed by the threat of DICOM and repossession, families in La Pincoya worked to keep up with the temporality of monthly debt payments, what they called manteniendo la imagen (maintaining the image). A common phrase used to describe the work to keep up with payments to department stores, utilities, and banks, maintaining the image conveyed the transient, insecure, and uncertain nature of the dignified life made possible through credit. Is this life a life that I can own, that I can trust? Will it exist tomorrow? This sense of uncertainty pervaded everyday relations. Gossip abounded about those who were aparentando, who projected the markers of material wealth beyond a family's means, and those who were marceros, who wore brand-name clothing even as they struggled to get to the end of the month. Against this uncertainty, families engaged in a work of maintenance to avoid falling into DICOM, to get out of DICOM, or to make debt payments in the face of repossession. Families cut back on food costs, asked neighbors, friends, and extended family members for loans, worked for overtime pay, and took on extra jobs. In this way, the “loaned life,” a fragile existence, was held together through, and often despite, the temporality of credit.
UNBEARABLE VOLUME
For Sra. Flora, this uncertainty knotted together with Florcita's addiction, generating a domestic struggle over time itself. By June 2004, the tension of intimate relations had reached a nearly unbearable volume, like the stereo that Sra. Flora had bought Kevin to calm his nerves and that now blared heavy metal day and night. Kevin and Florcita were consuming pasta base and had become increasingly violent with each other. Once while I had tea with Sra. Flora and Rodrigo, we heard Florcita and Kevin yelling and fighting. The sound of breaking glass and walls being punched reverberated through the corridor. Then Kevin ran into the living room holding a knife. His forehead was lacerated. Florcita had hit him with an iron bar. He called the police. When two policemen arrived, they first questioned Kevin in a formulaic tone, “How many times have you hit your woman?” Kevin laughed, saying “Look at me, she hit me.” An argument ensued between Kevin and Florcita in which each accused the other of being a golpeador/a (beater). Despite our contestations and pleadings, the police ultimately sided with Kevin. They arrested Florcita and took her into custody for the night. Later, Sra. Flora and I learned from Florcita that the argument had been set off by a missing piece of pizza. Florcita had brought home a pizza from the school where she worked. She shared it with her sisters, setting aside a piece for Kevin. The piece disappeared, however, and Kevin accused Florcita of eating it.3 This eruption of violence set in motion a daily struggle between Rodrigo and Sra. Flora over Florcita and Kevin's place in the home. Rodrigo simply demanded that they leave. Sra. Flora, on the other hand, wanted to help Florcita separate from Kevin, which would take its own time. Gradually, this struggle over letting time do its work became cast in economic terms. Rodrigo told me his unstable wages were barely covering monthly bills, department store quotas, and food. Florcita and Kevin, he said, were not contributing to the home. They were leaving the financial and emotional responsibility for caring for their own children to him and Sra. Flora. Tired of spending his income on paying the bills, he used his end-of-the-month pay to buy a new shirt, sweater, pants, and shoes. When the light was cut to the home for nonpayment, Rodrigo argued that it was her excessive care for family members that produced this darkness.4 His frustration with her defense of Florcita and Kevin bled into relations with her other kin. He said that she would “sit in the dark” until she “put limits” on her family visiting the home. As she told me, “How can I limit my own family members from coming here? I was not raised that way, and it's difficult for me to change at this point in my life.” After Rodrigo lost his job, she said, “Se puso machista, muy machista” (He's become very dominating).
In our conversations, Sra. Flora moved between the affective registers of time and space when speaking about Rodrigo. Time as possibility, an enduring patience with Rodrigo: “Let us see everything in its time.” Space as a declaration of the finitude of her relation to him: “I want him to leave the house!” Yet when she recounted how she met Rodrigo, she cast their relationship and their process of constructing a life together in the shadow of other intimate experiences of male violence. Sra. Flora had met her husband when she migrated with her family from Los Angeles in the south of Chile to Santiago in search of work. She was sixteen years old when she became pregnant with her first child, Carmen.
I was dating my husband when I was sixteen years old, and I was very sick, very sick. I went to the doctor, and they did some blood exams, and then afterward they did not explain anything. They gave me a letter from the doctor. I went to a meeting with my friend. I had the letter in my sweater pocket, and left it there on the chair [at home]. I still had not read the letter. My mother read it, and arrived to the [friend's] house furious. My mother beat me up [me sacó la cresta], took a stick and hit me in the face, in the mouth. I did not know why. And afterward, my father came and he beat, beat, beat me in the face, breaking all my teeth. And then all of my brothers—imagine it, I have four brothers; there were only two women in the family. All of my brothers and my father went to look for my husband, and they beat him up. I was in the hospital for one month, and he was there for forty-five days. They operated on my mouth and had to take out all my teeth. But I did not lose the baby. This baby was Carmen. Afterward, there was so much pressure for me to marry him. And, we married in ’66. He began to walk around with other women, drink alcohol. And my brothers saw him with other women, and they hit him, beat him. My father said to him, “You are walking around with another woman when my daughter is in the home pregnant with your child?” But when they beat him, he arrived to the house and hit me, saying that it was my fault that they beat him. And every time they beat him, he arrived to the house to hit me. And that went on for years.
In 1976, tío Ricardo came to live with her. Arriving in Santiago destitute and in search of work, by chance he saw Sra. Flora