Life in Debt. Clara Han
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says ‘equis’ [X] country, and packages it. And they throw out the ten workers that before made the cup. The CUT [Central Unitaria de Trabajadores, the national union organization], which supposedly should protect the worker, does not want to do anything, because it does not want to criticize the government now. But, I say, if Lavín [then mayor of Santiago, and a member of the Unión Democrática Independiente party, backed by Opus Dei, an ultraconservative Catholic organization] were president, then maybe we would have a change with the CUT, because we would have to fight against something.”
Valentina yawned. The discussion of the CUT did not seem to be holding her attention. But as I turned the conversation back to the home, she became animated. “Do you make it to the end of the month?” I asked. Valentina answered, “We use the [credit] cards—Falabella, Rip-leys, Almacenes París—because you have to buy materials and clothes for the children to go to school. We can't pay with money, so we have to use cards.” She continued: “You know, I went to the municipality to do trámites [paperwork]. I spent the whole day tramitando [doing paperwork] to get the subsidies, but the asistente [social worker] there said that they would use the same information, the same paper [hoja, literally, the “sheet of paper”] that we had in 2002, and now it's 2004. Las cosas han cambiado” (Things have changed). Right now, she said, “we are passing a critical moment”.
She told me about the social worker's visit two years earlier, in 2002. She had petitioned the municipality to have the social worker assess their household for a water and electricity subsidy when Pato was out of work. “He only looked at what we have. Our TV, our stereo system, refrigerator, and he gave us a point score that was higher.” Pato latched on, with frustration in his voice: “The most grave is that I am without work now; now I have unstable work. For that, I ask for help now. They see the tele and think that we are well, but they do not understand that I beat myself up [me saque la cresta], almost going crazy, working to buy this tele, working twelve hours a day. But it was because of this, because I could do it with overtime.”
Pato and Valentina sketched out the temporal disjuncture between discontinuous work patterns and needs assessments materialized in social workers, paperwork, and point scores. This temporal disjuncture took on moral intensity with respect to specific material objects—televisions, stereos, and more recently, computers and laptops. Pointing to the TV, Valentina joined in: “But, they do not understand this achievement. That we achieved buying this tele when he was working well, overworking, more hours because we wanted to buy the tele. And, now, what do I do? Like most people around here, take the tele to the house of a friend, hide this table [pointing to the table on which the TV sits], hide the stereo system and the refrigerator, to show that, yes, we are poor. Today, things are so bad. It's bad will” (la mala voluntad).
Pato and Valentina illuminate a few crucial observations with respect to the experiences of economic precariousness. Let us first consider the unpredictability of wages and work. On the one hand, working “extra hours” has become one way to save money in order to buy large consumer goods. These consumer goods, then, are taken as part of household assets in needs assessments, without consideration that “extra hours” and “almost going crazy” in fact allowed for their purchase. On the other hand, working “extra hours” may be necessary just to cover monthly expenses, or may be insufficient to cover the month. Second, institutional credit through department stores and supermarkets is often necessary in order to “make it to the end of the month.” Yet, as we also have seen in chapter 1, the unpredictability of work is at odds with predictable monthly debt payments, but this unpredictability also means that credit must be relied on.
Third, there is an intense moralism articulated around the relations of the poor to consumer goods. This moralism may be related to an image of the poor as nonmodern or precariously modern. In this view, consumer goods bring the poor into modernity, and being deprived of consumer goods then qualifies a household to be a recipient of state intervention and aid. But, at the same time, many households do have consumer goods, and it is the plethora of consumer goods that feeds arguments that the poor are engaged in profligate spending: that they are not being “responsible” consumers. Thus, we can understand Valentina's gesture of pointing at the television and her vehement remark that it is an achievement. The argument about profligate spending not only forecloses a consideration of the multiple demands and desires that the poor experience but also asserts and demands a hyperausterity and hyper-rationality of the poor that those who are not poor—and who do not struggle to get to the end of the month—could simply never live up to. It grounds decision making in the division of reason and emotion. And it limits poverty to survival, but in doing so, forecloses careful attention to how need might be enmeshed in a whole range of relations.6
GOVERNMENT OF THE POOR
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