Life in Debt. Clara Han
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after children, doing the laundry, learning how to wire a doorbell or rig an electricity meter, cooking, and going to the feria (outdoor market), I began to appreciate how the dynamics of economic reforms, as well as state violence, were lived in intimate lives. Far from being the place of safety or take-for-granted stability, as Carsten remarks, “the house and domestic families are directly impinged upon by the forces of the state” (Carsten 2003, 50). Rather than thinking of the forces of the state as “impinging” on the house from without, however, we can think of multiple ways in which the state is layered in people's intimate lives, such that houses and domestics are not neatly overlapping. State institutions and economic precariousness are folded into people's intimate relations, commitments, and aspirations. And further, for many of the men and women I came to know, experiences of torture, exile, and disappearance were realities that took shape in their intimate lives, casting doubt on modes of intimacy themselves.
With the golpe on September 11, 1973, history abruptly took a different course. On that day, men and women in La Pincoya saw helicopters and jets fly over the hills surrounding the población. From those same hills, they saw smoke pouring out of the presidential palace, La Moneda, where Salvador Allende had given his last radio address to the nation and then died. Because of the force of social movements, as well as its association with both socialist and communist militants, the población was a threat to the military regime. Rumors circulated that the regime had plans to bomb La Pincoya and, as people said to me, “erase it from the map.” The regime persecuted the población, subjecting it to military sniper fire. Men and boys were rounded up and contained on the soccer field while military officers interrogated them for suspected leftist leanings. Allanamientos, or household raids, were performed in order to search for contraband materials, such as pamphlets, newspapers, and books, and to take men and women into preventive detention. Men were humiliated in front of their families. Relatives and friends were disappeared, politically executed, and tortured. Those who were militants had to live clandestinely or were exiled.
Along with this state violence in the form of repression and terror, the regime advanced a policy of decentralization to fragment political organization and spatially separate the rich from the poor. According to the regime, decentralization would be the foundation of a “protected democracy.” Grassroots organizations would articulate concrete, local demands to the municipality. Thus, the state, freed of political pressure, would be able to fulfill its bureaucratic technical role. Paradoxically, Pinochet decreed “local participation,” instantiating “participation” through authoritarianism. In 1982, he decreed that municipalization would be institutionalized to “juridically organize the direct participation of the community in local government.” He then consolidated this “local governance” into law in 1988 with the Municipal Government Law (Gideon 2001; Greaves 2005, 193). Mayors were appointed, not elected. Political demands thus became tightly circumscribed to geographic location.
In the name of “local governance” and “participation,” the municipalities were now to provide for their own populations in several key areas: primary care and education, transport and public highways, sanitation, sports and recreation, and local planning and development (Gideon 2001, 224). In urban housing policy, erradicaciones (“eradications,” the forced movement of the poor to land of low value) were undertaken to facilitate the free-market regulation of housing supply. Poor and rich were geographically separated, paving the way for social spending targeted to spatial areas (Dockendorff 1990; Espinoza 1989). Thus a decrease in social spending (from 25 percent of GNP in 1971 to 14 percent in 1981) mirrored an increase in the amount of state subsidies given to the extreme poor. In 1970, 37 percent of the income of a poor family was subsidized by the state, in 1988, this subsidy had increased to 57 percent. The subsidies, however, were barely half of what a worker would make at the monthly minimum wage.
The municipality of Huechuraba was formed through this decentralization process. In 1981, Huechuraba came into existence when the larger municipality of Conchalí, in which it had been embedded, was split into two sections. The new Conchalí was the historic lower-middle-class sector with a slightly higher income level. The new municipality of Huechuraba was, at the time of the split, comprised of poblaciones (the working poor) and campamentos (squatter camps). It now includes a burgeoning transnational business sector, called the Ciudad Empresarial. This sector is directly connected by highway to the international airport. With the influx of upper- and upper-middle-class people into Huechuraba came a pervasive rumor that has ebbed and flowed over the years: that there are plans to expropriate the entire neighborhood because of this sector's surge in property values.
In 2008, when I visited Ruby, a developer was trying to make alliances with local social leaders, such as the president of the Junta de Vecinos (Neighborhood Council), in order to gain neighborhood support for his development plan for La Pincoya that he was proposing to the state under its new “Quiero Mi Barrio” (I Love My Neighborhood) community development program. This program consists of forging public-private partnerships in the name of community development. Thus, the state contracts with private companies, selected through a competitive process, who invest in “development.” I happened to be staying with Ruby when the developer visited. He plugged his pen drive into my laptop and showed us the PowerPoint. His plan involved converting La Pincoya into a barrio bohemio (bohemian neighborhood) of discotheques and bars for international clientele, converting the green hills to flower farms to produce blooms that could be sold to the owners of upper-class condos, and creating what he called a “head-hunting agency” (in English) to filter out the “thieves” in La Pincoya and thus find “honest women” who would be able to work as nannies in the condominiums. He explained his plan while eating a homemade sopaipilla and taking tea in Ruby's house with the children and Ruby's husband, Héctor. Afterward, Ruby politely thanked him for stopping by and offered more than a few niceties; but as she came back into the house, she called him a “snake.” Her eldest son offered more colorful prose. Ruby talked about him to Sra. Cecy, her neighbor, who said she would chain herself to her house before anyone would expropriate it. “People in La Pincoya would not leave their houses.” He did not return, and the plan has not been realized.
CHAPTERS IN TIME
For many of the men and women I came to know, memory is both an ethical practice of the self and autonomous from the self. It is tied to the self's political commitment, but it is also lived in intimate relations and in the very materiality of the house and the neighborhood. Memory also manifests through a past of state violence that is available to the present through the arrangements of the state and market today. Aspirations for democracy and disappointment with actual political and economic conditions also constitute a medium through which relations with intimate kin are lived and sometimes broken.
While I came to know men and women who had been militants in the democratic movements, I was also introduced by these men and women to neighbors whose political affiliations were completely at odds with theirs. Neighborhood life does not fall along clear fracture lines of political affiliation. There are feelings of deep betrayal among those of the same political affiliation, and differences in political commitment within families. While a neighbor might despise her neighbor's political commitments, she might also say that her neighbor is “a good neighbor,” meaning that she is helpful and respectful. In La Pincoya, people inhabit different relational modes simultaneously, so that attending to others in daily life might not entail an all-or-nothing judgment. By considering how people are enmeshed in these different relations, ethnography can attend to the possibilities of solidarity, generosity, and kindness in everyday life. Thus, this ethnography does not just make the point that the self is always in relations with others, as opposed to a self-constituted “I.” Rather, this ethnography considers the importance of how the self is enmeshed in relations. That is, the self is simultaneously enmeshed in different relations that entail different demands and desires.
Likewise, the travails of “the market” are lived through relations: in the difficulties of making ends meet, in temporary work contracts and their unstable wages, and in pervasive economic indebtedness. Indeed, keeping up with mortgage payments on the house through the help of one's intimate kin shows that the forces of the market are not disembodied market values that come from somewhere else and fragment “the family.” Moreover, credit has become a resource in caring for those