Violence Breeding Violence

Socially Situated Violence

In Harm’s Way is a nuanced exploration of the causes and consequences of chronic violence. The authors ground the book in the historical, political, and economic context of Arquitecto Tucci, a marginalized community on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The population is 170,000, and the city is adjacent to the highly polluted Riachuela River. Poverty levels in Arquitecto Tucci are twice those of the state average. It includes working-class communities, a shantytown, and squatter settlements. Arquitecto Tucci is also home to La Salada, the largest feria, or street market, in Argentina. Many of the residents are dependent, both directly and indirectly, on La Salada. Residents work in the stalls of the market, in the sweatshops that manufacture the goods, and as babysitters for those working at the market. Much of the violence is also structured by the organization of La Salada. La Salada brings with it many opportunities for street violence, policing from state police and private security, andcorruption among police, security, and vendors.

The suburbs of Buenos Aires began to develop in the 1930s, when massive internal migration led to dramatic population growth in the Greater Buenos Aires area, with working classes and the urban poor being the first to settle in suburban areas. Argentina then experienced a military dictatorship (1976 to 1983), followed by financial deregulation, the privatization and flexibilization of labor markets, and trade liberalization in the 1990s. The dictatorship followed by neoliberalism led to two waves of deindustrialization, resulting in a growing population of unemployed people. Today, the blue-collar jobs that attracted many of the original residents to Arquitecto Tucci and other neighborhoods like it are gone, replaced with an informal labor market. These economic and political circumstances shape contemporary violence.

The other key component to Arquitecto Tucci’s history is the development and evolution of La Salada. While size estimates vary, La Salada is a massive operation attracting shoppers from all over Argentina and from nearby countries. All transactions are in cash, making it all the more attractive to would-be robbers. La Salada began as an area of natural beauty and health resorts before the river became contaminated through unregulated industrialization. The neglect of this area, combined with the growing ease of getting to the coast as a vacation spot and a struggling economy, ended the era of La Salada as a resort destination.

In the early 1990s, the first marketplace opened. By the end of the 1990s, the third market was established. At the same time, the ferias’ administrative apparatuses controlled the means of violence by consolidating private security forces and extracting taxes (by and for security enforcers) from vendors. The state also protected and regulated the operation of the feria through policing and bribes. Once violence in La Salada was controlled, the violence, often connected to opportunistic crimes like robbery, moved outside La Salada to the immediate surrounding areas. This meant that, by all accounts, violence in Arquitecto Tucci increased dramatically over this time period, and that it was higher on days when La Salada was open to the public.

Concatenations of Violence

The violence in Arquitecto Tucci is not limited to that associated with La Salada, however; Auyero and Berti also discuss violence in the home and in interpersonal disputes. One of their key arguments is that these different expressions of violence should not be treated independently, but rather as related and mutually reinforcing. Substantively and theoretically, a major strength of the book is the way that they discuss and show the connections between different types of violence, from robberies and retaliations to rape and domestic violence. While the violence is normalized, in the sense that it is common, it is also clearly traumatic for the residents of Tucci and contributes to the perceived need for violent responses. Much of the analysis focuses on the concatenations of these different incidents and forms of violence. They demonstrate that violence functions as a means for retaliation or respect or “to advance or defend territory, discipline children, defend self and property, acquire economic resources, and establish dominance within the household; in other words, violence is deployed to solve many pressing problems” (p. 81).

Violence is used to establish or maintain authority. It is also a result of frustration and a sense of impotence resulting from widespread drug addiction and alcoholism. People experiencing addiction steal from family to buy drugs. Family members feel helpless to stop the addiction and the related thefts. Auyero and Berti detail one incident of a mother beating her son, who had also beaten his girlfriend. The young man needed, and wanted, help with his addiction. Another young man addicted to drugs stole and sold a neighbor’s bike. The neighbor then threatened the man’s mother with a gun. The repercussions of the man’s addiction and theft affected the whole family, in part because he lived in the same household as his mother and seven other children. He and another brother also fought over his behavior. When he did get arrested, after stealing the family toilet and being spotted by police (who assumed he had stolen it from a local depot), he spent the night in jail—but his mother stillcouldn’t retrieve the toilet because shecouldn’t afford the transportation costs involved (examples from Chapter 2).

One of the consequences of this prevalent violence is a sense of collective trauma. Many of the students in Berti’s classes have been the victims of violence or have family members who have been victims. They are all shaped by it. Residents don’t trust the police to respond quickly, honestly, or effectively enough, and so they retaliate. Men feel emasculated and so beat their partners and/or children. Mothers are frustrated because of the drug abuse or criminal involvement of their children, and so they beat them. Meanwhile, the school children relayed stories about being kept awake by shootings, hiding in the bathroom to avoid stray bullets, and piling furniture against the door to prevent break-ins (p. 87). They are clearly not inured to the violence around them, and yet they are learning that it is a common response to a variety of disputes.

Adults are not immune to or accepting of violence either. Residents respond both by “splitting apples,” or learning to defend themselves with violence, and by “making toast,” or building in simple routines to bring order and predictability into a chaotic environment. While both individual and collective violence are ways residents respond to violence, they also respond through individualized and collective non-violent responses. Residents adopt strategies like fortifying their homes, isolating themselves, and diligently supervising their children. Together they meet and rally to protest police inaction and complicity and to publicly shame known offenders. Women provide much of the work in structuring these practices and routines, as part of the gendered division of labor. Some of the formal and informal responses, while understandable, exacerbate problems, both for individuals and for the community as a whole.

Through these examples, we see not only the interrelatedness of different types of violence, but also the interrelatedness of the social problems that lead to violence and the variety of ways in which people respond. The residents of Arquitecto Tucci are poor, often unemployed or employed in informal and unstable labor markets, and they live in polluted areas and benefit from little state support or, at times, suffer from state complicity in their victimization. While drug addiction, alcoholism, crime, and violence are some of the residents’ responses, they also coordinate efforts to keep one another safe and provide mundane structures and routines to add a sense of normalcy to the lives of their families. Sometimes their “ethics of care” involve violence or the use of police or prison systems in last-ditch efforts to keep family members safe. Even while detailing what many would consider destructive or problematic responses, Auyero and Berti describe the residents and their responses with empathy. They persuasively demonstrate the concatenations of violence, in both obvious and less-obvious ways, and the concatenations of responses to it.

Doing Collaborative Ethnography

In Harm’s Way is based on a collaborative ethnography, born out of circumstance more than strategic design. Auyero is a U.S.-based sociologist who made trips to Buenos Aires but could not maintain enough of a presence in the area to collect all the data himself. Berti is a school teacher who heard many stories of her students’ experiences with violence. She had access and a strong connection to the community but also maintained a full-time job that prevented her from fully embracing data collection outside of the school. Augustín Burbano de Lara, a third collaborator, worked on the project as a research assistant while he was an undergraduate sociology student at the University of Buenos Aires. He did much of the fieldwork and had the most consistent field presence in Tucci. All three conducted interviews.

Circumstances and practical constraints led them to adopt this approach to data collection, and yet the approach has interesting implications. Much ethnography remains an individual pursuit, for better or for worse, and typically ethnography done in teams is pursued by groups of faculty and graduate students. Auyero, Berti, and Burbano de Lara also had different relationships with residents of Arquitecto Tucci because of their respective roles in the community. Auyero and Berti write that they did not need to seek out stories of violence, because they happened so regularly. This point is made clearly as Berti describes some of these incidents in her notes, based on her interactions with elementary students in her role as their teacher. Former students and family members or acquaintances of these children are regularly killed and wounded. They tell stories of robberies and other forms of violence related to La Salada, domestic violence, and sexual violence. School lessons turn into discussions of violence in the children’s lives. When they do class assignments, like drawing what they like and don’t like about their neighborhood or making a “tree of wishes” for International Women’s Day, the students draw pictures of gunfights and wish for an end to rape. While it’s possible that these sorts of stories and moments would occur in traditional ethnographic research, Berti’s quotidian role in the community, and having the first window into these experiences be the perspectives of children, adds poignancy by showing how commonplace these experiences of violence are. Burbano de Lara then followed these stories into the community by conducting in-depth interviews with residents to gain a broader perspective on these events and the community context.

The authors used a variety of methods to collect their data. Collecting basic information on demographics and homicides involved personal connections and incomplete or informal data. Many of the “objective” measures of violence were constructed from information from doctors, including information on surgeries in an emergency room. In addition, they used observation, interviews, short field-based interviews, focus groups, and photography workshops with students. These workshops included instructing students to photograph life in Arquitecto Tucci; some of these photographs are included in the book, providing a powerful visual display of how young people experience life (although I wish the photos were larger and in color and also that they were credited to the individual photographers where possible). The authors also included several drawings by students. Some of this data collection, again, was out of necessity: official records are so limited that the authors had to get creative to supplement them. Together, however, they tell a more complete story, with experiences portrayed from multiple perspectives and in multiple ways. What students may not think to say in an interview, for example, might get captured in their description of a photo or in a passing comment in class. While any one person’s perspective on a particular incident of violence is limited, the story becomes more complete through triangulation.

It is probably unlikely that this approach to data collection will be widely replicated by other ethnographers. But there are important lessons to be learned from how the authors went about the research for this book. They went to great lengths to gain a more complete perspective on the events they discuss. While they were forced to do so given the circumstances and the topic, we should all remember to be this thorough and creative in developing and testing our own ideas and data. Even the composition of the research team is creative and unusual, which is worth widespread consideration. Each of the collaborators has something to offer to the project, and together, as they say (repeating a saying in Spanish), “cuatro ojos ven más que dos” (“four eyes see more than two”; p. 190). I would have liked to have read more about this collaboration, how it emerged, and about how it shaped their approach to analysis as well.

Implications

While the experiences of violence in Arquitecto Tucci are situated in this context, there are important lessons to learn and apply to other contexts as well. For example, the police attribute the violence in Arquitecto Tucci to the “foreigners” living there (while saying also “it is wrong to be racist or to discriminate. But most people who live here . . . most are foreigners. And most are like that” [p. 113]). While the specific ethnicities and nationalities mentioned are different than what you would find in most U.S. neighborhoods, the falsely attributed stereotypes are not (I focus primarily on U.S. urban areas here, because they are what I am most familiar with. The authors draw some parallels to other Latin American contexts, and I expectthe discussion of stereotypes is more broadly relevant as well). Similarly, the tense cooperation between people committing crimes, the police, and other residents and the simultaneous over- and under-policing parallels research findings on disadvantaged U.S. neighborhoods. We also see the ways in which prison shapes the lives of the residents of Arquitecto Tucci, including Berti’s school children. The specific forms that violence and the responses to violence take in Arquitecto Tucci are specific to Arquitecto Tucci, but the social dynamics have broader relevance.

The authors acknowledge their own ambivalence about writing some of the stories contained in the book. This is a challenge of ethnography—to accurately represent the site and the people, while knowing this may reflect poorly on them in the minds of at least some readers. And a book focused on violence downplays other aspects of the lives of the residents of Arquitecto Tucci. Still, this is an important story, particularly the strong sense of collective trauma. Auyero and Berti are rightly very careful to remind the reader that “common” or “frequent” is not the same as “accepted.” We see many glimpses into the extreme poverty, the sense of impotence, and the lack of state support in the lives of residents. While this should be as compelling with adults as with children, I suspect that many readers will find the experiences of the “innocent” children particularly sympathetic.

The focus on concatenated forms of violence and the historically, politically, and economically situated description of Arquitecto Tucci make this book a valuable contribution to political sociology, urban sociology, and criminology. The team-based ethnography, use of multiple methods of data collection, and inductive analysis make In Harm’s Way a strong and unique contribution to ethnography.