IMÁGENES DE/DESDE LAS VILLAS: LA CONSTRUCCIÓN LITERARIA DE ESPACIOS EN LA CIUDAD INFORMAL

The villas (commonly viewed as “shanty towns”) in Argentina, have been addressed in literary texts since they began to form as part of the “informal city.” This dissertation interrogates the literary images of these spaces in the city of Buenos Aires, with a particular focus on works that emerge from the villas themselves. Accordingly, they do not appear as marginal, but are situated as the narrative center from which it becomes possible to question the image of a modern, compact and definitive view of the city. This dissertation has grouped texts as they relate to their sociopolitical contexts. The first group includes the short story “$1 en Villa Desocupación” (1933) by Enrique Amorim, the dramatical work La marcha del hambre (1934) by Elías Castelnuovo, and Las colinas del hambre (1943) by Rosa Wernicke (the only novel that takes place in another region); all three set in the 1930’s. The second provides an analysis of the novel Villa Miseria también es América (1957) by Bernardo Verbitsky, in order to follow the trail of the first appearances in newspapers of the term “villa miseria,” which paralleled the ways these phenomena were made visible in the second half of the 1950’s. The third group consists of four novels that followed the 2001 socio-economic crisis: Santería (2008) and Sacrificio (2010) by Leonardo Oyola, La Virgen Cabeza (2009) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, and Con V de villera by Lula Comeron. By then, the villas were a well-recognized fact; therefore, these novels do not necessarily center on revealing their existence. The spaces that comprise the villas that these works produce are boundless, diverse, and fluid; moreover, they move away from privileging visual images, prominent in the works of the two previous groups. All of the works insert the villa within a literary tradition as spaces, equal to any other, where literature is possible. It is not a question of ignoring the power dynamics that mark the villas as a phenomenon, but to consider the movements that these works represent as they relocate the center by focusing on the interior of the villas and thus, literarily, constructing narratives from within