Javier Auyero, Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. 296 pp. $64.95 cloth; $19.95 paper

Extract

During the early 1990s, Argentina's Peronist Party accomplished a political magic trick: under the leadership of President Carlos Menem, Peronism turned away from its traditional commitment to social justice and an activist state, embraced the free market and neoliberal reform, and yet maintained the electoral support of the majority of the poor. For many Argentine intellectuals, this trick was easy enough to explain. According to the conventional wisdom, poor people remained loyal to Peronism, despite their rapidly declining standard of living, either because they remained under the hypnotic spell of Juan and Evita or because they were bought off by clientelist politicians offering handouts. Javier Auyero's ethnography of Peronist politics in an impoverished shantytown on the outskirts of Buenos Aires challenges these simplistic explanations. This timely and important book reconceptualizes political clientelism, a crucial phenomenon within scholarship on Latin America and beyond, while making visible and intelligible a population that has been relegated to marginality both by socioeconomic realities and by academic discourse.