As part of the on-going villa series looking at Buenos Aires’ poorest neighbourhoods, we re-visit Charlotte Turner’s 2007 story on the ‘Ciudad Oculta’.
The White Elephant building in Ciudad Oculta (Photo: Kate Stanworth)
The year is 1978. The eyes of the world are about to fall on Argentina, which is due to host the most-watched sporting spectacle on the calendar – the football World Cup. In preparation for the event the military dictatorship, led by Jorge Rafael Videla, has sent
camionetas to scour the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods, scoop up residents and drive them out of the city’s limits and into the
pampa where they’ll be dumped out of sight.
In the most westerly corner of the capital between Mataderos and Lugano, a wall is being constructed around a particular slum bordering the motorway that will run visitors from Ezeiza airport into the city centre. As planned, the neatly-laid brick wall cleverly conceals the disorderly clutter of Villa 15’s ill-construed shacks, blotting from view the shameful ‘scab’ of poverty that, if seen, would shatter the image of a prosperous and modern country that the de facto government is trying to project.
But still, there is one structure that refuses to be hidden – an abandoned 15-storey-high concrete giant that presides over the villa’s cowering shacks and towers defiantly over the new wall.
Built during the first Perón era, the building was meant to be a hospital for patients suffering from tuberculosis and was planned to be the biggest of its kind in Latin America. However, the 1955 military coup that ended Perón’s presidency also brought to a close the hospital’s construction.
Today, although the dividing wall has long since crumbled, the ‘Ciudad Oculta’or ‘hidden city’ as Villa 15 has since been known, still continues to sprawl around the enormous edifice, referred to by locals as the ‘white elephant’.
The passing years have led the beguiling structure to take on significances of its own; for some it is a geographical landmark that pinpoints the villa from the blocks that surround it, a marker of identity for the barrio, whilst for others it is a symbol reflecting the boom and bust cycle of a country that, though wealthy in resources, too often ill-employs them, laying its riches to waste.
“I’m the old lady of the building,” laughs Julia, 28, with a smile through well-worn teeth but with a glint in her eye that gives away her youth. The white elephant has no greater significance than for Julia – for the last quarter of a century it has been her home. Until 2000, undeterred by rumours of structural damage that were spread to keep people away, the family in which she grew up was the only one to inhabit the building.
Since then desperate times have forced others in, and Julia, her husband Néstor and their seven children are now just one of 54 families occupying the desolate building’s vast ground floor.
Since October 2006, these families have welcomed a new neighbour from the other side of the villa’s limits. Following a fire that destroyed 25 neighbouring families homes, Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organisation set up after their children were disappeared during the last dictatorship) have successfully channelled government funds to construct 37 new homes alongside the disused building, giving form to their ‘Sueños Compartidos’or ’shared dreams’ project. Run from the white elephant itself, an office, classrooms, a soup kitchen, and even a nursery to look after employees’ children, occupy the mothers’ refurbished ground-floor wing.
Julia’s sons look out of the window of their home in the White Elephant building (Photo: Kate Stanworth)
“We give thanks to the mothers because everyone passes by here, saying that they are going to do things or whatever… and they never do,” says Julia’s mother, Graciela, the real mum of the building. It has been her home for more than 40 years and is the site from which she established and now runs her own community soup kitchen.
Graciela is only too happy to share her space with the Mothers. During the course of their 30-year-long struggle for human rights, the organisation has gained great respect within the barrio, even acting as an inspiration for some in their own struggles for respect and recognition beyond the villa.
“But what I’m most proud of is the fact that we are the ones in charge of what is being done here.”
A key characteristic of the Sueños Compartidos project is that all those who staff it are from the Villa 15 itself. In an area where unemployment figures run as high as 40%, the project has had a significant impact on the lives of the 300 people who now have gained fixed employment through it.
For most it is their first chance of working legally, with the added bonuses of social security, pension schemes, the chance to gain valuable work experience, and of course a regular wage.
Julia’s husband Néstor, 29, is one of those to have found work through the project. Before he started labouring on the construction site, he struggled to keep his family fed by working each night on the city’s streets searching for recyclable rubbish as a cartonero.
Clearly excited by his new job, he particularly enjoys learning differing skills from variety of trades from construction to electrical work to plumbing. At the same time, he is earning qualifications through the Universidad Popular de Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo which runs classes from the white elephant building – training that will have real currency when he seeks work in the traditional workplace, outside of the villa.
Liliana, the mother’s representative overseeing the project, has been astonished by the changes she has seen in some of those she now works alongside. In particular, what most struck her was that in the course of a couple of days, gestures and appearances changed as the employees started to show pride in themselves and the work that they were now doing.
“Many of the women are over 40 years old and this is the very first time that they have been given the responsibility of a real job.” She recalls how one of the cooks in the soup kitchen had arrived ‘with the composure of an old, bitter woman’. By the end of the week, with a feeling of dignity in the job at hand she started to come to work ‘dressed with care and with a smile on her face’.
What continues to impress Liliana is the growing sense of camaraderie amongst the staff, no more evident than on one particular payday when a construction worker had her wage stolen from her bag. Straight away, her colleagues began chipping-in to a kitty to make up the difference that she had lost from their own pockets.
And no I haven’t described the wrong person – with a policy of employing equal numbers of men and women, half of the labourers on-site are women, a strange sight in machismo-fuelled Argentine society.
Aware that women are typically the most sidelined members of an already marginalised community, the mothers insisted on non-gender specific roles, encouraging woman to take paths that they previously did not think possible.
Another stipulation was that for every family to move into the new houses, each must have a member working on the project to promote feelings of self-reliance and, most important of all, ownership.
Together with her husband and their one-year-old granddaughter, Gómez María Angelica, 52, has spent the last few months following the fire that left her homeless living in a government-provided emergency shelter. Perched on the edge of the villa and right on the side of the road, the white elephant’s skeleton overshadows the corrugated iron and wood structure that she currently calls home. It is clearly as highly unstable and unsafe as her previous house that was so easily destroyed by flames.
Although only provisional, government inaction frequently means that such short-term, ‘quick-fix’ measures commonly transform into the long-term solution.
People living next to the building in Ciudad Oculta (Photo: Kate Stanworth)
With less than one month to go until the move-in date, Angelica is feeling relieved that her family will live in an environment that is ‘covered, insulated and clean’. “I am very happy,” she says, clutching her granddaughter in her arms and letting her eyes wander again to the construction site where her new home is steadily taking shape.
In a barrio whose inhabitants live in conditions of extreme poverty, overcrowding and insecurity, it speaks volumes that these three simple attributes to a home mean far more to Angelica than the luxuries of hot running water, modern sanitation and a safe electricity supply, with all of which each house will be equipped.
Perhaps the most obvious question would be: why not solve the villa’s housing problems by converting the deserted levels that make up the white elephant into apartments? Unfortunately, the costs of such an undertaking would exceed those of constructing separate homes from scratch. Since 2001, as in most parts of the country, times have been tough. Brick by brick, nearby residents have chipped away at the edifice, taking what they can to use to construct their own dwellings.
Walking up the wide staircase into the building, you look up at a mighty wall that now stencils the sky in blue squares – open holes that once used to be glass-filled windows and ledges.
To the right as you step inside is the area run by the Mothers’ Universidad Popular, the organisation involved in recruiting and training project staff. Here, noticeboards line the walls displaying posters offering classes from English to cookery, and educational workshops on subjects from security, hygiene and electrical risks to paco (a drug made of base cocaine) prevention.
It seems like this could be the hallway to any UBA faculty building, only this one is planted right inside one of Buenos Aires’ most impoverished and poorly-educated communities.
Pinned to the door of the cinema room, whose floor has just been surfaced by the ceramic tiling workshop, a small sign reads: “Every man has the right to be educated, and the duty to contribute to the education of others.”
The courses here are mainly attended by the 300 project workers, although they are all open to anybody in the villa. Each entrant on the project’s work scheme must have an attendance rate of at least 75% to continue on with it, and once approved, his or her learning gets accredited through a diploma awarded by the Universidad Popular.
Following the corridor, pastel-coloured drawings on the walls lead the way to the project’s nursery, where 100 sleepy heads are enjoying a post-lunch siesta. Fully-equipped with its own kitchen, playrooms, child-sized toilets and sinks, high chairs and tables – the nursery appears just like any that you would find in one of the city’s wealthier suburbs.
For many of the children, this is the only truly safe and clean environment they have known. Even to turn on a tap for the very first time and let the water rush out proved a terrifying experience for some.
At the far end of the nursery a door opens out onto the gutted carcass of the building’s un-used ground floor. Instead of toy mountains and alphabet square mats, the floor here is littered with rubble, dirt, glass and bonfire remains, a reminder that it is just a thin wall that separates these children, cocooned in the quiet and ordered tranquility of the nursery, from the often harsh everyday realities of life out in their barrio.
The hope is that enough funds can be raised to convert this empty space into a primary and a secondary school for local children from Villa 15. One of the major problems that will affect these children’s futures is the difficulty of finding schools where they will be respected and encouraged to build a steady education for themselves. In neighbouring areas outside the villa, school places are scarce. If accepted, bullying towards students from poorer areas such as this is commonplace.
“Discrimination comes from the outside,” says Graciela. I ask her how she feels towards more prosperous parts of society who take such things as housing and their children’s education almost for granted. “It is the same for them as it is for us. The middle classes might seem to be rich, but nowadays, they too must work hard to pay for their rent and bills each month.”
With wide viewpoints sweeping over the villa, Julia’s children shout down to friends from their high, unobstructed and glass-free window as the afternoon sun licks long shadows on the glimmering tin roofs below. Her family is on the list for a new home in the next phase of the Mother’s housing project and she hopes that one day her children will call what was once their home, their school.
The greatest problems that afflict this neighbourhood – drug addiction, violence, unemployment – are the same that affect all neighbourhoods. However, they tend to have a greater impact here due to the difficulty, and at times, impossibility of gaining access to essential services and rights such as education, health care and employment. Only serving to make these problems worse are the unnecessary barriers of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’- a form of exclusion and marginalisation inflicted by society – which often prevents it from seeing anything beyond just the problems that affect the villa’s population.
“The ‘hidden city’ our barrio was called when, long ago, certain people with money decided to build a wall so that they wouldn’t see the poor,” explains Julia, “…but all we want is to give it back its original name: barrio General Belgrano.”
