Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 0

Inequality and poverty: Subsistence strategies and peri-urban production structures in

Argentina. The case of Bolivian Migrant communities’ in Piedra Blanca, Cordoba

Natalia Reyes Tejada* and Gerardo Avalle**

*PhD Fellow in Integrated Water Systems and Governance in the Institute for Water Education, IHE
– Delft, The Netherlands. MSc. in Environmental Governance by the University of Freiburg,
Germany (nataliareyest88@gmail.com)
**PhD in Politics and Government by the Universidad Catolica de Cordoba, Argentina. M.A. in
Sociology by the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba. Affiliation: Universidad Catolica de Cordoba.
Unit of Social Sciences and Humanities - CONICET. Research Team “El Llano en Llamas”
(www.llanocordoba.com.ar; avallegera@gmail.com)

Short Biography:
The authors met in 2007, in the Faculty of Political Science of the Universidad Catolica de Cordoba, Argentina.
Dr. Avalle was a teaching assistant in the subject of Research Methodology. Later on, MSc. Reyes Tejada joined
the research team “El Llano en Llamas” where Dr. Avalle is a founding member. During 2011 and 2012, both
collaborated in a project studying social struggles around open-pit mining in Argentina that resulted in the
publication of the book “POR EL ORO Y EL MORO. Explotación minera y resistencias en Catamarca, Córdoba
y La Rioja” published by Editorial El Colectivo in Buenos Aires. In 2015, Dr. Avalle agreed to be Miss. Reyes
Tejada’s MSc thesis supervisor and the following paper is part of that research project on social struggles and
peri-urbanization in the city of Cordoba.
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 1

Inequality and poverty: Subsistence strategies and peri-urban production structures in

Argentina. The case of Bolivian Migrant communities’ in Piedra Blanca, Cordoba

Abstract

The following article presents the results of a previous research on the sustainability of peri-urban

production structures. The aim of this piece, in particular, is to understand and interpret the forms of

organization and collective production in peri-urban territories in a context of extreme poverty and

rising inequality. The New Rurality as a theoretical perspective was used to identify the production

structure’s strengths and weaknesses, since it studies the changes that the rural spaces have

experienced in the last decades as a result of a rapid urban development process that comes hand in

hand with globalization and deepens marginalization and segregation processes in the city. In

Argentina particularly, there are many case studies on peri-urban production structures in the Buenos

Aires metropolitan area, hence the case of Piedra Blanca has been chosen to be analysed, on one hand,

to bring the new elements resulting from the province of Cordoba’s particular context to the study of

peri-urbanization. On the other, Piedra Blanca’s production structure is suffering a transition from its

claybrick production tradition towards becoming a referent of healthy food production and has two

innovative aspects. First, the fact that food production is undertaken by Bolivian migrants jointly with

Argentinean producers and, second, the fact that it is carried on almost exclusively by female

producers. Thereby, the following paper aims to understand how Bolivian migration affects the

production structure’s political, socioeconomic and cultural strategies to improve their life conditions

and therefore the sustainability of the community as a production unit.

Key words: Peri-urbanization, new rurality, migration, cooperativism, food production.

Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 2

Introduction
As a result of the change in the relationship between the cities and the countryside side, the number

of publications studying the different aspects of the peri-urban areas has raised considerably in the

last years in Latin America (Ávila Sánchez, 2008; Gomez, 2008; Llambi and Perez, 2008; Ruiz Rivera

and Delgado Campos, 2008; Svetliza, 2010). A variety of perspectives to study the contemporary

rurality emerged and the concept “new rurality” became the most accepted one to generically describe

the forms of organization and the shift in the functions of the non-urban and peripheral spaces around

big cities (Ruiz Rivera and Delgado Campos, 2008).

The following article presents the results of a previous research on the sustainability of peri-urban

production structures, which are initiatives from vulnerable populations in the frame of an informal

production and commercialization market. That research’s working thesis was that the perspective of

the New Rurality is a quite accurate theoretical framework to describe the peri-urban production

structures’ current situation of vulnerability, but we suggested to conceptualize sustainability for the

approach to gain more scientific validity. Under that premise, the case of Piedra Blanca, an emerging

farm chickens’ production initiative in Cordoba, Argentina, was chosen to explore its sustainability

as a peri-urban production structure whose economic profile is in a transition process from a clay

brick production tradition towards its consolidation as a healthy food producer.

The aim of this piece, in particular, is to understand and interpret the forms of organization and

collective production in peri-urban territories facing the rising marginalization they are submitted to

due to the eviction of popular sectors from the city. Given this rise of inequality within the cities,

collective organization is presented as a new strategy of subsistence and reproduction of life in the

peripheries. In other words, we theorize how the adoption of a community feature, such as the

participation of several families undertaking these projects in a self-managed way and count on a

specialized coordination, helps the families, as production units, to incorporate capitals that favour

their survival and sustainability.

Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 3

The New Rurality as a theoretical perspective was used to identify the production structure’s strengths

and weaknesses. Accordingly, using an ethnographic approach the case of Piedra Blanca was

explored under the analysis dimensions prescribed by the New Rurality. Therefore, an interpretation

of the construction of the territorial identity illustrates the vulnerability condition of the territory.

However, the community's survival strategies demonstrate their intentionality to achieve

sustainability in the territory. Equally, the following analysis was complemented with an

interpretation of the new production relationships resulting from the shift of Piedra Blanca's

production structure. Therefore, cooperativism in Piedra Blanca appears like an alternative

employment and income source able to achieve economic viability and social sustainability

simultaneously while causing low environmental liabilities.

In that framework, Bolivian migration showed to be a crucial factor for an accurate understanding of

the analysis dimensions applied to the case of Piedra Blanca and their importance was not foreseen

as the research was designed. For that reason, the following article aims to emphasize the

understanding of the migrants’ work and organization culture and their impact in the political and

production structure in the territory. For that aim, we will, first, describe the methodology (Chapter

II) and conceptual framework (Chapter III) we used in our research. Second, we will shortly introduce

the case of Piedra Blanca (Chapter IV) for being able to describe the emergent concepts concerning

this paper: Bolivian migration (Chapter V) and Subsistence Strategies (Chapter 6). We offer a short

summary of our findings as a conclusion (Chapter VII).

I. Methodology

The following article responds to a qualitative research approach. Specifically, we used data

collection strategies from the ethnography, such as the participant observation and the in-deep

interviews. Afterwards, the information was processed using a content analysis methodology, which

was provided by the grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). This perspective sustains from a

constructivist approach that the researcher is able to construct, from their won lecture of the data, a
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 4

permanent link between different theoretical alternatives and to create that way and interpretation that

does not necessarily correspond with the theoretical framework by understanding how the social

reality or the study object are constructed.

That way, the content analysis of the data collected on the field generates new categories or “codes”

(Strauss, Anselm & Corbin, 1990) that allow us to understand the subjective and intersubjective

construction made by the actors in the frame of the studied phenomenon. Moreover, the emergent

concepts or categories are the result of the constructivist approach of the grounded theory. This theory

consists in fragmenting qualitative information in small thematic fragments, which later on are

bonded conceptually, constructing hypothesis and new statements.

Furthermore, these emergent categories proved to be the concepts who articulate sustainability with

the rest of the analysis dimensions. They have the strongest explanatory power as they were identified

to be the link between the milestones that define the community’s territorial identity. That is why the

narration of the case will be constructed based on these emergent categories for allowing a better

understanding of the analysis of the interrelation of how the social actors inhabit the land, the process

of its valuation, and their corresponding survival and organization strategies.

The fieldwork was carried out in Piedra Blanca in April, 2014. The sample consisted in an intentional

selection of cases, conforming an analysis unit of 15 interviews and over 30 field registers.

II. Conceptual Framework: The perspective of the New Rurality

The “New Rurality” as a theoretical perspective studies the changes that the rural spaces have

experienced in the last decades as a result of a rapid urban development process that comes hand in

hand with globalization (Baudron, 2010; Ruiz Rivera and Delgado Campos, 2008; Echeverri and

Ribero, 2002; Giarraca, 2001). Thus, the New Rurality’s study object is the historical process of

economic change related to a process of diversification in rural societies and economies that have

been traditionally oriented towards farming activities (Arias, 2005). These processes have modified
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 5

the economic dynamics within the communities, as well as their external relations and articulations

and can be understood as innovative local development processes (Kay, 2008; Ruiz Rivera and

Delgado Campos, 2008; Arias, 2005; Delgado, 2003; Barkin, 2001).

Hence, the New Rurality’s study object are the phenomena resulting of the need to mitigate the loss

of agrarian activities and jobs, which lead to an intense and complex local process of searching for

an economic alternative and labour system (Reyes Tejada, 2015). The mentioned loss is relevant not

only for the local economies, but also for the collective identity, relationship towards the territory,

and local history and resources. This is a double process of exclusion and spatial segregation within

the city that is given a new meaning by the people and used as a platform to face the rising inequality

to which they are submitted (Reyes Tejada, 2015).

Unlike in Europe, in Latin America, the peri-urban reveals the urbanization’s territorial expansion

and dispersion. In other words, it shows the deepening of the physical and social fragmentation, the

increasing distances and the residential segregation, the predominance of the private over the public,

the hegemony of the exchange over the productive activities and the consolidation of a values’ scale

that prioritizes the individual concurrence (Baudron, 2010; Cardoso Magalhães and Ortiz de

D’Arterio, 2010; Puebla, 2010). Consequently, the excluded peri-urban territory employment and

labour certainty decrease, while poverty, marginality, inequity and discrimination rise (Baudron,

2010). The distance between the diverse social groups that inhabit metropolis are not only physical

anymore, but cultural and symbolic: there is an interests and power struggle. The resulting social

inequities deepening is especially evident in the peri-urban zones (De la Vega, 2010; Hernandez et

al., 2010; Soldano, 2008).

Within the new rurality’s perspective there are various ways of approaching the study object and this

is why we cannot talk about a theory of the new rurality. The disciplines contributing to the new

rurality vary in their study interests from the analytical sociology, the normative sociology, until

territorial models and neomarxist approaches (Ruiz Rivera and Delgado Campos, 2008). However,
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 6

all of the perspectives converge in the need of recognition of the urban environment’s influence in

the social, cultural, and productive dynamic of the traditional rural means, especially of those

immediate to the cities (Ávila Sánchez, 2004).

Furthermore, the perspective of the new rurality needs to keep on developing its concepts and to move

forward with its research (Svetlitza, 2010; Ruiz Rivera and Delgado Campos, 2008; Ávila Sánchez,

2004; Gomez, 2003). The peri-urban production structures develop in a state of permanent tension

caused by the threat of urbanization, the instability of the land property and tenure system, the

migratory flows, the declining soil quality and the lack of control and planning by the municipal and

provincial governments facing the ongoing desruralization process (Svetlitza, 2010).

Hence, the perspective of the new rurality is quite accurate to describe the peri-urban production

structures’ current situation of vulnerability through the mutual influencing interactions of the local

– global levels, but it does not question the future possibilities of the studied communities. Therefore,

the assumption is that considering the sustainability of the peri-urban production structures and their

transformation possibilities would help the new rurality perspective to overcome its mere descriptive

approach and would be entitled with more scientific validity (Reyes Tejada, 2015).

III. The Case of Piedra Blanca

In Argentina particularly, there are many case studies on peri-urban production structures in the

Buenos Aires metropolitan area, but there are few research projects around other big cities under this

perspective. This is the case of the province of Cordoba, which is the second biggest in Argentina in

terms of its population and its economy, which has been growing sustainably since 2003. Because of

its privileged location in the Argentinean pampas and its accelerated industrialization process during

the 1950’s and 60’s, Cordoba has historically been host for intern and foreign migration of families

who made a living working the land, these migratory flows triggered a great expansion process since
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 7

the second half of the 20th century. Cordoba is also an important cultural and economic centre in

Argentina thanks to the long academic tradition of the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba.

Furthermore, the urban expansion of the city is characterized by a rapid population growth and the

discontinuous extension towards the urban periphery. According to the website of the province’s

government in 2008, the economic sector of construction represented 13,6% of the total GDP, while

agriculture, cattle raising and fisheries represented 12, 5% and the business and real estate activities

21,2%. The three sectors contribution to the provincial GDP add 47, 3% which explains why the

pressure on the land around the city of Cordoba is so high and generates conflicts around the land

tenure, such as land grabbing accompanied by police repression.

The transformations suffered by the city show a pattern in the territorial occupancy that expresses

with an increasing intensity the inequalities and socioeconomic differences within its population.

These are no coincidence, because, since 2004 the province’s administration has been implementing

social housing policies called “Programa Mi Casa, Mi Vida (PMCMV)” that led to a deepening of

the social segregation within the city of Cordoba (Avalle, De la Vega y Hernández, 2009 and Avalle,

Brandan y Saccucci, 2014).

Hence, the case of Piedra Blanca has been chosen to be analysed, on one hand, to bring the new

elements resulting from Cordoba’s particular context to the peri-urban production’s study. One of

these particularities is the PMCMV and its consequences in the city’s spatiality. In Buenos Aires, the

city and province governments have implemented relocation measures as well, the novelty in the city

of Cordoba is the authorities’ frontal intention to hide poverty away from the city and the resistance

that these actions generated in the popular sectors. Here, new neighbourhoods were created under this

policy and located outside the city with limited access to basic services. Furthermore, the policy did

not contribute to level up the city´s housing deficit.

Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 8

By the beginning of 2013, a series of land grabbing actions took place in Cordoba showing the broader

context of the housing situation in the city (Avalle, Ferrero, Job, Villegas, 2014). The attempt to force

70 families out of a neighbourhood called “El Bordo”, a Villa Miseria1 within the city which was

about to be evicted by the authorities so that a real state giant could built a high income housing

consortium triggered this problematic into the media’s attention and the cause gained the solidarity

of the public opinion. Therefore, other communities, among which Piedra Blanca stands out, started

an organization process and grabbed lands within Cordoba's urban network and in the adjacent zones.

Some of those resistance actions are still in force and questioning the province's exclusion and

segregation policies through social organization and political formation (Ciuffolini, 2016).

Even when the land grabbing in Piedra Blanca lasted for less than a year, the community represents

a paradigmatic case on how the realization of the unfairness of this exclusion situation leads to a claim

for citizenship rights. This collective action and the resulting political local organization provided the

community with an opportunity to achieve a life with dignity beyond the absence of the statehood as

an organizing entity in their territory. Access to land is a basic principle for subsistence, but the

absence of policies that guarantee it leads the people to generate autonomous strategies to obtain it.

Therefore, exploring the case of Piedra Blanca under the perspective of the New Rurality implies,

first, recognizing the territory as a space who is a social relationship itself, as a space where the

collective subject is articulated, beyond its material conditions. Therefore, it is the territory as a

geographical unit the element that better reflects Piedra Blanca’s vulnerability as a peri-urban

production structure. Nonetheless, it has great potential for contributing to the production structure’s

social sustainability as friendship and solidarity bonds help generating senses of belonging and

rootedness that result on the collective construction of a territorial identity.

1
Name given in Argentina to the informal settlements characterized by a dense proliferation of shacks.
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 9

Second and directly related, the New Rurality allows us to identify the social actors’ political,

socioeconomic and cultural strategies to face the adverse context in which they are inserted. In the

case of Piedra Blanca these strategies started being survival strategies aiming to their biological

reproduction and of their life means and the territory and currently they expanded to the intentionality

of improving the community’s life conditions and even to achieve a life with dignity.

As part of this transition, the constitution of a chickens’ production cooperative appears as the

milestone of the transition in Piedra Blanca’s production structure from a historical clay brick

production economy to become a place where healthy food is produced. Therefore, additionally, the

case has been chosen to show how sustainability can be included as an analysis dimension

complementing the ones already foreseen by the New Rurality perspective. As the organization of the

production embodies the collective action oriented to achieve economic viability and social

sustainability with reduced environmental liabilities (Reyes Tejada, 2015).

IV. Bolivian migration

Bolivian migration is between the “emergent concepts”, which are those categories that were not

foreseen in the theoretical framework, but proved to be crucial and central in the social actors’

discourse at constructing their stories.

In that sense, an unexpected turn of the research was realizing that chicken producers are on their vast

majority Bolivian migrants and women, the wives of the clay brick producers. The chicken production

allowed them to achieve a certain level of economic independence as a starting point for turning over

the gender inequality situation they suffer in their everyday life. In the same sense, the conditions in

which the Argentinean families live are not the same as of the Bolivians. Nowadays, the site is

composed by three properties belonging to two families and a landowner. Both families are

Argentinean and inhabit their own lands, while the landowner rents the brickyards in his property to

Bolivian workers in very precarious conditions. There is a clear division in the territory between the
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 10

space occupied by the criollos2, who belong all to one family, and the Bolivians living in a borrowed

piece of land. The neighbours in Piedra Blanca started recognizing this unjust situation by the end of

2012 when various lands were grabbed in Cordoba by homeless families. The case of El Bordo served

as an x-ray of Cordoba’s general housing situation raising the public opinion’s support for the

struggling families. Thus, in early February 2013, 4 Bolivian families decided to grab an adjacent

land in Piedra Blanca, which they claimed to have been unoccupied for 40 years.

It is mandatory to acknowledge that the housing situation of the Bolivian families is very similar to

vassalage because they are obliged to work in the brickyards and pay the rent in form of a percentage

of their production instead of a monetary amount. They have to yield the owner of the land 10 per

cent of every batch of production they make, which is between 8.000 and 12.000 clay bricks. The rest

is for them to sell to the intermediaries for about one peso each clay brick, which will be sold in 2,80

pesos3 in the market. It is in this context that the idea of the casita, the little house comes into play.

Many of the interviewees mention the need of a little house, that place to call their own, that secures

their permanence in the territory, that they can leave as a legacy to their children. The little house is

the main justification for the land grabbing and condenses the participant families’ dream of a better

life in equity.

After 8 months of sustaining the land grabbing, the pressure exercised by the police led many families

to leave the zone. Repression was not violent in a traditional sense, but discrimination against the

migrants was present and a court order was introduced forbidding to make any innovations to the

disputed land so that the grabbers ended up living in houses made out of nylon. Furthermore, they

2
Something that is characteristic of the culture and tradition of a Hispano-American country. In the case of
people, it refers to those persons of Spanish or European ascendant who were already born in a Hispano-
American country. In Argentina this term is commonly used to differentiate the own culture from the foreign
and/or migrant costumes.
3
The price of the peso fluctuated around the ten cents of euro throughout 2015, therefore 2,80 pesos represent 0,28 euros.
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 11

were not able to improve their life conditions in the new site either and if they did not go back to the

brickyards they would have lost their original livelihood, which is the clay brick production.

The land grabbing became a milestone in the way that the community conceive the space they inhabit

and their relationships with each other, it comes up as an extraordinary circumstance that marks a

before and after in the territorial identity and brought many opportunities with it. Even when the trial

was on TV, a group of lawyers helped clearing the migration situation of some of the Bolivian

families. Also, after the land grabbing, an opportunity to access some public funding for the chicken

production came up, but for that the producers had to constitute a cooperative. That is how the

“Cooperativa Gallo Rojo” was born sustained in the values of self-management and solidarity.

Nowadays, chicken production is developed simultaneously to the clay brick production, as

mentioned, mostly on charge of women and faces the need to deal with the cultural differences

between the Bolivian and the Argentinean producers.

The challenge of the cultural differences due to the fact that Bolivian migration is so strong in the

area lead to a particular construction of otherness within the community itself. One example for this

is the difference between the Bolivian and the Argentinean members, which cannot be framed in a

definition of racism, but is present as a sense of otherness. This recognition leads the individual to

construct the own identity in contrast to that what is foreign, to assess the own and construct and re-

construct it permanently (Boivin et al., 2004; Braidotti, 1999; Valdez and Di Rienzo, 2014). For

example, Bolivian members are perceived by their fellow producers to be distrustful and they prefer

one-on-one relationships. The assembly dynamics challenge them as they do not feel comfortable

talking openly to the group and often develop shared positions with their acquaintances behind closed

doors. The Argentinean members, on their side, perceive this attitude as some kind of betrayal.

A very interesting proof of this is the use of the word “nosotritos” by the Bolivian families, it means

“little us” and refers to the closest social circle than differentiates the person’s significant others even

from the group he or she belongs to. This shows how every individual within the community belongs
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 12

to more than one social group which results in a particular process of collective subjectivation that

serves to generate a sense of community in Piedra Blanca.

In the same direction, the land grabbing also awakened a second tension that served for unifying the

Argentineans and Bolivians as both groups established clear differences between their identity as

inhabitants of Piedra Blanca and those who live in the Barrios-Ciudad4. They appreciate highly the

trust they have on each other in the community, the tranquillity of the rural life and the work culture

that rules their personal relationships, while the Barrios-Ciudad represent a kind of poverty related to

delinquency, dependence on the State and overcrowding.

V. Subsistence strategies

The construction of the territorial identity is marked by the mentioned cultural differences and they

also contribute to shaping a particular work and organization culture in Piedra Blanca as a peri-urban

production structure. In that framework, for addressing the shift in the local economies’ and their

environments (Arias, 2005 ), the New Rurality aims to visualize the social actors’ strategies in light

of how the forms of production change in the rural world in terms of the political, social and cultural

processes they face (Ruiz Rivera & Delgado Campos, 2008). In the case of the peri-urban settings

such as Piedra Blanca, these strategies are rather subsistence strategies, attempts to reproduce

biologically and to reproduce their life means in the territory. In that sense, the best example of these

strategies is the creation of the chickens’ production cooperative, which was the process that resulted

from all the previous instances where the community realized they had to join their efforts for securing

food availability and income sources in their territory.

These subsistence strategies were conceptualized into three categories : political, socioeconomic and

cultural strategies (Reyes Tejada, 2015). First, the political strategies are those tools used by the

4
Barrio-Ciudad is the figure introduced in Cordoba for the relocation of evicted families. It is an urbanization
project that can be described as a self-contained neighbourhood in the city’s periphery where inhabitants are
provided with housing and public services in a way that they do not depend of the city for their livelihood.
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 13

social actors to create a local environment that encourages production and a self-sustained

development and are those that shape how they interact with the institutional framework present in

their territory (Vazquez Barquero, 2015). Promoting the territory´s production and achieving its

development are closely related and none of them can be dissociated of the community's interaction

with the legal system and power exercise in a broader context. In that sense, the actual strategies are

the community's political organization, the organization of the territory and the construction of a

political discourse, of a shared position to face the presence of statehood in the community, which is

often under the form of oppression (Reyes Tejada, 2015).

In Piedra Blanca there are three organizational instances, which are independent entities in theory,

but in practice are very difficult to differentiate. The first are the cooperatives that gather the chicken

producers and the clay brick producers. The second is the local organization, which is on charge of

the community's broader activities and the organization of the territory. The third organizational

instance is the “Encuentro de Organizaciones (EO)”, a nonpartisan political organization working on

several areas in the city aiming to achieve autonomy for the popular sectors jointly with the

communities. Thus, the EO aims to accompany Piedra Blanca’s autonomous creation of tools for their

sustainability and provides political formation, which together with the cooperative´s organization of

the production converges to shape the organization of the territory.

In respect of the socioeconomic strategies, the cooperative gathers the community under the form of

a domestic production unit, which we understand as a group of persons with a sustained bound to

each other and that are reciprocally and regularly responsible for providing and distributing the

material conditions for all of their members (Coraggio, 1999). The cooperative’s functioning

principle is that for achieving economic viability the local organization needs to be consolidated and

the production needs to be based in solidarity as a principle (Avalle y Pleitavino, 2012).

In other words, economic viability is highly related to social sustainability in the territory, that is why

the first kind of strategies to be analysed are those related to the construction of social capital in Piedra
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 14

Blanca and the second kind refers to the organization of the production in the territory. Without

forgetting that the main survival strategy of the community is hard work as often remarked by the

neighbours, it is to say, the employment of the own labor force to make a living. Together these two

sets of strategies will determine the production structure’s economic sustainability.

Thereby, construction of social capital and “hard work” are highly related, as there is an undeniable

back and forward between labor and interpersonal relationships. Knowing people, having contacts,

making friends is what allowed the migrants to find a job and settle in Piedra Blanca. Furthermore,

these networks are what provides them possibility to improve their life conditions and gain status

within the community; such is the case of some families who started working for someone and now

own a brickyard and have people working for them.

These activities lead to the developing of friendship ties and interpersonal relationships that beyond

probing collective actions to have better results than individual ones, contribute to the production

structure’s social sustainability, on one hand, and to overcome the cultural differences, on the other.

In other words, construction of social capital within the community means developing lasting social

relationships, which enable rootedness in the territory and developing the producers’ capabilities and

skills for them to be able to sustain their production structure independently of external assistance or

founding.

Finally, the community’s cultural strategies are those who together with the organization of the

production will allow the social sustainability of Piedra Blanca’s production structure. These

strategies those who aim to construct a collective identity and the sense of belonging and the

rootedness to the territory (Avalle, 2010). The cultural strategies reflect, on one hand, the way that

the members of the organized community construct otherness towards the other members to affirm

their own identity and role in the production process, and in the other, how a state of consciousness

shared by the group leads to their collective action in the frame of the cooperative.
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 15

As mentioned, the first great difference dividing the producers as a group is their origin. The oldest

members of the community recall about the Bolivian families that “it was easier when they were less”

(Interview to the leader of a criollo household). The fact that the community is now constituted in its

majority by migrants triggered their need to redesign the own behaviour to face the cultural

differences.

Therefore, the developing of territorial identity is not a single or linear process, on the contrary it

condensates multiple identities struggling for equality as stated by Rancière (1995). This struggle

reflects a series of tensions within the construction of one community identity and the task is to

identify the determinant factor, this question in common that exceeds the particular tensions to

become transversal to all of its members. In this particular case, the joint cause that triggered the

construction of a community sense was the fact that during the land grabbing, nor the Bolivian

participants or the Argentinean supporters wanted that site to become a big neighbourhood. This aim

to maintain their rural and quiet lifestyle lead them to become an “us” against a new group –

urbanization under the form of a Barrio-Ciudad - to build an otherness with.

VI. Conclusion

The particularity of peri-urban food production by Bolivian migrants has been extensively studied in

Argentina (Svetlitza, 2010), however in the case of Piedra Blanca’s production structure this

phenomenon has two innovative aspects. First, the fact that cooperative food production takes place

jointly with Argentinean producers under a cooperative model and; second, the fact that it is carried

on almost exclusively by female producers. We are in debt of a deeper analysis of the gender

inequalities in the study of this case, but in the following paragraphs, we aim to synthetize our findings

on the production strategies.

Having in mind that the original research studied the sustainability of the peri-urban production

structures and their transformation possibilities, adding it as a conceptual dimension for helping the
Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 16

New Rurality perspective to gain more scientific validity, in the present article we studied the actors’

strategies to overcome their situation of vulnerability. We discovered by analysing their subsistence

strategies that when their production initiatives adopt a cooperative feature in a self-managed way

and count on a specialized coordination, they incorporate social and economic capitals that favour

their survival. We assumed that such a peri-urban production initiative cannot compete in a traditional

capitalist market logic, but since the producers managed to generate alternative commercialization

networks and an identity appropriation of those initiatives, sustainability is now possible.

The success of Piedra Blanca’s chicken production can be explained because the creation of a work

cooperative does not present itself only as an economic initiative, but rather as a subsistence project

with great influence in the organization of the community’s life. The shift from the clay brick

production economic profile towards becoming a referent of healthy food production in Cordoba

reflects the convergence of the mentioned factors. However, the consolidation of the cooperative and

self-managed peri-urban production structure had to overcome the cultural differences between the

Bolivian migrants and the Argentinean producers. Moreover, what we called the survival strategies

of the community as a production unit were highly influenced by the migrants’ cultural asset and new

subjectivation processes were triggered during the creation of the cooperative. These new

subjectivation processes were crucial to the construction of a territorial identity and strengthened the

production processes.

Moreover, these organization instances play a key role in organizing a territory where statehood is

absent. In that sense, the experience of Piedra Blanca allows us to understand the development of

lifestyles in the city’s periphery offering the novelty of being able to comprehend the case through

the theorization of collectivization as survival and organization strategy. It brings light to the

processes through which peri-urban sites are resignified and appropriated by their inhabitants. For

them peri-urbanization becomes an opportunity to overcome vulnerability in contraposition of a city

that offers poverty and precariousness.

Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 17

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Amsterdam Social Science <info@socialscience.nl> 15 ene.

Dear Natalia and Gerardo

Thank you for getting in touch,

We would be happy to review your submission.

We are open to both articles (between 4000-7000 words) and more concise essays (2000-3000 words).

As well as the article/essay itself, we also ask for a short biography (1 to 4 lines) about you, as well as an
abstract summarising the paper.

As this is a special edition, it will be printed in hardcopy as well as published online (accessible via Jstor).
Submissions are assessed through a double-blind peer-review process.

The specific guidelines for layout can be found via the following links (you can submit it directly on the
website or via email, either is fine!) :

http://socialscience.nl/submit-journal/

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/

Also, here is a previous edition of the journal, just so you can see how the articles are normally laid out in
the final version.

http://socialscience.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ASS_7.1_FullContent-final.pdf

The deadline for submissions for the special edition is 20th January.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Kind regards,

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Bolivian Migration and Peri-urban Production in Piedra Blanca, Argentina 20

Web: www.socialscience.nl
E-Mail: info@socialscience.nl

Natalia Reyes Tejada <nataliareyest88@gmail.com> 19 ene.

Dear Samuel,

Thank you for your quick reply. Please, find attached our article following the ASS guidelines. We
hope to hear soon from you. Thank you!

Best regards,