Shanty Town or Slum found in Argentina.

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• published: 14 Apr 2015
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A villa miseria (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈbiʎa miˈseɾja], locally: [ˈbiʒa ~ ˈbiʃa ...]), or just villa, is a type of shanty town or slum found in Argentina, mostly around the largest urban settlements. The term is a noun phrase made up of the Spanish words villa (village, small town) and miseria (misery, dejection), and was adopted from Bernardo Verbitsky's 1957 novel Villa Miseria también es América ("Villa Miseria is also [a part of] the Americas"). These settlements consist of small houses or shacks made of tin, wood and other scrap material. Generally, the streets are not paved and narrow internal passages connect the different parts. The villas miseria have no sanitation system, though there may be water pipes passing through the settlement. Electric power is sometimes taken directly from the grid using illegal connections, which are perforce accepted by suppliers. The villas range from small groups of precarious houses to larger, more organised communities with thousands of residents. In rural areas, the houses in the villas miserias might be made of mud and wood. Villas miseria are found around and inside the large cities of Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba and Mendoza, among others. The villas draw people from several backgrounds. Some are local citizens who have fallen from an already precarious economic position. In most cases, a villa miseria is populated by the children and grandchildren of the original settlers, who have been unable to improve their economic status.[citation needed] Villas miseria are known to be house for criminals, from minor thieves to drug dealers, because the houses are typically safe from police and they are really cheap and easy to acquire.[citation needed] These shantytowns are euphemistically called asentamientos ("settlements") or villas de emergencia ("emergency villages"). In most parts of Argentina, the non-modified word villa usually refers to a villa miseria. Argentinian painter Antonio Berni dealt with the hardships of living in a villa miseria through his series Juanito Laguna, a slum child, and Ramona Montiel, a prostitute. The Argentinian writer Hugo Pezzini, in his book, The Latin American Literature of the Neoliberal Crisis: The Emergence of a Postmodern Posthegemonic Heterotopy (Amsterdam: Universiteit van Amsterdam - Cultural Analysis Summer Academy, 2013), commenting on writer César Aira's 2001 novel La Villa says the following: "The apparent absurdity of César Aira's novel La Villa provides an instance of resourceful mediation to semantically reorganize a situation of emergency and locate it within its particular rationale. In Argentina, a slum is popularly called 'villa miseria,' or simply 'la villa.' In politically correct language, that is, officially, is called 'villa de emergencia.'” The slum of Aria's La Villa is an organized-organic posthegemonic microcosm whose symbols and rational design are only understood by its posthegemonic inhabitants, who are also its architects and engineers. To them their semantics are perfectly logical and knowable."