ABSTRACT
How did the shantytown women respond to the exacerbated poverty they faced? They could have responded by abandonment, inactivity due to despair or, as was the case with some of the mothers in Scheper-Hughes’ (1992) Death Without Weeping, letting a child die since, despite their best efforts, they could not feed them, while adhering to a discourse about certain children not wanting to live. Instead, they joined local groups that produced food or generated an income, and in parallel sought work with emergency employment programs or private employers, engaged in entrepreneurship, cut back spending at home, participated in reciprocal exchanges, and devised one-off solutions such as asking their local priest for help. In their groups they engaged in direct action, or work to solve the poverty-related problems in an immediate and direct way (the subject of this chapter), and in applying pressure through protests and denunciations about their poverty (Chapter 6). Because what the women did to cope with poverty was such a radical departure from their previous existence, I begin by introducing the reader to what their lives had been like previously, “within the four walls,” as they put it.
