Origins of the shanty towns in the city of Buenos Aires - towards a critical revision of the traditional perspectives

Abstract

Through the research and systematization of a group of primary sources about the first precarious neighborhoods within the city of Buenos Aires, it is possible to redefine the general characteristics of their conformation, establishing a critical analysis of the traditional perspectives regarding this topic. By doing so, in order to define a temporal delimitation of the shanty towns’ constitutive process, we will take distance of those periodizations that situate their origins by the mid-twentieth century, during the boom of the internal migrations and the consolidation of import substitution industrialization. Unlike these approaches, evidences show that the mentioned process can be identified between the late nineteen century, and the early twentieth, during the agro-export model.