Patients of the State

The Politics of Waiting in Argentina

Author: Javier Auyero

This is about the power that can be imposed, and the misery that is caused, especially for the poor, by the simple act of waiting. Although set in Buenos Aires, Auyero describes a variety of different situations, including waiting for national identity cards, for welfare agencies, and the endless waiting for relocation from the slums. This study of power by bureaucrats and the state is applicable to many countries and places.

This volume examines the power that can be imposed, and the misery that is caused, especially for the poor, by the simple act of waiting. Although set in Buenos Aires, Auyero describes a variety of different situations, including waiting for national identity cards, for welfare agencies, and the endless waiting for relocation from the slums.

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Patients of the State is a sociological account of the extended waiting that poor people seeking state social and administrative services must endure. It is based on ethnographic research in the waiting area of the main welfare office in Buenos Aires, in the line leading into the Argentine registration office where legal aliens apply for identification cards, and among people who live in a polluted shantytown on the capital's outskirts, while waiting to be allocated better housing. Scrutinizing the mundane interactions between the poor and the state, as well as underprivileged people's confusion and uncertainty about the administrative processes that affect them, Javier Auyero argues that while waiting, the poor learn the opposite of citizenship. They learn to be patients of the state. They absorb the message that they should be patient and keep waiting, because there is nothing else that they can do. Drawing attention to a significant everyday dynamic that has received little scholarly attention until now, Auyero considers not only how the poor experience these lengthy waits but also how making poor people wait works as a strategy of state control.

Critic Reviews

“"...this [book] is a careful and beautifully written ethnographic investigation of the contours of ordinary people's lives under neoliberalism in Argentina." - Gianpaolo Baiocchi, American Journal of Sociology”

"Patients of the State is an insightful and long-overdue exploration of how the worst Latin American welfare programs reinforce powerlessness and sub-citizenship even as they sporadically relieve economic misery. Vividly describing the phenomenally cavalier ways in which the governmental agencies of Buenos Aires waste poor people's time and resources, Javier Auyero calls attention to the insidious violence of systems that sap political initiative and hobble complex and delicate urban survival strategies. With this study, he has once again opened new pathways for the study of contemporary Latin American poverty." Brodwyn Fischer, author of A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro "In this brilliant, insightful, and sensitive investigation, Javier Auyero brings careful ethnographic research to bear on the routine temporal experiences of people who seek help and social services from the state. In doing so, he shows us how the state constructs political dominance through the control of its citizens' time and temporal experience. By making the urban poor wait for whatever they need, the state creates subordination and political resignation. Patients of the State will have a major impact on scholarly and public discourse; it helps us see what is happening to millions of people around the world." Michael G. Flaherty, author of The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience

About the Author

Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor in Latin American Sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina: The Gray Zone of State Power and a co-author of Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. His books Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition and Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita are both also published by Duke University Press.