Women of La Toma: communicational analysis of territorial public policies with a gender perspective

Abstract

The ways in which poverty has been more crudely installed in the peripheral neighborhoods of the Greater San Miguel de Tucumán (GSMT) agglomerate, in the north of Argentina, and the conditions of misery in some cases, conditions the life of its inhabitants. Women and girls are especially affected, due to other social problems. The history of structural poverty and child malnutrition in this sector of the territory explains the existence of dozens of canteens, picnic areas and community kitchens throughout the agglomerate, organized and managed mostly by women. The question then arises as to whether public policies with an impact on the territory take into account the particular situation of women in poor neighborhoods; whether they identify their own meanings and in relation to their community, especially if they are state operations where the objective is a participatory process of joint work with the community; in order to analyze what they contribute to the lives of these women, what they cancel out or what they deprive them of. In this sense, it is proposed to investigate and analyze public policies with an impact on the production and/or improvement of the habitat, from a gender perspective, with special attention to the role assumed/assigned to women in the territory. The women's organization of the La Toma neighborhood in the municipality of Tafí Viejo, located within the metropolitan area of the GSMT, is taken as a case study. The women's group is organized -with some intermittences- around the planning of a community project that will allow them to promote the development of native productive enterprises and the tourist exploitation of the area in the future. From the development of the field work in the neighborhood, and through the analysis of the main emergents collected in the interviews conducted, it is evident how the role of women in their community is related to care tasks, especially about food, since many of them manage a dining room and two picnic areas in the neighborhood. In this case, these are isolated subgroups that are not related to any other enterprise, since there are some divisions among the women who carry out these tasks. Nevertheless, the women have managed to overcome individualism, promote dialogue and reach agreements with the aim of working towards general improvements in the neighborhood