Cesar Sanabria He was a cartonero, he takes care of cars, he worked as a bricklayer and, against many predictions full of prejudices, he graduated as an architect, becoming the first graduate of Villa 31 in that career. And, as if that were not enough, at the last Book Fair he presented “La 31, una historia de Resistencia”, a book in which he tells about his origins, his upbringing in the place where he still lives and the culture of work within of a complex context.
News: What is your book about?
Sanabria: Trat of the history of the neighborhood, of the genesis, of how it was born. It is no longer Villa 31 because an urbanization law was passed in the Buenos Aires Legislature in 2018. Now His name is “Father Carlos Mujica” for the priest The book is divided into temporary chapters, temporary segments. The neighborhood was born in 1932, when there was a great world crisis in 1929 and the stock market crashed in New York, and then the First World War. All this led to a large flow of European immigrants to South America, a migratory flow that Argentina capitalized on with reception policies for Italians, Poles, and Spaniards. They worked in the port area and these people were given some very precarious boxes to live in.
News: Since when do you live in 31?
Sanabria 😀Since I was two years old. TI worked taking care of cars, collecting cans, I was a cartonerobut always with this logic of work culture my parents taught me. My mother is 63 years old and to this day she continues to work as a domestic worker, and my father taught me a little about the masonry trade, which is why I decided to study architecture. HToday I am an architect, professor at the University of Buenos Aires, one of the best universities in the world.
News: Why is it a story of resistance?
Sanabria 😛Because it was always a neighborhood that resisted the political attacks of wanting to eradicate it. Many times the different governments, both de facto and democratic, wanted to eradicate it. In the 1970s, the military, with the excuse of the World Cup, carried out a major eradication of the city’s slums because it was not nice for foreigners to arrive and see those humble little houses, those precarious shacks. There were forty-eight families left in our neighborhood who went to court and managed to stay with legal protection, otherwise we would all have had to leave. They came to be called the “Commission of Claimants” because together with 31 they joined other neighborhoods. Time passed and the neighborhood was repopulated. In ’83 there was a new wave of settlers, people from the interior of the country and neighboring countries who came in search of a job opportunity.
News:What did you feel when you were a child and lived in a neighborhood like that, a “vulnerable population”?
Sanabria: When I was a child I had no dimension, but when you grow up you become aware of where you live. It’s like a mixture of feelings, some that have to do with rejection, others with fear, resignation, a mixture of everything. But I’m from the neighborhood and I plant my flag: I am proud to say that I am from the neighborhood, whatever they say. I come from a hard-working, humble family and that is what makes me proud because There are many workers in the neighborhood. When we went out looking for work we had to deny our address, because it condemned you to the employer not giving you the chance to get that job. They are those fears that they think badly or that they discriminate against you.
News: What would be the problem that you would like to eradicate from your neighborhood?
Sanabria: The theme of drug use. That is a problem that has not yet been solved. ANDhe State has to press hard to solve this issue, which is often a taboo subject. Many young people consume the residue of cocaine that is called base paste. That ruins them, makes them young aimless, people who look like zombies. It is very unfortunate to see people who have their whole lives ahead of them and, sometimes due to family or context problems, choose this type of drug that also leads them to other types of situations such as theft, crime in general.
News: If you had to highlight a virtue of the people in your neighborhood, what would it be?
sanabria: The Solidarity. I name you a clear example of solidarity that happened on several occasions. Services in the neighborhood are not paid, electricity is not paid, we have gas in bottles, water is not paid either, only now are we adapting and we are going to have rights and obligations. This means that frequently, in winter or very hot seasons, there are fires in houses. That is where solidarity is seen, when a house burns in three minutes, it is not an exaggeration, in three minutes there are three hundred people collaborating with buckets, water, risking their lives trying to put out the fire. When the pandemic was, we neighbors cooked to feed families who had no resources. That is the greatest strength of the neighborhoods, and I name them all the popular neighborhoods that are four thousand four hundred in Argentina. Solidarity is strength. Also when we had to go to block streets to claim for services, for the urbanization law, for the land law, on those occasions we have also twinned.
News: How is life today in your neighborhood?
Sanabria: Lpeople from popular neighborhoods always have a bad time because prices rise with inflation and the popular sectors are the ones that suffer the most. In the pandemic we had a very bad time, because Barrio 31 was one of the first neighborhoods where the coronavirus broke out. The overcrowding, the context of constructions so close to each other made the contagion more frequent. Unfortunately we lost many historic neighbors in our struggle, I tell about it in the book. There is a chapter referring to the pandemic and I pay homage to those neighbors who unfortunately died from the virus: Ramona Medina, a referent of the Powerful Throat, she was claiming for the water cut in the middle of the pandemic, Gladys Argañarás who is a referent from a dining room that also passed away, the dining room he used to go to when he was a boy, Pablo Alemán, another benchmark who passed away, he worked disinfecting the streets, we affectionately called him “the searcher”.
*Gabriela Fernández Rosman is a student at the Profile School of Communication.
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