The Denial of Citizenship: “barbaric” Buenos Aires and the middle‐class imaginary

This essay explores how, in the Buenos Aires of neoliberalism, middle‐class residents strove to make sense of their own impoverishment and their disenfranchisement by generating a consensus on how this city's modernity was being eroded by the presence of a mestizo lower class. Through an analysis of the discourse that constructed the urban poor as barbaric (i.e., dangerous, polluting, and foreign), I suggest that this representation not only sought to reinforce the fading social difference between the middle‐ and the lower class, but it also contributed to denying the latter its citizenship in a Buenos Aires that struggled to be modern.