welcome to the country club

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Author

Justin McGuirk

Photography

Toms Garca Puente

Published

24 November 2011

Location

San Salvador de Jujuy

Sections

Architecture

Keywords

Alto Comedero, DOMUS 951, Milagro Sala,

Organizacin Barrial Tupac Amaru

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Welcometo theCountryClub

In the settlement built by the Tupac Amaru movement, a model for a possible

alternative to gated communities and social housing.

Architecture / Justin McGuirk
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This article was originally published in Domus 951, October 2011

At the entrance to Alto Comedero is a sign that reads "Bienvenida

al Cantri". That "cantri" is a phonetic misspelling of "country",

but the joke is no worse for it. "Welcome to the Country Club."

Driving in, you'll encounter a vast swimming pool, a Jurassic-

themed playground and a replica of the Incan temple of

Tiwanaku. These extravagant amenities nestle among row upon

row of singlestorey houses. From a distance the terraces resemble

a piece of working-class Liverpool, except here, in northwest

Argentina, what appear to be chimneys are rainwater tanks

branded with the face of Che Guevara. This is not really a country

club; this is social housingsocial housing as you've never seen

it.

Alto Comedero is the largest of the communities built by a social

movement called Tupac Amaru. Based in the city of San Salvador

de Jujuy, where Argentina approaches the border of Bolivia,

Tupac Amaru claims to represent the neediest in society,

providing housing, education, medical care or whatever else they

requireit might be a meal or a pair of shoes. As well as its own

housing system, it has its own factories, schools and hospitalsa

degree of self-sufficiency that has led some to conclude thatTupac Amaru is effectively a state within a state. It has more than

70,000 membersor followers, depending on how one defines

themmade up mostly of indigenous Kolla Indians. A

revolutionary movement with quasisocialist ideals, Tupac Amaru

is known for its radical politics and for the efficacy of its direct

actionwhen the movement decides to demonstrate, it can

paralyse the streets of Jujuy, a fact that has turned many of the

local middle class against them.


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Alto Comedero is the model housing quarter built in several stages since 2003 by the Tupac Amaru cooperatives.

"Be careful of these people. They're dangerous," said the

taxi driver as he dropped me off at the Tupac Amaru

headquarters in Jujuy. Such are the rumours that circulate

around this movement. Some of the animosity stems from its

leader, a diminutive Kolla woman named Milagro Sala, who has a

reputation as both saint (Milagro means "miracle" in Spanish)

and sinner. It is difficult to understand the particular urbanism

that Tupac Amaru has createdthat combination of exurbia,Disneyesque theme park and radical socialismwithout

understanding something of Milagro Sala. The Milagro legend

holds that as a baby she was abandoned in a box outside a

hospital. She ran away from her adoptive home at 14 to become a

street hawker, but fell into petty crime and eventually wound up

in prison. There, she emerged as a natural leader, organising a

hunger strike over the quality of the food and helping to teach

inmates to read. Having risen up through the Peronist Youth

Movement and the unions, her subsequent political image is part


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A recent demonstration in Ledesma. Housing isone of the social struggles pursued by the Tupac

Amaru movement, led by Milagro Sala. The

movement wins the consensus of descendants of

the original populations.

revolutionary leader and part Mother Theresa. And yet local

scuttlebutt insinuates she'd been a prostitute and a drug addict.

The rightwing media has portrayed her as presiding over a mob,

while somelike that taxi driver no doubtsee it more as a cult.

Despite her unpromising beginnings, Milagro is one of

the most powerful women in Argentina. In her headquarters

there are pictures of her with the Argentinian President Cristina

Kirchner and Bolivia's Evo Morales, whom she calls "comrade


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Evo". Perhaps, rather than an extraordinary anomaly, she is best

understood in the context of a new breed of socialist-style South

American leader wielding genuine grass-roots power. Morales

and Hugo Chavez, together with first Lula and then Rousseff in

Brazil, and the late Nstor Kirchner in Argentina, have brought a

socialist dynamic back into the mainstream of the continent's

politics. "We are and we aren't a revolutionary organisation,"

Milagro told me. "We are not revolutionary in the sense that we

don't carry weapons and we don't believe in violencewe

understand the value of human life. But we are revolutionaries in

that we understand that we can change how people think.

Through dignified work and a change of consciousness, people

can become better."

Tupac Amaru has built thousands of houses for the poorestpeople in this region. It began with a mere 148, when Milagro

took a punt that even she, with no construction experience,

could make better use of government housing subsidies than the

corrupt local politicians. Today she controls government funding

worth 1,000 houses per year. But her real genius is in how she

spends that money. Tupac Amaru created its own brick and

steelwork factories, making the construction process that much

more efficient. Receiving 93,000 pesos (23,000 dollars) per

housea third less than volume housing companiesit builds

those houses four times faster than the private sector. One reason

is that it employs the poor as a labour force, which must make

this one of the few schemes in the world where you can be paid to

build your own houseand then be given it for free.

It is difficult to understand the particular urbanism

that Tupac Amaru has created that combination of

exurbia, Disneyesque theme park and radical

socialism.


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The movements political ideology is represented not only by Jos Gabriel Condorcanki Tupac Amaru (a mythical figure, vic tim of Spanish repression inthe 18th century), but also by Che Guevara and Evita Peron. Their images decorate the water tanks on the roofs of the houses.

There are 2,700 houses in Alto Comedero, home to 7,000

people. The buildings themselves are unremarkable. This is a

standard-issue pitched-roof design handed out by the ministry of

housing. Each single-storey unit consists of 50 square metres

with two bedrooms, a garden in front and a small courtyard out

back. There were no architects involved herethe local

architects' association demanded too hefty a fee. But what makesAlto Comedero truly unique is not the architecture so much as

the luxurious amenities and the surreal place-making.

Everywhere you look, Tupac Amaru's revolutionary cosmology

has been turned into a didactic branding concept. Each of the

houses is stamped with a face. It might be Tupac Amaru himself,

the 18th-century Incan leader who rebelled against the Spanish,

after whom the movement takes its name; or Eva ("Evita") Peron,

that talismanic Argentine heroine; or Che Guevara, the socialist

revolutionary (Che's face is also written large on the walls of the

community factories). This is the holy trinity of the organisation's

iconographya blend of T-shirt radicalism, Argentine populism,

and local ethnic folklore.

The theme-park urbanism of Alto Comedero is equally sui

generis. What Tupac Amaru saves by creating its own factories

and by cutting out all the middlementhe developers,

construction companies and architectsit can reinvest into thecommunity as grand social gestures. It was news of the


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swimming pools that first brought me to Jujuythe idea that with

a simple gesture you could make the poor feel rich. And yet I'd

expected some standard rectangular affair, not the amoeboid

aquatic park that awaited me in Alto Comedero, with its giant

penguin figures and walruses. Seeing the glee with which a boy

dive-bombed that water was enough to validate the entire

concept.

The Tupac Amaru neighbourhood association is responsible for the self-construction of more than 3,400 homes in the Jujuy region alone, using funds

allocated to government-subsidised public housing.

And it's not just the pool: I passed a basketball court, a

football pitch andalmost bizarrely, considering it is the sport of

the middle class a rugby pitch. But these were only too prosaic

compared to the sight of the Jurassic theme park. In this vast

playground roamed by dinosaurs, children shrieked as they

spilled down slides attached to woolly mammoths and

triceratops. Granted, the production values aren't quite

Industrial Light & Magicthese creatures are handmade by

craftsmen in the local steelwork factorybut the effect is no lesssurprising. Teenagers, meanwhile, hung out under palm-frond


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pavilions fitted with barbecue grills. What kind of childhood

heaven was this? That sign at the entrance was ironic and

utopian at the same time: Welcome to the Country Club. Yet that

leisure-zone concept is not sufficient. The strangest feature of

Alto Comedero is the replica of the ancient temple at Tiwanaku in

Bolivia. This sacred Incan site has been reconstructed out of

breezeblocks, like something on a Hollywood set. Ersatz, yes, but

authentic enough to attract Mapuche Indians from Patagonia,

who come here to celebrate Inti Raymi, the Incan festival of the

sun. Milagro had pointed out to me that one of the differences

between Tupac Amaru and a Marxist movement was its spiritual

dimension. She is not religious, but she understands that

keeping alive Kolla traditions is one way of bonding a community

together.

Promotion of the model housing quarter is accompanied by the slogan, A dream in progress, synonymous with determination and power.

Set aside the economic efficiency at work here and there

is an innocence to all of this. Alto Comedero personifies a kind ofChristmas-list urbanism, perhaps even a nave whimsy that rules


9/15



nothing off the menu: a theme park, a templewhy not? It is

hard to over-estimate what a far cry Alto Comedero is from the

shanty-style settlements around it, where people have built their

own homes with whatever they could muster. Ordinarily, the

only way people can acquire a house of the quality of those in

Alto Comedero is on a state programme. But you need to prove

that you earn 2,500 pesos (600 dollars) a month to get yourself

on a waiting list that may be eight years long, and precedes the

coughing up of a 12,000-peso (2,900-dollar) down payment. In

other words, the genuinely poor can't even reach the first rung of

that ladder. In contrast with nearby villa miserias, Alto Comedero

has the sense of exclusivity of a gated communitywithout the

gate.

of the Tupac Amaru struggle against marginalisation. According to Sala, Poverty is a circumstance that can be changed only if the poor do not identify

with it.

Social housing is ordinarily a matter of achieving the

minimum, of ruling out the inessential so that state expenditure

can be minimised or private profits maximised. But how do youdefine "essential"? A swimming pool is an inexpensive way of


10/15



giving the poor a taste of civic pride, of creating a community

that can bond through leisure and not merely through

agglomeration. Milagro would scarcely phrase it in such terms,

but Alto Comedero is a giant middle digit held up at the

politicians and the private house builders. But perhaps most

importantly, what Alto Comedero represents is a zone of

exception. With centralised social housing out of political

fashion all over the world, it is increasingly rare to find a form of

place-making that is not in thrall to a market that depends on

privatised services, rising property values and speculation. What

may be Tupac Amaru's most remarkable achievement is in

carving out a few squares of independent territory on the

capitalist gameboard.

Justin McGuirk,

Journalist and critic

Incan temple of Tiwanaku in Bol ivia is so authentic that Mapuche Indians come here to celebrate Inti Raymi, the Incan festival of the sun.


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The districts public park covers an area of 40,000 m2. The figures that populate it are inspired by characters from the film Ice Age.

Author

Justin McGuirk

Photography

Toms Garca Puente

Sections

Architecture

Keywords

Alto Comedero, DOMUS 951, Milagro Sala,

Organizacin Barrial Tupac Amaru

Location

San Salvador de Jujuy

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welcome to the country club

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