Villa Miseria

A villa miseria (Spanish language: "misery village"; also just villa) is a form of shanty town or slum found in Argentina, mostly around the largest urban settlements. The term is a compound noun made of the Spanish words villa "village, small town" and miseria "misery, dejection". The name was adopted from Bernardo Verbitsky's 1957 novel Villa Miseria también es América ("Villa Miseria is also the Americas").

These settlements consist of small houses or shacks made of tin, wood, and/or other materials, whatever can be found. The streets are usually not paved—narrow internal passages may connect the different parts. The villas miseria have no sanitation system, though there may be water pipes passing through the settlement. Electric power is sometimes taken directly from the grid using illegal connections, which are perforce tolerated by the power companies.

The villas range from small groups of precarious houses, well inside the urban grid, to larger, more organised communities with thousands of residents. In rural areas, villas miserias might be made of mud and wood. Villas miseria are found around and inside the large cities of Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba and Mendoza, among others.

These shantytowns are also euphemistically called asentamientos ("settlements") or villas de emergencia ("emergency villages"). In most of Argentina, the unqualified word villa usually refers to a villa miseria.

The villas draw people from several backgrounds. Some are local citizens who have fallen from an already precarious economic position. In most cases a villa miseria is populated by the children and grandchildren of the original settlers, who have been unable to raise their economic status.

Villas miseria are considered by most citizens as havens for criminals, from minor thieves to drug dealers.

Argentine painter Antonio Berni dealt with the hardships of living in a villa miseria through his series Juanito Laguna, a slum child, and Ramona Montiel, a prostitute.