Villas miserias

A villa miseria (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈbiʎa miˈseɾja], locally [ˈbiʒa ~ ˈbiʃa ...]), or just villa, is a type of shanty town or slum found in Argentina, mostly around the largest urban settlements. The term is a noun phrase made up of the Spanish words villa (village, small town) and miseria (misery, dejection), and was adopted from Bernardo Verbitsky's 1957 novel Villa Miseria también es América ("Villa Miseria is also [a part of] the Americas").

These settlements consist of small houses or shacks made of tin, wood and other scrap material. Generally, the streets are not paved and narrow internal passages 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 accepted by suppliers.

The villas range from small groups of precarious houses to larger, more organized communities with thousands of residents. In rural areas, the houses in the 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. 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 improve their economic status.

Villas miseria are known to house criminals, from minor thieves to drug dealers, because the houses are typically safe from police and they are really cheap and easy to acquire.

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