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This article examines the actions that millions of new-poor Argentine citizens took when confronted with impoverishment during the country's economic crisis in 2002. Drawing on World Bank and Latinobarómetro survey data, it explores how their distinct understandings of citizenship; their possession of human, social, physical, cultural, and financial capital; and aspects of their middle-class identity shaped the very specific forms of resistance that they adopted compared to the structural poor. It provides insights into why some citizens perceived their hardship as a political problem, formed collective grievances, and manifested their resistance through protest, while others located the causes of hardship in their own deficiencies and tended to confine their responses to individual self-improvement strategies. It also finds that differences in personal biographies, experiences of poverty, and the changing spaces available to protest influenced individuals' choice of action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a shantytown in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, this article studies the workings of Peronist "political clientelism" among the urban poor. It analyzes the web of relations that some slum-dwellers establish with local political brokers to obtain medicine, food, and solutions to other everyday concerns. The article also explores the main functions of the "problem-solving networks," which are resource control and information hoarding, and pays particular attention to an underexplored dimension of the operation of clientelism: clients' own views on the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]