Abstract
From the end of the 80s, the "Comedor Popular" (Grassrroot Soup Kitchen) is installed as a repertoire or organizational strategy in the urban popular neighborhoods in Argentina. What emerges as a collective survival strategy becomes a territorial social organization as well as an actor in social policy, especially in that linked to food-nutritional needs. This organizational format endures and is becoming increasingly massive, beyond the economic situation and the varying levels of poverty at each juncture.
This thesis is based on the question: Why does the soup kitchen emerge and become widespread as a territorial organizational strategy in Argentina? What makes it possible to maintain its validity for more than 30 years beyond social and political changes? In other words, it seeks to understand the reasons that made possible the emergence and maintenance over time of the “Comedor Popular” in Argentina. From a theoretical perspective that is based, to a large extent, on Symbolic Interactionism, it seeks to understand the meanings attributed to this social space as well as organizational practices and trajectories. Using different variants of the biographical method as the main strategy for collecting and analyzing information, it reconstructs the personal and organizational history of historic soup kitchens in the city of Lanús, Buenos Aires, Argentina. It analyzes the transformations that occurred in the period 1989 - 2019 and finds three lines of analysis. On the one hand, the “comedor” as a collective action reconstructing the process of institutionalization. On the other hand, the meanings attributed to this space by the various social policies that had it as an actor, showing the changes and ambivalences over time. Finally, the meanings given by the women who lead these spaces. As a main conclusion, it shows that the “comedor popular” as a hybrid space between various logics of action typical of social policy, the family and territorial organization. That it becomes a space to face various challenges of the life of urban popular families, as well as a form of territorial power construction.