The "location" of the poor: space, social representations and stigmas in Mexico City

A perspective that understands poverty as an extremely complex, socially constructed phenomenon is used to analyze relations between the social, spatial and symbolic dimensions of deprival and urban inequality. The accounts of residents of a peripheral locality of Mexico City are used to explore how society perceives of the poor and poverty and how it relates to them. The author points out that the experiences, perceptions and images of place are marked by territorial stigma and conceptions that tend to blame the poor for their situation. She highlights the naturalization of inequality and its high levels of acceptance in Mexican society, emphasizing its negative consequences for social coexistence. Adapted from the source document.