Managing the pandemic across scales: centre-periphery tensions in Argentina

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a series of transformations at the social, political and cultural levels that came to strain Argentina’s territorial arrangements. Based on ethnographic work conducted in two case studies of the national tourist corridor, this article explores how the health crisis in its initial stage —as a strategic analytical moment— and the uncertainty to which it led, updated historical discussions on the relations between the capital and the peripheries. It analyzes how various elements associated with the metropolitan ‘coronaexodus’ generated frictions, synergies and practices of resistance in non-metropolitan territories, which problematized the fragility of a federal political-territorial model whose virtues appear in theory but which, in practice, are hindered by political-spatial borders and suffocated by the concentration of resources and relations of domination. In particular, we detected how traditional territorial imaginaries were re-signified, with the big city taking on a threatening face and the non-metropolitan taking on the appearance of an immunological sanctuary. This situation, we have concluded, unleashed migratory flows which, in turn, triggered the implementation of national and local policies that combined punitive and disciplinary measures, coupling and decoupling to address or prevent the health emergency.