Abstract

BARBA SOLANO, Carlos  and  VALENCIA LOMELI, Enrique. The social construction of poverty and the devaluation of the poor in Mexico in fifteen years of the newspaper El Universal. Espiral (Guadalaj.) [online]. 2019, vol.26, n.76, pp.183-232. ISSN 1665-0565.  https://doi.org/10.32870/eees.v26i76.7080.

This article is inscribed in a constructivist sociological perspective, and emphasizes the symbolic dimensions of poverty and the exercise of symbolic violence against the poor, so it seeks to reveal the social mechanisms that contribute to stigmatizing and devaluing that population. To do this, it analyzes publications made between 2000 and 2014 regarding poverty in El Universal newspaper (Mexico). Critical discourse analysis is applied to a corpus of three hundred and seventy-nine articles, which allows to detect an emphasis on the governmental perspective, although occasionally some critical views are included; that the issue of poverty is limited to rural areas -farmers and indigenous, with little agency, except criminal, and with little presence of urban poverty; and that the poor are stigmatized and characterized as threats to public safety and society.

Keywords : Poverty; simbolic violence; social construction; El Universal; Mexico.

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