Radios and live TVAlmost 80 years after the publication of the mythical novel by the Buenos Aires writer who lived in Rosario, the poverty that she starkly describes in that area of ​​the city remains among its inhabitants who lack decent living conditions.Rosario3 toured the undulating town facing Paraná, where needs accumulate and the complaint for the consumption of paco among the youngest is litThe myth points out that the first edition of "The Hills of Hunger" that the writer and journalist from Buenos Aires Rosa Wernicke, who lived a large part of her life in Rosario, published in 1943 illustrated by her partner, the painter Julio Vanzo, was sent to burn for a man who felt identified with the work.A copy, yellow and worn by time, rests in a large library in Pichincha, safe from fire.Opening it and delving into its pages is a challenge for the soul that becomes sensitive to misery, social inequality, the suffering of lack and oblivion.The social novel of denunciation, one of the first Latin American texts that deals with survival in a slum, lucidly and starkly recreates the suffering existence of a handful of endearing and vile characters in the Mataderos neighborhood of Rosario in 1937.The area, attached to the banks of the Paraná where it extends irregularly undulating, is still standing in 2022. Today it is Villa Manuelita and very little has changed.“The surgeon was walking as fast as he could.He was going to his neighborhood, to his hidden world there, on the other side of the Rosario-Puerto Belgrano railroad bridge.First the asphalt: Urquiza, Córdoba, Maipú, Avenida Pellegrini, then the cobblestone: Necochea, Ayolas, Esmeralda, Berrutti, Convención and, finally, the unpaved alley towards the dump.He was going towards his world located between an active port, an elegant ring road, still in the pipeline, a street with the name of a precious stone and another with the name of a hero or a spa”, Wernicke wrote - as a way of leading the reader to that unfortunate corner- about one of its protagonists, Julián Alegría.This man ate and dressed from the leftovers and waste that he managed to gather in the center, which he carried on his shoulders for dozens of blocks.Today, in Villa Manuelita, many men and women make a living by cardboarding and doing odd jobs to collect a few pesos.The most critical sector of the neighborhood is the one that the journalist born in Pergamino identified with the hills, almost 80 years ago.He described an undulating area where the muddy earth was mixed with the garbage that its inhabitants could not avoid stepping on, many of them barefoot (“…the dump, that corner of the city remained with its miasmas and its bacillary creatures, with its hunger, with its lice and its legion of exploited”).Ayolas and Necochea streets draw their limits these days with simple houses made of material and asphalt.However, from there towards the riverbank the map intensifies with the proliferation of precarious houses, armed with crosses of hollow bricks, sheets and cardboard, piled up in corridors where services do not exist.It gets worse above Ayolas (today that area is known as Bajo Ayolas) where the shacks huddle together, balancing on the zigzagging terrain.Marina and Flavio did not read Rosa Wernicke, but they know firsthand what the woman revealed in 1943, causing a real shock to local literature that would earn her recognition as well as hostility.The couple, who are in charge of the “Mirta” milk glass that the Evita Movement carries out in the place, know about the hills of hunger and the resignation that forces them to inhabit a land-funnel, eight decades later: “The area it is like falling, the drains are constantly clogged and when it rains the water reaches knee-deep, there are marks on the walls. People put up little walls so that the water doesn't get in. The ditches and the sewers are together, there is no collection of waste and no matter how much they come to uncover the pipes they put, they are small for so many families. They did something good, but not enough, "said the 27-year-old who was born in the neighborhood and inherited from her mother the task of giving eat their neighbors and neighbors. "Here before it was a ranch, we saw the sunlight when it dawned. My mother was doing it. Now we have a flat. Things cost, we are not well but we are comfortable and calm, "he said with a quiet and calm air.It is said that Wernicke settled in Mataderos for a few days, in the 40's, together with her partner Vanzo de Ella.While she took notes of misery, the painter drew her.In her book, the author explored the traces that this condition leaves in her spirit and body and she exposed them without hesitation or cold cloths."The character soured with misery, the race degenerated with hunger and all kinds of privations," she specified.Regarding the boys and girls, she explained: “At the age of five, the frightful, tenacious, iniquitous struggle began (…) her little faces reflected the powerful influence of the unhealthy air, of the sufferings and deprivations.”The situation of children in Villa Manuelita continues to be a concern because the lack of food and care has been compounded by the sale and consumption of drugs.Mariano Romero is in charge of the southern area of ​​Evita in the city and reported the seriousness of the situation: "What scares me in particular is that they are consuming base paste, a few years ago this was not seen in Rosario and the The damage it produces is terrible,” he said.The paco is a reality in this moor.Just a walk through its boarded up and extremely narrow corridors is enough: in the middle of the morning, a boy of about 8 years old smokes his pipe, sitting on the floor.He has a lost and dilated look, his little face reddened and stained.He is in another world.Marina and Flavio are also alarmed in this sense: “There is no work, most of the boys, due to lack of things in their houses, become soldiers and get lost.Before the big ones took drugs, now the boys.You see them on the side, little boys who are getting lost, 10 years old and up.They have no help or anyone.Everyone comes here, and beyond the glass of milk they ask us for everything”, she commented to which her partner added: “Many have no choice but to sell drugs, they have up to 5 children and we have to feed them .They grab what is within reach.They can go out to cardboard, but sometimes you don't find anything.There is more and more competition.All night and all day they are searching.”Where the funnel sharpens, between the empty houses, the loose cables, the overflowing ditches, little supermarket monkeys and cars are parked.They are the "work" tools that some can access, others search for it at traffic lights cleaning car windows or simply asking for money.Many others -Romero highlighted- cook and sell their products among neighbors and also at popular fairs: "We think of the family's genealogical tree, and generally we find that the grandparents of the male and female companions who are in their twenties, out there had Registered work in a refrigerator, or in the port, railway.And now, those possibilities of insertion are not there and they are all changarines.There may be a few policemen walking around, the rest do changa”, he observed.The difficulty of accessing a job and the sale of drugs seem to go hand in hand.But economics is not the only reason: many boys and girls need a place of belonging, an identification in the midst of so many absences.Flavio put it in his own words: “(The drug traffickers) grab the boys because they don't have anything to eat, they don't have a pair of slippers, so they tell them « come with me and you'll be fine ».And that's a lie because your life will be at risk.And it is the youth of today, from 10 years old and up, they are already derailed, they want to grab drugs.The family does not have the access to help and buy something for the son, ”he lamented.For his part, the social leader pointed out: “It is not that they become millionaires being soldiers, it is the last link, they are the ones who end up in prison or dead.They want respect too.The kids are thrown away, they have nothing, they are trashed by everyone and here, even if it is based on violence and force when participating in it, there is respect, there is some recognition there.The growth of the circulation of illegal drugs, both their purchase and their sale, promoted, as in all the neighborhoods of Rosario where the problem has acquired a lethal imprint, violent relationships that complicate the routine of neighbors and neighbors."These guys have nothing to lose because they don't care about their lives, except that of a neighbor," said Flavio, who assumed the proliferation of firearms and the usurpation of homes through extortion methods in the neighborhood.When asked if there is still respect for those inhabitants who earn an honest living, he said: “It depends on who the person is.But as they say, they are agile, they may have a little bit of something, but they don't do anything.So, they are the giles because they are the living ones”.For Marina and Flavio, there are many young people who look into the world of crime, however, they recognize that there are many others who seek to earn their weight by doing changuitas or accompanying their parents to collect cardboard and waste from nearby and downtown containers. .On this point, Romero was more specific: "The vast majority of workers, those who are linked to this (drugs and pressure) is one percent of the neighborhood, the vast majority of families are not involved, but it has such an impact which makes it bigger.The rest goes out to tinker and cardboard”, he contemplated.The pre-Peronist scene that Rosa built in her hills of hunger -a decade later the area would be the cradle of the Peronist Resistance when in the midst of the irruption of the Liberating Revolution that removed President Juan Domingo Perón, a group of workers hung a poster with the legend “The United States, Russia, England, recognize Lonardi.Villa Manuelita recognizes Perón” (it should be noted that there are several versions of the same message) -it can be seen in the present of the Manuelita, perhaps with less harshness and lack of state protection, with more bricks than cardboard and pestilential fabrics instead of doors, even with greater monetary disposition among its inhabitants than those described by Wernicke, but multiplied throughout the city of Rosario and aggravated by the installation of the drug market, intimidation by order and the constant institutional weakening, factors that have gained strength after the economic breakdown and society of 2001.The land continues to wave towards the Paraná, resisting the fall.“Cándida felt horror and repulsion for everything that surrounded her, because everything was gray, insolent and rude.The ragged men, smelling of sweat and grime.Women aged from puberty, with a sour character and tired of fighting adversity all their lives”, Wernicke wrote about one of the protagonists of his story, managing to rescue the most intimate feelings of a young woman who denies her poor existence.The enormous task is also done with the rest of the characters: the surgeon Julián Alegría, the vigilante and supportive Martín Fuentes and his brother Juan Ramón who presents himself as his counterpart, a symbol of Rosario who does not want to know about that rotten corner that grows to the south.The novel of social denunciation and strong interpellation towards the state role, constantly stirs up the dilemma of the distribution of wealth, reveals the miserable life of the villeros (here are the swineherd Juan Basanno, Antonio Luna and his family, the prostitute Eulalia and her hairdresser husband, among others) and reveals the thinking of those who, having superior economic means, try to calm their consciences with theories that prove a naturalization of inequalities and a supposed balance between strong and weak;bosses and subordinates.There is Manuel Fernández, the person in charge of the garbage dealer (urban legend indicates that the character was inspired by a real man, a Spaniard who exploited the garbage dump that emerged in the place of the slaughterhouse, who, recognizing himself in the book, ordered to burn their copies), Esteban Videla, César Grandi and others.The fiction based on a true state of social marginality that today subsists in the same territory was published for the first time in Buenos Aires and the myth immediately caught fire.It was a work that managed to transcend the realism of the time by identifying oppressed and oppressors in a city unaccustomed to this type of story.In 2009, the book was reissued by La Capital and in 2015 by the Serapis publishing house, a label from Rosario, which added Vanzo's original drawings included in the first edition.Her love affair with this famous local plastic artist, being a divorced woman, her participation in the bohemia and her identification with progressive sectors were the factors that enhanced her imprint.Rosa was born in Pergamino in 1905 and after passing through Córdoba and Santiago del Estero she settled in Rosario in 1934 -she wanted to settle near Paraná- where she worked for the newspapers La Prensa, La Capital and La Tribuna.She, but she, not only worked as a journalist, she was also a literary critic, wrote poetry, plays, and even collaborated with movies and radio plays.Rosario writer Fabián Bazán included Rosa among ten women in the history of Rosario in his book “Insumisas”, edited by Homo Sapiens in 2020. In the chapter he dedicates to her, he goes into detail about his love story with Vanzo defying the conservative gaze prevailing, but above all it places her as a disruptive intellectual who writes with a feminist perspective when cooking recipes and marriage advice for women readers were imposed on the newspapers."Rosa Wernicke was not, of course, the first writer, but she was someone who (very) bravely exercised her rights in her private life, and from her literature, she called for a fairer society for women," she said.In 1938, according to Bazán, she published the first book from Rosario entitled "The Thirty Moneys" that brought together 11 stories, illustrated by her partner and her later husband, that addressed social injustice and an oppressive context.It was a few years before her most extensive work, her only novel, “The Hills of Hunger” would see the light of day, but Wernicke was already dedicating her prose to the unprotected, questioning the social and state indifference to indigence.In 1941 she returned to the ring with twelve more stories collected in "Isla de anguish", which Julio Vanzo also drew.This work was awarded by a contest of the newspaper La Prensa and the Provincial Commission of Culture of Santa Fe."The Hills of Hunger is considered the first Latin American novel that takes place entirely in a slum, even though the use of that term had not been extended to designate the irregular settlements that were appearing as the big cities were emerging," he said. the local writer and mentioned the accumulation of beneficial reviews that highlighted the sensitivity and strength of his writing."It was a bombshell," summed up the poet Eduardo D'Anna in a personal interview with Bazán, about the novel's impact on Rosario society.In “Insumisas” another legend around the novel is confirmed, which establishes that, after its publication, a juvenile judge intervened in the neighborhood in order to assist some marginalized boys and girls.Also, the author reports that in 1944 the controller of the province of Santa Fe at that time ordered the construction of incinerator ovens for the waste dumped on the site.Both data print and certify the repercussions generated by Rosa's social denunciation, dressed in a fiction as lacerating as reality itself.It was the last book of his published.In 1957, she suffered a stroke that left her bedridden and later in a vegetative state.Vanzo, her life partner, lovingly cared for her until her death in 1971. The journalist was buried in the La Piedad cemetery in Rosario.More General InformationFollow us on the networks and you will be the first to find out!Do you want to receive notifications from our site?© Copyright 2022 Rosario 3 ® All rights reservedJuan Domingo Peron 8101, Rosario.Telephone: 4575415, extension 525