model, the shack began to consolidate as it progressively closed in respect to the outside. As overpopulation pushed the shacks one on top of another, there remained the possibility of building upward in order to avoid suffocation. Those who had the possibility began to build in concrete36 and to make good use of it to add a new floor (story) that often remained as a pending project, and since the house was mounted on piles to save it from flooding (which had returned since the time the gullies were occupied), there were two spaces (a lower level and the terrace) that contributed tri-dimensionality to the barrio. These spaces had many uses. At times, they will be a spot for hanging the washerwoman’s clothes, other times there will be a place for raising animals, even a place for setting up a workshop, and often a transitional space. The lower and upper levels are not privatized in a formal way and it would be the use that, years later, would more or less establish the “property” rights. As we have said, the land in Volga remained the property of the State and settlements, even though they were tolerated, did not give any official rights. In fact, rights in Volga were related to the volume occupied and not to the soil37. This reality generated knowledge and excluded anonymity; it created ties between people, and those ties begot a community. The Shack in the Period of Women: The Return of the Plant (Since the 1980s). If the diagram of the rural habitat was traditionally coordinated based on domestic subsistence production, in Martinique it was rarely related to the house... probably due to issues of matrifocality38; the Creole garden, the man’s place, was located elsewhere; itinerant for the dual reasons of deficient and scarce soil, since working rights were always minimal (there people were rarely owners of the land). Also the garden around the shack is a jardin riméd razié39, which belonged to the woman, more than a vegetable garden40... For Volga-Plage, as we have seen, the crowded conditions were such that the luxury of a planted space was ruled out and vegetation was practically non-existent. Curiously, during the third stage in the evolution of the barrio, which we call “the period of women”, vegetation played a particularly important role in the rupture with the rural world 41
through the introduction of flowers, a sign that the vegetable garden was moving away, and, overall, by keeping them in the house at night, proof that we are now in a relationship different from what we had with green plants... Here is the festive character, the refinement, the beauty... that has become a priority for averting the character of the rural and its utilitarianism... Volga-Plage, during the period of women, became integrated with the city; that is to say, more and more distant from rural self-sufficiency, and closer and closer to exchanging it for city interdependence: “We interpret it as a farewell to rural life, a goodbye to the mythology of the foundation.42 Now, the third generation and the overpopulation have caused the disappearance of any remains of community. Any type of help must now be paid, and popular savings migrate toward banking establishments that, in fact, do not re-invest in the settlement43; the inhabitants no longer know one another after the different interventions of the State had more or less dismantled the ensemble44. Due to fear, the city turned its back on the settlement and let it die instead of trying to understand it. Thus, lacking an alternative, the members of the group withdrew and today are drifting; however they can, toward the forced adoption of bourgeois ways. The properties have gotten closer together, which has provoked various dramas45 and the houses are the object of speculation. Many people have left –often to be relocated in public lodging– and they rent their houses in Volga-Plage to third parties. Others, betting on a regularization of the lands, promised for twenty years and still the order of the day, occupy the houses of isolated old people, hoping to keep the property. Concrete was definitively imposed and the houses, more and more impressive as they were regrouped for sale and the “weak” people were expelled, began to articulate a relationship increasingly more “bourgeois” in the public space of the street, now well differentiated by fencing walls and the appearance of showcase gardens in the entranceway. It was this way that what used to be a “town in the city” and the seed of a community was only transformed into a poor barrio of it.
Dominican Popular Architecture
279