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Film short abstract

In a brief documentary, anthropologist Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori provides a glimpse into the precarious lives of poor older Peruvians whose experiences mirror those of countless elders around the world.

Film long abstract

La Merced is a deteriorated landscape, a precarious topography. How does one—old, poor, sick, and abandoned by family—grow old amidst emotional deprivation, loneliness, and institutionalization? This documentary is an attempt to elucidate how one of the most invisible, unmapped, and understudied populations of Peruvian society, the elderly urban poor of Lima, come to terms with this process. Growing Old on the Margins tells the story of how elderly residents in the La Merced shelter struggle to hold on to life, render their aging experience meaningful, and, finally, wait for death. At La Merced, destitution, oblivion, and postponement weigh heavily on people’s everyday lives. Uncertainty and a rumbling instability is the dramatic context where those who lack family networks, care, and economic security are endlessly embracing new tactics of endurance and resistance as they grow old. What are the limitations and possibilities of remaining intelligible actors at the end of life in an environment of perpetual loss, destitution, and abandonment? How do people give sense to their last days of existence and endure life in such an inhospitable place? In other words, what sustains these persons in the world? What do they cling to in order to live? Maybe, this short film can offer an answer to these questions because these images speak of the ways the elderly in Lima—and, probably, in other parts of the Global South—grow old enveloped in absence and scarcity, adversity and vulnerability, but also signal a relentless existential struggle for endurance.