Approaches to, and expressions of, social issues as poverty involve discussing how social fractures connected with the process of capitalist restructuring are shaped and to be addressed in several dimensions (economic, political, cultural and social). This paper aims to review this debate 40 years after Jose Nun's marginality theory turned a fresh eye to Latin American poverty. It highlights singularities over that period in ways of looking at poverty as a social issue in Latin America and the approximation with French theorists of social exclusion. After the 1990's the debate is steered by the theoretical perspective of social exclusion, operationalised as a category capable of revealing the weakening and breakdown of social cohesion in terms of multiple levels and relational dimensions.
poverty; social inequity; social sciences