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Since the 2000s, policies of assistance to unstable sectors of the popular classes are consolidating in Argentina as in most Latin American countries. Local leaders and political party and social activists have participated in the administration of some parts of these policies. Accordingly, genuine coproduction of the social intervention of the State in popular districts has taken place. Based on ethnographic work in three Argentine neighborhoods, this article analyzes the everyday production of social policies on the ground and in particular the role of its mediators: para-state bureaucrats. These actors also come from the popular classes, and they are both relays – that are not always institutionalized – of the State in the popular districts on the one hand, and belts of transmission of the demands of the inhabitants of these districts back to the State on the other. We argue that the status and working conditions of these bureaucrats, as well as their reliance on unstable political relations with state officials to ensure the continuity of access to goods to be distributed at the local level, make it possible to grasp fundamental features of the relationship between the state and popular classes, as well as of the forms of welfare provided by the former.