A Civil Death: Homeownership, Migration, and the (Un)Making of Urban Subjects

Drawing together a diversity of urban actors, the contemporary housing movement has articulated sophisticated lines of protest and repertoires of action while also transforming everyday people’s relation to the ubiquity of property. Drawing on archival and ethnographic materials, the author looks to the PAH to untangle the ways in which urban subjects have long been produced through homeownership. In crisis, many of those subjects also passed through a process of foreclosure, in which they articulated themselves as having experienced a muerte civil (civil death), a common though atomized identity within the post-crash city. The chapter then moves to consider the capital city’s Andean population and the ways in which the property market became a means for their incorporation. Moving into crisis, it’s then revealed why and how this community was the first to challenge evictions and by extension homeownership, drawing upon their unique positions within transnational networks of migration and exchange. In so doing, the author illuminates how they transformed civil death into civil disobedience, enunciating a new identity of the afectada (affected).