Over the last three decades, Santiago, Chile has experienced rapid urbanisation. The city’s expansion has prompted the proliferation of high-rise residential buildings, mediated by spatial segregation along class lines and fragmented urban governance. Concurrently, economic opportunities in Chile have drawn regional labour migrants, resulting in an unprecedented increase in migratory flows. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article charts the everyday experiences of migrants in high-rise residences. As new arrivals seek housing, social networks channel migrants – particularly Venezuelans – into shared high-rise apartments, producing specific buildings as vertical enclaves. Lived experiences within the confines of verticality are frequently shaped by the challenges of overcrowding. As migrants craft daily practices to mitigate these limitations, their routines make full use of limited space and meaningfully engage with building common areas, public spaces and neighbourhoods. The everyday practice of verticality articulates links between high-rises and surrounding sites, neighbourhoods and the broader urban fabric.

Research projects at the University of Arizona's Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) have provided graduate students an opportunity to engage in anthropological inquiry and application, often in teams, and with guidance from experienced researchers. In this paper, we focus on our experiences as graduate students working on two community-based environmental anthropology research projects in the sister cities of Nogales, Sonora, and Nogales, Arizona (known collectively as Ambos Nogales). In choosing to participate in these projects, we hoped to develop our skills with specific anthropological research methods (interviews, participant-observation, surveys, focus groups, and the writing of field notes), gain experience with a community-based participatory research (CBPR) model (including strategies for prioritizing community decision-making and incorporating local knowledge and interests throughout the research process), improve our Spanish skills, and learn to integrate research and action in a mutually-enriching way. Of course, having a job that reduced the cost of school was beneficial, but our main goal was to become anthropologists capable of contributing to academic, policy, and community-based action.

Latin American migration to Chile has increased exponentially over the past 20 years. As migrants settle in Santiago, they face numerous articulations of bureaucracy—at entry, in visa processing, in labor regulations, and in housing law. This article charts a central paradox of migrant experiences with two discordant bureaucratic entities in Chile. Migrants are frequently able to acquire residency documents, yet they are often unable to enter into formal rental agreements or easily access adequate housing. Drawing on data collected during 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Santiago, Chile, I explore migrants’ lived experience of bureaucracy. As migrants navigate the processes involved in attaining visas and in securing housing, their experiences expose the interstices of bureaucracy, sites of disjuncture between contrasting bureaucratic entities and realms. These bureaucratic interstices are critical sites where structural violence is fostered, normalized, and made invisible.

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