To repay or not to repay: financial vulnerability among mortgage debtors in Spain

Muriel, Irene Sabaté

doi:10.4000/etnografica.5130

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The paradox of consumption for the middle class is that while spending upholds an individual's class status and makes them feel middle class, it also locks them into further debt and financial vulnerability while exacerbating class inequalities (Sabaté Muriel, 2018;Montgomerie, 2009;Williams, 2004). In the context of mortgage debt, several mechanisms reproduce these inequalities: irresponsible mortgage lending practices including predatory lending and sub-prime mortgages, and veiling risks of consumption such as mortgage indebtedness through misinformation and lack of transparency (Reid, 2010;Sabaté Muriel, 2018). The American middle-class experience from the 1990s to the 2008 recession was contradictory and anxiety-riddled for the middle class, due to a dramatic upscaling of the middle-class experience coupled with the struggle to finance infrastructure of homes, jobs, and credit (Heiman, 2015).…”

Section: Theorizing the Middle Class Through Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Modifying the American Dream: An Ethnography of Foreclosure Prevention in the Great Recession

Jefferson

Perez

2023

Papeles

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The United States’ housing crisis and Great Recession of 2007-2009 ignited personal, political, and cultural reckoning with central facets of American identity, namely what it means to be middle class. Homeownership is historically a key symbol of having achieved the “American Dream” and entering an idealized middle class. As a cultural phenomenon, foreclosure is therefore a loaded symbol both of individual downward mobility and threats to a national myth of the American Dream. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Michigan in 2009-2011, this paper argues that the housing crisis created a liminal class status of “facing foreclosure”. From that vantage point, homeowners facing foreclosure and housing counselors assisting them critically re-examined the meanings of middle classness. The fieldwork reveals that they relied on material, moral, and political demands to obtain mortgage modifications to reassert their status as middle-class subjects. When these efforts failed, they turned to systemic critiques rather than the individualized blame the American Dream would predict.

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Section: Theorizing the Middle Class Through Ethnographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Modifying the American Dream: An Ethnography of Foreclosure Prevention in the Great Recession

Jefferson

Perez

2023

Papeles

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“…In Spain, too, nancial crisis generated social activism and the production of new collectivities when yoked to the dissolution of mortgages, which had earlier established terms for national inclusion and social mobility . When the global banking meltdown drained mortgages of their promises and rendered these debts unpayable, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (P AH) came together to resist evictions and to provide mutual help to group members (Palomera 2014(Palomera , 2020Sabaté 2016a,b;Sabaté Muriel 2018Suarez 2022). Joiners, however , had to be seen to "work to earn" P AH support and inclusion in the activists' community (Gutierrez Garza 2022).…”

Section: Formats Technologies and Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Financialization and the Household

Zaloom,

James

2023

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions.

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“…En situaciones de distrés financiero (Sabaté, 2018) como las que acabamos de describir, se producen profundos cambios en el plano de los significados. Así, por ejemplo, la representación del crédito como algo positivo, como una oportunidad o una suerte para el deudor, es sustituida por una nueva imagen, la de la deuda como algo negativo, una carga o una condena que obstaculiza la obtención del sustento y niega oportunidades de futuro (Gregory, 2012).…”

Section: Significados Cambiantesunclassified

Sobrendeudamiento, ejecuciones hipotecarias y cuestionamiento de la legitimidad de las deudas

Muriel

2019

Arbor

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Como consecuencia de la crisis económica, inmobiliaria y financiera experimentada en España en los últimos años, muchos deudores hipotecarios no pueden hacer frente a sus cuotas y corren el riesgo de perder sus viviendas, en ocasiones conservando una deuda imposible de afrontar. El sobrendeudamiento y la morosidad hipotecaria abocan así a ciertas economías domésticas a situaciones insostenibles que pueden llevar a una reordenación de los gastos y necesidades, entre los que las cuotas hipotecarias dejan de tener prioridad. La legitimación de la condición de moroso que puede observarse en esos casos es un fenómeno con importantes implicaciones antropológicas, en la medida en que constituye un cuestionamiento de la obligación de devolver el préstamo. Desde el punto de vista de los deudores y de quienes les brindan apoyo, caer en el impago, lejos de constituir una transgresión moralmente reprobable, puede entenderse como un acto de responsabilidad que tiende al sostenimiento de la vida.

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To repay or not to repay: financial vulnerability among mortgage debtors in Spain

Cited by 7 publications

References 21 publications

Modifying the American Dream: An Ethnography of Foreclosure Prevention in the Great Recession

Modifying the American Dream: An Ethnography of Foreclosure Prevention in the Great Recession

Financialization and the Household

Sobrendeudamiento, ejecuciones hipotecarias y cuestionamiento de la legitimidad de las deudas

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