“We can’t demand anything:” Migrants’ practices of accommodation and urban incorporation in an autoconstructed settlement in Santiago, Chile

Abstract

Migrant populations globally are often subjected to explicit forms of housing discrimination based on their race, nationality, migration status, and social class. In Chile, due to the dramatic increase in rent prices and a worsening housing crisis, migrants have turned to autoconstructing their own houses in campamentos (squatter settlements) in recent years. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, we show that the campamentos autoconstructed by immigrants have turned into new spaces of sociality, inclusion, and the emergence of new forms of citizenship. Unlike most of the anthropological literature on autoconstruction processes, we do not focus on how the symbolic and material production of the city frame poor people's involvement in social movements for housing. Rather, we show how, by self-building their houses and neighborhoods, immigrants produce a specific form of political subjectivity based on an ethics of civility and individual accommodation. Furthermore, we highlight the paradoxes that emerge between, on the one hand, their discursive emphasis on individual strategies to achieve legitimate citizenship and urban social inclusion and, on the other hand, their actual participation in collective life in the settlement, as well as a sense of shared norms and common morality. In doing so, we argue that this tension emerges from the need to defend their right to urban social inclusion as inhabitants who see themselves as embodying and enacting stigmatized forms of city-making and urban incorporation.