En Espera: State, Social Citizenship, and the Negotiation of Time in Chile’s Social Housing System

• In Event: 197 - Regular Session. Ethnography/Ethnographic Studies

Abstract

This paper draws on long-term ethnographic research with poor peripheral residents of Santiago, Chile, as they seek access to subsidized social housing. Engaging with a growing literature on the political and subjective effects of waiting for the state in contexts of neoliberal restructuring of social provision, it uses a focus on the responses of low-income citizens to state-imposed waiting in order to expand and complicate existing understandings of waiting as productive of passive compliance and antithetical to citizenship. It shows how waiting becomes part of the structure and meaning of the social rights of citizenship within Chile’s housing system, and how the temporal terms of housing access are actively negotiated by the dispossessed through varied and shifting strategies. Specifically, I identify three central responses to waiting, which I call enduring, mobilizing, and exiting, and empirically explore the conditions under which each of these strategies is enacted and the subjective effects they produce. Finally, I argue that by making disempowered waiting an inseparable aspect of what it means to make claims on the state in Chile, the state contributes to the production of a form of autonomous market citizenship among poor housing seekers, as the latter seek a greater sense of control over time through individual market strategies to improve their housing conditions.

Author

• Carter M Koppelman, University of California-Berkeley