Toward a life with dignity: Housing struggles and new political horizons in urban Chile

Pérez, Miguel. 2018.  Toward a life with dignity: Housing struggles and new political horizons in urban Chile. American Ethnologist 45 (4):508-520

In the last decade, poor urban residents in Santiago, Chile, have powerfully struggled for the right to housing. They have done so by enrolling in neoliberal housing programs through which they seek to become homeowners by both saving money privately and applying for subsidies. In a context in which market-based urban policies have contributed to the segregation of low-income families in the city’s peripheries, the right to la vida digna (life with dignity) has emerged as the new political horizon of these struggles. As a right based on a moral category like dignity, la vida digna reveals the actions and discourses through which the poor, while becoming ethical subjects, signify their everyday experiences with vulnerability in political terms.

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