ABSTRACT
This chapter has two goals: first, to provide an overview of how low-income residents in Santiago de Chile have earned a right to housing since the 1960s and, second, to qualitatively assess this change. As such, the chapter traces the intense mobilization that has gone into making housing a right of citizenship, developing the creative ways in which activists have expanded the boundaries of housing rights in Chile. Yet the chapter also underscores how such rights have remained constrained by an overall regime of citizenship that places limits on who can be defined as a deserving citizen and what kinds of benefits such individuals can receive. While gaining a right to housing has been an important achievement, it has not led to a more equitable and integrated city. The chapter develops its general arguments through a unique methodology that lies betwixt and between anthropology and history. As such, archival material and the past promises of historical struggle meet their counterpoint in the immediacy of urban participant observation, the latter of which underscores how the homes of low-income urban groups are often troubled by an environment of criminality, high levels of debt, and forms of unemployment and underemployment.
