What does politics look like from the perspective of an emergent population of ‘housing invaders’ in northern Mexican public housing contexts? How might this seemingly novel phenomenon (of large-scale housing invasion) be tied not only to a certain politics in the present, but to social policies of the recent past, from Agrarian Reform (which land invasions attempted to radicalize or realize) to family planning and demographic policies? Just as this dissertation’s reflections on extended fieldwork with Mexican public housing residents, builders, sellers, and regulatory experts, based in Tijuana, attempts to answer the first of these questions by unpacking contemporary perspectives on one infrastructure (public housing) that has proved particularly formative/indicative of mass political sentiments in much of the Global South during our unfinished neoliberal era, the latter of these two questions locates the dissertation’s key historical concern: with continuities between shifting forms of invasion politics within an at once materially and temporally unfinished neoliberal era.Chapter One is set at El Barzón Tijuana, the city and state headquarters of what is also a national Mexican debtor aid civil association and social movement. Founded in the 1990s, but with a strong legacy of Agrarian Reform politics, the association was, at the time of my fieldwork, the largest of its kind in both Tijuana and Mexico as a whole. Against this backdrop, as well as the incoming horizon of an ever-closer 2018 national election that would be won by a Barzón ally, the ‘left’ Morena party (marking a major shift in national politics) the chapter considers how a new politics of scale was becoming both shaped and interrupted by invaded houses across not only northern Mexico, but the nation and region, post-subprime. Next the dissertation looks at linkages between territory-making and social policy expertise from a more historical context. Chapter Two of the dissertation aims to place the social policy role of Mexican public housing programs in the context of characteristic forces of social policy expertise that have characterized the last fifty years, from intra-institutional struggles between demographic and territorial planning-centered bureaucracies of the political and private sector, to Cold War tensions between social scientists who disagreed radically (not only in Mexico, but across the Americas) on the political meanings rural and urban land invasions. How, the chapter ultimately asks, did shifting forms of expertise attached at once to land invasions and new public housing programs in the early neoliberal era mediate broader shifts in social policy expertise? Finally, through a comparative ethnography of two public housing construction firms and their evolving relationships to local residents in developments where these companies operate as increasingly quasi-governmental institutions, Chapter Three explores how employees and residents alike in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez markets sense and model other territorial scales through collectively perceived facets of the infrastructural landscape. A collectively felt sense of unfinishedness, most commonly indexed with the phrase ‘obra negra’ (literally, black work, but meaning ‘unfinished structure’), my interlocutors in the chapter argue, most expansively and exactly characterizes this affective infrastructure.