@article{ThePoliticsofInvasion:NorthernMexicanPublicHousing:3478,
      recid = {3478},
      author = {Furlong, Matthew},
      title = {The Politics of Invasion: Northern Mexican Public Housing,  Land Struggle History, and the Twilight of an  Infrastructure-Building State},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-08},
      pages = {264},
      abstract = {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. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3478},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3478},
}