Inclusion in Indignity: Seeing the State and Becoming Citizens in Chile’s Social Housing

Abstract

Building on recent ethnographic research on social provision in the global South, this article examines the everyday construction of a welfare state that links distributive inclusion with social degradation of the urban poor. The Chilean state has long affirmed its responsibility for housing poor citizens, and claimed considerable success in doing so. Since 1979, subsidized provision of privately built housing has moved millions from precarious residence into formal homeownership. In beneficiaries’ eyes, however, state housing agencies often appeared not as benevolent guarantors of social inclusion but rather as producers of material and symbolic indignities endured by poor city-dwellers. This ethnographic study of social housing in Santiago examines how residents’ understandings of social rights, and of the state itself, are produced in routine encounters with agents of housing provision. In particular, it traces two competing images of the state that emerged in state-citizen interactions. First, grounded in lived experiences of claiming and inhabiting social housing, residents envisioned a denigrating state that regarded the poor as second-class citizens and willfully relegated them to substandard conditions. Second, housing officials challenged this view by presenting the alternative image of an incapable state, which was unable to guarantee dignified housing in a market-oriented society. Each of these images, in turn, informed residents’ everyday political practices. While the denigrating state-image elicited contentious claims-making for better conditions, official performances of an incapable state encouraged residents to abandon collective action in favor of costly private strategies of home improvement.