 Dr. Sophie Gonek is assistant professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where she teaches in the Metropolitan Studies Program. Her work examines property regimes, immigrant activism and housing justice. She's also written about New Municipalism in Spain and the United States. Her first book Dispossession and Descent, Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid was published by Stanford University Press in 2021. Dr. Gonek's talk today is entitled Contesting Dispossession, Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid, which draws from her book Dispossession and Descent, Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid, published through Stanford University Press in 2021. So Dr. Gonek, if you're ready, I'll pass things over to you right now. Thank you. This is a pleasure to be here with you all. And thank you, Ron, Jeannie and Carolyn and Helena for organizing. Thank you to Himabua Carve for first inviting me to participate in this event. And as I say, it's a really pleasure. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm about 100 blocks south of where you all are in at Columbia at my own apartment. Hopefully my dog will behave and I won't have to quickly switch to headphones and a microphone because it's not very comfortable. I'm just going to get started here and I look forward to your questions at the very end. I'm going to talk about my new book Dispossession and Descent, Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid, which I have several copies here, which just came out with the Stanford and today's talk draws from this book. I realize I have to share my screen. I will say this is actually I've done a book talk now in person. And this is one of the first that I've done virtually and so it's a little just kind of figuring out the logistics is somewhat complicated. Okay, there it is. So Contesting Dispossession, Immigrants and the Struggle for Housing in Madrid is the title of today's talk. As I said, it draws from my book, which examines the intersection of housing and migration. Because since the kind of great recession of 2008 housing has really been at the center center has been central to a lot of critical urban scholarship that's examined the kind of consequences of crisis in part because it's a key site that brings together the concerns of financial capital with the kind of wants, aspirations and, and devastating experiences of everyday urban dwellers. And Spain's platform for people affected by mortgages or PAW, the platform of the affect those for leipoteca has captured a lot of attention precisely because it brought together ordinary citizens to stand against the banks in corporate capital in addition to catapulting activists, intellectual politics which as Ron Judy mentioned in her introduction I've written about elsewhere. Yeah both in relation to this movement, the Spanish right to housing movement, and more generally an urban scholarship. There has been little attention to immigrants as they navigate some of the shifting demands of housing markets and even while we're kind of in a moment of unprecedented migration and mobility. Thus, in dispossession and descent I focus on immigrant housing struggles to both illuminate homeownership capacity for dispossession against ideas of inclusion, and reveal how housing crisis paradoxically create opportunities for new forms of alliance making that can advance novel political claims. I reveal that homeownerships reliance on outside debts, and the violences that those debts can incur ruptures historical attachments the owner ownership model and transforms it into a target of social and political protest. Immigrants I argue can be key catalysts for this kind of transformation, and the kinds of protests that emerge in response. And as we'll see today, and in relation to the Spanish anti evictions movement, it was in fact, and the immigrants that is immigrants from Ecuador and Peru, who were the ones to kind of create the movement that grew out of their early activism. I'm going to talk about this community and how they drew upon cultures of acts, activism and past experiences of capitalist exploitation to rebuke the foreclosure of urban life under the tyranny of debt. Now the collapse of homeownership and the onset of financial crisis devastated the city of Madrid. I show that homeownership made both the city and its citizens. Its failure led to urban devastation but then also to rebirth. In the case of Madrid that rebirth was led by these, this group of immigrants from from the Andes, many of whom were indigenous, a community that's not typically imagined as kind of at the forefront of urban politics and, and indeed the Spanish right to housing movement, but was nonetheless key in its, in its formation and later success. And while this is a story that resonates throughout cities of it, you know, in many places across the globe, and even while conditions of indebtedness continue to proliferate the book examines the city of Madrid. The Spanish model of urbanization is particularly acute. The economy came to depend almost entirely on construction, particularly of housing. And also in that city where we see spectacular urbanization the proliferation of different forms of credit and rapid immigration occurring kind of simultaneously alongside one another within the short span of a decade from about 1998 until 2008. And today I concentrate as I say on the Andean and really the Ecuadorian community in particular. As I, as I outline, they were the number one immigrant community in Madrid during the boom. They were also highly organized, allowing for the spread of both homeownership and subsequent outrage, which the salient points to the story and which to which I'll return later. Here I want to consider a question of methods. In Madrid when the, when the platform for people affected by mortgages first blocked first eviction in the Spanish capital that already begun blocking evictions and other parts of Spain. This was 2011 shortly after the occupation of the central squares and many of the throughout many of Spain's urban centers. This Bulgarian family was supposed to be evicted that day, and yet over 100 people 500 people sorry showed up to block the police from entering the block and carrying it out. From that moment, I began to interrogate immigrant home ownership and outrage. The most visible faces of the movement were Spanish. To learn the rhythms and practices of this collective, I uncovered its immigrant origins, and I came to understand that Andean immigrants in particular were salient actors. Now I wasn't able to rely on official quantitative data. The extended community began to migrate in the late 1990s, following financial collapse and political upheaval in Ecuador and Peru. Their acquisition of home ownership really occurred between about 2003 and 2007, which is basically the break of crisis with the onset that of crisis that crisis in 2008. Many lost homes and some returned to their countries of origin, but census data on home ownership was collected only in the years of 2001 and 2011. Meanwhile, eviction data is notoriously difficult to locate and is kept in kind of a very ad hoc way in various kind of judicial offices, local courts, and is incredibly diffuse. One of the major challenges that has confronted activists has precisely been its inability to collect authoritative data. And so the only way then to access home ownership and eviction patterns amongst this particular community is through historical and qualitative methods inquiry. I draw on an array of historical legislation, real estate and banking advertisements, planning documents, popular culture and parliamentary debates. I also employ ethnographic methods from over a year and a half of participant observation with Madrid's anti evictions groups, during which I interviewed key figures, and also carried out a number of immigrant oral histories. In considering home ownership's capacity to inspire both this possession and novel forms of contestation, I highlight two interlocking paradoxes that kind of frame the story. Spain, similar to many other places around the world, promoted home ownership as a vehicle for both modernization and national identity. The Spanish culture of property was overwhelming. At the height of the boom over 80% of people lived in owner occupied housing, which just as a point of comparison in the United States, I don't think we've ever gotten above something in the 60s. So it's, you know, even while it's so much part of this kind of like American dream, it's, we actually have lower home ownership rates than in Spain, and actually a number of Southern European and Eastern European countries. So this meant that in a moment of rapid immigration home ownership was the perfect vehicle to make foreigners into Spaniards. And it's here that I highlight the first paradox that instead of integrating immigrants into Spanish society, home ownership instead increased differentiation. The second paradox, however, is that in losing home ownership, immigrants remade the political arena, claiming rights and recognition from the collapse of a model meant to integrate immigrants instead demanded inclusion. Central to both paradoxes, I argue, are the strong communal ties that bound together the Andean community in the city of Madrid, those ties spread credit, then they spread vulnerability, and finally they spread outrage. So throughout today, the talk today I kind of interspersed these paintings from Antonio Lopez Garcia, partly because I like them and I think they do a very good job of evoking a particular dynamic of Madrid's urbanism and but they're also going to contribute to an argument that I'm going to come back to at the very end. So think of them as kind of visual interludes. I'm going to first think about questions of home ownership and urbanization from Madrid's more recent history against the longer kind of urban and built trajectory of change, and then going to zoom in on the Andean community. And then I kind of go in even further to examine their experiences of crisis. And then I stuck back to consider how they were the first to reframe their experiences of economic crisis into a political claim. I'm going to conclude by thinking about some of the lessons or resonances that this this case might offer for other other kind of urban trends that we see in many parts of the globe. So Madrid has long been kind of a source of consternation within broader Spanish cultural currents. During the golden age, that is the age of colonization in the kind of 1500s. Before it became the capital really in name only for its strategic position here at the very center of the country. The history then policy makers writers artists and philosophers lamented its insignificant urbanism. It lacked the rich history of nearby Toledo, or the industrial might and sweeping vistas of Madrid, or Bill bow, which were much kind of stronger economically. Sorry. So how could this kind of poultry city you know it's a, it's almost a village in the center of the, the peninsula command control over the entire nation. The victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939, the general turn dictator Francisco Franco found a means of achieving this task, and this is an image of Madrid around the time that he took power and which it really is still a very small city though it has a number of outlying territories that he would go on to annex. So, his, his kind of response to the problem of Madrid's urbanization was the question of home ownership, which would be fomented through the construction industry. This is a homegrown solution to the physical and economic destruction of war and the transformation of the city. observing a city ringed with shanty towns. He also wanted to transform proletarians or proletarians into property owners. He entered into a Faustian bargain. Construction would be the pillar of the economy to the detriment of all other forms of industry. Property taxes from home ownership would allow other projects to take place. This would remake Madrid and indeed Spain but meant that particularly in the city of Madrid, the urban economy was locked any kind of diversity. But Franco also focused on another cultural question that would animate the city's built history, namely Madrid's place not only within Spain, but also within a kind of pantheon of European capitals. He wanted it to be uttered in the same breath and included in fact in the grand tour alongside Paris Berlin or Rome. One emblematic project that was completed in 1958 is this building that you see right here, the Edificio España or Spain building that when completed that year it was the tallest building in all of Europe. It was a luxury hotel even in the midst of entrenched urban poverty. It was built by developers who had gotten rich off of building middle class housing estates throughout the city, often for for members of the army. Throughout its 20th century history, the city continued to emphasize that spectacular urbanism that might proclaim its Europeanness. As it entered into the democratic era audacious products projects continue to define its urbanism. But this time both the cultural references and the political economy of construction were decided in the international. Here we see the Torres Kio or the Kio towers built in the northern Castilla Plaza in the 1990s, which was very much emblematic of the kind of urbanization that was taking place in the kind of democratic era of Spain which begins in the late 70s. This was built on land that was owned by families who had gotten rich under the Franco regime with ties to Opus Dei and the kind of emerging technocratic expertise in an industry that was that made people a lot of money in the later half of the Franco era. It was financed with Kuwaiti oil dollars and built on land and part of it and designed by the architect Philip Johnson. When these buildings were built and finished they were christened the pop the port of Europe or the gate of Europe, leading both geographically and metaphorically toward that kind of like promised land of modernity and cosmopolitanism. And yet by the 1990s, all available land in the city and in much of the country to have been urbanized and the economy was faltering. How to carry out this broader project of Europeanization which I talk about as both the project of these kind of cultural aspirations of becoming a European capital, alongside the kind of issues of European integration integration into the European Union and entry into the the Eurozone and so on. So as an antidote to this problem, the conservative president Jose Maria Asnard immediately upon taking office in 1996 class new land use legislation that more or less allowed urbanization on most available land. The law is, commonly, commonly referred to as the urbanization of everything law. And in response, the Madrid government crafted a new general plan that sought to build to the extent of its capacity, expanding land surface by over 50%. The development that followed this new plan was a rapacious accelerating processes that were already underway. The historic center went from dingy to dazzling new skyscrapers, fall or taller than existing stock came to a light on the northern part of the city and here these are the Cuatro Torres Business Center, which are much taller than the nearby Porta de Europa. This is this kind of new multinational architecture of the boom years and actually a couple of years ago I came and gave a talk with a studio from at GSAP that was doing a project on a piece of land nearby this particular site. So one particular point of interest was the Madrid-Mansanades River project. The turn of the century philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century had once lamented the capital's river that it was kind of a pathetic stream that couldn't compete with something like the Thames or the Seine. And so the conservative mayor Maurice Gallardo's answer to this problem almost a century later was to spend about 5 billion euros transforming this area of the city into an orderly series of manicured parks and charming pedestrian bridges and they had to sink a huge highway underground. How to finance all of these projects? Well, home ownership. It was the construction of housing that far eclipsed these other developments. The 1990s had seen a sharp spike in demand for housing. Planners estimated the need for between 120,000 and 170,000 new units. They also justified expanding the surface area of the city considerably and here what you see is this plan that sought to incorporate all of this new territory at the edges of the city. But they were all going to be basically residential neighborhoods and planners decided to plan for 300,000 new housing units that would populate these kind of greenfield sites at the city's periphery. This area is far from the center of the city. Here we see one of those developments as it's being constructed, the Ensanche de Vallecas. And we see it far far the distance which if you're watching this on the big screen you probably see better we see those four towers and the other leaning towers there so this is a ways away right. It's far spent expanding the metro system but not nearly at the same pace. And you know it's here is a view then of that housing estate once it was completed. And it's kind of literally like where the city ends or where the sidewalk ends to use a shell Silverstein ism. I was there several years ago and it's literally like the city continues continues it continues and then just stops and you're in the air and planes of Castile. But you know the idea was basically that the inhabitants of all of these new housing units would pay property taxes that would finance a lot of this other kind of speculative speculative construction and allow the city to kind of line its coffers and that's Madrid couldn't just create new homes it also had to create new homeowners. As new units flooded the market so to do new instruments of consumption with EU integration the state passed a series of laws that allowed for the liberalization of mortgage markets, which was seemed very much as part of this kind of integrating real estate into a global economy, and they also of course introduced securitization. These new instruments in turn created new clients, the working class, young couples and single people now had home ownership easily in their reach. And then created new jobs real estate agents popped up kind of on every street corner, your neighbors and friends suddenly we're making a lot of money working in the construction set sector or in the finance sector real estate sector. What's more in this particular culture of economy of property rather the mortgage allowed for a host of other kind of consumption opportunities, because into the quantity of the mortgage you could. You could add additional credit to to purchase a new car or to renovate your house or to get a new furniture set or even go on a, you know, luxury vacation. It was in this moment that the housing and international aspirations of kind of being cosmopolitan European citizens converge and the culture of property produce a culture of international consumerism. In this I love this image because, you know, in addition to all the kind of heteronormative ideas that are being perpetrated in this image is also this house that looks absolutely like nothing, like no house in Spain but is, and it's very kind of an American house but is nonetheless kind of evokes this international, this international property market and the dream of homeownership that was at once very Spanish but also kind of embedded within these global circulations of credit and consumption. But saying even in this moment of triumphant Europeanization when the economy was really booming in many ways but was also stagnating in other ways. So as the economy was growing wages refused to rise the birth rate of the city of this country was plummeting as such it had to kind of find a new, you know, new home buyers there was only so many home buyers that the native Spanish population provide. So who might consume these thousands of new homes. So here Madrid need to have an outside an outside injection of residents to prop up this urban political economy. And it's here that we turn to the kind of immigrant histories of home ownership. And indeed it was in the same moment of rapid urbanization and financialization that Spain suddenly became a site of massive immigration from 2001 to 2011 the immigration population swelled 500%. So we see on the top right that like the evolution of the population that's growing considerably but a lot of that growth is just basically due to the fact that there's a huge number of immigrants who are moving to Spain. And, you know, after not being a country basically immigration for many years it suddenly becomes this major destination, and in the Madrid region that migration is really is really led by populations from Latin America, namely Ecuador overwhelmingly Colombia. So, you know, as we see it's, you know, the fears of declining birth rates were going away but then there's a whole number of other issues related to its its transformation into an immigrant nation essentially with the onset of massive immigration the national government established norms and regulation for entry and likes of stay. However, integration policy was devolved to local subnational arrangements and was the responsibility of regional governments. The Madrid regional government conceived of integration within a very traditionally economical economically liberal framework of personal advancement and individual attainment. And that extra integration was largely placed on the figure of the immigrant herself. So today I'm focusing very much on Indian immigrants that is immigrants from Ecuador and Peru and we see here as to why. And I want to tell you about kind of why how homeownership became this de facto integration policy for this particular community. And it's here that both state policy and discourse on the one hand and the experience of Indian immigrants on the other conspired to make home ownership, the premier mechanism of urban incorporation. Now, South Americans by and large have themselves taking up irregular work with little legal protection. They told us live in domestic caretakers, some contractors, day laborers. Yet against that kind of irregular forms of employment that they found they needed regular and legal housing. This is because adequate housing is a prerequisite for both permanent residency and family reunification policies under immigrant Spanish immigration law. But the policy had increasingly privileged ownership, leaving the rental market very precarious and unregulated. The rents were often reluctant to rent to immigrants and required exorbitant security deposits. These employment irregularities met people, many people lacked legal contracts, which were also prerequisites for rental agreements, people had to seek out alternatives. One anecdote here is that I once tried to rent an apartment from somebody who quoted me to prices. One price was if he wanted if I wanted to have a formal contract and that was about 1200 euros. And another price was if I wanted to rent it under the table and it was going to be 800 euros. The landlord who with whom I was speaking was somebody who worked within the Treasury Department of State and so I just love that the tax man who cheats on his own taxes, which is kind of emblematic of something. So anyway, at the same time that this, you know, the state was very eager to direct immigrant funds into productive circles of the national economy. Politicians bemoaned the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of euros, leaving the country in remittances destined for elsewhere. They were worried that they had no control over this, these funds and how they were used in places like Ecuador. More worrying still was that immigrants who had shown great capacity to save were not spending their hard earned cash within the Spanish economy. This partnership, however, was a site par excellence for immigrant investment. And indeed, banks and real estate agencies were also eager to access immigrant economies and provided the solution to the problem with housing. The banking industry had already come to see immigrants as a potent new trove of clientele. The bank had its arms wide open and welcome calling cards and remittances services had penetrated these communities early on establishing trust. The deregulation of the financial industry allowed for the proliferation of entities that explicitly catered to immigrant populations. Eduardo agreeing Ecuadorian who once worked construction detailed to me how real estate agents would haunt building sites during lunch breaks and after work, handing out enticing offers like candy. With these offers the laborers themselves can now take part in the city that they helped produce. The publicity campaigns appealed to migrant clients with images of domesticity mainstream notions of kind of an heteronormative notions of normalcy and and traditional ideals of heart and home. While state practice and discourse could often read delinquency and deviancy and immigrant life, which I talk about extensively in the book. These campaigns presented a different reality. For example, we see this particular ad where we have a young couple dreaming of their future and the house of their dreams at the best price with the depiction of the kind of ideal family. Even though they're blue. But so it's kind of tapping into these aspirations that immigrants had, and that, you know, the readers of Latino, which is a publication that was destined for the was handed out for free to Latin American immigrants reflected these particular offer these particular ideas of possibility expansive opportunity and an imagined future that actually reverberated with their own dreams for for kind of the magic urban future. To create an investment into the Spanish or culture of property was facilitated by the communities and social networks. The short rapid onset of their migration created strong internal ties. The collective was highly organized and they had numerous civil society or associations. They had bars and restaurants and weekly pilgrimages to the capital's numerous parks for sprawling barbecues. And that's penetrated this community easily through informal ties financial entities could spread this their products, the financial entities that catered to immigrants of course also had immigrants on staff and one interlocutor talks about this as a kind of the contagion of the mortgage there was this, you know, we're here we are in a pandemic but this kind of the mortgage as something catching that you couldn't escape from. Finally, South Americans were cognizant of the ways in which they had become integral to the economic this economic model throughout the popular press, both catering to their community and the public at large articles frequently in the ways in which migrants were sustaining this economy. We see this on the screen, you know, with that they were not just, they were not just clients that they took on this kind of the guys of the good client, they're kind of valiant economic subjects keeping the system afloat. This is the gap between immigration policy and everyday practice home ownership not only solved many issues related to immigration settlement, but also was easy available and trustworthy. It also capitalized on migrants own dreams for both settlement and an imagined return that in which they could sell their homes and make a lot of money and kind of live comfortably in in their countries of origin. In a short span of a decade home ownership became a de facto mode of incorporation into the city and indeed in a country in which where homeownership rates hover between 80 and 90%, what could be more Spanish than acquisition of property. Indeed, what would once craft proletarians into property to owners would now make foreigners into madreleños. So thus far I've detailed the experiences of immigrants against the backdrop of Madrid's decadent urbanism. Now I want to kind of focus on the ways in which they experienced the collapse of the system. The collapse had intimately personal consequences, which reveal our first paradox that home ownership rather than allowing for integration instead increased differentiation. The mortgages that were offered to immigrants, similar to in the United States to have variable rates and often balloon payments. With the collapse of the economy mortgage payments shot up to pay monthly installments migrants took on extra work slaving away nights and weekends, rather than refuge. These were sources of stress, demanding physical and emotional energy to avoid ruin. When the mortgage in Spain passes into her rears. These homeowners who found themselves on a blacklist that prohibits a whole, a whole host of economic activities and exchanges. To not take out a credit card, a new cell phone line or a small loan. More damningly, Spain currently has no bankruptcy laws that would allow for a fresh start or the discharge of the debt. More damningly still is that mortgage law dictates that even after foreclosure and bank repossession, people owe the outstanding balance, which in fact can be passed down to your children if they don't renounce their inheritance. Most everything, people were also left owing hundreds of thousands of euros to the bank that had already taken their homes. They had quite literally less than nothing. Compounding economic exclusion was physical isolation, rather than offer a means of incorporation into the city, immigrants instead found bought homes in peripheral areas. Often these were neighborhoods abandoned by Spaniards who are able to purchase better and newer elsewhere. For example, here's a map of Madrid, this like kind of on Shell, this is was a heavily immigrant neighborhood, it was about 25% foreign born with which in a city like Madrid is significant. It's in that neighborhood, for example that the building stock is incredibly old and decrepit, many structures like elevators and modern heating, transportation options are limited. But as housing prices continue to skyrocket, people bought homes further and further a field. This is actually Madrid City but soon they were buying houses, you know, within an hour and a half, two hours, three hours from the city. Because you could buy more house, of course, in a place like Toledo or Ceceña which are kind of ex-urban areas of the capital, rather than Madrid proper. And that's why they were sold these kinds of images of Madrid's glittering modernity, the realities and stark contrast. Vulnerability soon spread like wildfire throughout this community. The ties that allowed for the perpetration of credit were not only social, they also became financial. Banks deemed immigrants to be high risk clients, and thus required guarantors. In the heady days of housing consumption, these entities came up with several chicks in order to facilitate this kind of purchases. Two immigrant households might guarantee each other's loan, which were crossing guarantors. That's like, I'm buying a house. Professor Boa Carr is buying a house, we both act as guarantors for one another. Or you might create a loop whereby I'm guaranteeing Hibba's loan, Hibba's guaranteeing Ronjani's loan, Ronjani's guaranteeing my loan, but of course if one of us defaults then the whole thing falls apart. It's all in deep trouble. And so, you know, if in these conditions the default of one household could quickly provoke a kind of chain reaction, and this entire house of cards begins to crumble to mix some metaphors. This is with a tool designed to integrate to make these foreigners into cause of polish and Europeans, instead increase their vulnerability and exclusion. Rather than offer redemption, homeownership and state made already precarious dwellers into outsiders crushing immediate worlds in the process. And then to combat this crushing defeat. Now we kind of enter the second paradox which is that the collapse of this model which was meant to integrate instead prompted immigrants to claim recognition and reimagine their urban futures. Well the experiences of exclusion I've just detailed peer totalizing, which I talk about a length of the book I demonstrated how this community rallied against conditions of indebtedness. All personal histories had fostered an awareness of the connection between the political, political kind of economic conditions and everyday domesticities. Many of you know, many of my interlocutors, much of the, the Indian community in Spain migrated there because of the political and economic crises that grip their homelands in the late 1990s. They left their homelands in moments of tremendous financial ruin. One interlocutor and recalling his migration to Spain, told me he left a country that didn't have any international economics significance, but nonetheless was where the lords of economic science could come into experiment with shock and austerity. We already lived through one brutal economic collapse tied in strictly to questions of indebtedness. As such, informants were personally familiar with the intimate ties that bind together these kinds of macro changes, and the micro scale of the household. The ways in which debt is incredibly punitive. Many Indians have to leave behind children, which forced them to see also in very intimate ways the ways in which politics in the economy are entwined with what we are often, what are often imagined as kind of apolitical spaces of the family at home. And I too felt this kind of this intense sting of isolation and shame and loss, their lived histories nonetheless sort of contextualize and make sense of personal ruin as situated within complex landscapes. While they understood the violence is indebted ruin several communities members past activism catalyzed them into action. So the figure in early struggles against foreclosure and eviction is the one we see on our screen I eat a quinoa, who once told me that solidarity is in our blood. She's been a leader in the indigenous uprisings in Ecuador that saw, you know, in advance of the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival. There was one of many of indigenous uprisings in which she was was a key player. She advocated on behalf of her community to desk brutal acts perpetrated by the national government and multinational corporations, in addition to the kind of long legacies of colonialism and it's more recent permutations. She migrated to Spain was a crisis but she brought her activism along with her. She replaced one kind of peripheral identity that of indigenous women for another precarious migrant worker. She worked as a cleaning lady and came to occupy an almost invisible role within the city's modernizing project as the quiet presence, who took care of the house. The other women native Spaniards, you know took on office jobs and suddenly have this kind of like public public facing work in Madrid she got involved with Ecuadorian cultural associations as a means of kind of advocating for her community as in addition to introducing Spaniards to Ecuadorian culture, and she became the president of Madrid's largest Ecuadorian group, the corner they are national coordinator for Ecuadorians in Spain. Well previously she fought for indigenous rights and recognition in Ecuador. Now she fought for immigrant rights and recognition in Spain. In 2008 families. Yeah, families started to come to her with their struggle in this role she could see that the issue of foreclosures and mortgage related evictions was an issue that affected many people. The issue of mortgages would perhaps far removed from both indigenous struggles and Latin American economic history, and hardened back to similar processes of wealth power corruption, and of course extraction and dispossession from that first glimmer of trouble she responded to a collective problem, negating its individual consequences, and she learned from the indigenous struggle in struggles she had to get organized. These ties also allowed for the spread of credit and then the spread of vulnerability, yet with crisis those ties also proved a means of sharing information and collectivizing mortgage problems. And the top we see ads that helped spread credit through these kind of personal ties. And then on the bottom you see that that this was also to this newspaper and the kind of social networks that rely on was also a tool that could be used to spread outrage. And here on the bottom is an announcement for the first meeting to convene around mortgage issues. So long before the events of the 15th of May 2011 we just celebrated the 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in my name was the 10th anniversary of the indignados movements. And several more months before activists in Barcelona would formally create what become the platform for people affected by mortgages. The leaders of South American immigrants arrived at an auditorium in a far-flung neighborhood of the city to discuss this particular situation and put forward a solution. They alighted on the problem of debt as it crushed their community. Without the complicity of the state and promoting indebtedness, signaling the course boundaries between governance real estate and finance. The narratives that they developed would go on to be a central pillar of the pause message on housing and urban justice and collectivizing the problem, demonstrating how it emerged within a situated political economic landscape. Early dissenters channeled their fear and sorrow, guilt and shame into anger rage and action, because as Eduardo noted, they had that bad habit of organizing to vindicate their rights. These early seeds of resistance, which firmly located the debtor within a terrain of power and politics are thus embedded within a genealogy of struggle against oppression. Contesting housing disposition dispossession emerged out of very specific spatial conditions that connected past experiences with more recent struggles against vulnerability. Such struggles transformed exclusion into a political claim, the wayward debtor into the aficdada. By identifying themselves as people affected by mortgages, these activists embedded their condition within a landscape of decadence and ruin. And in such they made legible the connections between their domestic situation and flows of policy, practice, corruption and austerity. Their activism in Madrid also uncovered a lengthier paradox, one that kind of flickers as a backdrop to much of the story. And here I want to return to what I mentioned was a Franco's Faustian bargain, where he kind of promoted the construction industry and the construction of housing to the detriment of all other industries. It is an economic model that might allow cultural aspirations to make themselves manifest in space. Additionally, invent that the economy swelled and the city flourished, but only so long as construction continued and people bought houses. The sole means of growing household wealth. Deep inequalities in all their sectors and indeed tremendous wage stagnation. We're masked by the audacious gains afforded through the ownership of property. With the collapse of the property market, those inequities have been laid bare. The country now finds itself at the bottom of many of Europe's list. It has the worst income inequality, the highest rates of child poverty, and the most empty housing between three and four million units, even as everyday citizens are forced to go houseless. The future is salient to our global moment. As I mentioned at the beginning and interspersed these photographs and accounts with the paintings of Antonio Lopez Garcia. His Madrid, while beautiful is always empty that emptiness makes them seem like set pieces awaiting actors will perform the real event. They remind us in this way that the city is not just built form, but relies on the communities that populate it. Baudelaire's flanur that figure of modern urbanity requires not just the boulevards of Paris in the painter of modern life. The Great Parisian prose poet wrote the crowd is his element as the air is that of birds and water fishes. He also requires the bustle and hustle of street life, the other urban denizens, perhaps perhaps anonymous yet made intimates by proximity. And yet, as I illustrated in part today, it would appear that in many places around the globe, the empty scapes of Lopez Garcia are preferable to say, these kinds of black and brown neighborhoods of Jacob Harlow, Jacob Lawrence's Harlem which is your neighborhood at Columbia. And here I want to again kind of zoom out and consider what the lessons are here and how the story might resonate with elsewhere. Home ownership is still the central to many international development practices and urban policy, urban poverty policies, a means of pushing people onto the ladder of progress. Meanwhile, investment in residential real estate is at the forefront of financial practices, even though as we've seen this week with the Evergrande story in China, you know, often to kind of great instability. The formation of these trends has produced ghostbounds throughout across the globe from new build excerpts to hollowed urban centers. These kinds of empty scapes that we see in Lopez Garcia work are quickly becoming the new normal, either through dispossession or over urbanization. We've written about more recently in relation to New York City, which is of course where I now live, and where I can see heads and yards out my window. Vacancy is now a common condition throughout many urban centers. This vacancy is not produced through capital fright, but rather capital's excesses, which have pushed everyday urban dwellers into crowded areas of the urban margins. Over the last year and a half, the consequences of such spatial miss, the spatial mismatch is greater exposure to epidemiological risk, and of course, even death in our pandemic present. Indeed, our cities continue to be marked by categories of exclusion and massive spatial inequity. Housing movements then confront the reality of the city has speculative project that relies on, of course. But to draw out the ways in which urban development as usual is antithetical to just shelter is not sufficient. Rather, multi ethnic and multiracial housing movements force us to contend with the differential impact of the property order property they demonstrate. Further's discussion along lines of race, gender and migratory origin recent debates over rent strikes moratoria and urban budgets reliant on property taxes demand a reckoning with dependency on private ownership as a means of financing and reproducing the city. Indeed, the pandemic has revealed the violence and dispossession of property systems upon low income communities of immigrants, the indigenous and people of color, a reality that many movements have long denounced struggle over shelter struggles over shelter already confront and strive to abolish dominant modes of producing and dwelling the city in the city. So why do they articulate more egalitarian forms of habit of habitation to reimagine the city in the age of epidemiological risk and cat climate catastrophe then collective such as the palm might provide blueprints for an alternative urbanism of cooperation against the tyranny of the market. Within their insurgencies and counter imagined areas, we might find and propagate hopeful more inclusive housing and urban futures. Thank you. Here, for those of you interested in purchasing the book. Thank you so much. I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much, Professor Gonyk for your talk, and I would like to open up the session for questions. Escape from my screen. Oh, yes, please, if you like. So as a reminder to ask questions participants on zoom are encouraged to use the raise your hand feature. And I'll call on you to unmute and ask your question directly, or you may also type your questions in the chat box and I can lead them out. The audience in every 114 you can raise your hand and I'll call on you, and you can ask your question directly if you like. So I see a couple of questions in the top in the chat. Should I answer those first. Yeah, of course. Okay. Thank you. So the first question is, does this study also include was sometimes now referred to as Catalonia. This is a, it does not and this is a book that specifically about Madrid and the experiences in Madrid, which is in some ways very different from the ways in which housing struggles in Catalonia and particularly Barcelona. Articulated themselves. There has however been a lot of work that's been done on this particular movement. In particular, which in some ways is also, you know, there's a moment in which kind of immigrant and then working class activism in Madrid connects with some housing activism in Catalonia to kind of become this more national movement. And so people such as my colleague Melissa Garcia Lamarca who's in Barcelona has done work on similar struggles in Barcelona and nearby Sabadell. And then the geographer Jaime Palomeda has also done work on also specifically on Ecuadorian indebtedness in and housing movements in in Barcelona. So this was a specific to Madrid. And then with regards to the brochures advertised that campaigns and market betrayals geared towards immigrants considered taking on home ownership. So, um, I so part of this project relied on my own experience of living in the city during during the height of the boom and so that's how I even knew about this particular immigrant publication which was no longer in existence I had to go and I spent about two weeks in the National Library of Stain which is like basically the only place that this this exists and took terrible crappy cell phone images of a lot of the advertisements. So I didn't actually get the opportunity. I talked with some interlocutors about the kinds of images but mostly what I do in the book is, I read some of these images alongside the narratives that people tell me themselves about their experiences. In part as an effort to flesh out the kind of visual and material culture of housing acquisition during this point, but that's a really good question and I, and then also, you know, as I say, within the kind of oral histories interviews. And also participant observation that I did that, you know, I'm paying attention to the ways in which they these people who are experiencing foreclosure are themselves invoking ideas around family, community, home. One of the things that I talk about in the book is actually that, while, you know, in some ways this becomes a mech mechanism for integration and the state sees it as a form of directing assets into the Spanish economy actually what a lot of people talk about is that they're bought they wanted to buy housing precisely as I mentioned so that they could sell their housing and, you know, buy a much nicer place in a place like Keith or Lima or, you know, rural areas and have a lot of cash left over essentially to, you know, return and be and live very comfortable kind of middle class lives in their countries of origin. So I hope that answers your question, Stefan. I actually have a question regarding your, your method. I think at the beginning you sort of said that it's quite difficult to, you know, piece together this entire picture of evictions because eviction data is so, you know, sort of fragmented and quite potentially unreliable and I'm assuming because it deals with immigrants, it's probably that much of it is also, you know, hidden from their side I mean they potentially find it better to not declare what their housing situation is. Is that the case? So, so evictions and data which now I think are collected. It's, you know, well after the events of this book. I think that there is now an effort to collect some sort of authoritative data on, on evictions. And that's any eviction whether it's an immigrant family, a Spanish family, you know, whether it's a second home or first home. You know, one of the things that everybody talks about in relation to this housing movement in which I have it talked about today is the kind of process of empowerment that people go through such that people are learning to narrate their own experiences and what I mean, part of that which I talk about in the book is, is part of it is also learning how to, it's just for themselves learning what happened to them kind of financially because it's incredibly complicated process, you know, but you know the process from buying a house to finding yourself into foreclosure and losing the house like, and there are many different financial entities that are involved. And so, so for people who have have kind of gotten involved. The kind of process of revealing their, of revealing their situation is precisely, you know, something that they kind of go through in order to then be able to take part in resistance. But yes, certainly I mean there's an as I detail, particularly the book has a whole sentence has a whole chapter that's called debt sentences that's about basically the experience of finding yourself kind of underwater without a possibility to pay with foreclosure certain that that's like the kind of shame and guilt and feelings of ruin are incredibly overwhelming, and that indeed for immigrants, they face another series of questions. But it's not, you know, I think it's, so yeah, it just poses distinct challenge, I think for the researcher, but also distinct challenge in terms of organization right in terms of the challenge of social movement mobilization of getting empowering people such as they could talk about these very painful experiences. So, yeah, I hope that answers your question. Thank you. So we have another question from the audience. Actually, you'd like to go first. Yeah. Thank you so much for the talk. I can hear you. I'm like, I have no idea which who you are in that room. Thank you so much for the talk. It was brilliant. And I was just wondering, early on you showed a graph of like the countries of origin. The second country of origin was Morocco and obviously is now North African immigration. So I was wondering if there were similar efforts by both the state and the lenders to like encompass North African or some sort of African movements into this vision of the Spanish homeowner and if those like were visually or were visually different or had a different narrative, or they were excluded by virtue of not being like from the former colonies as a word. And if you encountered anything related to that, it would be interesting to hear how it was different or similar to the Indian communities. Yeah, so I mean that's a really that's a really interesting question. So, you know, quite simply like in the movement itself there wasn't nearly, but there weren't nearly as many Moroccan families represented and I think that's for a number of different questions I think I mean just simply on the one hand that the proximity to Morocco means that it's much easier to go back and forth. And I think that you do see like a lot more patterns of circular migration. But then, you know, there's also to consider the kinds of Islamic attitudes towards indebtedness that that are very different from from, you know, Catholic or Spanish relations to debt, that is, I think taking on debt is seen as something that one does not do and so to find that it's just so self indebted and and unable to pay, you know, there's an added kind of cultural element. But it just so I don't. You know, the fact that Moroccans were not nearly as present in the kind of housing movements that I was involved in just simply meant that that they don't feature much in that at all. I think a lot of the same kind of how and of course the same forms of housing discrimination are rampant in amongst you know that that that community faces. So yeah, that's, that's kind of as best I can answer that question. Thank you. I think it's another question in the audience please go ahead. Thank you for your presentation. You detailed how building for ownership is susceptible to credit or practices on the lending side on the speculative building side. I'm wondering if you looked at bills for rent. There's a third form of development, which might be less mandatory in its behavior just because it involves different financial models and like building building for rental building for ownership. So, part of what what's going on here is that the rental market is tiny and it's very unregulated and there's no, there's no financial incentive whatsoever to basically build something that would then be for rent. The vast majority of construction is construction for for the ownership model. And this is because of, you know, 70 years of housing policy that that completely directs all construction and also you know gives the tax breaks to home ownership allows the kind of rental market to wither and die on the vine so to speak. And, and that what even, you know, what little Spain has of social housing is also basically done under the rubric of, of subsidized mortgages. So it's a very, very small amount of the social housing stock that we would think of as like public housing, ie like at a very low monthly rent. And so really a lot of what you find to rent in a city like Madrid is old buildings that, you know, that somebody has decided to run out to people. And that's just, and this has been a major problem of course in the, the post crisis era, in which I would say that there's, you know, the housing crisis in Madrid continues because of Sorry, I just, I saw a question and then I, like, lost my train of thought. I'm still even after a year and a half of this I'm still kind of trying to catch my bearings on zoom. So, yeah, I just to say that like the, there's very little rental housing stock, you're at the mercy of landlords who want to charge what they want to charge, and they're just not building rental housing. So, yeah. I see how your proposal that Latin Americans, migrants also about housing acts of tennis is interesting I wonder to what extent or how migrant housing movements connected with influence or help grow the general housing movement. So that's a really good question and I don't, I don't think it's specifically. It's not specifically housing movements in Latin America. It was that you had people who'd experienced indebtedness in very particular ways and had to leave often because of it and then also you have this influence of the experiences with indigenous organizing, which were a handful of members of Madrid's Andean population, like I use the case of IE that she's kind of the most emblematic but there were a number of people who were involved in, you know, she'd been involved in the indigenous uprising. I know Eduardo, who I cite today, is somebody who's worked on a lot of like recent and actually it's gone back to Ecuador and works with indigenous communities on water issues, and it's, you know, part indigenous itself. So that it's not, you know, it's mostly, I think it was more of an orientation to particular questions of debt and extraction and dispossession, rather than like, oh it's this movement that has, you know, that shows up in this other movement. If that makes sense, like, there are, you can draw these kinds of like threads, I guess, between previous activism and between, but one of the things that I, that I ultimately say is like I don't, there's, it's really hard to pinpoint like why this tactic like where does it come from like it shows, it's something that shows up in say a lot of different movements that is then, you know, finds resonance with various different actors who have these other kind of life experiences. So I was, I had this conversation with, with a couple of more senior colleagues about the kind of idea of the follow the activist right. And then you're not actually like, in a lot of cases of following the activists you're following these kind of like anti globalization, often white men. But that doing this kind of like subaltern flows also produces these kind of rich geographies of objects of protest so that's my answer to that. Are there others. Yeah, I'm sorry. I also, I guess. Hi. I'm also kind of wondering, you know, you talk about this, you talk about this kind of like in Madrid, but then I imagine that kind of a broader population was also experiencing, you know, the fallout from the financial crisis and and detrimental effects of financialization of mortgages and so I wonder what was the relationship between these kind of migrant movements in Madrid and kind of the broader housing movement in Madrid in particular. Yeah, so, so what I do, I kind of omit that is that, and that's the book. And so, what happens is that the these vibrant and the migrants who are involved in these Ecuadorian associations in Madrid, start to get organized around the question of mortgage related for closure on fictions. Other than because of the first to actually face it right there the first people will lose jobs. And at some point there's this, they're organizing they said they make contacts with a number of different civil society groups included like the United Left, which is kind of the traditional Communist Party and workers unions, which is how they then kind of connect with some working class activism that's happening around similar issues but in the very periphery of Madrid, and then through these kinds of itineraries of outrage and organizing they connect with. This early trip that Aida Eduardo who I cited and then also somebody who's named Rafael Mayoral who's now high up in Podemos who's a lawyer. They make this trip around around Spain and try to talk to different Ecuador communities around Spain about the issue of mortgages. They meet with housing activists in Barcelona and it's actually before the creation of the PAW, but it's, you know, I've never been able to say that they were the ones that like it was through this idea that they decided to start this, you know, but so it is this kind of like the influence of people and places and time and, and financial ruin. That is not, you know, yeah, again it's like pulling apart kind of various threads, and some of which you just can't say, you know, it was one way and then it was another way. I hope that answers that. Is there anybody else. Yeah, I think we have time for one more question from the audience. Andrea, go ahead. So, thank you for your talk. I am from Ecuador, one of the reasons I wanted to comment because I know it's like a big problem. So I was just like curious about the motivations for immigrants like for example from Latin America to Spain, obviously back home. Can you hear me. I, the motivation to go to do what? To immigrate to Spain. Oh, okay. The situation is not great, but then based on like evidence, like you mentioned that they often take like informal roles or low paid jobs so I just, and they know that this is a situation for immigrants. And if like Spanish government motivates like facilitates them coming or, or if the Ecuadorian government like is interested in them going because they receive the money, usually they bring money back for their family. Yeah, I mean, in this at this point. I mean, so there are several things around here when Madrid in about 2005 I talked about this I'm sorry about this is an interview recently that it is actually considered like the third largest Ecuadorian city because they're almost half a million Ecuadorians there. And it's true that like in after the financial crisis, Ecuadorians are either migrating to and living in a few neighborhoods in Madrid or coming to Queens. And part so what you know, in migration scholarship like we talked about these kinds of chains and that you know somebody goes and establishes early connections there and then you know more people start going and it creates, you reach critical mass. I think the reasons for going to Spain are that you know particular colonial attachments being that there are favorable at like their favorable immigration laws to people who are coming from former colonies, you obviously have the same language, you have same religion, but is also a moment in which there is this booming economy and even if you're taking on a, you know, not great job. You're actually able to earn, I mean significantly more than what you were able to. And I did many people with people talk about kind of being driven out by the economic crisis of 1998, 98, 99. And so it's, you know, just simply a question of where then does one go. And a lot of people also have family that's gone on to more to, you know, Germany and France and the UK. But it is this kind of early, early very intense relationship is established between Madrid and Ecuador. Yeah. So, thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah. On the behalf of GSAP and the urban planning program in particular like thank you for presenting today. We really appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, I thank you for having me and you know maybe for the next book I can come in person. I'm hoping for that I think. And, you know, I'm, it's really a pleasure I'm sorry that we aren't able to do this in person because I would have loved to have spoken more particularly with grad students about the kinds of projects that you're working on. But it's really been a pleasure to be here with you today. Yeah. Yeah, and everyone please make sure you join us next week, the same time for the lip stock by Dr. Jamie Saxon, whose talk will be on structures of local mobility in Chicago.