The eviction room: How Carolina Maria de Jesus can help us analyze migration,segregation,and the politics of citizenship in the city

Introduction

By recording her daily life, Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) taught us about the city. A Black woman from the interior of Brazil, she was part of a rural-urban migration that transformed São Paulo into Brazil’s economic powerhouse in the mid-twentieth century. Surrounded by the city’s then growing wealth, de Jesus ended up selling recyclable material at scrapyards to barely sustain herself and her three children in a favela. But her trajectory took a striking turn thanks to her passion for writing. Her angst- and poetry-laced journal was published as a book in 1960 and became an immediate bestseller in Brazil. It was the first time that the writings of a favela dweller had made it to the country’s bookstores.

Quarto de Despejo: Diário de uma Favelada (De Jesus, 2017) was the book’s original title. Quarto de Despejo translates literally as “eviction room,” a metaphor de Jesus created for the favelas of São Paulo. In her book, she likens the city to a house with different rooms: the city center is the luxurious living room; the favelas, the eviction room. She came up with the term because in the 1940s many tenements in the city center were being demolished, and the people who were evicted from them, herself included, were compelled to relocate to nearby favelas—from where they could be evicted again. As eviction rooms, the favelas were the place where people like de Jesus were kept out of sight, out of mind to the elites, who inhabited the more comfortable rooms of the city-house.

The experiences and imagination that de Jesus transcribed into her journal reached me in 2018 as I finished fieldwork. I had just spent 6 months in São Paulo trying to make sense of the marginalization and the political claims of Brazilians and international migrants who were living together in squats in the city center. What struck me most clearly in de Jesus’s report of her daily struggles in the favela—a report written about six decades before my fieldwork—was how it echoed the struggles of the squatters I had just met, many of whom were migrant women of color. De Jesus’s book unveiled a cyclical history of arrivals, housing precarity, and evictions in the city. It gave me a vocabulary with which to frame the circumstances of the squatters I had interviewed. Though I will return to my research in São Paulo’s squats as an illustration, this paper is not about this empirical study per se.

This is a more conceptual paper about how Carolina Maria de Jesus’s creative take on the city can help us analyze migration, residential segregation, and the politics of citizenship together. As I will show, the metaphor of the eviction room can help us put aside the oft-denounced blinders of “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2003). Methodological nationalism is an “intellectual orientation” that “equate[s] society with the nation-state” (576) and that takes for granted the administrative distinction between citizens and noncitizens. Those of us interested in human mobility have been urged to question these assumptions and to investigate both citizens and noncitizens through a single analytical framework (Çağlar and Glick Shiller, 2018). We have been advised to “de-exceptionalize” the migration experience by seeing it within a broader social context (Dahinden, 2016). And we have been warned that if our research continues to assume that migrants are somehow outside of “society” and that they should be “integrated” in it, we are contributing, even if unintendedly, to a racist project (Schinkel, 2018).

But we have been less encouraged to position citizens within a frame of migration— “migration” is here understood as referring to both involuntary displacements and more autonomous forms of mobility. Methodological nationalism carries a sedentary bias: citizens are seen as rooted in the territory of their state. Human mobility is analytically relevant as long as it involves the crossing of international borders. Nevertheless, domestic forms of mobility, such as rural-urban migration, “can have a far more dislocating and alienating effect on families and people” (Hage, 2005: 469). Evictions, as the ones endured by de Jesus, are involuntary displacements that have multifaceted and lasting effects on people’s lives and on their communities (Desmond, 2016). How can an attentiveness to migration shed light on the condition of citizenship in cities?

In this paper, I expand on de Jesus’s metaphor of the eviction room and propose it as an analytical vantage point, centered on the politics of residential segregation, from which to see the linked urban struggles of citizens and noncitizens. When analyzing the struggles of racialized and low-income city dwellers living in marginalized neighborhoods and precarious forms of housing (such as favelas, squats, tenements, inner cities, etc.), we can think of their eviction to the margins of the “city proper” as being accompanied by an eviction to the margins of citizenship. As I will further explain, citizenship here is understood as a politics of group differentiation rather than just a legal status. To be evicted to the margins of citizenship means to be constructed as the other of the city’s “good citizens.” If we imagine the city as a house with multiple rooms, those segregated in its eviction rooms are not only physically but also politically cast out. The entitlements and privileges enjoyed by the “good citizens” inhabiting the living rooms depend on the continuous disenfranchisement and stigmatization of eviction room dwellers. Their displacement within the city is also a continuous process. Eviction rooms are spaces of arrival for underprivileged newcomers to cities as well as for city dwellers who have been pushed out of their homes.

The frame of the eviction room challenges the centrality of the formal citizen-noncitizen divide for determining the political belonging of disenfranchised city dwellers. Nevertheless, it does not deny the relevance of citizenship status per se. As James Scott (1998: 83) argues, administrative categories of the state are “artificial interventions” in their origins, but, because such categories are assumed and operationalized by state institutions, they structure people’s experiences. So, for example, citizenship status informs the encounter between eviction room dwellers and the police. Even though these urban dwellers are generally targets of mass incarceration and police surveillance and brutality, those who are noncitizens face the additional risk of deportation.

In inviting a joint analysis of the political position of citizens and noncitizens, the eviction room does not assume a shared political outlook at the urban margins either. In my own research with squatters in São Paulo, I found it helpful to frame all squatters as eviction room dwellers to recognize their common stigmatized position in the city, but I also stress the differences between citizen and noncitizen squatters when exploring their divergent political stances—an example on which I later elaborate. The fact that I could not find a unifying stance among squatters speaks to the wealth of political visions that can be found in eviction rooms more broadly. Some eviction room dwellers might seek to overturn their stigmatization and strive for recognition as the city’s “good citizens.” Others might bypass or outright reject good citizenship norms and forge alternative ways of being political in the city.

The eviction room is a vantage point that emerges from a focus on cities of the global south but that does not take the south-north binary as a starting point for analysis. Eviction rooms can be found in both world geographies as well as across them. The eviction room puts forward a research agenda centered on the spatial, temporal, and socio-political dimensions of cities and citizenship. I close the paper with examples of questions that animate this agenda.

To fully explain the eviction room as an analytical frame, I need to first clarify how I understand the politics of citizenship and the city’s role in it. I do so next by foregrounding Engin Isin’s (2002) conception of the city as a difference machine through which the identities of the citizens and their “others” emerge.

Citizenship and the city

Cities lie at the root of citizenship, both the term and the institution. This is easy to forget: since the eighteenth century, citizenship has been associated with legal membership in a nation-state. But as James Holston and Arjun Appadurai (1999: 2) stress, cities “engage most palpably the tumult of citizenship” because of their “concentrations of the nonlocal, the strange, the mixed, and the public.” The two main citizenship traditions in the West have their origins traced back to ancient cities—Athens as the birthplace of the republican tradition; Rome, of the liberal one (Pocock, 1995: 29). Western genealogies of citizenship move next to Renaissance city republics and to the urban revolutions that erupted in Europe between 1789 and 1848, through which modern and national understandings of citizenship emerged and became dominant (Bauböck, 2003: 156).

Such historical lineages, however, are contested. They are oblivious to non-European developments, and they are told from the standpoint of the city’s “victors”: the “aristocrats, warriors, merchants, nobles, and the bourgeoisie” (Isin, 2002: 2), who successfully instituted themselves as citizens in their historical periods. Critical studies point to a contradiction at the heart of citizenship: while it has been historically defined as universally inclusive, in practice, it has excluded different groups of people (Mignolo, 2006; Young, 1989). The purported universality of citizenship in liberal states today belies the fact that individuals’ specific location in society “—their group membership and categorical definition by gender, nationality, religion, ethnicity, ‘race,’ ability, age or life cycle stage—mediates the construction of their citizenship as ‘different’ and thus determines their access to entitlements and their capacity to exercise independent agency” (Werbner and Yuval-Davis, 1999: 5).

Bridget Anderson’s (2013) concept of the “community of value” highlights that citizenship is always differentiated. To be a citizen in law does not automatically entail inclusion as an equal and valued member of society. States present themselves as a “community of value, composed of people who share common ideals and (exemplary) patterns of behaviour expressed through ethnicity, religion, culture, or language—that is, its members have shared values” (2, emphasis in the original). The community of value encompasses the “good citizens” whose belonging is taken for granted. But this category needs its “others” to exist. In the British context, Anderson identifies the others both among the citizenry, in the “failed citizens” (criminals and “welfare scroungers,” for example), and outside of it, in the low-skilled and racialized immigrants. These othered groups are perceived as either disappointments or threats to the community of value. There are also the “tolerated citizens”: those whose acceptance into the community of value is contingent—examples include the hardworking immigrant and the deserving benefit claimant.

But what is the relevance of the city for the constitution of citizenship? In Being Political, Isin (2002) positions the city as the key arena through which citizens and their others emerge. He conceives citizenship as a relational politics through which certain groups become dominant and manage to claim for themselves a virtuous identity as citizens. The citizens are hence “those who were able to constitute themselves as a group, confer rights on and impose obligations on each other, institute rituals of belonging and rites of passage, and above all, differentiate themselves from others, constructing an identity and an alterity simultaneously” (2). Isin is less interested in the constitution of citizenship through the exclusion of transitive outsiders or aliens, and more in how citizenship is built on the othering of immanent groups, groups made up of members of the city who are nevertheless framed as strangers and outsiders. A key political moment happens when immanent others seek to reverse their position and make claims to justice. By making such claims, those who had been marginalized “become political” and transform the meaning of citizenship itself.

For Isin, the process of group differentiation through which the virtuous identity of the citizen is constructed can only happen through the city. But he does not conceive the city as a geographically bound or administrative urban unit. Instead, he sees the city as a “difference machine” or a “battleground” (2002: 283) through which social groups are formed in a relational way. Space is key to this process of group formation. As groups position themselves with and against each other, co-constituting identities and alterities, they produce space (such as in the creation of buildings and boundaries), and they deploy spatial strategies (such as segregation, incarceration, and dispersion). As groups realize themselves in space, they create and make claims to what is then called “the city.” Hence the city as a difference machine is a “paradigmatic formulation,” “a spatial constellation taking different forms,” and the particular form a city takes “emerges through a multiplicity of socio-spatial struggles” (McNevin, 2022).

I find Isin’s conception of the city as a difference machine through which citizens and their others are co-created illuminating. In the following sections, I put it in conversation with works on urban migration and residential segregation—as well as with de Jesus’s metaphorical take on the city—to shed further light on the spatial (as well as temporal) dimensions of the city’s politics of citizenship. Cities have historically worked as difference or sorting machines in very concrete ways: they have been the stage for the attraction and the segregation of differentially valued people in differentially valued territories and forms of housing. How can we think patterns of migration and residential segregation vis-à-vis the politics of citizenship?

The city as a sorting machine

If cities are at the origin of citizenship, migration is at the origin of cities. The urban has historically captured our imagination as a site where “existential mobility” (Hage, 2005) can be achieved; that is, as a site where we can feel like we are “going somewhere,” and at a satisfactory pace, rather than feeling “stuck” or like our lives are moving too slowly. Cities have also worked as a refuge for those displaced by conflicts, persecution, and dispossession. The networks that are built by communities of newcomers boosts cities’ attractiveness, mitigating the multidimensional hurdles in transitioning to a new place (Logan et al., 2002).

There is, however, a sorting dynamic to cities. While people have historically been attracted to cities, they have also been segregated in them. Racialized and poor newcomers are generally pushed to territories symbolically constructed as outside the “city proper,” where many feel unsafe and existentially stuck (again). Here I am mostly interested in forms of residential segregation that emerge not out of cultural affinity but out of the deliberate exclusion, by the upper and governing classes, of underprivileged people from valued urban areas—even though I recognize that these two forms of segregation cannot be easily isolated. As Iris Marion Young (1999) points out, segregation that is a product of the exclusion of people based on their racialization and class is a social problem for it perpetuates inequalities in life chances and stifles political communication across segregated groups.

Marginalized communities such as slums, inner cities, and underserviced peripheral neighborhoods commonly emerge out of the survival needs of newcomers who are unable to secure or deliberately blocked from securing adequate housing. Low wages, unemployment, unaffordable housing, real estate speculation and exploitation, and exclusionary urban planning combine with racial discrimination in the buying, renting, and financing of housing (by homeowners, realtors, private and public credit institutions, and government agencies) to keep desirable areas of the city inaccessible to these newcomers. Marginalized neighborhoods of arrival, thus created by social design rather than by their dwellers’ desire, are subject to a “suffusive territorial stigma” (Wacquant, 2008: 271, emphasis in the original) or the “myth of marginality” (Perlman, 1976). This stigma or myth typically characterizes these communities as crime- and disease-ridden territories and their dwellers as responsible for their poverty. Though this characterization does not stand up to empirical scrutiny, it pervades and persists in cities the world over because it helps to perpetuate an unequal status quo.

With the breakneck pace of urbanization in Latin America since the mid-twentieth century and, four decades later, with the triggering of this process in Asian and African countries, dystopian images of a “planet of slums” (Davis, 2006) have captured perceptions of urban reality across the global south. But the emergence of under-resourced neighborhoods inhabited by disenfranchised newcomers in growing cities has not been an exclusive feature of the global south or of the past century. In mid-1800s England, to quote a famous example, Friedrich Engels (1844) denounced the unsanitary and crowded conditions of Manchester’s slums, a phenomenon he saw as produced “by unconscious tacit agreement, as well as with outspoken conscious determination” (46). In the United States, the Great Migration of about six million African Americans from the rural South to the country’s Northeast, West, and Midwest between 1910 and 1970 was met by deliberate practices and policies (such as terrorist violence, restrictive covenants, blockbusting, and redlining) to keep Black people segregated in disinvested neighborhoods of concentrated poverty (Massey and Denton, 1993).

This is not to say that all marginalized neighborhoods are inhabited exclusively or mainly by migrants. What I am highlighting here is, first, that historically these communities have been founded by racialized and poor newcomers. Second, that these under-resourced communities continue to operate as key arrival sites for disenfranchised newcomers. Contemporary examples include squats in cities such as Athens and Rome, where, in the mid-2010s, North African and Middle Eastern asylum-seekers converged (Mudu and Chattopadhyay, 2016); and the villas of Buenos Aires, where Bolivians and migrants from other neighboring countries have been building their homes (Bastia, 2015). Journalist Doug Saunders (2010) calls “arrival cities” these disinvested neighborhoods in cities of the global south and north where underprivileged newcomers settle. Third, and as I will further elaborate, I mean to stress that these are neighborhoods marked by high levels of displacement, caused by evictions, violence, and natural disasters. The idea that people “settle” in them is hence often inaccurate, considering their high turnover rates and how the threat of displacement looms large.

If we can thus think of cities as difference machines in quite concrete ways, that is, as sites of simultaneous attraction, displacement, and segregation of people, what does this sorting dynamic tell us about the politics of citizenship in cities? Next, I build on de Jesus’s eviction room metaphor to grapple with this question.

The city lived and imagined by Carolina Maria de Jesus

One way to make sense of how cities work as difference machines, as sites through which the virtuous identity of the citizen and of its others are co-constituted in socio-spatial ways, is to look at how those pushed to live in segregated communities of arrival are also pushed to the margins of the city’s community of value. As I searched for an image to frame this double eviction process—to the margins of the “city proper” and of citizenship—de Jesus’s writing proved helpful. Because her life story is part and parcel of her views on the city, more words about it are necessary.

Born in a village in the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil, de Jesus was raised by a single mother who had been raised by enslaved parents. She spent her youth peregrinating with her mother to different towns, where they took up low-paying informal jobs, mostly as cooks and domestic workers (Farias, 2017). In 1937, de Jesus, then aged 23, moved to São Paulo by herself in search of an existential mobility she could not find amid rural deprivation. “[I have] the impression that I’m transferring myself from one planet to another,” she noted (Farias, 2017: 109, my translation). Initially spellbound by São Paulo’s crowded and impersonal streets, she became quickly disenchanted with her prospects in the city. After multiple job and address changes (including a 2-year hiatus in Rio de Janeiro), she found herself both jobless and homeless when the family she worked for as a live-in domestic worker learned about her first pregnancy. She then found a room in a tenement that was shortly after tore down by an urban renewal program. De Jesus’s most durable housing solution came in 1948. That year she assembled a wooden shack in the Canindé favela near the city center, where she eked out a living by picking up recyclable material and selling it at scrapyards.

De Jesus had three children from three absent fathers. Her every waking hour was guided by the imperative to earn enough change to attenuate her and her children’s insistent pangs of hunger. Despite this daily struggle and the fact that she only had one and a half years of schooling, she made time—if only a few interrupted minutes a day—to write. Using scraps of paper that she collected over time, she wrote journals, novels, plays, poems, proverbs, and samba songs. Confident in her talent, she repeatedly pled with the city’s newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses to bring out her writings. A few of her poems were published in the 1950s. When journalist Audálio Dantas met de Jesus while visiting Canindé for a news article, she immediately showed him her compositions. A few years after this encounter, in 1960, Quarto de Despejo was published collecting her journal entries from the previous 5 years.

The book’s first edition sold out in one week, and it was translated into an estimated 14 other languages. In the early 1960s, Brazil’s urbanization, marked by the emergence of favelas, was at the heart of cultural and political debates. De Jesus’s diary quenched a national thirst for a first-person account of the favelas (Meihy, 1998) and catapulted her into Brazil’s elite circles. With the book’s revenue, she moved out of the favela and into a brick house, her long-held dream of existential mobility. Celebrating the triumph of her book, São Paulo’s city council awarded her the title of “honorable citizen” of the city. She had made it to the city’s living room.

After the mostly sympathetic fanfare around Quarto de Despejo subsided, and as a coup installed a military dictatorship in Brazil in 1964, de Jesus and her work moved out of the spotlight. Never losing confidence in her work, she self-published two books that did not sell much. Her stay in the living room was short-lived. Three years after moving into a brick house, she was compelled to move to another eviction room, a house on the rural outskirts of São Paulo. In 1977, she died poor and forgotten by Brazil’s elites. We can read her re-eviction to the urban margins as a product of the limitations encountered by eviction room dwellers when they are recognized as good (or even “honorable”) citizens. This recognition is a contingent one, as a “tolerated citizen,” to put it in Anderson’s terms.

Yet, in recent years, de Jesus has resurged in the Brazilian cultural and academic scene. There is a growing number of mainly literary studies on her writings; her books are being re-edited and re-published; her life and work are the theme of numerous artistic productions; and she has received a posthumous honoris causa doctorate. This renewed interest in de Jesus is partially propelled by a reinvigoration of identity politics and by mobilizations against far-right authoritarianism in Brazil. In progressive circles, she is celebrated as a symbol of Black female strength, resistance, and creativity in the face of systemic racism, misogyny, and classism.

Quarto de Despejo is dominated by de Jesus’s anguished descriptions of her daily battle against hunger. Still, she makes occasional critical comments on the “hell”—as she put it—in which favela dwellers must live. The term quarto de despejo features in some of these comments. The eviction room is part of her metaphorical representation of the city as a house where different people are deliberately allocated to different rooms:

When I am in the city centre I have the impression that I am in a living room with crystal chandeliers, rugs of velvet, and satin cushions. And when I’m in the favela I have the impression that I’m a useless object, destined to be forever in a garbage dump (2003: 29).

I see de Jesus’s reference to the urban poor pushed to the favelas as “garbage” as expressing the way she felt they were treated: not like people with inherent dignity, but like disposable objects to be hidden away.

Both quotes were taken from the English translation of de Jesus’s first book, which was oddly titled Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus (De Jesus, 2003). ¹ It translates quarto de despejo as garbage dump, but I opt for the literal “eviction room” for two reasons. First, because it preserves de Jesus’s image of the city as a house and of the favela as a room in it, albeit an unwanted one. Second, because I believe this translation better captures the factual eviction of the urban poor from valued urban areas. When asked about the title she picked for her first book, de Jesus explained:

It’s because in 1948, when they started demolishing the small houses to make room for the tall buildings, we, the poor, who lived in the tenements, were evicted and had to live under the bridges. That’s why I call the favela the eviction room of the city. We, the poor, are the old junk (2017: 195, my translation).

The eviction room: at the margins of the city and citizenship

Expanding on de Jesus’s re-translated metaphor of the eviction room, I propose it here as an analytical frame to illuminate how the intimately tied processes of migration and residential segregation shape a city’s politics of citizenship. We can say that, regardless of their citizenship status, eviction room dwellers are constructed as the immanent others of the city’s “good citizens.” Relegated to the margins of the community of value, they tend to be portrayed as burdens and threats to society. As such, their rights and political belonging are tenuous at best rather than self-evident. Given the stigmatized way they are seen in the city, eviction room dwellers are generally deemed undeserving of rights, protection, or political participation.

In spatial terms, eviction rooms represent marginal sites of arrival for racialized and lower-income newcomers. Disenfranchised longer-term city residents or natives are also part of these communities, and they make up a higher proportion of eviction rooms when cities cease to grow at rapid rates. Slums, squats, and underserviced neighborhoods, for example, can all be seen as renderings of the eviction room. In terms of territorial location, the margins in which eviction rooms are situated need not be at peripheral neighborhoods or on the outskirts. The margins of the so-called “city proper” can dot or even fully take up central urban areas, as in the case of American inner cities.

In temporal terms, while eviction rooms represent places to which disenfranchised groups are pushed or evicted, people’s stay in these places is haunted by the risk of another eviction. Natural disasters, such as flooding and mudslides, can lead them to lose their homes and lives—these communities’ vulnerability being anything but natural. Eviction, though, is often enforced by the state. Ambivalence and exploitation characterize the relationship between eviction rooms, on the one hand, and the state and formal market, on the other. As Teresa Caldeira (2017) highlights, in much of the global south, marginalized neighborhoods tend to engage with formal institutions in “transversal ways,” neither fully evading nor complying with them. Residents might, for example, hold land titles and build their homes on a grid to later find out that both are disputed by state authorities. When eviction room dwellers own property or land titles that are officially recognized, they can be displaced with little or no compensation due to urban development plans. Especially in the global north, eviction room dwellers are targeted by predatory mortgages with high foreclosure rates (Gonick, 2021). For eviction room dwellers in the formal rental market, exploitative leases, severe rent burdens, and limited tenants’ rights put a great proportion of them one paycheck away from removal (Desmond, 2016). In sum, given their “evictability,” eviction room dwellers are in a state of “permanent transience” (Rolnik, 2019: 131) in the city-house.

Combining these coordinates, the city-house has multiple renderings of the eviction room in its territory-plan and across time. Some of these rooms are long-lasting, while others are ephemeral. The threat of eviction is nevertheless always present. Eviction rooms are eliminated by police-enforced eviction orders or the razing to the ground of shacks, and new ones crop up with the construction of precarious housing projects in underserviced areas. Living rooms are abandoned by investors and fall into disrepair (eventually being converted into a new eviction room), while luxurious new ones are added on (perhaps built via gentrification, taking over what used to be an eviction room). Corridors link different eviction rooms, as the one de Jesus took from a tenement to a favela in São Paulo. Walls separating living from eviction rooms are erected, militarized, undermined, and tore down. The city as a house is under constant construction and renovation.

Metaphorical takes on the city are as pervasive as they are necessarily incomplete—organic (as in the Chicago School), mechanic (in political economy approaches), and aesthetic ones (as the Lefebvrian oeuvre) immediately come to mind. As heuristic devices, these metaphors lend a sense of logic and order to the complexity of the urban, but they can never fully account for it. The metaphor of the city as a house whose construction is never finished and always in dispute illuminates spatialized forms of segregation without assuming their fixity. While I have relied mostly on the relation between the living rooms of the “good citizens” and the eviction rooms of the immanent outsiders, one can think of subdivisions in these rooms or of other relevant rooms for a city’s politics of citizenship. Still, the metaphor implies a certain degree of spatialized stability that might not always be instructive or easy to map out. The house metaphor also suggests a pre-conceived floor plan or blueprint, but the external boundaries and internal layout of the house emerge through the political struggles of different social groups—like Isin’s city as a difference machine. At the same time, structural forces (such as racism, sexism, and capitalism) inform the codes or parameters of the construction, accounting for the repetition in patterns of segregation across different cities.

Racism is crucial to the formation of eviction rooms. Ideologies of race (such as white supremacy) produce a segregated urban space, even in the absence of explicitly racially-based laws shaping urban development. The residential segregation of racialized eviction room dwellers, the exploitation of their labor, the police terror to which they are subject, and their consequent high levels of incarceration all go hand in hand. From São Paulo to Los Angeles, laws, policies, and policing guided by white supremacy establish a direct pipeline between the “ghetto” or the favela and the prison system (Amparo Alves, 2018; Hernández, 2017). Nick Gill and colleagues (2018) propose the concept of carceral circuitry to highlight the connections between carceral establishments and wider social systems. The concept unveils a carceral landscape that includes underserviced neighborhoods, immigration detention centers, and psychiatric asylums, for example. In keeping with a critique of methodological nationalism, we can think of eviction rooms, like carceral circuitry, as operating beyond the administrative borders of actual cities or states. If the city as a house is an open form, it can encompass transnational connections—as when racialized eviction room dwellers cross borders only to be pushed down a corridor to a new eviction room in their destination, where they might be imprisoned or from where they might be deported.

Gender also shapes the ordering of eviction rooms. While racialized men have been the main targets of mass incarceration, racialized women, and especially those who are single mothers, tend to be the main receivers of eviction orders. As Matthew Desmond (2016: 98) sums it, in American cities, “Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.” Low-income single mothers are burdened by the costs and reproductive labor of child raising and discriminated against by employers, realtors, and landlords. The fact that de Jesus was fired and evicted from her employers’ home after they found out about her pregnancy should thus be seen in a context of gender inequality that shapes the experiences of eviction room dwellers.

The frame of the eviction room resonates with scholarship on the temporalities of migration and migration governance (Jacobsen and Karlsen, 2021). This literature stresses how borders are enforced through time as well as space, subjecting disenfranchised people on the move to prolonged periods of indeterminacy, limbo, and “stuckedness” in designated places (camps, detention centers, shelters, etc.). An imposed regime of waiting—for passage, status determination, or resettlement, for example—characterizes these places, a regime that constrains people’s ability to act on aspired futures and that can be so chronic as to span generations, as in the case of some refugee camps (McNevin and Missbach, 2018). The temporal indeterminacy and the stigma attached to people caught in these places approximate their condition to that of eviction room dwellers.

A related condition of permanent transience afflicts those who are “deportable.” The concept of deportability foregrounds how the state’s categorization of certain racialized migrants as “illegal” (and their consequent vulnerability to deportation at any moment and space) results in the availability of a submissive workforce and in the disposability of migrants’ lives (De Genova, 2002, 2013). If the hovering threat of eviction is a temporal hallmark of eviction room dwelling, the hovering threat of expulsion from a national territory defines deportability. Eviction room dwellers who are illegalized noncitizens are both “evictable” and deportable—and a formal eviction can trigger a deportation.

Because the frame of the eviction room is not premised on the state’s legal categories, it sheds light on how permanent transience and disposability can afflict not only noncitizens in various precarious statuses but also documented noncitizens and disenfranchised citizens living at the urban margins. This frame responds to Georgina Ramsay’s (2020: 388) call for conceptualizing the “commonalities of precarious times of both migrants and non-migrants.”

The eviction room also speaks to the concept of precarity, which similarly invites an analysis of disenfranchisement across the citizenship divide. For some authors, precarity refers to a specific labor condition typical of neoliberalism; for other authors, it refers to a broader political condition of devaluation of human life. Juxtaposed with the former understanding, the eviction simply echoes the reminder that temporary, low-paid, and unprotected labor might be a new (neoliberal) condition for relatively privileged groups in the global north, but it has been common for minorities and for most workers in the global south (Millar, 2017). De Jesus’s occupation as a live-in domestic worker with no labor rights and her garbage-picking years in mid-twentieth century São Paulo illustrate this.

The eviction room’s juxtaposition with the understanding of precarity as a political condition is more generative, though. Judith Butler (2016, 2020) theorizes precarity as an exploitation of the precariousness inherent in life. In their conception, precariousness is an existential condition, in the sense that we all depend on social and political networks of support to survive and flourish. Our lives are thus radically relational and vulnerable, in the hands of known and unknown others whose desires and actions escape our control. Precarity is an exacerbation of this inherent vulnerability. It is not universally experienced but “differentially distributed” (Butler, 2016): it afflicts those with failing life-sustaining networks, who are thus more exposed to deprivation, violence, and death. Their lives are deemed disposable; their deaths, ungrievable. Geographers have deployed this understanding of precarity to analyze the vulnerability of social groups such as squatters (Vasudevan, 2015), asylum-seekers (Burridge and Gill, 2016), and families under colonial occupation (Harker, 2012). They stress that precarity is differentially distributed in space, that certain population’s exposure to it hinges on where they are located, to where and how they can move, the spaces they create, etc.

In conversation with these works, and at a more descriptive level, the eviction room can be seen as designating the spaces where precarity is allocated or concentrated in a city—their dwellers’ lives were denounced as disposable by de Jesus over six decades ago. At a more theoretical level, the frame of the eviction room suggests that the uneven distribution of precarity in a city is produced by a relational politics that takes shape through spatial (residential segregation), temporal (“evictability”), and perceptual (stigmatization) dynamics that occur simultaneously. This frame can help to further develop a “spatialized theorization of precarity” (Strauss, 2018: 622) by drawing on the metaphorical image of the city as a constantly shifting house, signalling how the spatial distribution of precarity is not fixed but depends on socio-political struggles over whose lives and territories are valuable, over which groups and places can be associated with the community of value. Finally, because the eviction room, as the concept of precarity, “cuts across identity categories as well as multicultural maps” (Butler, 2016 [no pagination]), it can contribute to reflections on the political possibility of forging coalitions across such identities and maps, a possibility raised by Butler and to which we now turn.

The politics of the evicted

When it comes to analyzing the political agency of those at the urban margins, the frame of the eviction room does not assume an inherent disposition or agenda. We cannot assume that the politics of those at the urban margins will be necessarily aligned with the progressive ideals of the time or that it will be united. The breadth of de Jesus’s views exemplifies this. She consistently frustrated attempts at ideological classification. In her writings and interviews we can find, for instance, both denunciations of anti-Black racism and prejudiced remarks about racialized migrants from the Northeast of Brazil; impassioned statements in favor of women’s independence from men and comments supporting wives’ submission to their husbands.

An investigation of the “politics of the evicted” asks: What sort of political responses are enacted by those evicted to the margins of the city and of citizenship? For example, do they strive for inclusion in the order of the “city proper” and of its community of value? Or do they refuse both orders and devise other forms of inhabiting the city and of being political in it?

In The Politics of the Governed, Partha Chatterjee (2004) argues that the concept of citizenship cannot capture the political mobilizations of “people surviving on the margins of urban life” (61). For him, citizenship is an institution belonging to the bourgeoisie and the elites. Analyzing an association of squatters living along Kolkata’s railway tracks, Chatterjee claims that these people are only formally citizens, and that, in practice, they are “population.” He refers to population in a Foucauldian sense, as a category created by governmentality for the sake of control and targeted policymaking. Chatterjee proposes the concept of “political society” to refer to the politics of marginalized groups deploying their population status to influence policymaking in their favor. But he stresses that the squatters’ association made claims to rights both by appealing to their population status and by presenting themselves as a moral group upholding “the duties of good citizenship” (60). As he put it, “the association was also appealing to the moral rhetoric of a community striving to build a decent social life under extremely harsh conditions” (60). And this moral rhetoric is key to how he defines the politics of the governed. Those at the urban margins, he observes, add to their population status “the moral attributes of a community” (57, emphasis in the original).

Chatterjee’s analytical choice to see the politics of those at the urban margins as divorced from the concept of citizenship seems to be premised on a liberal understanding of the term, as a formal status distributing rights and duties among a legally equal citizenry. However, if we understand citizenship in the critical way I have been discussing it, the claims of Kolkata’s squatters do not really escape it. While I agree with Chatterjee’s point that formal citizenship status does not translate into a substantive entitlement for those living at the urban margins in “most of the world,” I am not convinced that the concept of citizenship is irrelevant for conceptualizing their politics. If we see the struggles of those at the urban margins (citizens and noncitizens) through the frame of the eviction room, we might be able to analyze if and how these groups try to reverse their othering in the city’s citizenship politics. In the case of the Kolkata squatters, their attempt to affirm their good moral standing in the city (as a community striving for dignity against all odds) can be seen precisely as a moment when they seek to reverse their position as the immanent others of the city’s good citizens.

Because othering is central to the constitution of eviction rooms, the politics of the evicted must somehow respond to it. When making claims to justice, eviction room dwellers are often compelled to first shake off the stigma attached to their communities and demonstrate their deservingness. They might insist that they are hardworking people, taxpayers, homeowners, responsible mothers, upstanding individuals with no criminal involvement, etc. ² If they take part in the discourse of deservingness that undergirds a city’s community of value, they might have their demands met and become “tolerated citizens.” At the same time, they unintendedly reproduce the very boundaries of the community of value; that is, they end up reinforcing the idea that certain urban dwellers who fail to demonstrate the same values and behaviors are not (or not as) deserving of recognition. If we see citizenship as a politics of group differentiation, this more exclusionary consequence of struggles for inclusion should come as no surprise.

The struggles of eviction room dwellers lack a predefined telos. Although I am maintaining that eviction room dwellers must somehow respond to their stigmatization, their response might also entail, for example, a refusal to abide by good citizenship norms and to seek inclusion in the community of value, or a bypassing of such norms and the horizon of inclusion. I will discuss the possibilities of refusal and bypassing in turn.

Jaime Amparo Alves (2018) interprets the participation of São Paulo’s favela-dwelling young Black men in the “world of crime” as a form of “black insurgency” against the criminalization of their communities. He sees their role in the country’s largest drug dealing organization as a “tragic” form of agency in the face of police racial terror. His ethnographic work shows these men’s awareness of their targeting by police officials, of the justice system’s bias against them, and of the unbridgeable chasm separating them from those living in the “legal city.” But Amparo Alves neither romanticizes their agency nor denies its contradictions. He discusses their culture of violence against women and how they establish a parallel and brutal “law and order” system in favelas. These young men’s criminal path can be seen as a response to their precarity and othering as eviction room dwellers, a response that refuses to adopt good citizenship behaviors and plea for inclusion. Their path carves out a way of being political in the city that goes against respectability, civil society, and the legal regime. At the same time, this path helps to bolster the criminal stigma attached to eviction rooms.

Eviction room dwellers can also bypass rather than outright reject the horizon of inclusion. Instead of struggling for recognition in the city, they can cultivate horizons that stretch beyond its limits and citizenship hierarchies. An example of this can be found in Loren Landau’s (2021) analysis of the cosmopolitan stance of “deferred distanciation” adopted by African migrants in the South African province of Gauteng. These migrants respond to their marginalization and to xenophobic violence by detaching themselves from the matters of the city. They disinvest from the goal of inclusion and, instead, invest in an aspiration to migrate again to a better place. Through this stance, these migrants seek to use the city to accumulate enough resources for a desired future elsewhere. African Pentecostalism, preaching individualism and aloofness from the city’s matters, offers an appealing discourse to these migrants and to natives seeking to free themselves from local obligations.

The politics of the evicted based on rejection and on bypassing signal that eviction is a condition that can be imposed and cultivated at the same time. People who have been pushed to the margins of the city and citizenship can also cast themselves out of (or evict themselves from) good citizenship norms and the city itself. Their marginal position can be used as a resource or a springboard for other ways of living and being political in and beyond the city, ways that are not guided by dominant values and exemplary behaviors or the hope of inclusion. Their politics challenges the assumption of full citizenship as a universal horizon of struggle (Hansen, 2015).

I have presented three quite schematic strategies: when eviction room dwellers seek to belong to the community of value, when they refuse it, and when they bypass it. But I do not see these strategies as mutually exclusive, clear-cut, or as constituting an all-encompassing typology. The politics of the evicted might combine elements of these three different strategies, and it might not neatly fit into any of them. The point of outlining these paths is to shed light on the sort of political terrain eviction room dwellers must navigate to be political given their position as the city’s immanent outsiders.

The linked marginalization that people of different origins encounter in eviction rooms does not make them a socially homogeneous group. For example, some eviction room dwellers are deportable, some have more years of formal education, or a minority of them is not racialized. By the same token, though alliances and coalitions can be forged within this heterogenous group, a unified politics of the evicted cannot be assumed. Divergent political horizons can be found across the city’s eviction rooms but also within each of them. For example, in my research on citizens and noncitizens living together in squats in central São Paulo, I describe the different political discourses that coexist under the same roof (Zacca Thomaz, 2022). Brazilian squatters leading a housing movement articulate a “we are all refugees” discourse, thereby proposing a homogeneity among squatters in terms of their stigmatization, displacement, and denial of rights. The leadership seeks to reverse squatters’ disenfranchisement in the city by claiming for their recognition as São Paulo’s “full citizens,” understood as hardworking and politically engaged people deserving of their rights. In contrast, noncitizen squatters, coming mostly from Haiti, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are not generally compelled by this discourse of coalition and inclusion. Disillusioned with the racism and precarity they find in the city, they often aspire to better lives elsewhere, beyond Brazilian borders, articulating a cosmopolitan discourse like the one described by Landau.

The eviction room is thus an analytical frame for the linked struggles of citizens and noncitizens living at the urban margins that makes space for their social heterogeneity and diverse political horizons.

Global echoes and a research agenda

Two years after the publication of Quarto de Despejo, in 1962, an Afro-Martinican woman called Françoise Ega came across an article about the book in the magazine Paris Match during her bus commute to clean the home of a middle-class family in Marseille, France. Ega did not feel compelled to read de Jesus’s work itself: “Everyone reads you out of curiosity, but I will never read you; everything you wrote I know…” (Ega, 2021: 5, my translation). Instead, she immediately took to writing her own journal as a series of letters addressed to de Jesus. The letters, never delivered, were published in 1979 as a posthumous book replete with mirrors of Ega’s and de Jesus’s sister struggles and indignations.

Even though the eviction room (both de Jesus’s metaphor and the analytical frame proposed here) emerges from the realities of São Paulo, its potential value is not meant to be restricted to cities of the global south. My hope is that, as an analytical frame, the eviction room may travel like de Jesus’s original work and be reappropriated by those thinking about cities across the global south-north binary. Far from being a universal construct, this frame is “simultaneously located and dis-located” (Roy, 2009: 820): its contextual starting point is São Paulo, its development hinges on scholarship on migration, segregation, and citizenship across world geographies, and it can be borrowed, transformed, and remapped in any city.

Perhaps abusing the house construction metaphor, I see the contribution of the eviction room qua analytical frame as being about building on and mixing the materials of different literatures rather than tearing down a particular theoretical foundation. I expand on de Jesus’s metaphor to help us think about how a city’s politics of citizenship specifically relies on the entwined processes of migration and residential segregation, to stress the spatial and temporal dynamics of this urban sorting, and to frame the political agency of marginalized urban groups. The eviction room also offers a way to resist the hold of methodological nationalism on our imagination, to see the relevance of migration for a city’s politics of citizenship without assuming an ontological separation between the struggles of citizens and noncitizens.

The eviction room opens a research agenda on the spatial, temporal, and socio-political dimensions of citizenship in the city. The questions brought by this agenda can be answered by empirical explorations that further feed into theory-making. What kind of subject emerges with the eviction room? What spatial forms does the city as a house and the eviction room take in a given context? How is temporal indeterminacy spatialized, experienced, and resisted in a city? What corridors and walls connect and separate different eviction and living rooms? How does gender, race, sexuality, ability, and other intersecting social markers shape the condition and politics of eviction room dwellers? What historical continuities can be identified across eviction rooms? What transnational connections? What kind of political coalitions, competitions, and antagonisms surface within and across eviction rooms? What visions of transformation arise in them in the absence of an automatic and universal politics at the urban margins?