Struggles for Eviction

Housing Trajectories and the Politics of Dispossession in Salvador

Abstract

This article examines the politics of displacement in Salvador, Brazil. It shows how the very threat of displacement in a peripheral neighborhood ignited hope for homeownership among the city’s roofless population. By forming an informal settlement, these residents strategically sought inclusion in an urban development project that promised compensation and resettlement in newly built housing after eviction. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study analyzes the struggles for eviction and their contestations through the perspectives of the residents of the squatter settlement, public employees involved in the urban upgrading project, and

the Roofless Workers' Movement (MTST) that became an ally of the squatters and mediated on their behalf with public authorities. The ethnography reveals a distinctive struggle for housing where residents did not resist eviction but hoped to achieve eviction, and in turn resettlement, highlighting the deeply ambivalent results of Salvador's politics of displacement and its production of new urban frontiers.