Staging Dispossession: Struggles for Eviction and inclusion among Brazil’s roofless population.

The chapter examines the politics of dispossession in Salvador, Brazil, a city with a longstanding failure to address the massive housing deficit for its low-income population. It investigates how forming an illegal squatter settlement emerged as an opportunity to seize a rare opportunity for achieving homeownership. By fighting for eviction, the squatters struggled to be included in an urban upgrading project that upon eviction would offer compensation through resettlement to social housing. The chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Salvador between 2013-2019 among residents in the squatter settlement, public officials and social movements, tracing the dispute. After years of negotiations, the squatters were evicted and eventually they were offered resettlement. The squatter’s successful strategy of ‘possession through dispossession’ cannot, however, singularly be attributed their ‘subaltern politics’, challenging the state's politics from the margins. It was also the result of the very bureaucratic procedures of waitlisting, which they had tried to circumvent through squatting. The squatters were designated to housing projects in remote and recently established urban zones on the hinterlands of the city that lacked adequate services, infrastructure and work opportunities. Years of struggle for eviction was replaced by new daily challenges of building a life and urban space on the city’s new frontier.