Abstract

This chapter explores how migrant women in Northern Chile experience and respond to displacement by self-managing informal spaces, raising questions about housing as a human right in the context of urban inequality. Through focusing on the spatial figures of tugurios and campamentos, Contreras’s narrative reveals a complex tapestry of urban inequality where women become displaceable subjects through various structural forces, including market pressures, state negligence, conflict, and profit-seeking by small landowners. While the quest for shelter and security entails multiple movements and a state of hypermobility, for these women, displacement also becomes a project – an insurgent practice of making home in the face of adversity. As one woman argues in the chapter, ‘[We, the displaced and evicted] are in the process of building your city’.