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

Abstract

In this paper, I propose the “eviction room” as an analytical frame for the linked struggles of citizens and noncitizens living at the urban margins. The metaphor of the eviction room was coined by Carolina Maria de Jesus, a late Black Brazilian writer and favela dweller. De Jesus sees the city as a house: the city center is its luxurious living room; the favela, its eviction room, a precarious space to which the racialized urban poor are pushed like disposable objects. Expanding on this metaphor, we can think of those segregated and stigmatized in a city’s eviction rooms as not only physically but also politically cast out. Regardless of their legal citizenship status, eviction room dwellers are constructed as the immanent others of the “good citizens” inhabiting the city’s living rooms. Segregated in space, their presence is transient in time given their “evictability.” While the frame of the eviction room can help us make sense of the urban marginalization of both citizens and noncitizens, it assumes neither their social homogeneity nor a united “politics of the evicted.” I expand on possible strategies within such politics, as well as on the spatial and temporal dimensions of the city as a house with an ever-shifting plan. The eviction room advances a research agenda centered on migration, residential segregation, and the politics of citizenship relevant to urban contexts across the global south and north.