Book review

Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People: Life and Struggle with Mortgage Debt in Spain

Maka Suarez

Published in Issue 4.2 // Updates

Keywords: Housing financialization, mortgage debt, PAH, ethnography, Spain

Abstract:

García-Lamarca offers us an ethnography of the disciplining power of mortgage debt in Spain and the political response of La PAH— a grassroot movement for the right to housing— to discriminatory banking practices in terms of race, gender and class and linked to Spain’s history of private home ownership. The book takes us from bank branches to PAH assemblies to the everyday life of indebted activists/compañerxs to show how the financialization of housing works on the ground and how people organize and fight back against financial injustice.

https://doi.org/10.54825/AJYL5516

Maka Suarez is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo working in the fields of economic, political and medical anthropology. She cofounded the Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography – Kaleidos at the University of Cuenca, Ecuador, and she is an activist with La PAH

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Topics: debtethnographyfinancializationSpain