From foreigners to urban citizens: autoconstruction and migration in the Santiago Metropolitan Area

In several metropolises of the so-called Global South, the claim for the right to live in the city has resulted in widespread processes of "autoconstruction", a concept that alludes to a mode of producing the urban peripheries in which poor residents are the main agents of urbanization. Autoconstruction has made possible the emergence of new forms of citizenship in which the urban poor have generated novel spaces for civic participation through which they have turned into legitimate rights-bearers. What happens, however, when the agents of autoconstruction are immigrants demanding not only the right to housing, but also their recognition as subjects of rights in a nation-state that does not consider them citizens? This article discusses that question by ethnographically examining the case of Nueva Esperanza squatter settlement, an autoconstructed neighborhood in Colina, Santiago in which most of its residents are foreigners. We conclude that, to constitute themselves as citizens, immigrants formulate an "urban" type of citizenship in which the act of residing in the city turn them into rights-bearers. In such a process, these residents build ethical and political narratives through which they make sense of their desires for incorporation and belonging to the national political community.