Talk:
\n\u201cAfter Inclusion: Property and Social Relations on Mexico\u2019s Financial Frontier\u201d<\/p>\n
by
\nIn\u00e9s Escobar Gonz\u00e1lez
\nJunior Fellow
\nHarvard Society of Fellows
\nines_escobargonzalez@fas.harvard.edu<\/p>\n
Date and Zoom Info:
\nTime: May 22, 2025, 05:00 PM Istanbul<\/p>\n
This is an online meeting. To request event details please send a message to department.<\/p>\n
Abstract:
\nIn 2001, low-income Mexicans were granted access to mortgage finance for the first time in Mexican history. Part of a wider effort to consolidate the democratic transition and North American integration, Mexico\u2019s reform was one of the world\u2019s largest experiments with financial inclusion. The resulting flood of housing credit relocated a fifth of the country\u2019s population and spurred financial markets. In this talk, I discuss how urban poor Mexicans\u2019 lives changed when they were turned into formal homeowners and pulled into global financial flows by way of mortgage loans. As beneficiaries became mired in debt and failed to keep up with their mortgages, longstanding social institutions built on reciprocity and trust eroded, and property was ruptured and remade. The property regime that emerged at the conjunction of poverty, financialization, and rentier capitalism is best described in the imperfect tense, in which homeownership is continuously practiced, performed, conjured, and, yet, always unfinished \u2013 or never completed. The financial inclusion of Mexico\u2019s urban poor, in other words, led to the suspension of property as a process of asset-construction to the benefit of rent extraction and rent seekers. Ultimately, Mexico\u2019s new homeowners illuminate the ongoing, structural transformations of poverty and property in a global political economy driven by financial rentierism.<\/p>\n
Short Bio:
\nIn\u00e9s Escobar Gonz\u00e1lez is an economic anthropologist studying the origins and effects of financialization in our daily lives, social relations, and political practices. Her current research focuses on the history and transformation of low-income households and communities in Mexico as they have been incorporated into flows of global finance by way of policy reform, or how financial neoliberalism remade poverty on the global periphery. Her research has been funded by the United States\u2019 National Science Foundation (NSF) and Mexico\u2019s National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT), amongst others.
\nIn\u00e9s is currently a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. At Harvard, she has been writing an ethnography on poverty, political economy, and global finance in Mexico. It\u2019s titled After Inclusion: Poverty, Property, and Politics on Mexico\u2019s Financial Frontier (under contract with University of California Press). She studied her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago (2020), where her dissertation won the award for the Best Dissertation in Anthropology (Lichtstern Distinguished Dissertation Prize; 2021). Before Chicago, she studied an M.Res. in Anthropology at University College London and a B.A. in Social Anthropology at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Talk: \u201cAfter Inclusion: Property and Social Relations on Mexico\u2019s Financial Frontier\u201d by In\u00e9s Escobar Gonz\u00e1lez Junior Fellow Harvard Society of Fellows ines_escobargonzalez@fas.harvard.edu Date and Zoom Info: Time: May 22, 2025, 05:00 PM Istanbul This is an online meeting. To request event details please send a message to department. Abstract: In [\u2026] <\/p>\n