When Property Becomes Rent: Social Reproduction on Mexico's Financial Frontier

In Mexico, property has become rent for millions of poor, urban households who were made into mortgage-based homeowners at the height of neoliberalism and are now suspended on the edge of time. The project to turn low-income Mexicans into homeowners through the proliferation of mortgage-driven property was part of a bilateral, public-private alliance between the United States and Mexico aiming to curb migration by expanding North American prosperity in a new era of neoliberal democracy. As Mexico’s new homeowners became overwhelmingly indebted and the 2008 financial crisis unraveled, however, the financial frontier that neoliberal statecraft and global finance created would defy liberal expectations. Far from worlds of eviction, this is a frontier of permanent rent-extraction and extortion; the seed and vanguard of an emergent rentierism rooted in shifting property form that is transforming Mexican practices of social reproduction in the image of debts that are “like drugs.”