Abstract: Chile is famous for successfully reducing its poverty rate over the past decades through the clearance or “eradication” of precarious settlements, or “campamentos,” and the massive provision of housing subsidies to resettled families. Campamentos have nevertheless persisted and, recently, the number of people living in campamentos has dramatically increased. The Chilean state has therefore favored “integral” approaches to their eradication, working with families before, during, and after resettlement to address the intersecting and dynamic forms of “vulnerability” (to environmental risk, crime, and gender-based and racial violence, in addition to poverty) that lead people to settle, remain in, and often return to, campamentos. This talk is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and historical research in Antofagasta, a city in northern Chile with the highest proportion of people living in campamentos, the vast majority of them predominantly Black and Indigenous Latin American migrants. I show how, paradoxically, migrant women working with the state’s eradication programs to resettle their neighbors while making their campamentos temporarily less vulnerable become invested in their preservation and development. The “ecologies of care” that migrant women build into the precarious environments of their campamentos give their lives a relative sense of protection and futurity in contexts of entrenched and systemic vulnerability. I argue that, in times of environmental, public health, and political crises in Antofagasta, Chile, and elsewhere, this case suggests a different politics based not on eradicating vulnerable neighborhoods but learning how to live in and transform them.

Bio: Pablo Seward Delaporte received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2023. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown’s Population Studies and Training Center, and in 2024 he will begin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Saint Louis University. A critical medical and psychological anthropologist, Pablo’s research specializes in transnational Black and Indigenous migration in Chile. He examines the relation between migration, urban space, and racialized and gendered forms of vulnerability, belonging, and care.