Paulo Andre Suarez Rojas

PAULO SUAREZ ROJAS, then a graduate student at City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in April 2023 to aid research on “Urban Financialization and Its Others: Housing Dispossession and Tenant Politics in Los Angeles,” supervised by Dr. Miriam Ticktin. This study interrogates contemporary assumptions that housing markets become financialized. Instead, this dissertation explores how financial devices, practices, and discourses enter a terrain of consolidated and unfolding housing struggles in Los Angeles. It answers a set of interrelated questions: What modes of political participation emerge from contested investments (financial, libidinal, moral, etc.) in rental housing? How do processes of rental housing financialization transform the social relations of tenants, and how do these relations ground and challenge finance capital? Finally, how are practices of housing financialization situated within and productive of a racial capitalist mode of urban governance? While this study’s archival research traces the histories of rental housing dispossession in the city to examine the continuities of political subjectivation, its ethnographic component focuses on the organizing efforts of the Los Angeles Tenants Union and the organizational ecology of housing politics this movement inhabits. The project proposes a critical approach to the study of political subject formation, attentive to critiques of political economy and theories of subjectivity, through an analysis of various efforts to politicize tenancy in L.A..