Sara Isabel Castro Font

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: The Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant provided the financial opportunity to conduct in-person ethnographic fieldwork in Puerto Rico for over 9 months. This phase of the project is an ethnography in Santurce, Puerto Rico that analyzes the aesthetic practices that organized communities employ as strategies to defend their right to stay in their neighborhoods. The research draws from participant observation in organized community meetings, community cultural centers, anti-displacement conferences and events, and from recorded interactions and interviews with community members and anti-displacement activists. Using linguistic and semiotic anthropological frameworks, the author discusses the financialization of housing in Puerto Rico and analyzes how these conditions have generated discourses that claim permanencia, or the right to stay, as well as alternative narratives that challenge the absolute right to private property, carrying with them strong implications about people’s relationship to land that iconizes collective land tenure with permanence.