A conflictual marriage: credit and changing livelihood practices in Spain

Urban Spain is a paradigmatic example of the way in which the working classes are systematically being drawn into the financial system in order to secure access to basic resources such as housing. Between 2003 and 2007, roughly one million migrants from the Global South living in Spain were granted mortgages to buy homes. The current moral fable portrays these new working classes as having lived “beyond their means”, lavishly bathing in the financial mania, when they should have been more austere. However, what is obscured from all macroeconomic accounts is the world of informal room renting and poverty that lay at the core of the housing boom, sustained by overlapping forms of debt: between financial institutions, kin and neighbors.

Based on long-term ethnographic work in a Spanish housing project that recently became infamous for its high number of foreclosures and evictions, this paper will expose the connections between credit and the changing practices of the working poor in the living space. What emerges is that finance capital is often embedded in and dependent on people’s livelihood strategies and forms of organization in the territory. Paradoxically, while financial expropriation depends on the relations of trust and moral debt that emerge in the living space, it simultaneously commodifies them, generating sources of tension. The paper will also explore the effect that debt and the constant reconfiguration of the household have on the kind of future migrants imagine for themselves.