Women's Right to the City: The Family as a Dispositive in Urban Settlements in Mexico

This work analyses how women connected their political claims for housing with the family as a political category in the configuration of urban spaces in Sinaloa, Mexico, during the mid—1970s and 1980s. Women challenged and reinforced the cultural and political significance of their subordination, while trying to fulfil their urgent housing needs, obtain a piece of land for their children and legalise their ownership of land. This co—generative relationship between womens political participation and the family as a political category shows that the family was a crucial aspect of varying intensity and significance in the development of settlements. Womens political involvement took place throughout their entire struggle to access housing: seizing land, organising new settlements and obtaining legal possession of their plots. Hence, womens individual and collective experiences reveal a dynamic process of them becoming political subjects based on their claim for a piece of land for their families.