Dr. Amy Starecheski, Squatters Make History: Property, Peoplehood, and Claims on the City

Dr. Amy Starecheski
Oral History Program Columbia University
November 28, 2018 4:00-5:30 PM Schmitt Hall, Rm. 104
Sponsored by the MSU Department of Anthropology

As illegal squatters became co- operative homeowners on New York City’s Lower East Side, they were also making history: creating museums, walking tours, archives, storytelling performances, and oral histories.

Why? Producing history can be a powerful way of making claims on the city, and making sense of one’s place in the world. In a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, squatters used their past to try to produce a future of which they could imagine themselves a part.

Based on oral history, archival research, interviews, and seven years of ethnographic fieldwork, this talk explains how urban citizens have produced decommodified housing, and histories. In a moment of crisis in which who cities are for and how cities work are crucial questions of public debate, the story of how squatters became homeowners in New York shows both the possibilities and difficulties of producing spaces and stories that challenge the hyper-commodification of urban space.