"It's all paperwork and a waste of your time." Migrant mothers in Barcelona confronting the chronopolitics of housing provision

Abstract

Irregular migrant mothers in Barcelona face residential exclusion resulting from intersecting multiple forms of discrimination. Given the impossibility of accessing the formal rental market, they resort to precarious housing solutions such as subletting or squatting, as well as to the city's social services. Here, their status as single mothers in an irregular situation places them in an ambiguous position vis-à-vis the institution and its workers. In their interaction with social services, these mothers must navigate an institutional paradox that requires them to simultaneously demonstrate vulnerability to access resources, and agency to be considered ‘good mothers’ who deserve help. Interaction with the institution's welfare interface is governed by a chronopolitics that establishes forms of control over these mothers' time and rhythms, where a particular type of waiting, active waiting, far from being a mere bureaucratic issue, becomes a central criterion of deservingness in the mechanisms for distributing scarce aid. Faced with this chronopolitics, mothers develop daily resistance tactics that we can conceive of as forms of infrapolitics and that express agency within a system that manages poverty rather than guaranteeing rights.