Customs, Pacts, and “Privileges”

Based on field research in a Buenos Aires public housing neighborhood, this paper explores the work of internal legitimacy of occupants without housing permits to gain a more secure legal status. Focusing on the relations between the families and the Housing Institute reveals the construction of a consensual and negotiated order, which tends to bring housing rentals in compliance with the law. This is the reason the implementation of rules is not just the result of a ruling coming from the upper spheres of the administration or the product of unilateral strategies of subordinate agents. It is also the action of the inhabitants who use legal texts and the “passages” they contain (Lascoumes and Le Bourhis, 1996). The neighborhood appears to the observer as the site of an assemblage of legality centered on practices of occupation in search of social legitimacy.