Where crises converge: the affective register of displacement in Mexico City’s post-earthquake gentrification

Abstract

Affect theory suggests that imagining different futures for cities begins by feeling the present differently. This article considers the political potential of the affective register in the context of gentrifying Mexico City, where the 2017 earthquake, as a crisis-event, burst onto the ongoing crisis-ordinary of gentrification-based displacement. I argue that this convergence of crises opened an affective impasse, or a time and space lived in excess of predictability. This affective impasse both interrupted business-as-usual gentrification and channeled historical affects across 32 years from the 1985 earthquake, and in turn generated new political energies. Informed by affect theory and trauma studies, I use qualitative data to invite the reader into the impasse and observe its affective dynamics. The empirical sections describe the entry points to the impasse, the affective activities that subjects engage in there, and the role of historical trauma in reshaping the atmospheres that emerge from this space. The resulting research investigates how affective ways of navigating an impasse offer the potential to reshape ongoing struggles against displacement. This builds on recent work in urban geography that uses psychoanalysis and affect theory to understand gentrification’s complexities, contradictions, and ambivalences.

Displacement beyond dislocation: Aversive racism in gentrification studies

“…Davidson (2009), Davidson and Lees (2005), and Marcuse (1985) were particularly influential in loosening the grip of Cartesian understandings of space on critical gentrification studies, and their work has ushered in a wide range of research that takes seriously the experiential, emotional, and otherwise more-than-material dimensions of displacement. For example, geographers have shown via case studies of gentrification in places like the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint (Stabrowski, 2014) and Bushwick (Valli, 2015), the London borough of Hackney (Butcher and Dickens, 2016), Mexico City (Linz, 2021), and elsewhere, that in addition to processes of spatial dislocation for ethnic minorities, the elderly, and working-class residents, gentrification occurs in psychic (Fullilove, 1996; Ji, 2021; Meyer, 2021; Seitz, 2022; Westin, 2021) and affective registers (Addie and Fraser, 2019; Frank, 2021; Jones and Evans, 2012; Linz, 2017; Pain, 2019; Wilhelm-Solomon, 2021) through the everyday loss of “agency, freedom, and security to ‘make place’” (Stabrowski, 2014: 795). Throughout this work we find recognition that in many instances of gentrification, “it is the relationship to a place that is displaced, rather than an individual being physically removed” (Wynne and Rogers, 2021: 397).…”

Forms and scenes of attachment: A cultural geography of promises

“…Both Cockayne and Bissell engage with Berlant (2011a) to stay with how attachments endure or are lost across situations where, in some way, the attachment is placed in question. Also learning from Berlant's orientation to the non-linear dynamics of attachment, Linz's (2021) work on displacement in Mexico City carefully follows how past attachments affect the present, present attachments are ruptured, and some attachments endure.…”

Allure in the uninhabitable: on affect, space, and Blackness in gentrifying Philadelphia

“…22 Existing works have found that gentrification provokes feelings of loss, turmoil, and displacement for original residents. 23 On the other hand, incoming gentry are often found to express a dialectical fear and fascination for gentrifying neighborhoods and their original inhabitants. 24 The histories, look, sounds, and smells of a space that prompt these varied emotional responses are laden with racialized meaning.…”