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In a shantytown in Lima, who counts as a resident depends on who is
counting. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Peruvian "self-help"
housing community, I show how censuses and surveys are woven into residency
determinations and negotiations over property rights. In these contexts,
"residency" is not a self-evident status but rather a complex performance that
involves possessing ... read morethe right kind of need, participating in development
activities, accumulating documents, and being legible to myriad political and
personalistic "state-like" entities. Meanwhile, conflicts over inadequate
residency performances generate violence, insecurity, and confusion about who "the
community" is and who is entitled to represent it. I argue that viewing residency
as a contested performance that mediates and remakes long-standing inequalities
can improve anthropological interpretations of the sprawling and pockmarked cities
of the Global South and the dynamics of urban citizenship that produce
them.read less
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