When property becomes rent

Abstract For millions of working‐class Mexicans, property has turned into rent. This transformation has fundamentally dislocated social reproduction in Mexico by eroding households’ ability to envision themselves as holders of patrimony and as lasting social formations. To understand how and to what effect property turned into rent, we must look to the Partnership for Prosperity—a NAFTA‐inspired, high‐neoliberal program of financialization and expanded mortgage‐based homeownership. Its implementation trafficked in and emptied people's aspirations, hopes, and resources with its promises of a middle‐class future. Having evaded eviction during the 2007–9 financial crisis, households on North America's financial frontier must now contend with a ruptured property form, one that has enmeshed them in relations of extraction and extortion. In homeowners’ emic notion of their property as a “drug,” there emerges an opportunity to denaturalize mortgage‐based homeownership and resume the urgent work of theorizing how property is being remade in the wake of high neoliberalism.