Edward Murphy renders a smart and well-written history of the politics of urban housing in Chile, primarily the capital city of Santiago. For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960–2010 focuses on the interaction of social movements for improved housing and government responses to those pressures during and after the Cold War. Yet the arch of Murphy’s argument spans the entire twentieth century. An excellent first chapter tracks urban planning and social management policies from the 1880s through the end of the Second World War. Here, Murphy situates the origins of Chile’s “housing crisis” within longer debates over the “social question(s)” of racial health, labor radicalism, and women’s prominence in industrial labor. The main chapters of the book claim that struggles over urban housing were central to the state-led development programs of Chile’s democratic governments in the 1960s and early1970s as well as to how Chile became a poster child for neoliberal privatization during military dictatorship (1973–1990) and the elected civilian administrations that followed.

Murphy’s most original research stems from his use of oral histories in conjunction with archival records from Chile’s Ministry of Housing and Urbanization (MINVU), particularly letters and petitions to the government from individual citizens. Other scholars of Latin America have combined ethnography and archival research, but Murphy takes this in new directions. Most admirably, he underscores poor people’s deep investments in privacy, property ownership, and consumption—subjects that usually get short shrift from historians of Latin American working-class life. He argues that the desire for a “proper home” resonated deeply with poor people, who had their own ideas about what such a home should entail. Housing policy was never simply about social control or management from above.

Murphy’s arguments about social movements are innovative and add new dimensions to discussions about Latin American citizenship. The book demonstrates that poor people’s organized efforts to demand better housing—including illegal squatter actions and mass protest—helped transform housing into a “right” and often forced governments to act on the poor’s behalf. Murphy shows this to be the case not only during times of radical democracy, such as Eduardo Frei’s “Revolution in Liberty” (1964–1970) and Salvador Allende’s “Chilean Road to Socialism” (1970–1973), but also during Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship (1974–1990). Indeed, Murphy contends that poor people’s mobilization for housing was not entirely repressed under military rule; instead, government-sponsored housing projects continued under the new regime. However, as he deftly emphasizes, the notion that housing was a “right” of citizenship had very different meanings and ramifications in these different political contexts. In the 1960s, housing movements were central to state-building projects aimed at the redistribution of wealth and mobilization of poor people as political actors. By contrast, in the 1980s, housing policy became the basis for tying citizenship to private property and individual transactions in the market.

Murphy’s book beautifully cuts across the tendency of histories of Chile to separate the radical democratic projects of 1964–1973 from the Pinochet years. Simultaneously, it argues for the strong continuities between the dictatorship’s policy on housing and that of the center-left civilian governments that headed Chile’s return to democracy after 1990. In short, the book bridges three different periods of Chilean history that are often kept quite separate by scholars. The temporal breadth of this study is an impressive achievement.

Murphy also employs a compelling interdisciplinary methodology. His combination of urban studies, cultural anthropology, and sociology models a welcome reinvigoration of social history. He also goes to particular length to emphasize women’s activism and leadership in housing struggles. Occasionally the analysis falls short of the conceptual promise of the book’s introduction. Murphy might have asked why men and women had different responsibilities within government projects and housing movements and why that mattered, or how women’s investment in the privacy of “a proper home” had different political meanings than did men’s. Given the book’s engagement with the concept of spatiality, it is odd that the author uses no maps and only occasionally discusses his many superb photographs of housing. Nonetheless, For a Proper Home makes a major contribution to understanding the politics of modern Chile and should enjoy a wide readership. Its ambitious scope, interdisciplinarity, and focus on the links between activism and consumption represent a cutting edge for historical studies of Latin America.