As a political scientist, I tend to think about politics in terms of ideas, institutions, and identities. I see Chilean history as a series of grand struggles for big ideas like social equality, freedom, rights, stability, and political power. I also think about Chile in terms of the trajectory of its political regimes: the Popular Front, the Revolution in Liberty, the Popular Unity, the military dictatorship, the Concertación. And finally, I think in terms of the collective actors who have been the forces for and against change: political parties, unions, women's groups, indigenous organizations, students, the armed forces, and human rights activists. I think about individuals too, but generally (and with apologies to my historian friends) in terms of their roles in broader political and social conflict.

This book reoriented how I think about Chilean history in a fundamental way. At the center of Murphy's account is a desire that most people share, one that perhaps lies at the core of all grand political struggles: the desire for a safe, secure, and proper home. Wanting a home is intensely personal but, of course, also political. The demand for a proper home, as Murphy shows, is central to struggles for citizenship among low-income people. Moreover, “the question of what a proper home life is has been important in state institutions and international development organizations. It has animated the formation of social movements and claims involving the rights of citizenship” (p. 5). The book tells the history of the efforts of low-income people in Santiago to gain housing, from the perspective of what those struggles mean to individual people. The motivation behind the book is to understand “the manner in which low-income residents in Santiago have come to live in legally sanctioned homes and the consequences that this change has had” (p. 27).

One of Murphy's key claims is that the struggle for housing has been closely connected to notions of propriety. Such notions have been central to these struggles—among both politicians who decide housing policy and dispense (or take away) property and the pobladores themselves, who demand not just any home but a decent one that affirms their dignity. Many scholars have written about the land seizures that took place in the decade leading up to Chile's 1973 coup, but Murphy is the first to discuss the ways in which participants in those actions sought to conform to notions of proper behavior in order to demonstrate they were worthy of urban services. “By demonstrating that they were responsible and disciplined, pobladores showed that they deserved, as citizens, to be homeowners who would have access to basic city services” (p. 97). In concrete terms, this meant people had to keep their houses clean, send their children to school, go to work if they had jobs, avoid alcohol, and avoid fights. The propriety imperative constituted a source of continuity with the past that challenged revolutionary claims to new ways of doing politics and establishing legitimate political claims.

Murphy hopes that this book will incite anger and prompt people to take action, but it is not clear what kind of action he would like us to take. The implications would have been clearer if the book identified what has distinguished Chile from other countries in regard to the establishment of proper homes, something Murphy hints at but does not develop explicitly. Have Chilean pobladores been more successful in establishing a right to housing and getting proper homes than lower-income people elsewhere? What lessons from Chile could help us think about how to address housing beyond its borders?

Murphy's book adds layers of nuance and insight to existing scholarship on Chile. It will also appeal to those unfamiliar with Chilean history because it is so beautifully written. It weaves personal stories about the lives of individual pobladores into cogent overviews of the broader context. It describes in rich detail the ways that the broad philosophical and political forces I list above shape, and are shaped by, the wishes and efforts of ordinary people to live with dignity.