Book review: Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People: Life and Struggle with Mortgage Debt in Spain

Abstract

García-Lamarca offers us an ethnography of the disciplining power of mortgage debt in Spain and the political response of La PAH— a grassroot movement for the right to housing— to discriminatory banking practices in terms of race, gender and class and linked to Spain’s history of private home ownership. The book takes us from bank branches to PAH assemblies to the everyday life of indebted activists/compañerxs to show how the financialization of housing works on the ground and how people organize and fight back against financial injustice.