On How to Live Well: Houses as Theatres of the Good Life in Mexico City

Abstract:In this article, the author explores the contours of housing as performance by examining a sampling of cases drawn from mid-twentieth-century Mexico City. In her analysis of the erection of modernist middle-class housing projects, suburbs, and architectural sculptures against the informal housing system that expanded throughout the national capital from the 1950s through the 1980s, the author reads housing as shifting performances of race, nation, citizenship, capitalist development, and class aspiration. Together, these readings reveal how houses are more than shelters; they are also theatrical practices that offer competing visions of ‘the good life.’