By Night, a Street Rite

Abstract

The concept of desalambrar put forward by this volume helps us, first, to think about the ways in which fields of proprietorial power are constituted—that is, how fences are built, patrolled, and maintained in relation to challenges from those defined as outside; and second, to consider how those defined as outside permeate the perimeters in actions ranging from going over or under the fences to acts of appropriation such as squatting and poaching to the out-and-out over-running and dismantling of those fences. In framing how terrains of privilege and power are demarcated and challenged, I am particularly interested in the fact that subordinate people inhabit spaces defined in part by their own domination in often ambiguous and contradictory ways.