Ciudad juárez and the broken promise of housing: Teresa Margolles' La promesa and the production of the inhuman

This contention reads Teresa Margolles' La promesa as a material geography of working-class exposure in Ciudad Juárez. The work begins with an abandoned Infonavit house, purchased by the artist, dismantled, crushed into gravel, transported to Mexico City, and collectively reworked inside the museum. I argue that this movement makes visible a historical process in which housing, labor, and bodily integrity cease to operate as supports for the reproduction of working-class life. Against readings of violence that isolate spectacular death from the infrastructures that precede it, the essay proposes the inhuman as a politically produced condition: a threshold at which rights remain formally legible while the material supports that make them enforceable are withdrawn. Situating La promesa within the history of land dispossession, maquila-led urbanization, neoliberal housing policy, and the violence of the tiempo malo in Ciudad Juárez, the essay shows how the ruined house condenses a broader geography of de-reproduction under neoliberal and hyper-imperial conditions. The collective labor that activates the work does not restore the lost home, but it interrupts the house's reduction to debris, allowing its material to appear again as common ground and as a practical figure for rebuilding the relation between work, shelter, and future.