Homeloss: Narratives of Eviction in Contemporary Spain

This article considers how the prospect of losing one’s home to eviction is portrayed in three contemporary Spanish literary texts: Cristina Fallarás’s A la puta calle. Crónica de un desahucio (2013), Doménico Chiappe’s Tiempo de encierro (2013), and Isaac Rosa and Cristina Bueno’s Aquí vivió. Historia de un desahucio (2016). All three texts feature middle-class households at risk of homelessness due to the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, thus testifying to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Spaniards in the wake of the global recession. Yet as this article argues, these narratives transcend the purely testimonial, as they problematize the very act of storytelling and thus draw our attention to the ways in which narrative – in its broadest sense – can be used to construct, justify or contest the socio-historical context we inhabit.