UCLA

How do you house the rural poor at a national scale? This question drove one of the most audacious social policies in late-twentieth century Latin America. More Than a Home: Dwelling, Place, and Poverty in Rural Uruguay is a historical, ethnographic, and policy-oriented account of the origins, evolution, and impact of Uruguay’s Movement for the Eradication of Unhealthy Rural Housing (MEVIR). Guided by the slogan, “To see it rain from inside without getting wet”, MEVIR was founded in 1967 to provide dignified living for rural laborers residing in precarious mud and straw dwellings. A parastatal institution premised on mutual aid construction, MEVIR has since built over 33,000 homes and exists in nearly every small town across Uruguay. A sui generis effort to bring housing policy, urban planning, formal homeownership, and a sense of community to remote areas, MEVIR keeps the rural working poor rooted in places they call home and away from informal settlements on the periphery of cities. In the predominantly urban field of social housing, MEVIR is a rare case of best practices in a rural setting. More Than a Home draws on twenty-two months of fieldwork in Uruguay, including analysis of archival documents on MEVIR’s founding, observation of the MEVIR office and MEVIR field sites, and interviews of over forty actors involved in MEVIR throughout its history. Three factors explain MEVIR’s sustained effectiveness: a clear objective to serve a specific geographical context, a methodology of policy implementation as a process of social growth, and a sensitivity to the scales and places where it operates. As my travels to all nineteen departments (first-level administrative divisions) of Uruguay with MEVIR technicians illustrate, MEVIR vindicates the power of geographic knowledge.