“All we need is a home” Eviction, vulnerability, and the struggle for a home by migrants from the Horn of Africa in Rome

Abstract

This article retraces the aftermath of the eviction of a squatted building that took place in Rome (2017). It draws on ethnography among Eritrean and Ethiopian migrants, analyzing their search for home, and critically engages with the concept of vulnerability. It explores how the evictees—hundreds of people living in “vulnerable homes”—coped with this event by relying on community ties and the process of home-making enacted in an otherwise empty setting. It also shows how the language of vulnerability was mobilized as a moral and bureaucratic resource both by public authorities, to select those to protect, and by evicted people, to claim their rights. Vulnerability emerges as an intersubjective space of experience that people learn to navigate and in which anguish and creativity overlap.