In recent years, Spain’s housing market has differed in two key ways from those of almost every other country in the industrialized world. First, the country has had a striking paucity of rental housing, but this has been mirrored by an equally striking abundance of mortgage money available for purchasing a home. Indeed, Spanish Banks’ liberal provision of mortgages to working class immigrants as well as to expatriate ‘holiday’ home buyers and investors helped fuel the nation’s economic “boom” in the early 2000’s. Second, the easy availability of mortgages in Spain has belied their extraordinary obdurateness. Where most countries’ banking laws terminate a mortgage when the original borrower dies, sells, or “returns the keys” because of insolvency, Spain’s laws, until recently, have allowed banks to go after now-homeless borrowers or even the relatives of a deceased borrow, to repay the mortgage’s full amount. It should not be surprising, then, that many individuals’ first mortgages have also been their last. Or that the US-led global financial “bust” of 2007 was particularly hard on Spain’s working class immigrants, many of whom came on temporary contracts that could be terminated when money became scarce. This paper asks how West African immigrant families have responded to the pressures created by Spain’s mortgage laws, whether in particular their desperation to either “save the house” or avoid association with indebted relatives may help to explain some of what demographers call “internal migration,” moving elsewhere in Europe to seek work.

(*)El autor o autora no ha asociado ningún archivo a este artículo