“Look at My House!” – Home-Making and Identity in an Urban Mobile Home Park

This paper focuses on meanings and practices of home among residents of a predominantly Latino mobile home park in Florida. It is based on an analysis of 30 qualitative interviews conducted with sixteen Latino/a, twelve White, and two African American community residents, follow up walks with fifteen interview participants, and ethnographic fieldnotes written by a Latino student researcher and community resident during 2008-2009. This research was part of a larger study investigating the communities and disaster vulnerabilities of working class families who lived in mobile home communities in Florida, during the unfolding of the last U.S. economic crisis.  

The paper specifically discusses the meanings and emotions of home for the Latino/as, who were predominantly immigrants, and emphasizes differences with how white residents thought and felt about their places. Latino/as generally displayed great pride in their neatly decorated and customized mobile homes.  They emphasized the (precarious) achievement of homeownership, the neighborly community, and the park’s safety and tranquility (especially when compared with surrounding areas) in their descriptions, which functioned as markers of decency, upward mobility, and personal identity. Whites, on the other hand, had less positive feelings regarding their homes and community overall, and at times struggled with negative public perceptions of “trailer” residents, as well as a sense of economic decline or failure.

In sum, the paper shows how residents of the same neighborhood in similar housing can, figuratively, live in very different places, based on culturally framed social locations and contextualized within the larger stories immigrants and natives tell about our lives.