Gimme Shelter: the home during the COVID19 lockdown in Mexico City

Abstract

The objective of this study is to explore the utilization of autoethnographies as a pedagogical instrument, especially in times of heightened stress. Additionally, it seeks to elucidate on the challenges faced by individuals in managing their living spaces and adapting to their altered functionalities during the COVID-19 lockdown. By documenting intimate spaces, this research endeavors to offer insights into home life, a domain often shielded from external observation and challenging to comprehend. The city is usually narrated from its streets, parks, shops, gated communities, historical downtowns or transport, (Borsdorf e Dattwyler, 2004; Giglia, 2008; Khaleghimoghaddam, 2023; Yang e Li, 2024; Zukin, 2010) but rarely from the experience lived in the intimacy of the house (Cruces, 2022; Douglas, 1991; Löfgren, 2014). This paper is based on the photographic and textual documentation gathered by sixty-seven students from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana campus Cuajimalpa (UAM-C) in Mexico City. The UAM-C is a public institution catering to medium or low-income residents mainly living on the outskirts of the city. The students recorded their living spaces and the transformation happening to their domestic lives between February 2020 and May 2022, in the first phase of the COVID19 pandemic. During that period, the city was lived mainly from within: interior spaces and their uses changed and acquired new, unexpected meanings. Dining rooms became offices; kitchens, potted gardens; entrances, sanitizing stations; and bedrooms, classrooms, or gyms. The research takes advantage of a selection of representative stories and testimonies to create a series of vignettes that illustrate how students and their families adapted spaces and their ways of life during confinement.