DuBois's ethnography centres on José Ingenieros, a Buenos Aires neighbourhood founded in a massive squatter invasion in the early 1970s, and describes how the military government's actions largely subdued a politically engaged community. DuBois traces how state repression and community militancy are remembered in Joé Ingenieros and how the tangled and ambiguous legacies of the past continued to shape ordinary people's lives years after the collapse of the military regime.

This rich and evocative study breaks new ground in its exploration of the complex relationships between identity, memory, class formation, neoliberalism, and state violence.