Abstract
Manufactured homes occupy a unique space in the American sociopolitical landscape. Colloquially referred to as “mobile homes” or “trailers,” manufactured housing’s ambiguous social, legal, and financial categorization produces continuous displacement pressure for millions of mobile‐homeowners living in for‐profit mobile home communities (MHCs). This article examines the consequences of mobile‐homeowner disparagement as “trailer trash” through the case study of Isabel, a mobile‐homeowner whose twofold eviction—of both owner and home—was justified based on her possession of socially undesirable (mobile) housing. Drawing on fieldwork in urban MHCs from 2011 to 2016, this article reconstructs Isabel’s story via the materiality of eviction and demonstrates a methodology for urban ethnographers who encounter displacement after the fact. Whereas corporate and municipal narratives attempt to delegitimize mobile home residents as “not quite” homeowners, reintroducing Isabel as an absent subject illustrates how potent sociocultural disdain produces, and even anticipates, the material ruination of “trailer trash.” [Housing; United States; Absence; Materiality; Ruination; Mobile Homes]