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In the following pages, I examine the literary representation of tenement housing and of the consumption of chicha in José Antonio Osorio's novella Casa de Vecindad (1930), emphasizing how these spaces and practices function as mechanisms of urban resistance.1 In this analysis, I bring to the fore that the urban poor constantly challenged the ordering of urban space by forging their own performativity through these practices. Even if official discourse disavowed and banned tenements and chicha consumption, both these spaces and practices continued to exist in the daily life of the Colombian capital. Literary representations of early twentieth-century Bogotá illustrate how, by claiming space for their own cultural customs, the subaltern class opposed urban segregation. One of the first novels of the big Colombian city, Jose Antonio Osorio's La casa de vecindad, tells the story of a nameless, unemployed typographer forced to live in a cheap tenement, and it exposes the ways in which regional identities challenged the city's modernization.
