Property relations in 1980s Montreal were a venue of struggle and change. In this period, a well-organized tenants’ movement and the election of progressive governments spawned a series of legal and policy changes that strengthened tenants’ rights in the city. During the same period, however, an emerging police, government and media discourse cast Black communities as criminal ‘ghettos’, and a variety of mechanisms, including new policies meant to protect tenants’ rights, were used to evict criminalized Black tenants. Guided by recent work on property and Black geographies, respectively, this article examines how racial subjects are constituted in struggles over tenants’ rights. The racial limits of tenants’ rights in Montreal, it argues, are traceable to the socio-spatial relations of slavery and the intensifying criminalization of Black life in the 1980s, each of which nullified Black spatial belonging in the city. The tenant, the article concludes, is never just a tenant, but also a racial subject – a subject formed at the edges of blackness. In a terrain forged by slavery and its afterlives, the possibility of expansive tenants’ rights presupposes a right systemically denied in advance for Black people in the Americas: the right to exist here in the first place.

1980 年代蒙特利尔的财产关系是斗争和变革的场所。在此期间，组织良好的租户运动和进步政府的选举催生了一系列加强城市租户权利的法律和政策变化。然而，在同一时期，新兴的警察、政府和媒体将黑人社区描述为犯罪的“贫民区”，并且各种机制，包括旨在保护租户权利的新政策，被用来驱逐被定罪的黑人租户。本文分别以最近关于财产和黑人地理的工作为指导，考察了种族主体是如何在租户权利的斗争中构成的。它认为，蒙特利尔租户权利的种族限制，可以追溯到奴隶制的社会空间关系和 1980 年代对黑人生活的日益严重的刑事定罪，每一次都使黑人在城市中的空间归属无效。文章总结说，房客不仅是房客，而且还是一个种族主体——一个在黑暗边缘形成的主体。在奴隶制及其来世造就的土地上，广泛的佃户权利的可能性以美洲黑人提前被系统性剥夺的权利为先决条件：首先是在这里生存的权利。