This work analyses how women connected their political claims for housing with ‘the family’ as a political category in the configuration of urban spaces in Sinaloa, Mexico, during the mid-1970s and 1980s. Women challenged and reinforced the cultural and political significance of their subordination, while trying to fulfil their urgent housing needs, obtain a piece of land for their children and legalise their ownership of land. This co-generative relationship between women’s political participation and the family as a political category shows that the family was a crucial aspect of varying intensity and significance in the development of settlements. Women’s political involvement took place throughout their entire struggle to access housing: seizing land, organising new settlements and obtaining legal possession of their plots. Hence, women’s individual and collective experiences reveal a dynamic process of them becoming political subjects based on their claim for a piece of land for their families.