Caffeinated aspirations: social mobilities and specialty coffee baristas in Brazil

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the work experiences of specialty coffee baristas in São Paulo, Brazil, considering specifically the role of passion and aspiration. Through ethnographic profiles of four baristas, it reveals how the pursuit of a good life through employment extends beyond immediate economic gain, but that there are complexities in converting forms of capital within the café workplace which are shaped by Brazil’s social context and distinct histories and hierarchies around food service labor. Success and longevity in the position was shaped by baristas’ preexisting capital, and heavily mediated by socioeconomic status; although certain baristas faced more precarious trajectories, they called upon discourses of passion to mitigate challenges inherent in lower-waged food service work. By exploring the experiences and aspirations of baristas in Brazil, this paper sheds light on the complex dynamics of social mobility and labor in emerging connoisseur and artisan markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Specialty coffee
• Brazil
• baristas
• aspiration
• social mobility
• passion

Introduction

As the high-end specialty coffee market has developed across the globe, becoming a barista – an individual who prepares and serves coffee in cafés – has concurrently developed as a form of aspirational labor for some, a job where individuals can marry conditions of labor (working in a coffee shop) with leisure and preexisting hobbies (passion for coffee). While much literature on aspirational labor frames the end goal of such aspiration as economic, through my work with Brazilian baristas in São Paulo I show that aspirational labor exists for some as a means of achieving a “good life,” considering factors such as satisfying social relations, mental and physical relations, work-life balance, and a sense of individual satisfaction and purpose (Fischer 2014). I show that the limited success of converting social and cultural capital into economic capital meant that baristas seek to legitimize their work by aspiring to passion, and that aspiration to economic advancement is not necessarily a motivating factor or particularly desired end outcome.

This paper presents in-depth ethnographic profiles of four baristas who work in São Paulo, and who came to barista work and deployed it in different ways – though all shared a passion for specialty coffee. I pick up from the work of Brickner and Dalton (2019) on gendered experiences of barista labor and the call of Gemma Piercy (2018) to understand the compounding effects of racism and class background in relation to job satisfaction and security in the café workplace, showing through the narratives of Brazilian baristas the ways that intersectional identities influence on the possibilities or limitations of capital conversion. Further, while authors have written on the craft labor of baristas, this has largely been done in Europe and the Anglophone world, and so I pay particular attention to the specificities of the Brazilian context, and the histories and hierarchies of food service labor which frames the recent transition to high-end craft/artisanal foods, thereby giving an insight into craft food industries in the Global South.

I show that complicated and intersecting identities and tensions such as those related to race, class, and gender create a complex and dynamic context in which baristas enact – with varying degrees of success – their desired aspirations for these components of a good life and social, cultural, and economic capital. Though working as a specialty coffee barista is, in theory, open to anyone, success and longevity in the position was shaped by baristas’ preexisting capital, and heavily mediated by socioeconomic status; although certain baristas faced more precarious trajectories, passion was engaged as a means through which to temper the negative elements of lower-waged or unstable service work. Baristas were aware of these inequalities and in legitimizing their work, appealed to the aspiration to non-economic forms of capital and elements of a good life. Through this ethnographic evidence, I thus push forward the concept of aspirational labor to an expanded vision of what might be aspired to, and why.

In her work on Brazilian food cultures, Fajans (2012) notes that there has been a highly gendered, racialized, and classed dimension to the process of making coffee in domestic spaces. In the case of Brazil, in which it has been typical for mothers to prepare coffee for their families, and for domestic workers to prepare it for the families for whom they work, the fact that an increasing number of young people – men and women of different classes and races – see making coffee as a career which they can apply themselves passionately to and which both shapes and helps them strive toward their individual aspirations contains implications that go beyond simple changes in the ways coffee is made; it indicates shifts in social practices, mores, and ordering, and should be read with particular reference to the economic gains and great strides made in combating social inequalities in Brazil in the first decades of the 21st century, which created an expanded consumer class more broadly, the conditions for new, craft consumption subcultures, and the possibilities for new work opportunities and identities. There are still, however, difficult-to-resolve tensions revealed through the ethnographic exploration of barista work, in that while this labor and consumption landscape is shifting, it has not yet occasioned a fundamental reordering of existent inequalities or in terms of whose labor is valued at a wider societal level.

Contexts and methods: specialty coffee, baristas, and aspirational labor in Brazil

To analyze the experiences of Brazilian baristas in relation to their aspirations, passions, and various capitals, I first begin by describing the specialty coffee industry in Brazil and the role of the barista. I then discuss literature on aspirational labor and passionate work, the Brazilian context of the “new middle class” and associated consumer subjectivities, before proceeding to an overview of the research methodologies.

Specialty coffee and capital

What is specialty coffee? How does it differ from what we might think of as “traditional” coffee? Specialty is coffee of the highest quality and without defects – but as Fischer has elaborated (2017; 2022), the designation is both an abstract construction of social value and an indicator of the quality of coffee materials. Specialty coffee is a relational good, insofar as its superiority must be judged in relation to other coffees on the market (Reichman 2018).

A specialty coffee must maintain a minimum grade of 80 under international scoring rubrics at all stages of production until it reaches the barista. As the international trade organization, the Specialty Coffee Association, states, “Specialty can only occur when all of those involved in the coffee value chain work in harmony and maintain a keen focus on standards and excellence from start to finish” (SCA 2021 n.p.). There have, with good reason, been many studies from agronomy to chemistry and the social sciences that examine the quality of coffee on the farm and during transit, but as the entire chain up to the barista is important for this maintenance of quality, there is also an developing literature on the role of the barista. While there have been studies on the work of baristas in coffee-importing countries (Cotter 2021; Knox 2019; Ott 2020; Parrish 2020; Piercy 2018) the motivations and experiences of baristas in producing countries is an emerging area of research; such a perspective is valuable, as these are newer forms of employment made available in a different relational context inasmuch as the coffee value chain is concerned and when compared with coffee-importing countries and which therefore may speak to different potentials and pitfalls. Writing on baristas in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Grant (2020) explores how these young individuals do not frame their choice to become baristas in terms of socioeconomic advancement, but rather “in terms of a desire to find their creative selves” (151). Buchanan’s (2023) study of the specialty coffee cafe communities in Puebla City and Oaxaca City focuses heavily on owners and entrepreneurs over contract baristas, but nevertheless describes both the deepening of sensory knowledge as well as elevated prestige within the service industries as motivators for baristas to work within specialty coffee. Each highlight the non-economic aspects and passion involved with barista work, the shape this takes in these specific local contexts, as well as the sense of “ambassadorship” which baristas in producing nations feel. To these emerging studies of baristas in producing nations, this paper adds not only the specificities of the Brazilian experience, but also draws out the challenges and limitations of acting on one’s passions and fulfilling aspirations through coffee.

As a high-end connoisseur good with a parallel mass-market good, both working with and consuming specialty coffee readily lends itself to a Bourdieusian analysis of distinction and capital, both in terms of inter-subculture hierarchies (Cotter and Valentinsson 2018; Quintão, Brito, and Belk 2017) and, as more readily concerns the analysis of this paper, in relation to positioning within wider society (Bookman 2013; Curran and Chesnut 2022; Grant 2020; Roseberry 1996). As Scott (2017) explores in relation to what he terms “hipster capitalism,” or the conversion of the cultural capital drawn from a particular brand of urbane cool into economic returns as a new mode of petite bourgeoisie framed less explicitly around consumption, these hipster capitalists not only create new types of jobs but also refine and rarefy extant occupations: baristas were, in effect, invented alongside espresso machines in the early 20th century, but barista as elevated gastronome is a much newer phenomenon, and part of a wider trend of more traditionally working-class occupations being converted into higher-status positions more readily interpreted as “skilled” within urban, artisanal communities (Ocejo 2017). Further, symbolic capital, or the intangible social and cultural currency possessed by individuals and groups which influence their status, prestige, and recognition, has profound significance in the realm of artisanal service work, such as that of baristas. Making coffee has evolved and expanded beyond the utilitarian function, and into a platform for individuals to display their expertise, creativity, and skill. As bartenders transform mixology into an art form, so too can baristas craft not only coffee but also an experience, turning a latte into a canvas for self-expression, while showcasing deep sensory knowledge and skill which can earn the respect of both colleagues and customers alike. Prowess in these crafts help to transcend the transactional, market nature of these jobs, and frames the work not only as a service, but as a creative, cultural contribution.

Along these lines, Ott shows how specialty coffee baristas in Portland, Oregon, USA are, because of their status as connoisseurs, able to access “an extra benefit not inherent in all minimum-wage service work” in that “they profit in social and cultural capital that can be converted into further economic capital” (2020, 488) such as when they receive special treatment in the form of complementary food or beverages when visiting other local gastronomic institutions (coffee shops, restaurants, wine bars). Such conversion – although it may seem, on the surface, small – into some additional economic capital is a positive for baristas, because one aspect of barista life that is shared across geographies as distinct as Portland and Brazil is that these jobs are poorly paid: the average salary of a barista in Brazil is estimated at US$350–400 per month (Stein 2016). Piercy terms baristas the “artisan precariat” (2018, 237) while Ott calls them “minimum-wage connoisseurs” (RNSP 2020, 469) because they possess and embody extremely specialized sensory and taste knowledge – in addition to being specialists in customer service – even though in almost all cases this is a job whose level of specialization is not reflected in the immediate economic remuneration. Or rather, involvement in the barista profession comes with the hope of future economic stability (as the industry grows and becomes more popular, and as an individual advances within it), but with the simultaneous knowledge that this is unlikely or distant in the future. To this, my ethnographic work shows that while economic stability may be hoped for, it is not a primary motivating factor.

Aspiration and passion

In looking at aspiration and what and how baristas aspire, I base my definition of aspiration on that by Solava Ibrahim as “hopes or ambitions to achieve something” with the understanding that the “something” what is aspired to is necessarily contingent and culturally situated (2011, 3). This, taken in conjunction with Arjun Appadurai’s theorizing of the more holistic “capacity to aspire” – that is, the ability to develop aspirations and the strategies needed to move toward the realization of such aspirations – reveals the temporal and cultural spread of aspirations inasmuch as they have a future orientation (they are a potentiality to be realized in the future), but they are grounded in their own history and in the past context, which informs what is aspired to.

The strongest link that tied together the specialty coffee community of São Paulo, who were otherwise a diverse group of people, was their passion for specialty coffee. For the baristas involved in this community, their labor was passionate work or that which is often summarized by the maxim “do what you love.” This can be seen as a form of “creationist capitalism,” whereby work and play blend into each other and “labor is understood in terms of creativity, so that production is understood as creation” (Boellstorff 2008, 206). If one can do what one loves, individual fulfillment and self-actualization are foregrounded (Tokumitsu 2015); pleasure becomes the criterion upon which success at work is measured, rather than advancement or economic or social stability, while this approach also complicates solidarity networks by making it harder to trace class-based linkages (Sandoval 2017). Although this phenomenon is often represented positively in popular and media accounts, it does have a “dark side,” in that it can be used to shield exploitative and unequal workplaces and mask the need for structural change, inasmuch as the onus falls on the individual to evince sufficient passion to overcome obstacles (Duffy 2017). In popular and self-help literature, passionate labor has traditionally been associated with positive values of self-fulfillment and actualization (James 2019; Parkin 2016), but it has become a point of engagement for labor scholars to approach these values in the context of a critical reflection on neoliberal ideologies. Building from the idea of barista work as a craft which involves creative elements, I link this passion to the ideas of “aspirational labor,” which has largely been theorized in work on the creative and social media industries. As Duffy writes in her study of women in cultural production, “aspirational laborers pursue creative activities that hold the promise of social and economic capital; yet the reward system for these aspirants is highly uneven” (2016, 443).

In their studies of professional work and passion, social scientists have primarily been concerned with the passionate, aspirational work that takes place in specific creative industries; I argue, however, that it is also useful to examine the geopolitics of these industries’ countries of origin and who is portrayed as partaking in them, to reach an expanded application and utility of the concept of aspirational labor. In an important rejoinder to the geographic focus on the Global North within such studies, Alacovska and Gill critique the fact that “creative labor studies focus almost exclusively on Euro-American metropolitan ‘creative hubs’ and hence the creative worker they theorize is typically white, middle-class, urban and overwhelmingly male” (2019, 195). The authors warn against labor policy solutions that are drawn from drastically different sociopolitical contexts, and their uncritical deployment in emerging economies whose creative industries may be even more precarious than those in the Global North, as well as more serious labor abuses that have the potential to be obscured through the discourse of passionate labor. In this vein, there has been a trickle of recent work that has critically explored passionate and creative labor outside the Global North. Iqani (2019) shows how the labor of South African social media influencers is similar in form to that of influencers in the Global North – and, crucially, is also spoken about in terms of passion and love – but needs to be read with reference to specific local histories and contexts. Local race and economic disparities in South Africa are particularly salient to the context in question because they intersect with and shape the ideas of belonging, citizenship, and aspiration that are enacted by the influencers. In this work, I both apply aspirational labor to the creative craft work of baristas and provide ethnographic context to the racial and economic disparities at play within the Brazilian specialty coffee context, as the country has historically been characterized by extreme inequalities along these lines.

The new middle class and consumer subjectivities in Brazil

In accounting for the emergence the specialty coffee community in São Paulo, it is necessary to contextualize class in Brazil, and particularly the burgeoning middle, upper, and creative classes to which many coffee enthusiasts belong. While this ethnography was conducted in 2017–2018, as Brazil’s GDP began to rise again after several years of recession, the social landscape had been heavily influenced by the preceding decades of economic boom and government policy to reduce social inequalities, particularly during the first two terms of the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party – PT) President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, better known simply as Lula. Over the 11-year period between Lula’s 2003 inauguration and the start of the 2014 economic crisis (beginning during the presidency of his successor, Dilma Rousseff), government policies and a focus on the largest conditional cash transfer program in the world contributed to a reduction in poverty, an increase in educational attainment, and increased employment both overall and in the formal sector (de Andrade Baltar et al. 2010; Manzano, Salas, and Santos 2016; Weisbrot, Johnston, and Lefebvre 2014), and analyses reveal a substantial reduction in overall social inequality within Brazil during this period (Costa 2016; Montero 2014; Neves et al. 2022). These social and economic changes brought more people and families than ever before into the realms of formal employment and market participation.

This population was termed “the new middle class” by Brazilian economist Marcelo Neri (2011), whose work “eventually came to symbolize this widely shared realization that the low-income population could become avid consumers” (Spyer 2017, 6). While this conclusion has been hailed as a sign of Brazilian economic success, social scientists have been more skeptical of such changes, pointing out that greater purchasing power in terms of commercial goods does not necessarily entail a substantive improvement in wellbeing (Anderson 2019; Kopper 2020; Pochmann 2014). Moreover, Neri’s work focuses on income, which is only one aspect of what constitutes “class;” cultural aspects are conspicuously absent from his analysis. Pinhero-Machado and Mury Scalco (2022) offer a further critique on the political impacts of inclusion in transnational market economies and status consumption among poor Brazilians, illuminating how the subtle and ongoing negotiations around class and race manifest in consumption practices, further complicating the linear narratives of economic wellbeing paralleling overall wellbeing; as will be evidenced through my ethnography, these contestations exist in the workplace as well.

Specialty coffee enthusiasts in Brazil tend to have sufficient spare time and income to spend on their passion for coffee (Guimarães et al. 2019; Quintão, Brito, and Belk 2017), yet it should be recognized that many of the individuals with whom I worked had only arrived at such a point of economic stability relatively recently. Those coffee enthusiasts with whom I worked who still pertained to the lower classes were nonetheless mobile and aspirational; they were without exception young café or roastery employees who traversed considerable distances on gridlocked public transit to commute to work, and toward the possibilities they saw it affording them. While many Brazilian coffee enthusiasts are part of the “new middle class,” and I offer ethnographic examples of this experience, this did not categorize all project participants. Moreover, of the “new middle class” participants, very few felt in immediate danger of slipping back into poverty as a result of the recent economic and social instabilities in the country, a phenomenon to which anthropologists Klein, Mitchell, and Junge (2018) have drawn attention to define the precariousness of this social group, whom Hilgers et al. (2022) describe as an “expanded vulnerable class” (550). Many of my participants shared a recent history of economic ascendency, but may be better described as, together with those of more affluent economic background, forming part of an emerging creative class. Florida and Mellander tracee a global shift “from industrial capitalism to a new age of knowledge-based or creative capitalism … creativity [is] an infinitely renewable resource that is continually enlarging” (2015, 313). High-end coffee shops are an amenity whose presence is frequently associated with the emergence of the creative classes and creative cities (Machado, Simões, and Diniz 2013); these shops form part of a constellation of informal working spaces. New forms of labor and a continued blurring of the categories of labor and leisure were widespread among study participants, who – for those not working directly with coffee, or those baristas who also worked side jobs – held jobs from independent market researcher through coder, architect, and book jacket designer to artisanal peanut butter maker; flexible working patterns contributed to the amount of time available to this population to spend and make community in coffee shops (Ferreira, Ferreira, and Bos 2021). Such new creative classes have been the subject of intense debate and research on passion and labor, thereby situating this work in discussion about neoliberalized forms of labor as they relate to wellbeing and one’s place in the world. The ethnographic evidence and analysis in the remainder of this paper moves these debates forward by examining the ways in which aspirational labor exists outside those traditionally conceived as creative industries; the labor of the specialty coffee barista is elevated in gastronomic terms through the skill and creativity it requires, but it is ultimately a position based within the food and hospitality industry, which has its own histories, inequalities, and hierarchies.

Methods and population of study

This paper draws on 12 months of ethnographic anthropological fieldwork conducted with the specialty coffee community in São Paulo, Brazil from June 2017 to June 2018. During this period, I participated in educational and social events (such as informal coffee tastings, sensory training workshops, and competitions), worked as an on-call barista at two cafés, and worked twice weekly for eight months as an assistant at a specialty coffee roastery. These means of participant-observation were available to me as an experienced barista and coffee taster, who has worked with specialty coffee since 2006, and had several preexisting professional contacts within São Paulo’s specialty coffee scene who were able to facilitate introductions to business owners. I further conducted a total of 67 formal interviews (ranging from 40 minutes to three hours) with 34 individuals (with many participating in multiple interviews), who were a mix of both coffee professionals and amateur lovers of specialty coffees. Of the 34 interview participants, 23 had worked as a barista at some point (either presently or previously, in either full- or part-time capacity), and those with barista experience ranged in age from 18 to 61.¹ Those working as baristas at the time of participation were predominantly younger Brazilians, in their late teens, twenties, and, occasionally, early thirties.

The analysis in this paper is related to baristas, recognizing the important central roles they play within the wider specialty coffee community. Further, the position of specialty barista is a relatively new job within Brazil (the first specialty coffee shop, Coffee Lab in São Paulo, opened in 2009) with undefined long-term career prospects, and aspirations are actively forming around these potentials. Pseudonyms have been used for all baristas, as well as many cafés. São Paulo was selected as the study site due to its strong historical linkages with the coffee trade (Holloway 2012; Vidal Luna and Klein 2018) and at the time of the study having more shops than any other Brazilian city meeting Specialty Coffee Association (Ward 2016) guidelines on what counts as a specialty café (e.g., serving only specialty-graded coffees and are primarily coffee shops, rather than, for instance, restaurants with high-end coffee programs).

Caffeinated aspirations

In this ethnographically-informed section, I present and analyze the stories of four paulistano baristas to reveal how passion, aspiration, and consumer subjectivities come to be enacted in the realm of hospitality. While the lives and stories of each of the many baristas I interviewed were unique, there were characteristics and themes shared across narratives, particularly as related to the transformational processes of becoming a barista; each of these stories, although standing alone, is representative in some ways of narrative themes I encountered across baristas. I begin with a story of a young man who rejected his job as a lawyer in order to become a barista, and who called upon his passion for coffee in order to justify this decision; in the second I explore the inverse, or that of one young man using the cultural capital of working with specialty coffee to advance his social capital and create new opportunities which he did not see as available to him in other forms of service work. The third and fourth sections complicate these two initial narratives by exploring further how race, gender, and forms of economic privilege shape the experience of barista work in Brazil, and consider situations in which barista work is viewed as a stepping-stone and not a permanent career.

‘I knew I didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore’

The first story illustrates the ways in which baristas coming from a higher social status can use the cultural capital gained through craft work to temper what may superficially appear to be downward social mobility, and the ways in which passion for coffee can help orient oneself toward a “good life.” Though only in his mid-twenties Lucas was a successful lawyer, climbing the ranks of the law firm at which he worked. But he had a secret: a deep sense of dissatisfaction and discontent within. He could not find a purpose to the long hours he and the other junior lawyers put in and began to find it harder to focus; each time his colleagues showed off their new and increasingly ostentatious watches, he felt this chasm widen. He felt himself growing both sadder and angrier, and the thought of the lifetime in law spreading out ahead of him filled him with dread, he explained to me as we sat together at a table at a café in the centro.

I gave the feeling some time to go away. More than a year. But I saw eventually that it was not going to go away […] I started going and not really working, just existing, going home without making deadlines. I was starting to see the impact of not making a decision about how I felt. I was very sad.

I had to come up with a plan, something that wasn’t law and something that wouldn’t make me sad. So I went to my favorite coffee shop and said, “I like you and I like your structure and that you have farms, you have a roastery, you have a shop.” I liked them and I could see a future with them. I didn’t really want to be a barista exactly, but I knew I didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore. Their company was growing and I thought maybe in ten or fifteen years, I could be something else [in the company] or have my own place.

Lucas had easily talked his way into a job at Casinha Café, one of the hippest specialty coffee shops in São Paulo. He later mused whether his ease interacting with the shop’s upper-class and professional clientele had something to do with it; the shop was even frequented by the staff of another law firm whose headquarters was next door. Moved by the prospect of no longer hating his work, he began to tear through the educational and training programs Casinha offered their staff, even before he was formally employed by them. Lucas had become convinced that life was much more than practicing law and buying watches, and perhaps finding a career in coffee would improve his life.

Although he knew it would be difficult to make his family and loved ones understand his decision, Lucas knew he needed to go through with it. “My girlfriend cried. A lot. She’d been thinking we’d probably get married in a couple years, but when I told her, one of the first things she said was: ‘How are we going to pay for the wedding?’” Given that Lucas was going to be taking an extraordinary pay cut – he said that he went from earning the equivalent of USD$2,000 per month to less than USD$500—it was not an inconsequential question. How he might maintain his general lifestyle was a major concern to Lucas during this transition, as he had previously never had to abstain from or restrict activities such as going out with friends on the weekend due to financial barriers; nevertheless, he saw this low-earning period as a time of investment, expecting to move into a higher-earning role within the coffee industry in due course.

Lucas’s girlfriend took a few days to think things through, before returning to his side. She was still unsure about his future as a barista but she trusted his assessment of the potential for advancement in the growing specialty coffee market, recognizing that remaining in the legal profession would be unsustainable for his mental health. She accompanied him when he informed his parents of his new career direction, and he attributes the fact that he won them over to her support: “Of course, they asked me to think very, very carefully about what I was doing. What sacrifices I was going to have to make. But in the end, I think they could see how unhappy I was.”

Lucas was acutely aware of the trade-offs his career change would entail, and particularly those relating to appearance and respectability within the upper-middle class milieu he was from. He related to me the scorn with which one former law colleague reacted to his new position when they later ran in to each other at a mutual friend’s home, asking if Lucas, who was a white male, would also “do the cooking and cleaning for his new bosses:” the snide implication of the comment being that preparing coffee is the job of an empregada, one of the estimated seven million individuals in Brazil who are domestic workers, performing household duties in higher income households – and who are predominantly low socioeconomic status black women (Andrade and Teodoro 2020). Here we encounter the devaluation of high-end barista work by someone for whom the cultural capital conferred by niche, craft work did not have resonance, in addition to the deeply ingrained classed, gendered, and racial prejudices at work in Brazil relating to ideas of job roles (Lovell 2006; Quadros and Maia 2010). To stave off potential similar sentiments about his role as a barista, Lucas highlights the idea of “service teaching” (Ocejo 2017): according to him, the café is “more like a sensory lab, than anything else” and his job is to “guide and teach people about a world of flavors.” By reframing his position away from food service and placing sensory skills at the fore, Lucas is better able to position his work as a “good job” within the context of the Brazilian labor market by evading associations with lower-class work.

O’Dougherty’s (2002) ethnography of middle-class life in Brazil describes the widespread anxiety about maintaining class status as job categories became more flexible, and the importance of positioning one’s job as non-manual and in the formal sector to maintain respectability and status. Although it represented a radical departure from the work he had been doing, and the social status expected of him by others in his immediate social orbit, some elements of Lucas’ transition to specialty coffee work tie in with highly conventional ideas about employment trajectories: He recognized that he would need to begin at the bottom of the ladder (i.e., as a barista), but envisioned a linear career advancement parallel to that of the corporate world he was familiar with, once he had entered the specialty coffee system. Further, it is notable that while one can work in a barista either in a specialty coffee environment or, in a less craft-forward sense, in any number of other more commonplace outlets such as a padaria (neighborhood bakery), Lucas specifically targeted and only applied to the most high-end coffee shop which he appreciated as a consumer. The cultural capital associated with specialty coffee as a high-end foodstuff was useful to him in buffering the sense of social transgression of becoming voluntarily downwardly mobile.

Lucas was not an isolated case, and I met other young professionals of similar class background who felt burnt-out and dissatisfied with their careers and opted to move into coffee work; for some, this was temporary (with one young woman describing her year as a barista as a “sabbatical”), but others, like Lucas, found the positives outweighed the negatives, making the change permanently. Lucas reveals the ways in which occupations previously associated with lower- or working-class individuals can accrue status, though this does not necessarily happen without friction or is universally appreciated; nevertheless, his preexisting economic and social capital has allowed him to weather the initial storm of the transition and, as we will shortly see, establish himself in a coffee career over the long-term.

‘Nothing seemed simple from that point’

In contrast, for upwardly mobile Brazilians emerging from the lower classes and into the “new middle class,” the cultural capital that can be gained from working in a specialty coffee shop can provide advantages that balance the low wages of baristas. In this way, Marcelo explained to me, he saw the opportunity to become a specialty coffee barista as a career option offering greater potential than working at a padaria—despite the fact that in many ways, they are functionally similar jobs that hinge upon the serving of coffee. Expecting to “meet better people than if [he] stayed in [his] neighborhood,” Marcelo commuted over an hour each way from the flat that he shared with his mother, stepfather, grandmother, and three younger siblings to his full-time job at Casinha Café, even though he would have earned a similar salary at the padaria nearest to his home. Marcelo grew up in a low-income neighborhood without direct access to a Metro line; the multiple buses he needs to take, together with São Paulo’s notoriously congested traffic, guarantees him a lengthy commute. “[The neighborhood padaria] is always looking for staff and my mother is always trying to tell me to apply there, and not waste all my time on the bus.”

After completing secondary school, Marcelo began working as a clerk in a supermarket in a shopping mall. There, he saw a posting for a job in a Starbucks kiosk in the same mall; in addition to finding the green apron more appealing than the mauve uniform he wore at the supermarket, he noted that Starbucks paid very slightly more. He applied, and to his delight was accepted. He reported that at the time, his relationship with coffee was simply that of a beverage he drank with breakfast in the morning, and from the carafe in the staff room in the supermarket.

At first, he was intimidated by the amount of information he was asked to absorb by Starbucks, but as he learned more about coffee through the training program and on the job, his interest grew:

[Coffee] was just this thing that I never thought anything about, and then once I found out how complicated coffee was, it made me wonder what other things I didn’t know about. If coffee—this thing I’d just thought was whatever—could be this complex, what else in the world had I overlooked? Nothing seemed simple from that point, but I mean that in a good way.

Seeking to learn even more about coffee than what he read in the Starbucks training manuals, Marcelo began seeking out specialty coffee shops and events on his days off. Thrilled to find out that he was not alone in his growing obsession with coffee, he began to make friends among other coffee enthusiasts:

No one cared that I didn’t go to university or that I worked at Starbucks, and not even somewhere cool. Everyone was still friendly. Like, at a cupping,² it’d be me, just this kid, tasting coffee with other baristas, but also just people that were cool or rich or like, there was a surgeon at one coffee tasting. I wouldn’t ever expect to meet a surgeon, except on the surgery table! But on the cupping table? It’s possible there.

Elaborating later, he explained that as a young black man in urban Brazil, he had not envisioned a situation in which he would rub shoulders with a surgeon, unless he had been a victim of violence. And he certainly had not imagined interacting with such an individual from a position of, in that moment, superiority: The surgeon in question was attending his first cupping, and Marcelo had already attended several at this point, and so helped the surgeon to get to grips with the cupping protocols. The two even shared a laugh about the awkwardness of the slurping and spitting that cupping requires.

After performing well in the internal barista competition for Starbucks employees in São Paulo, Marcelo decided that this was a sign that he had progressed enough in his skills to move into working with specialty coffee, and he found a job at Casinha Café several months before Lucas was hired.

Marcelo’s family also struggled to understand his decision to work in specialty coffee, albeit for very different reasons than was the case with Lucas. His family suggested that working in a padaria would be preferable because it was “the same job,” it was also formal employment, and came with the benefit of not having to commute nearly as far. There were, after all, several padarias in the area surrounding the family’s flat, but no specialty cafés. Marcelo reported that it was only after his family came to visit him at Casinha, experiencing for themselves the difference in environment and patrons when compared with the padaria, that they understood what had drawn Marcelo. Marcelo’s story demonstrates the use of passion (in this case, for coffee) to realize one’s preexisting aspirations, as well as the ways in which Brazilian youth may reach for “cool” in an effort to transcend class boundaries (Pedrozo 2011). Besen-Cassino (2013) describes how employment in cafés and other low-wage, high-status jobs can become a “marker of identity,” and that for young people in particular, “the job can help define the person” (46). Social clues provided by where a person works can help others deduce “employees’ interests, social and political preferences, and other consumption habits,” (Besen-Cassino 2013, 46) and employment in specialty coffee provides class-aspirational workers like Marcelo access to a different set of signifiers than those available in his neighborhood padaria.

The limitations of specialty coffee as a space to equally materialize one’s aspirations and to convert into economic capital, however, are revealed by examining the subsequent trajectories of Lucas and Marcelo. I first met Lucas in a barista skills class taught at a renowned São Paulo roastery, where he was a polite and high-achieving student. Lucas and Marcelo both attended all the internal training opportunities offered at Casinha, but only Lucas had the financial reserves to pay for additional, out-of-house training opportunities and visits to domestic coffee producing regions; though he had taken a pay cut to become a barista, he had substantial savings from his time as a lawyer, partially due to the fact that like many unmarried Brazilian men, he continued to live at home, rent-free, during this high-earning period. Even though he had been hired after Marcelo and had less formal experience with coffee, the extensive outside training he attended eventually gave him an edge, and he was eventually promoted to head barista over Marcelo.

Speaking to Marcelo after this development, he attributed Lucas’ promotion in large part to their class and racial differences, noting that Lucas more closely reflected the high-class clientele the owners of Casinha were actively trying to attract, which in Brazil is also deeply entwined with skin color and lightness (Mikulak 2011). Although employment at Casinha allowed Marcelo to increase his own cultural and social capital, he perceived his own racial and class background as contributing to a ceiling in terms of the symbolic capital he could offer the business in return. In other words, Marcelo’s interpretation of these events suggested that he did not meet standards of “aesthetic labor” at Casinha (Warhurst and Nickson 2007) in which customers might see themselves reflected and both feel at home and as if they were in a space catering to their own aspirations. Whiteness was an important aspect of embodied symbolic capital for Lucas, which Marcelo did not have recourse to. As Williams and Connell explore in their work in the United States, upscale retail outlets privilege workers who both match their brand image and are “middle class, white, and conventionally gendered” (2010, 371). In the Brazilian context, Blackness is at the bottom of a racialized hierarchy of aesthetics, and with whiteness often being an unspoken requirement for many jobs (Caldwell 2007) aesthetics “[become] a powerful way to reinforce racial hierarchies” within the country (Jarrín 2015, 546).

Stung by this series of events and unhappy with the management, Marcelo left Casinha shortly after, and has worked as a barista at a series of coffee shops across the city in the intervening years, including a period as an irregularly employed freelance barista, when he supplemented his wages by working retail in a large chain clothing store. Despite the continued pressure from his mother, he never took a job at the local padaria, not even during this particularly unstable period of employment, choosing instead to continue applying for any specialty coffee vacancy he could find. Conversely, after less than a year as head barista at Casinha, Lucas was promoted into the management team.

Marcelo has continued to refuse equal-paying work nearer his family home that did not come with the same cachet and did not provide him with the same satisfaction as working in a specialty coffee shop; as of our last conversation in 2022, he continues to work as a barista near the city center, where he now shares a small apartment with three other baristas and a bartender, the latter of whom he also shares a bedroom with. Aged 26, and having worked as a barista for 7 years, he still has not progressed into management or other higher-paying positions in the industry. Despite his cramped apartment and continued financial instability, Marcelo reports that he is still, by and large, enjoying the work and his life: “I am having fun,” he tells me in a text message. Despite their different backgrounds, interests, and ultimate trajectories, Lucas and Marcelo remain active coffee lovers who continue to use their participation in the specialty coffee community and their consumption of specialty coffee to fulfill personal and social aspirations – though their preexisting social standings and available capital modulate the degree to which this fulfillment is possible and stable.

‘Doing what I love and fighting every day’

Building on elements introduced in the two previous sections, Bruna’s story also involves stepping away from a stable, recognizably professional career to become a barista, but further opens the discussion of how social background influences the trajectories of baristas in the Brazilian context. Today, one of Bruna’s job roles is barista, but she describes herself primarily as a coffee entrepreneur and educator. Bruna was the first person in her family to complete secondary school and to attend university; after graduating, she moved to São Paulo to work as a reporter. Having been contracted in 2013 to write an article on specialty coffee, her personal interest was piqued and she began to frequent a specialty café where she became friends with one of the baristas. She began taking lessons on making coffee and, the following year, started to work there on a part-time basis. Bruna considered this work enjoyable but supplemental to her primary role in journalism, though a series of personal devastations would ultimately lead to a reevaluation of her professional orientation.

In 2016, her barista friend and mentor died suddenly. Later that year, Bruna contended with a sense of horror and betrayal after what she described as the “horrible fascist coup,” which removed then-President Dilma Rousseff from power and marked a watershed moment in Brazil’s turn to right-wing populism. In the aftermath of these two events, she decided that she needed to “give value to [her] life by doing what [she loves] and fighting every day.” Thus, she began, in her mid-thirties, to work as a full-time barista, before founding a successful coffee subscription service, which today numbers clients across the country, while continuing to work on a part-time basis as a barista in a small café.

Bruna’s story of passionate work and specialty coffee is particularly illuminating in the Brazilian context: Not only was she the first person in her family to complete secondary school or to obtain a university degree, she is also a black woman. Her choice to move into a form of passionate work that intersects with service work must be read in reference to a particular social, historic, and economic landscape within Brazil. Black women in Brazil, compared to all other demographic groups, are most likely to be employed in low-wage, informal service work (Kopkin and Mitchell-Walthour 2020; Rezende and Lima 2004) and least likely to have finished many years of formal education or graduated from university, despite recent affirmative action policies and the near-doubling of the number of Brazilians enrolling in university since 2000 (Anderson 2019; Artes and Ricoldi 2015). Black women from lower-class backgrounds like Bruna also suffer worse long-term physical and mental health outcomes than other population segments (Caldwell 2017; Hogan et al. 2018).

In their work on the “socio-occupational structures” in Brazil, Quadros and Maia (2010) note that while salary bands are useful for a rough estimation of where an individual sits within Brazilian society, certain forms of work are valorized more than others and position the individual higher up in social structure; they identify, among the lower prestige work options, food and hospitality service. There remains a strong preference toward stable, formal sector, white collar employment as the apogee of respectable, stable work in Brazil (Torresan 2012), and this combined with data that suggest a high concentration of university students in a very small set of professionalized degrees – over 20% of all university students in Brazil study in the two courses of Law and Business Administration (Balbachevsky, Sampaio, and de Andrade 2019) – suggest that there is still a narrow band of acceptable, desirable career and educational progression within Brazil.

Against this normative background which also factored into Lucas’s story, Bruna’s choice to leave a recognizably professional career that was understood and validated as “good work” by wider Brazilian society, and after having earned a university degree, in order to transition into what was – at least at the start – unstable food service work represents a challenge to ideals of success and mobility in contemporary Brazil. Bruna is aware of this dynamic, and that many other Brazilians would view her choice to work in the service industry as “a step backwards from everything I, and my family, worked for.” But, as she once told me, grounding her current trajectory in relation to her experiences of poverty and racial identity: “Look: I’m a woman, I’m black, I was born in a poor neighborhood, and I’ve been working since I was 12 years old. I didn’t want to work ten hours a day anymore.”

Bruna was active in discussing how her race places her at a disadvantage within dominant aesthetic regimes of upscale specialty coffee in Brazil, noting that “if you enter a specialty coffee shop here, everyone’s white – and this in a country where over half the population is black!” She commiserates with the struggles Marcelo has faced, and over the years has provided him with mentoring and references:

Some white person who knows less than you might be chosen for the gig because they’re aesthetically “better.” There’s no meritocracy, you’re just looked over. And you’re always the one who gets asked to clean the bathroom! Or, in my case, I’m not seen as the owner of the business. People say, “Oh, who do you work for?” and “I want to talk with your boss.”

Today, one of her main goals is to increase the visibility of black business owners and to encourage and provide mentorship for other black food entrepreneurs – particularly women. To the best of her knowledge, Bruna is one of the only black, female specialty coffee business owners in the country, a fact which is a motivator for both her mentoring work but also her continued presence as a barista in cafes: she wants black patrons to feel comfortable in the cafe space, for potential black baristas to visualize themselves working in upscale food service environments, and to inspire others to think about the many ways they can make careers in coffee.

She suggests that there may be a prejudice against hiring black baristas because it takes away the veneer of exclusivity that specialty coffee cultivates by re-associating it with the lower classes and domestic workers: People “have always had black girls like me making coffee in the background. Then it’s not something special […] it’s something your empregada makes for you.” Recalling the way Lucas’s former law colleague dismissed his new role as a barista by likening it to the work of a domestic, this speaks to the tensions arising elevating a quotidian product to the state of craft, which often involves changing the context of who makes it and under what circumstances of employment (Gandini and Gerosa 2023). There is ample evidence suggesting that as products and practices previously associated with the domestic sphere become professionalized, they also become masculinized (Harris and Giuffre 2015; Stokes 2017), and this has been shown to be the case with specialty coffee more specifically (Parrish 2020; Reitz 2007).

These gender, class, and race inequalities are embedded in the consumption of specialty coffee worldwide, given the reliance on agricultural labor in the coffee-growing areas of the Global South for the production of the basic good itself (Cole 2008). But Bruna shows us that inequalities faced by baristas as the nexus between producers and consumers are present not only in coffee importing countries (Brickner and Dalton 2019; Cotter and Valentinsson 2018) but have their own unique shapes and experiences in hybrid producer-consumer nations such as Brazil, with its complicated legacies of exploitation and slavery tied to coffee: “Service is incredible, it’s something beautiful. Good service can be done with elegance, with love, with technique. But also, for us black women, it needs to be done with consciousness and care because of the struggles we have every day and the history we carry with us.”

Bruna’s invocation of passionate labor and “doing what she loves,” can therefore be read as a particularly radical act, finding wellbeing and joy in forms of work (coffee, food service) which have in other instances been direct means of the exploitation of black women in Brazil. By working passionately with coffee, Bruna has taken an opportunity to cultivate a desirable quality of life: she has accepted that she will never get rich, given the small profit margins of most specialty coffee businesses, but her new lifestyle has afforded her enough time to enjoy her garden, play with her dog, and practice martial arts – things that make her happy and, she considers, increase her overall contentment, despite the financial insecurity associated with running a small start-up and working part-time barista hours. On the other hand, she does not approach specialty coffee passively, and has used it as a platform to engage and challenge wider issues within Brazilian society, deploying her own passion for racial and gender justice to aspire and work toward a more equitable industry. In this way, despite the historically grounded racialized connotations of her choice to work in food service, Bruna directly engages with a central tenet of the passionate labor or “do what you love” discourse: a search for authenticity and being true to oneself.

‘I wanted to pretend I was an American star’

The three previous baristas sought to make permanent careers within specialty coffee. Our fourth case is an itinerant barista who, due to economic and familial circumstances, uses the work as supplemental as she seeks to fulfill other employment aspirations, revealing how a career in specialty coffee need not be the end outcome for it to play an important role in social positioning. Patrícia grew up in the periferia, the urban sprawl that spills out from São Paulo for miles. Periferia translates literally as “periphery,” but has no direct equivalent in English that refers to the same specific type of neighborhood; some periferias include favelas—slums that constitute roughly one-third of all housing in São Paulo’s periferias—but there are also more formal settlements and neighborhoods (Cotelo and Rodrigues 2013), and it was in one of these far-flung, lower-class neighborhoods where Patrícia was raised. It has been estimated that close to 60% of São Paulo’s population lives in the city’s periferias (McCaul 2014), whose residents have, on average, a lifespan that is 23 years shorter than their counterparts in bairros nobres, or upscale neighborhoods (RNSP, S 2020).

In 2006, her second year of high school, Starbucks opened their first store in Brazil in Shopping Morumbi, a high-end shopping mall in the upscale district of Itaim Bibi. Patrícia told me:

I had to go. I had to see it for myself and try these drinks that I always saw everyone in the shows holding. I didn’t really care that much about the drink—what I wanted was that green-and-white cup. I wanted to pretend I was an American star.

Patrícia began to save up the money she earned doing odd jobs for relatives and around her neighborhood, and one Saturday, she spent over two hours on a series of buses to finally reach Shopping Morumbi. She described having never been anywhere as chic, and she worried that either a security guard or patron would tell her that she did not belong and needed to leave. Nevertheless, she wound her way through the mall and to Starbucks, mustered up her courage, and ordered what she described to me as “some kind of big vanilla latte thing with a lot of whipped cream. The biggest size they had.” Finally, she had her cup.

Careful not to crush it, she took the cup back to her flat in the fringes of the metropolitan region, where she tenderly washed out the coffee residue. The next day, she brought it with her to school, where she filled it with water and placed it prominently on her desk, the Starbucks green mermaid proudly facing forward: a bold assertion to the classroom that she refused to be stuck in the periferia forever. She began to repeat her trips to Morumbi nearly every month to replace her cup, which would degrade over the weeks between her visits. This persisted until the following year, when “finally they opened [a Starbucks] on Avenida Paulista, thank God! It was still really far for me, but not like going all the way to Morumbi!”

Patrícia did eventually leave the periferia when she secured a place at university. Inspired by the power the image of the Starbucks siren logo had exercised over her, she earned a degree in marketing. She graduated from university in 2012, just as specialty coffee was beginning its boom in São Paulo; she had readily made the transition from Starbucks drinker to specialty coffee aficionado when she stopped taking sugar with her coffees and discovered she did not like conventional coffee. She became an active specialty consumer and well-known among baristas and other coffee professionals as an early adopter and avid user of Instagram to connect with the coffee community, chronicling her coffee drinking, rating and reviewing cafés. After graduating she began work at a large company, as a junior marketer. This position gave her a good salary that enabled her to support her coffee interests, take various coffee skills courses, and support her family: she continues to send some of her wages to support her mother (who is intermittently employed) and grandmother (who is unemployed and disabled) in the periferia. Although, as she admitted to me one Saturday as we sat trying on shoes in an upscale, vegan clothing boutique, she doesn’t visit them nearly as often as she feels she should.

By the time I met her in 2017, she was in her late twenties and had started her own small firm, but without the individual or family economic capital to bolster this nascent business, she had to take on additional work to maintain enough the same income standards her corporate job had offered. Patrícia had drawn upon her knowledge of coffee and her networks of friends within the professional coffee community to become a freela (freelance) barista: freelas are those who are not contracted to work at a single shop, but who may work ad hoc, short-term stints of days or weeks at coffee shops who find themselves short-staffed for any number of reasons, or work special events such as coffee festivals. Patrícia supplemented her income in between her advertising commissions by this freelance work, ensuring she could maintain a both a consistent lifestyle for herself and level of support to her family even when she was still establishing herself in her field of primary aspiration. She worked across many cafes in the city, as and when she needed money or one of the cafes on her regular rotation requires additional help, and on more than one occasion I entered a coffee shop to be surprised to find her waving at me from behind the bar, fazendo freela. I further encountered her at multiple coffee events, where she occasionally worked in a team with Bruna.

Patrícia does not speak about having experienced much class-based discrimination in her time, and as someone who identifies and presents as morena-clara (light-skinned mixed race), has also evaded many of the compounding effects of class and racial discrimination in Brazil (Layton and Smith 2017). Yet her class background shapes her current experience: sustained financial responsibility to her family in the periferia means that despite being upwardly mobile, she remains tied through social and familial obligations to a peripheral place and way of being. Nevertheless, through the networks she has cultivated through years as a participant in the paulistano coffee community – both as active consumer and now, as working barista – she has started gaining clients for her agency, simultaneously expanding her horizons outward and beyond the periphery. She has on her client roaster individuals she has met in the café while on shift and those she has bumped into in social settings related to coffee, in addition to one of the cafés at which she occasionally freelances.

While Lucas, Marcelo, and Bruna each position their work within specialty coffee as their calling and what they ultimately want to be doing, Patrícia’s passion for coffee has helped her work toward goals external to coffee. Working as a part-time, freelance barista while building up her own non-coffee business is perhaps more reflective of the average trajectory of baristas who, although they understand their work as skilled (Ott 2020) nevertheless frequently see it as a type of under-employment which serves as a stepping stone to something more permanent (Steffy 2017). Patrícia does not desire to work permanently with specialty coffee, but uses her genuine interest in and passion for coffee operationally, in order to support her specific aspirations of upward social and economic mobility while continuing to meet her familial and community obligations as she begins her journey with little preexisting economic and social capital available to her. The socioeconomic background of baristas thus shapes the ways in which aspiration and passion are negotiated through work.

Discussion and conclusion

This analysis of experiences of baristas working in São Paulo, Brazil has considered the relationships between aspiration and passion and the choice to work in the specialty coffee industry, showing the ways in which class background and preexisting economic capital influenced their successes and trajectories within the industry. Baristas deployed ideas of passion to neutralize the imbalances in their ability to convert social and cultural capital into economic capital. Some baristas used their passion for coffee to advance their own aspirations, while conversely, the aspirations of others shaped and grew their passion for coffee. For each of the profiled baristas, the social and cultural capital gained from working in specialty coffee was profound: it variously justified their career changes, provided social connections to individuals of higher class standing and of business interest, and the possibility to support and uplift others.

The question of available economic capital and just how effectively social and cultural capital can translate into economic capital is a salient one for these baristas, given the low wages of barista work and the high cost of living in São Paulo. Lucas’s financial resources allowed him to partake in additional training which gave him a workplace edge; and while Bruna had grown up in poverty, she had worked steadily in the communication fields for over a decade prior to making her career switch into specialty coffee, building up a small amount of savings which helped her invest in her business. For these two baristas, the transformation comes through the exchange of higher income potential for a broader embrace of other sorts of capital which might contribute to an overall satisfying life. We can see the potential of direct conversion of social capital into economic for Patrícia, through business connections she has made through specialty coffee community members, but the process is slow and her financial obligations to family impact on her options and actions; though only a year younger than Lucas, she is not able to draw on similar family reserves to support her career transition. For his part, the exchange into financial capital has been even less sure for Marcelo, the only one of these four individuals who continues to choose to work full-time as a barista but who has not been able to parlay that work into any more highly paid positions elsewhere within the coffee industry or more senior within the coffeeshop space itself.

While Ott (2020) demonstrates the conversion of the social and cultural capital of baristas into economic through the examples of complementary meals and beverages – a phenomenon I also witnessed with baristas in São Paulo – the conversion into economic capital was itself not enough to entail a substantive change in class positioning or even economic well-being, paired as it was with the low wages of the baristas. Regarding hipster capitalists, Scott writes that these individuals generally “appear from subordinate positions within social space, holding fewer economic resources and yet-to-be-consecrated cultural capital. This location, however, offers flexibility and a broad scope to improvise reconversion strategies that anticipate the future” (2017, 66). The choice to become a specialty coffee barista, while experientially shaped by the availability of capital, was understood and expressed by participants as aligned with aspirations, or future-oriented interest in achieving, doing, or becoming something. With financial gain very clearly not positioned as a main motivator for employment, the increased self-satisfaction, happiness, and well-being reported by these individuals through their employment in specialty coffee (despite the various challenges they faced), was a scenario they did not see more traditional – and potentially more financially lucrative – employment affording them. In counterpoint to other studies which position the role of the barista as one frequently going to overqualified and underemployed individuals waiting for something better, barista work was both desirable for these individuals as well as leading to desirable outcomes and lifestyles. Together, the intersection of passion for coffee with employment gave shape to individual aspirations and what Bourdieu terms an “optimistic progressivism,” toward the future and the future selves of these baristas (2010[1984], 351).

The progress and trajectories of baristas were not only shaped by the question of economic capital, with other identities and influences intersecting to give shape to both aspiration and outcome. Yet although the position of barista was available to those from both higher-status individuals and those whom Scott describes as emerging from “subordinate positions” (2017, 66), when we turn to questions of career longevity and sustainability, we find an echo of Ocejo’s analysis of craft occupations as exclusive, with “only people from certain social backgrounds and paths of life and with certain cultural dispositions and social abilities” obtaining and maintaining such positions and barista (2017, 255). Specific hierarchies of value are at play, shaping who makes an ideal barista and why. Race and gender, in particular, were lenses through which baristas experienced – and interpreted their experiences of – aspirational labor within the context of who has traditionally made coffee for others in Brazil. Bruna understood her move from stable, “professional” employment to coffee entrepreneurship in light of the historical connotations of slavery and domestic work which reached into present-day and shaped ongoing social inequalities in Brazilian society. To choose to do coffee work on her own terms was not “a step backwards,” but instead a way to push back against the current work and labor systems which left her – and others – tired, depleted, and unfulfilled. Marcelo’s example speaks to the intersection of race and gender in a different way: in our conversations he had expressed both his fears of being the victim of violence through the act of everyday living while young, male, and black in urban Brazil, and the unexpectedly thrilling – although, as we have seen, also limited – opportunities for social inversion through being an expert and educator. He perceives his lack of advancement within his chosen career as linked to his racial identity and presentation; regardless of the causes, he remains no “better off” in a normative financial sense through his work in coffee, yet his assertion that his lifestyle and employment choices have led to him “having fun” offers a vision of potential contrast against the trajectories of violence and misery which are so often reported in both popular media and anthropological research as characteristic of the lives of young men like Marcelo. Through his employment as a barista and within specialty coffee shops, he had encountered new modes and possibilities for his life through his meetings with new people and ideas, thereby giving new shape to his own aspirations. Classed, gendered, and racialized identities had measurable effect on the experiences of these baristas when framed in the economic terms of aspirational labor, but when considered in terms of creating a “good life” these identities mattered differently and were modulated by the specificities of precisely what individuals were aspiring to.

Grant (2020) describes how in Vietnam, “few young adults aspiring in the coffee industry take note of or measure each other’s worth and value by standards of living or other class signifiers” (151). Nevertheless, in the Brazilian case, although friendships and working relationships could transcend class lines, worth and value as related to opportunities and trajectories remain linked to class and capital. The entanglement between aspiration and work that characterizes those individuals working as specialty coffee baristas allows for an understanding of the subjectivities of class (im)mobility and changes in contemporary urban Brazil.

As Bruna once said, what she most values about coffee is the way it can bring together people of different social classes. There is hardly anyone in Brazil who does not drink coffee, she explained; even those who are less affluent can usually afford an espresso in a specialty coffee shop, thereby, in theory, purchasing temporary access to a social space of mobility more easily than they could in, say, the cocktail bar in which we were sitting while we conversed. “Coffee has a marvelous affective value for us Brazilians,” she said. “I think it can bring us together across the many divides that exist in our nation, because it is so deceptively simple.”

The ethnographic evidence shows, however, that people are not necessarily brought together, or brought together to equal ends. Rewards external to the economic are also unevenly accessible but were nevertheless powerful and motivating for the baristas with whom I worked. This new interest in and potential viability of making coffee as a career reflects some small changes in customs and values, with space increasingly being created for forms of aspiration outside the traditional forms of social advancement prevalent in Brazilian society and straightforward economic gain, and that young people can see their future in a humble cup of coffee – however unequal the rewards remain at present.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by St Peter’s College, Oxford; James Beard Foundation; School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.

Notes

1. The 61-year-old barista was an outlier in terms of age. Previously a specialty coffee fan, he had taken a one day per week barista position to keep himself occupied after a health concern had forced him into early retirement. Two participants in their 40s had formerly worked as baristas, and one cafe owner in his 40s who worked as a barista in his own shop was interviewed; the remainder were in their 30s or younger.

2. Cupping is a formal way of tasting and assessing the quality of a coffee, and it involves coating one’s palate with a coffee’s flavor and aroma, to which end practitioners slurp and spit a given coffee at varying temperatures, and then assign scores based on their assessment. The process is reminiscent of the process of wine tasting, except that rather than avoiding inebriation, the professional must seek to limit over-caffeination. Public cuppings are often held in coffee shops as a way to engage the public in trying many coffees in a single session.