Selling hope on credit: women's livelihoods, debt and the production of urban informality in Brazil

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses the embeddedness of informality in the city and ambiguities among low-income families around what constitutes the formal and informal in the arenas of housing, lottery betting and labour. Through ethnography of women navigating various dimensions of informality in Salvador, Brazil, the paper portrays the gendered circumstances and vulnerabilities of making a living and maintaining a home in peripheral neighbourhoods in the city. Specifically, the paper examines the implications of debt on women’s lives and life choices in the informal city. The paper demonstrates that formality was often beyond their means and aspirations whereas many informal practices, including credit practices, enable life to continue by providing a meagre income and the opportunity to avoid expenses such as rent and utility bills. Yet these same practices keep women on the margins of the city and the formal economy. Marginality engenders vulnerability, exacerbated during periods of turbulence as seen in the current context of Brazil’s economic downturn and struggle to manage the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper highlights state attempts and failures to reduce informality and sheds light on the production and persistence of informal housing, services and work in the city.

KEYWORDS:

• Informal labour
• credit practices
• urban renewal
• public housing
• gender inequality
• urban marginality

Acknowledgements

I thank Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos for the invitation to present at Oxford University’s Brazilian Studies Annual Conference ‘Informal Practices in Brazil: Exclusion and Privilege’ and subsequently the opportunity to participate in this special issue ‘The prism of Brazil: Informal Practices in Politics and Society’. I thank Diana Denham for the thorough reading of the manuscript and insightful comments. The 2019 fieldwork was funded by the Danish Research Council, DFF (grant agreement No. 8018-00065B). During this fieldwork, research assistant Thaise Sá Santos participated in some of the interviews and home visits and transcribed all recorded interviews. I am grateful for her competent assistance and inspiring collaboration throughout the fieldwork and beyond. Most of all, I am grateful to the women in this study for inviting me into their lives throughout all these years.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 http://www.caixa.gov.br/sobre-a-caixa/apresentacao/Paginas/default.aspx

2 The periferia is a disenfranchised but heterogeneous locality in Brazilian cities that in public discourse is reduced to a dangerous place of crime and despair. The term originally referred to the geographical periphery of the city, but today periferia is used as a contrast to what is considered ‘the formal city’ in a center-periphery hierarchy of urban residents who are included and excluded (Kolling 2019).

3 Names of people and neighborhoods in this paper are pseudonyms.

4 A major infrastructure project did in fact start in 2019 with the construction of a new highway next to the housing project, but it did threaten the existence of the housing project.

5 See article 50 in Brazil’s Criminal Misdemeanor Law http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/decreto-lei/del3688.htm

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark: [Grant Number 8018-00065B].

Notes on contributors

Marie Kolling

Marie Kolling is an anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. She has conducted extensive fieldwork on urban marginality in relation to housing, debt, livelihoods and violence in Northeast Brazil. She is co-editor of Who's cashing In? Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness (Berghahn Books, 2020) among other publications and is an occasional commentator on Brazil in Danish media.