Constructing a city, building a life: Brazilian construction workers’ continuous mobility as a permanent life strategy

Abstract

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of domestic labor mobility among Brazilian construction workers in the context of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. We start from the premise that mobile laborers are crucial for the physical development and expansion of cities. However, the importance of domestic migrants in this process is insufficiently addressed in mobility studies. Building on existing research on domestic population movements in Brazil, we argue that the current generation of mobile construction workers draws on the intangible and material infrastructure generated by previous generations of migrants to enable novel kinds of (permanent) labor mobilities.

Keywords:

• Mega-events
• Olympics
• Brazil
• construction
• labor mobility
• internal migration
• anthropology

Notes

1. Saunders (2011, p. 3) describes the arrival city as a ‘special kind of urban space’, a ‘transitional space’ that is being created by the great migration towards cities worldwide.

2. For more on Pereira Passos’ reforms and their impact on the image of Rio see e.g. Barbosa (2010), (Leite 2000).

3. Cidade de Deus (City of God) became internationally renowned due to the homonymous novel (1997) by writer Paulo Lins. Lins, who grew up in the favela, tells the story of three young men as they grow up in the fast changing community, in which they are confronted with petty crime in the 1960s, evolving in the 1990s to the violent drug trafficking for which favelas are now known.

4. Rio das Pedras is known among researchers and lay people as one of the communities in Rio with the strongest northeastern presence. Construction workers and residents of Gardenia we spoke to also emphasized the size and the importance of immigration from the Northeast to the expansion of Rio das Pedras. Our focus, however, was on the construction projects related to the Olympics, and consequently on where these specific workers were finding support for their mobility in Rio. This turned out to be in Gardenia, a much smaller and less studied community, but clearly not less important in these domestic labor mobility patterns.

5. Carioca is a demonym used in reference to the city of Rio.

6. These flat bed trucks were adapted to transport passengers in long and extremely uncomfortable trips across the country. The term is still used pejoratively as a nickname for Northeastern migrants.

7. Meaning ‘those who move away’, the term has been vastly used in Brazilian Portuguese to relate to Northeastern migrants who moved to the South and Southeast of the country in the 1940s and 1950s.

8. Classical works include Graciliano Ramos’ Vidas Secas (Barren Lives) originally published in 1938, and João Cabral de Melo Neto’s Morte e Vida Severina (The Death and Life of a Severino), originally published in 1955.