Climbing the ladder to safety: A qualitative investigation of social mobility in Brazil

Introduction

When we interviewed 31-year-old Patricia in August 2021, she had just earned a Ph.D. from a prestigious Brazilian public university and was about to start postdoctoral research with a government fellowship. Within the 2 years prior, she had visited the United States for a funded postgraduate internship, moving alone, upon her return, to a rented one-bedroom apartment near the center of Rio de Janeiro, which she could afford with her scholarship supplemented by freelance jobs. Her ‘long-waited’ and ‘very-well-planned’ purchase of a rug symbolized her transition to independent adultness – ‘It’s a weird feeling of being very grown-up, very fancy’. The Black researcher, however, experienced hardship as a child after her parents’ separation. She and her mother had to live as squatters before returning to some stability, living in the periphery of Rio. Although believing she was closer to becoming middle class – ‘because of the Ph.D. title, because of the city area where I’m living’, Patricia had not, in her view, completed the economic ascension cycle since she did not have property or the steady income of a trabalho concursado (permanent public service employment). So, despite her comfort, academic degree, and skill level, she claimed not to feel ‘really safe’ yet, as she described her present financial and social situation.

In this article, we analyze lived experiences of change in socioeconomic status in the Brazilian urban context of the early 21st century. More specifically, we examine how some residents of the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region (RJMR) perceive and interpret their trajectory of relative social mobility in the last two decades, focusing on achievements and gaps in access to opportunities to improve their lives. Increasing and changing consumption patterns in countries like Brazil, China, South Africa, and the Philippines, among others, transformed images of urban poverty and prompted discussions about emerging middle classes in the Global South (Albert, 2024; Chevalier, 2015; Schraten, 2020; Tsang, 2014; Zhang, 2010). Specifically in Brazil, poverty reduction policies coupled with a consumption boom in the late 2000s prompted the controversial announcement of the rise of a ‘new middle class’ (Neri, 2010, 2012; Klein et al., 2018). Our in-depth interviews with people who lived through that boom in Rio de Janeiro show the specificities of social mobility as an everyday experience in a megacity marked by inequalities.

Understanding such specificities qualitatively is a critical task as much of the economic and sociological debates recognize middle classes as associated with industrialization, non-manual labor, and cultural capital (Scalon and Salata, 2012), having Global North countries as parameters. As this article shows, however, the ‘new middle class’ in Brazil is less a complete status transition than an ambiguous experience shaped by family support and commitments (Motta, 2014; Sarti, 1994), urban territories and stigmatization (Perlman, 2010; Wacquant, 2008), and gains in forms of cultural capital that may not be immediately or sufficiently convertible into economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986). We propose an understanding of social mobility that goes beyond statistical measures to consider the interplay between different socioeconomic dimensions as perceived by those who have experienced some degree of improvement in their standard of living since childhood and compared to their parents.

Before discussing the findings of our interviews, we contextualize the issue of mobility in Brazil by reviewing the history of the making (and unmaking) of middle classes in the country and the debate over the 21st-century flourishing of previously poor sectors of society (Bresser Pereira, 1962; Neri, 2008, 2012; O’Dougherty, 2002; Owensby, 1998; Quadros, 1991; León, 2018). Then, we organize the analysis of the material following types of mobility identified from participants’ discourses – financial, geographic, and educational. Besides grounding our discussion in our interviewees’ views, we found the three forms of mobility suitable for exploring Rio’s specificities as a metropolis marked by sharp signs of inequality, racial segregation, and urban violence (Gonçalves, 2006; Misse, 2008; Perlman, 2010; Zaluar, 2004).

From pyramid to diamond: ‘New middle classes’ in Brazil

In the early 1960s, Bresser Pereira (1962), an economist who would later lead diverse ministry cabinets in the 1980s and 1990s, lauded the Brazilian ‘take-off’ period of industrial growth after the so-called Revolution of 1930 and the arrival of Getúlio Vargas to power. Supporting industrialization, he identified the rise of a new middle class as an indication of development, as a ‘modern capitalist system [replaced] the social system of the plantation’ (Bresser Pereira, 1962: 318). Half a century later, The Economist would once again declare Brazil had ‘taken off’, now compared to a global recession scenario and the other emerging economies of the BRICS. One of the outcomes and ingredients of that launch was a growing consumer middle class that ‘wants the good life’. (The Economist, 2009: 16). The report came one year after economist Marcelo Neri (2010) published a study indicating Brazil was experiencing the rise of a ‘new middle class’, prompting intense academic debates while stirring policymaking, media representations, and marketing strategies through to the mid-2010s.

From an economic history perspective, Léon (2018) shows Brazil had an incipient middle-class flourishing in the early decades of the 20th century. Crossing statistical data on income and employment from 1850 to 1950, the author found a middle class, defined in terms of income and non-manual work, appeared in the early 20th century when formerly enslaved people and European immigrants became a workforce, coffee exports were strong, and the interests of the embryonic industry sector aligned with those of the rural. However, following the crash of 1929, the middle class statistically dropped as income bipolarization grew despite industrialization (Léon, 2018). As Vargas’ measures sought to meet the demands of unionized manual workers while maintaining the interests of industrialists, the ‘white collars’ found themselves with little bargaining power, resorting to consumer practices, domestic life habits, and moral standards to mark their social status (Owensby, 1998).

Quadros (1991) shows the rise of a ‘new middle class’ of urban propertyless workers connected with the so-called ‘Brazilian miracle’ between 1968 and the mid-1970s. During that period, favorable domestic and international conditions led to a sustained increase in the GDP, fairly contained inflation, balance surpluses, and the accumulation of reserves. The military dictatorship adopted a conservative approach to development, betting that enough economic growth would mitigate the country’s deficiencies and social inequalities (Kopper and Damo, 2018). Despite the lack of social programs, a new middle class of white collars (Wright Mills, 1951) with diverse skill and income levels prospered during the ‘miracle’ (Quadros, 1991). That emergent group defined itself as middle class by its access to homeownership, private education, cars, and overseas travel, among other consumer practices that the prolonged inflationary crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s significantly curtailed (O’Dougherty, 2002). It was only in 1994 that the Real Plan contained hyperinflation and brought back stability. Yet, the crisis had been so long and the economic decline so steep that, according to Quadros (2007), the middle class in the early 2000s was proportionally smaller and poorer compared to the early 1980s. In his analysis, that shrinking signaled an occupational crisis and an unprecedented straightening of channels for upward mobility in the country.

Nonetheless, just a few years later, Neri (2008, 2012) observed a slight drop in income inequality during the 2000s, as measured by the Gini coefficient, and an economic ascendence of the formerly poor into the ‘middle class’. Neri’s analysis resorted to the five-tier class stratification (A, B, C, D, E) used by the Brazilian Institute of Geography, calculated the mean household per capita income of each stratum, bracketing the C class (the middle) as the one earning between US$ 500 and US$ 2000 per month, and then correlated it with data from monthly employment surveys and the Critério Brasil market survey that classifies households in terms of criteria such as the possession of specific durable consumer goods, hiring of domestic services, and education level. In doing so, Neri found that over 50% of the population would be in the C class at the start of the 2010s. That is, Brazil had become a middle-class country. The best representation of the country’s stratification would no longer be a pyramid but a diamond (Kopper and Damo, 2018).

The definition of the ‘new middle class’ of the late 2000s tapped into a symbolic link between socioeconomic status and consumption already present in Brazilian society, challenging analysts and policymakers used to discuss Brazil as a poor or working-class country (Kopper and Damo, 2018) and deep-rooted prejudices against long marginalized population segments (O’Dougherty, 2002; Owensby, 1998; Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco, 2023). Neri’s thesis gained support from the Worker’s Party (PT) government, the press, and especially marketing agents but faced criticisms from perspectives on social stratification that have relations of production and occupation as central concerns (Kopper and Damo, 2018; Pochmann, 2012; Scalon and Salata, 2012). The novelty in Neri’s ‘new middle class’ is that it departs from traditional debates, participating in a transnationally recognized trend in economics led by thinkers such as Angus Deaton (1997) and Joseph Stiglitz et al. (2009) that proposed to decouple national well-being and development assessments from production by shifting the focus to household income and consumption (Kopper, 2020). As a result of novel analytical parameters, the broadening of the ‘middle class’ reflected social changes – brought by stability, the expansion of the Bolsa Família cash transfer program, and policies for extending access to credit and university education – as much as it met government expectations of repositioning Brazil in the international stage as a thriving economy, ‘developed’ at last, especially during President Lula’s mandates (Kopper and Damo, 2018).

Looking at socioeconomic stratification from a different approach, studies using income tax data show that, despite the increase in earnings among poorer population groups, inequality in Brazil remained almost stable between 2006 and 2014 because of the income concentration among the wealthier groups. The 1% richest absorbed 25% of the total income, and the top 0.1% engrossed 11% (Medeiros, de Souza, and de Castro, 2015). Except for the top 10% in annual earnings, most of the Brazilian population is above the poverty line and within the same lower-income strata or the supposed new middle class (Medeiros, 2023).

The adoption of different etic measures afforded a more inclusive picture of the ‘middle’, attuned to the Brazilian context, but glossed over other issues like work types and the job market. Most significantly, the debate fell short of considering diverse kinds of mobility and how they interact in lived experiences, instead implying a pattern where improvements on one factor (like income, consumption, education, or employment) tend to come with or push improvements on another. So, here, we do not seek to define the ‘middle class’ but to show what social mobility looks like through the trajectories of our interviewees and how they perceive themselves and their surroundings. We take an emic and holistic approach that considers socioeconomic dimensions as they emerge in participants’ accounts of their habits, backgrounds, and journeys. Our analysis brackets three meanings of mobility – financial, geographic, and educational – to understand how different dimensions interact within the reality of a Global South megacity. In a country like Brazil, marked by inequalities and moments of economic peaks and falls, being ‘middle class is much more than a statistical matter. It is [. . .] as much a matter of becoming as a specific social station’ (Owensby, 1998: 340).

Method

We carried out fieldwork as part of the project No Longer Poor, Not Middle Class: New Consumer Cultures in the Global South (CCGS), ¹ which aims to understand how growing consumption is changing the realities of the ‘previously poor’ in four 21st-century metropolises – Guangzhou, China, Metro Manila, the Philippines, Mexico City, Mexico, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We interviewed participants who could fit the profile of the Brazilian ‘new middle class’ (Costa Filho and Rocha, 2022; Kopper and Damo, 2018). That meant inviting people based on socioeconomic criteria such as average household income and occupation but also considering other local class markers such as living in peripheral neighborhoods or having ever benefited from any government assistance aimed at underprivileged groups, such as affirmative action quota, cash transfer or housing programs, or the COVID-19 pandemic emergency aid.

Our fieldwork took place from July to December 2021. Since the COVID-19 social distancing protocols were still in place, we conducted 31 online interviews with residents in the RJMR using video conferencing or video call apps like Zoom and WhatsApp. Twenty-seven participants earned what most Brazilians above the poverty line do (Medeiros et al., 2015). Most of them, 17, had an average household income of over R$ 2000 and up to R$ 6000 per month, the band most associated with the so-called Brazilian new middle class (Kopper and Damo, 2018; Scalon and Salata, 2012). Five interviewees had slightly higher household earnings, over R$ 6000 and up to R$ 10,000, and five were closer to poverty, with an average income between R$ 1000 and R$ 2000. For comparative purposes, we interviewed four earning between R$ 10,000 and R$ 25,000, but two had experienced significant inter- and intragenerational upward mobility.

Participants included 18 women and 13 men; 60% had a higher education degree or an active college enrolment; 60% were self-employed workers. Among occupations, we interviewed street vendors, delivery workers, housekeepers, beauticians, micro-entrepreneurs, taxi drivers, waiters, bartenders, pensioners, schoolteachers, private tutors, personal trainers, creative workers, researchers, bank employees, and lawyers. Most of our interviewees (22) were between 25 and 39 years old.

Notwithstanding the distance, we maintained an ethnographic inspiration for our semi-structured interviews, which lasted between 90 and 150 minutes, encouraging participants to show their homes and preferred objects with their smartphone cameras or by sending us pictures. Furthermore, in 2022, we observed places and practices in Rio recurrently mentioned in the interviews, like street markets, supermarkets, department stores, and delivery workers on the streets. We asked descriptive and comparative questions about participants’ purchases, grocery lists, cell phone use, household appliances, regular expenses, everyday habits, and consumption dreams. We also asked them to describe and compare their present living conditions with those of their neighbors, close relations, and parents.

From participants’ accounts of their trajectories and comparisons between themselves and their origin family, relationships, and surroundings, we take three types of mobility to structure our qualitative analysis – financial, geographic, and educational. Beyond moving between income bands, financial mobility refers to participants’ access to credit and purchase power (Müller, 2014), provisioning arrangements between family members and households (Motta, 2014), and the moral commitments of such agreements (Sarti, 1994). Geographic mobility refers to the relocation of participants, their parents, or children to and within the RJMR and the hierarchization of territories from the most prestigious to the stigmatized (Fernandes, 2011; Perlman, 2010; Wacquant, 2008). Educational mobility encompasses skills and licenses to enter the job market and acquire habits, tastes, and worldviews – forms of cultural capital in Bourdieu’s (1986) terms.

The habit of helping: Financial mobility and family ties

Household income is a central marker in Neri’s new-middle class stratification, especially as it translates into consumption (Neri, 2010, 2012). Besides changes our interlocutors perceived with income increment, we discuss how their adult financial situation interconnects with that of parents, siblings, and other kin living with them or not. Drawing examples from our conversations, we show what the emerging middle means qualitatively. On the one hand, the upward mobility of one family member positively impacts the access to consumer goods and services of others in the same or different households. On the other hand, the financial setbacks or immobility of adult children stretch limited resources, keeping them and their families at risk of falling back into poverty.

William, a 35-year-old entrepreneur, had to rush his father to a hospital when he started having heart attack symptoms. Without hesitating, he drove his father to a nearby private cardiology reference center for emergency care, paying out-of-pocket for all expenses. Immediately going for the best possible option was not something his family was used to when he was growing up. His father was still a doorkeeper, and his mother was a retired housemaid. They lived in one of the favelas – mostly informal, self-built, and densely populated settlements – covering steep hills in the South Zone of Rio until William was 26 and could afford to move the three of them and his sister to a formal neighborhood in the North Zone. As William recalls, he only started choosing brands at the supermarket as a working adult, especially after his business took off. Having the confidence to seek what he deemed the best available care for his father in a crisis exemplifies how his upward financial mobility changed not only his living standards but also the life of his family of origin, even after he moved out and got married. In his words, ‘my financial security allowed me, precisely, to have my father receive emergency care in a private hospital and then get transferred in a private ambulance to another private hospital’ for the necessary surgical procedure.

The first decades of the 21st century saw access to credit among lower-income sectors expand significantly in diverse Global South countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, India, and South Africa, with the support of micro-finance services, digitalization, and public policies (Kar, 2018; Müller, 2014; Ossadón, 2014; Saiag, 2020; Schraten, 2020). As an affirmative action student in a prestigious public university and an underpaid Law intern, William benefited from such financial inclusion mechanisms, using his student credit card to buy work clothes and socialize with colleagues. So, by the early 2010s, he was learning to navigate the market, substituting a lower-interest loan for his credit card debt. Over that decade, as his remuneration improved, he bought a car and fully paid for a small apartment in a formal neighborhood through the Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) government subsidy program, which fostered an affordable housing market (Kopper, 2016). In his terms, he ‘checked’ the two boxes of ‘success relative to goods’. However, the experiences he deemed the best symbolic representations of his mobility were his holiday trips to North America and Europe.

William’s reflection echoes the self-definition and media representation of the Brazilian middle class of the 1980s and 1990s as ownership of a home and a car and travel consumption that O’Dougherty (2002) found in her ethnography in São Paulo. Having such experiences as traveling abroad and staying in hotels were ‘unimaginable’ in his childhood when his ideas of accomplishment were ‘simply getting a carteira assinada [formal employment]’, reflecting those of his family and neighbors in the favela. However, he had exceeded such expectations with his business and could now afford to pay two rents, one in the North Zone for his parents and sister and another in the South Zone where he lived with his wife and child. The entrepreneur acknowledged, ‘In the Brazilian reality, I am a rich person’.

By improving the size and location of their residences, William fulfills what studies on poor families in urban Brazil identify as the moral duty of children to repay their parents, especially if they ‘do well’, and the role of the older son in assisting or in some cases replacing parents as the main breadwinner (Motta, 2014; Sarti, 1994). As poorer families are less like a nucleus than a network, extended kinship relations translate into moral obligations, weaving members together in configurations that assure their well-being at times while also hindering their individualization or expanding their responsibilities (Motta, 2014; Sarti, 1994). For instance, Lucio, 33, formally employed as a forklift operator, considered his obligation to go beyond providing for his son to support members of his ex-wife’s household, his former mother-in-law and brother-in-law, who were unemployed. Because his extended family was going through a ‘tough time’, he was postponing the idea of a holiday trip to help them with groceries and money.

In Raquel’s family, her older brother, an economist, took the lead once he started working, enhancing their parents’ everyday comfort and hers, especially since securing employment in a government bank in the early 2010s. The financial stability he achieved in public service translated into works to expand the family’s home in a social housing neighborhood and health insurance for all of them, besides other kinds of consumption, even after he moved out and married. As 28-year-old Raquel recalled, her first cell phone and the many others she had over the years were gifts from her brother, who also passed on his older models to their parents. Many appliances in Raquel’s house had been either new gifts from him or items he had previously owned, including the stereo, air fryer, mini-oven, microwave, TV sets, an air-conditioner, and her computer – ‘He gives a lot of stuff because my brother is rich [laughs]’. She borrowed money from him to go to a conference abroad with her college friends, a loan she had no prospect or urgency to repay – ‘It is still on his spreadsheet that I must pay for this trip. That was in 2015’.

When discussing their experiences, our interviewees referred to their parents, siblings, grandparents, in-laws, and cousins, among other relatives, and often inserted themselves in broader family histories. However, these references did not relativize or mitigate perceptions of privilege (Friedman et al., 2021; Khan, 2011). On the contrary, interviewees’ recollections and descriptions acknowledged the family, broadly speaking, as an integral part of their circumstances since their finances and consumption involved ties that went beyond individual choices and the limits of a household unit, like in the logic of money circulation observed in ethnoaccounting (Cottereau and Marzok, 2012) and economic anthropology studies in Brazil (Motta, 2014; Müller, 2014).

For instance, Bruna, a schoolteacher, described her current financial situation within the larger history of a family climbing the ‘ladder’ of social mobility step by step. She was better off than her parents, given she already earned as much as her mother did in public service at 60. Her mother, in turn, was better off than her own parents and was the only one of five siblings who went to college, had job security, and owned a home. At 27, Bruna was about to buy a two-bedroom apartment in the North Zone neighborhood where she grew up with the money she had saved since turning 15. Part of her careful financial planning involved compromises to support her ill father. During the pandemic, she and her boyfriend rented her father’s vacant studio to secure him an income source. Had they continued renting a place of their choice, she would have had no money to spare to help. Bruna learned the ‘habit of helping’ from her mother, who had always sheltered relatives trying to study or work in Rio. Hence, she felt a duty now to offer the same support to her father and other kin, even if it meant less indulgence for her – ‘It’s not because I’m doing well that I’m going to pay all my luxuries and leave him with limitations’.

The comfort of Raquel’s and her parents’ household had improved due to her brother’s financial mobility. Another interviewee, 37-year-old Martha, also stressed how her stable employment in a government bank gave her a ‘comfortable’ and ‘privileged’ life, especially compared with her financially ‘turbulent’ home growing up in Rio’s West Zone. The steady income she and her husband, employed in the same institution, earned, allowed them to choose cosmetics brands, upgrade their iPhones, pay for courses, plan holiday trips abroad, and rent an apartment in the South Zone.

Statistical studies in Brazil indicate that formal employment reduces the odds of individuals and their households remaining poor (de Azevedo Araújo et al., 2024). However, various factors affect one’s prospects in the job market, including education, gender, and race (Mont’Alvao and Costa Ribeiro, 2020). Exams to enter public service are highly competitive, and, as Martha noted, one may not even know how to apply for them if they have no public servants in their family. Interviewees or their adult children who experienced difficulties finding jobs and steady income, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, relied on their parents, who were, in some cases, quite overstrained. For instance, Isabel, a 65-year-old pensioner, was caring for her older aunt and helping her son, trying to enter public service in secondary-level positions, and his partner, struggling to reconcile her postgraduate studies with work due to mental health issues. Over the years, Isabel had expanded her house in Maré, an impoverished neighborhood mixing social housing complexes and favelas. So, she could sell and rent out rooms to make money when her daughter lost her job and needed financial support to cover bills and provide for her two small kids. In Isabel’s words, she helps in whatever way she can: ‘When things get rough, I say: close down the place and move back here’.

Everyone left: Geographic mobility and territorial status

In interviewees’ accounts of their upbringing and the longer histories of their families, migration from smaller and poorer regions in the country to Rio and moving within the metropolitan area emerges as a factor shaping experiences of social mobility. As our analysis shows, the perceived symbolic and material differences between locations (Fernandes, 2011; Lago, 2000; Perlman, 2010) and forms of territorial stigma (Wacquant, 2008) render geographic mobility inextricable from the possibility of a change in social status.

Stressing her family origins, Raquel talked about her ‘poor’ and ‘peasant’ relatives in the Northeast region of Brazil, who her mother sought to help whenever possible. Her parents followed the steps of the many migrants who, since the 1950s, left rural areas in states like Ceará, Paraíba, and Pernambuco, lured by the prospect of better opportunities in Rio and São Paulo (Lago, 2000; Perlman, 2010). Known as retirantes, the peasant migrants from the Northeast were the implied urban poor in media representations and everyday discourses – often intolerant and racist – in the 1980s and 1990s (O’Dougherty, 2002). Upon their arrival in Rio, Northeasters settled in the more affordable neighborhoods in the North Zone and Baixada Fluminense or in favelas that spread in the city (de Queiroz Ribeiro and Lago, 2001; Lago, 2000).

Although an integral part of Rio’s urban growth, favelas have suffered from stigma since they began emerging in the early 20th century, as former enslaved and propertyless people arrived in the city and raised shanties on the hills without tenure rights or legal authorization, for lack of an alternative within their means (Gonçalves, 2006). As the metropolis expanded from its historic center in opposite directions, inland and along the coastline, land speculation and the symbolic hierarchization of territories ranked South Zone neighborhoods by the beach as the most prestigious and favelas at the bottom, even if they are physically adjacent to wealthy locations (Fernandes, 2011; Lago, 2000; O’Donnell, 2013). Today, favelas defy definition as they have become ever-more heterogeneous spaces regarding building sizes and materials, access to public services, household income, and the legality of dwellings. There are also significant differences in degrees of well-being and resources within and between favelas, but all share the persistent stigma attached to them and their residents (Perlman, 2010). The power of organized crime over neglected territories since the mid-1980s and the rise of gun-related violence in Rio not only increased the sense of insecurity within and around favelas but deepened their stigmatization (Perlman, 2010; Zaluar, 2004).

Revealing Rio’s hierarchy of territories, participants spoke of favelas on the hills of coastal neighborhoods as if they were not a part of the South Zone. Paulo, a 52-year-old waiter, settled in one of them in 1988 when he arrived from a small town in the Northeast. He gradually built the home where he continued to live with his wife and daughter, raising a third floor above the two occupied by his brothers and their families. According to Paulo, most of the inconveniences of living in the ‘community’ in recent years derived from the presence of drug trafficking. Unpredictable shootings created an atmosphere of fear and drew away visitors and services like delivery and ride-sharing drivers. Nevertheless, Paulo believed the favela where he lived was still ‘better’ than other places in the Baixada in terms of safety and granted that its residents suffered less discrimination from employers that preferred hiring people who live closer to the South Zone to pay fewer commute costs – ‘They’re not even thinking about other things, drug trafficking, marijuana, none of that’.

Elsa, a self-employed house cleaner, fulfilled her ‘dream’ of moving from the Northeast to Rio in 2000. She first settled with her husband provisionally in her sister’s place in the Baixada. But, not long after, she separated and moved with her two sons to a neighborhood surrounded by favelas on the hills at the end of a tunnel that leads to the South Zone, considerably closer to her workplaces. She spoke proudly about setting up her first apartment with secondhand furniture she bought or found in the garbage and providing for two children without any help from their father – ‘thank God, I was always hardworking. [. . .] I made it this far’.

When we met, Elsa had just moved to another rented apartment in the same area and purchased herself a brand-new wardrobe and table from a small local shop, noting that major retailers do not deliver to her address. The limits separating favelas and formal neighborhoods recognized as such are often imprecise, and some consider her street to be on the ‘hill’ (of the favela). Recurring gang-related shootings nearby made her life more uncertain and stressful. Hence, her latest dream was to buy a home in a more peaceful location, even if far away from the South Zone, and stop paying rent. Similarly, Paulo’s dream was to have a bigger house ‘outside’ the favela where he could receive more guests and not worry about prejudice or violence.

As our research confirms, favelas are not ghettos since their inhabitants participate in the broader life of the city (Fogarty-Valenzuela, 2022; Scott, 2021), nor are they traps since there is some degree of mobility toward formal housing (Perlman, 2010). However, territorial stigmatization affects the interactions of favela residents with employers, the police, government bureaucracies, and people from recognized neighborhoods (Wacquant, 2008). William recalled a survey that showed 49% of young favela residents prefer not to mention where they live to avoid discrimination (Villela, 2013), admitting he only stopped feeling embarrassed about his origins once he started to receive invitations to give talks about his company and life story. Born into a family originally from the Northeast, William decided to move out of the favela as soon as he could afford to take his parents and sister. The location where they used to reside suffered from an array of problems, from open sewers and drug dealing close by to precarious transportation, electricity, and garbage collection services. He continues visiting relatives who remain in the community but says urban and drug-related issues, like armed dealers and addicts on the streets, only worsened over 10 years.

Since giving up a research job, Raquel, who has a master’s degree, was back in her parent’s house in a conjunto, a social housing complex the state government built in the late 1990s to move families like hers from favelas demolished during the construction of an expressway. Raquel’s brother had already left the conjunto, and she considered doing the same once finding new employment. Although her parents experienced some financial improvement when they first moved there, the conjunto had become the territory of criminal groups, raising feelings of insecurity among residents and restricting their access to services and the broader city life. Raquel, for instance, wanted more freedom to order food to her doorstep, catch an Uber at any time of day, and go partying in other neighborhoods in the evenings. In her conjunto, she had ‘a curfew for everything’. The fact that Raquel also referred to her state-built neighborhood as a favela reveals the lingering territorial stigma (Wacquant, 2008) beset on the resettled families and its translation into the conditions and status of that urban space. Stigmatization leads to and results from flawed or poorly executed policies, government negligence, unplanned constructions, increasing criminality, and outsiders’ perception in a vicious circle that, as Kolling (2019) observes, converts the formal urban projects of conjuntos into favelas.

The advance of drug-trafficking factions and militias was also a concern for Lya, a 29-year-old telecom engineer. She lived with her parents and brother in their two-bedroom apartment in a formal but peripheral North Zone neighborhood, in the same residential complex as her grandmother and other relatives, since she was born. Though her place was conveniently close to a metro station, the neighborhood’s decline under the increasing reach of organized crime made her think about moving. Armed gang members had threatened her and her father when they were driving to the gym early one morning, and their ostensible presence was scaring delivery drivers away. However, Lya did not want to leave her family behind, finding market prices unfavorable for trading their apartment or renting in an equally suitable but safer location – ‘I would like for everyone to leave here because enough is enough. But everything is too expensive [. . .]’.

Enzo, a 27-year-old fitness instructor, was born and raised in the Baixada but had just moved to a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Copacabana, in the South Zone, with his fiancée in 2021. Commenting on the change of address, Enzo expressed immense satisfaction about finding rent within his budget so close to his workplaces, in a neighborhood by the beach, well-served by public transportation, and filled with shops and services. He was, however, annoyed with his friends from the Baixada who had since been calling him a ‘playboy’, a slang for entitled men who do not have to work for their wealth. The label struck him as unfair since he had always worked hard to earn money and pursue his goals, for years waking up early and traveling long hours from his parents’ home in the Baixada to work and getting back late – ‘I never ran away from work. [. . .] I had these dreams of living in a better place, closer to work, and buy whatever I wanted’.

Even if it felt negative, the reaction of friends calling Enzo a ‘playboy’ reveals their perception that relocating from the Baixada to Copacabana means an upward social status change. To some extent, the form of Rio’s urban growth with visible contrasts between favelas and poorer neighborhoods adjacent to formal and wealthier ones resembles the interspersed landscape of Metro Manila in the Philippines, where Garrido (2019) sees that class and housing divides mutually shape one another. The symbolic and material distinctions between municipalities, zones, neighborhoods, and even streets in the metropolitan region of Rio are such that geographic mobility, more than signaling, amounts to social mobility.

Joana, a 63-year-old pensioner and owner of a small soup shop, was living alone in the Baixada in a big house she and her ex-husband, a retired schoolteacher, arduously built for them and their three children. Showing us around with her smartphone camera, she joked the house looked like a ‘work by Gaudí’ because many things were left unfinished over the years for lack of money. Initially, their construction project aimed to guarantee each child could make a home for themselves on each of the floors when they grew up. But the children went to college, got jobs, and became so ‘independent’ and ‘successful’ that they did not need or want to stay in Joana’s house in the Baixada. Her daughter had just bought an apartment in Copacabana, and another son was living in that same neighborhood with his wife. Hence, she had no intention of concluding her past construction plans for the house, preferring to spend her modest earnings on travel. Looking back, Joana thought she and her ex-husband had been silly to dream of leaving a house for their children as if not believing in their potential to succeed – ‘It turns out no one wants to stay here. Everyone left [laughs]’.

Not on the same level: Educational mobility and belonging

Reassessing her spacious but unfinished house in the Baixada in light of her adult children’s achievements, Joana concluded education was the best thing one could leave behind to their kids, not property. All of her three kids went to college; two pursued postgraduate studies. Joana highlighted her past sacrifice to pay for her daughter’s student exchange program, going against her ex-husband’s will, as crucial for her accomplishments – ‘that was the boom in her life’. Likewise, William credited his mobility to his parents’ belief in education, guaranteeing he and his sister never had to work and could focus only on studying despite the family’s limited resources. He passed the competitive university entry exams – the vestibular – in the quota for low-income students; his sister is an alumna of the University for All Program (PROUNI). Their educational mobility was significant, considering their parents did not finish primary school and their grandfather was illiterate.

Education is a relevant factor for debates on class and mobility as it relates to different forms of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986), one institutional that involves the formal acquisition of skills, certificates, and licenses required by society, especially the job market, and another embodied in practices and tastes that mark one’s belonging to particular spaces and groups. Here, we discuss education by analyzing and comparing what interviewees say on the topic, their educational and professional paths, and how they experience class belonging. Many of them see education as a gate toward jobs, higher income, and a comfortable life. However, in some cases, undergraduate or postgraduate education did not immediately guarantee financial improvement or a sense of social mobility. Also, as we found in the examples below, their horizons for possible occupations, lifestyles, and worldviews different from those of their families expanded by attending university and having opportunities their parents did not have. Nonetheless, educational mobility on its own did not make them feel ‘middle class’.

In the 2000s, the Brazilian government started an effort to expand access to higher education (HE) through diverse policies among its strategies to promote the inclusion of lower-income, Black, and Indigenous students, particularly with an understanding that university degrees are prerequisites for accessing better-paying jobs. Addressing the private system, the government implemented schemes offering fiscal incentives for institutions in return for scholarships (PROUNI) and subsidized student loans (FIES); in the public system, affirmative action quotas became the key measure. Such policies sought to balance and expand opportunities for university admission, given the performance evaluation of the vestibular is like a funnel that favors better-prepared students. By 2016, undergraduate enrolment had increased substantially. However, studies suggest the HE expansion was less effective than expected in combating inequalities, since policies did not change institutional models and hierarchies (Balbachevsky et al., 2019) and enabled market concentration through subsidized privatization and deregulated distance learning (Carvalhaes et al., 2022).

Even with the various inclusion policies in effect, studies indicate that the probability of students from higher-income households entering HE is greater across all levels of academic performance and racial groups (Carvalhaes et al., 2023). High academic performance remains the main alternative for students in lower-income strata to enter HE, which leads to the question of their access to good schools, private lessons, and enrichment activities. William, for instance, exhibited high performance since he passed the exam to go to high school in one of a handful of reputable public institutions in Rio. Growing up, he benefited from tutoring and leisure activities provided by NGOs acting in his community, besides receiving a scholarship from an expensive language school for children living in favelas, which allowed him to take English lessons for 6 years. All these learning experiences contributed to his transition into higher education and exceptional journey.

Eyeing the HE entry competition, private school has been a priority for struggling middle-class parents, at least since the early 1990s (O’Dougherty, 2002). In the 2010s, lower-middle-income households drove the expansion of the Brazilian private school system. Some parents see such investment in their children’s education as a path to upward mobility; others consider it primarily as a way to keep their children away from perceived ‘deviant behaviors’ or ‘bad influences’, which they could be exposed to if attending the nearest public schools or spending too much free time in their neighborhoods (Costa Filho and Rocha, 2022). In Rio’s favelas and peripheries, parents and NGOs fear children can be recruited by drug trafficking gangs, which they hope to prevent through enrolment in school and enrichment activities. As Fogarty-Valenzuela’s (2022) work shows, vestibular preparatory courses attracting favela-resident students respond to that fear by presenting themselves with a military aesthetic and promoting discipline as a path toward middle-class lifestyle – formal jobs, safety, leisure, and shopping practices.

When we spoke, Elisa, a 36-year-old babysitter, had all these aspirations and concerns in mind. She believed education would allow her child to pursue her dreams, whichever they were – ‘I tell her that studying is everything’. Elisa never finished her secondary studies but paid for a private school for her daughter until 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic made the family move from the Baixada to a small town outside the RJMR. There, Elisa secured a spot for her daughter in a ‘wonderful’ public school that offered online classes during the health crisis. But, in 2021, her partner found work in the Baixada, and they had to move back. So, Elisa was pondering over what to do about her daughter’s education once in-person classes resumed. She could no longer afford private school fees as the family’s finances were weaker, but she disliked the public options in her neighborhood – ‘Either there’s no teacher, or no water, or no snack, or then illicit things going on’.

In William’s case, educational mobility led him to new habits and tastes and materialized in degrees as much as in financial improvement, more consumption options, and a more prestigious address. However, as our interviews also show, acquiring cultural capital via higher education entry does not necessarily bring about financial or geographic mobility in Rio. A Black favela resident, Ricardo, 34, had training in philosophy and was majoring in physical education as a public university quota student. Growing up, his father’s employment in the military provided the family with financial stability and goods. Their household had appliances, video games, and a car – ‘I was always a person from the favela who had things’. Still, Ricardo chose not to follow his father’s career path. His exposure to humanist knowledge and experiences in college expanded his awareness of social issues, especially the drug war that further marginalizes favela residents and threatens their lives (Zaluar, 2004, 2012; Alves, 2018). He became critical of the military police, parting relations with his family and childhood friends who joined the forces.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ricardo started sharing the rent of a one-bedroom house with a friend. In his terms, his financial situation was in a ‘warning state’, the government’s pandemic emergency aid and university assistance for lower-income students were his main incomes. Yet, he felt his broadened understanding of social matters had ‘improved’ his life. Ricardo also mentioned that his ex-girlfriend from college, a South Zone resident, introduced him to different spaces and people in the city, giving him ‘another perspective on life’. Influenced by her work in video editing, he started watching more films and organizing screenings in favelas. So, the knowledge and relationships that came with public university ‘turned [Ricardo] into a different person’, showing him diverse thoughts, tastes, and ways of living and distancing him from his family and childhood friends, even if he continued living in a favela – ‘I talk to all of them, but I no longer socialize with any of them’.

Educational mobility can lead to differentiation from one’s original circles of kinship and friendship. On the other hand, the lack of specific skills and clashes in formal learning spaces can also make one feel excluded. Interviewees perceived an instrumental and symbolic gap in education between them and South Zone residents or higher-income people particularly with respect to English language skills. Alberto, a 22-year-old bartender living in a ‘favela-like’ area in the historic city center, lamented he did not qualify for a position in a hotel because he did not know English. Since then, he has been trying to learn, using the free version of the Duolingo app while saving to take a course.

Joaquim, 32, grew up in a favela and used to work as a taxi driver, like his father, until the competition against Uber motivated him to finish Law School via PROUNI. In two years, work as a self-employed lawyer had already improved his financial life, enabling him to rent an apartment in a formal neighborhood where he was living with his partner and baby. Looking back at his childhood, Joaquim spoke with awe about how his mother, who had been a retirante and had a deprived childhood, worked hard as a manicurist to provide for him, even paying for him to study English like a ‘playboy’. He still recalled how the unusual presence of the manicurist’s son in the language course bothered one of his mother’s clients, who had a child in the same class. When we explained the project to him, he hesitated to identify himself as part of the ‘new middle class’ despite his studies, degree, and recent increase in earnings.

Lucy, a 48-year-old self-employed beautician, experienced feeling out of place in an English language course. She enjoys living in a roça or rural-like area in the Baixada but prefers working in the South Zone to earn more and expose herself to different lifestyles. She finished school and trained to be a nursing assistant before shifting to beauty work. But, in her view, her mother’s concern with education had been teaching her etiquette – ‘You don’t touch other people’s things, you have manners’. The ‘South Zone middle class’, even if struggling to maintain its status, invested more in their children’s academic education. Lucy thought English was ‘beautiful’ and tried fulfilling her dream of learning it as an adult, paying to attend a language school. However, she quickly quit. As a Black woman and older student, she felt her classmates would look at her with suspicion as if she did not belong there, and that discouraged her – ‘They see that you’re not part of the same level. So, that started upsetting me’. She could have transferred to a branch in the Baixada but lost her motivation.

Even if one has the skills, credentials, and relationships to participate in a professional field (Bourdieu, 1985, 1986) associated with the South Zone or ‘rich people’, such as cinema in Brazil, that does not automatically make them feel like they experienced social mobility. Leandro, 31, considered himself ‘poor’ despite holding a HE degree, working in the arts, having private health insurance, and enjoying the weekend wine. Raised in a lower-income neighborhood ‘at the very end of the North Zone, almost in the Baixada’, he decided to work in a cinema while studying in a public vocational school, carving his way into the field by getting involved with NGOs, taking courses in film schools on scholarships, and forming his professional network with Black filmmakers. His late father had been an electrician in the Navy. During the pandemic, when his freelance jobs in photography and filmmaking became more sporadic, he moved back in with his mother, a retired schoolteacher with an undergraduate degree. His comfort and stability during that period had been largely due to her support. Before the COVID-19 crisis, his jobs had already paid him to travel abroad a few times and earned him enough to afford rent, bills, work equipment, and an iPhone SE. Yet, describing his past and current economic situation, Leandro was unsure if he had experienced any mobility – ‘I think I’m still poor but have more consumption. Can I say I’m middle class? That’s up to you [laughs]’.

Concluding thoughts

Participants’ discourses on their consumption habits and dreams, background, and broader experiences allowed us to identify and analyze different meanings of mobility. By distinguishing them as financial, geographic, and educational mobility, we could understand how these dimensions interact in participants’ journeys, affecting their perceptions of status and life improvement in the context of Rio. Most interviewees noted aspects of their lives that had been improved or believed that they had comforts the poorest do not have but without explicitly recognizing themselves in any class. Some hesitated to identify as middle class, thinking they were not quite there yet or still trailing their way to changing status despite their academic experiences and relatively broader access to consumption. Their hesitancy stems from their lack of homeownership, steady income, or savings, their neighborhoods’ precariousness or low status, and the freshness of personal and family memories of struggle. The few who felt they experienced significant upward mobility had a home and steady earnings or achieved job security. They also moved to a more convenient and prestigious location and had higher education degrees.

In participants’ accounts, the family appears as a reference for self-reflection and differentiation as well as their support network and the beneficiary of their financial mobility, given the implicit commitment to repay. Though studies on class have observed how individuals frame their trajectories and broader family histories in ways that misidentify or downplay privilege and stress merit (Friedman et al., 2021; Khan, 2011), our research found that interviewees who experienced some financial and educational mobility were grateful for their family’s role in their achievements and aware of how much they had improved in terms of economic or cultural capital relative to their parents and other kin. They expressed a moral obligation (Sarti, 1994) to help their parents, siblings, or extended family members, especially in times of need, such as illness or unemployment. Helping means buying groceries, gifting appliances, lending credit cards, and covering bills, among other financial arrangements.

Although a central aspect of early 21st-century financial inclusion policies and the image of the ‘new middle class’ (Klein et al., 2018; Neri, 2012; Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco, 2023), consumption marks mobility and personal achievements by varying degrees, depending on forms of access and categories of goods. Participants attach feelings of accomplishment to moments when they bought, with their money, a desired brand or object, like a Kérastase shampoo or a new rug. They experience household appliances, mobile phones, having a beer, or ordering food as everyday comforts. However, these products and practices alone do not make them feel ‘rich’ or ‘middle class’, especially if consumed vicariously through the family network that supports them. On a higher category of goods, homeownership and travel (for leisure and with their resources) express their aspirations for life improvement and perception of upward mobility, like for the middle classes of the 1980s (O’Dougherty, 2002). Owning a home materializes the economic stability and safety they strive for. The caveat is that the desired property must be in a safe formal neighborhood. Participants mentioned travel even more recurrently as an example of status change or a consumption dream, which resonates with the notion of class mobility as taking on another group’s languages, aesthetics, and lifestyles.

Furthermore, educational mobility contributes to social mobility but does not amount to it alone. Access to higher education brought participants feelings of distinction related to acquired titles, knowledge, tastes, and relationships. In diverse ways, obtaining cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) prompted acts of differentiation from their family and background, like decorating a bedroom with cinema references, moving to a different neighborhood, or even cutting personal ties. Participants highlighted education as a central component for life improvement as objectively measured or subjectively perceived. However, even if educational qualifications are a prerequisite for positions in the job market, they do not convert immediately into financial mobility for all their bearers since that depends on the opportunities and constraints of professional fields and the conditions for one to navigate them.

Crucially, as our interviews show, changing place of residence in Rio can mean social mobility itself due to symbolic differentiations between bordering areas within the metropolitan region. These distinctions produce a hierarchy of territories and their respective residents with nuanced grades from the most prestigious neighborhoods (in the South Zone) to the most stigmatized favelas (Fernandes, 2011; Perlman, 2010). Although there is a degree of educational and financial mobility for residents of favelas and other underprivileged localities, territorial stigma (Wacquant, 2008) keeps them attached to images of poverty, lowbrowism, and criminality unless they change address. So, the problem is not just whether residents of such areas can attain enough means to move; it is the unspoken imperative to do so to overcome discrimination, exercise rights, gain respectability, access better services, feel safer, and live further away from the risks that drug trafficking factions, militias, and the police’s action against them impose. The violence in Rio undermines public policies aimed at reducing inequalities through educational and financial inclusion by reinforcing the vicious circle of territorial stigmatization, adding burdens to everyday life, and concretely threatening lives.

This article examines mobility experiences among residents of Rio de Janeiro who lived through the so-called new-middle-class rise of early-21st-century Brazil. Drawing from qualitative interviews, we explore the interplay between different dimensions affecting perceptions of status change. Increased access to certain consumption practices and education gives their beneficiaries a feeling of life improvement and sets them apart from the poorest. Yet, recognizing the achievement of a higher and ‘safer’ level on the social ladder requires more. Besides limits to converting education into financial security, mobility experiences feel ambiguous or incomplete since they are shaped by one’s place in a family network and unequal urban territories that reflect and reify discrimination.