The Afterlife of Rio’s Dump: Trajectories of Labor in Brazil’s Marvelous City

• In Event: Work at the Margins of Neoliberal Latin American Economies: Resistance, Resilience, Innovation

Abstract

In June 2012, what was at the time the largest garbage dump in Latin America closed. Located in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this dump had been the workplace for several thousand urban poor who collected and sold recyclables for a living. This paper traces the aftermath of this closure, considering what it means to lose work outside the context of regular employment. Though the end of a livelihood that is brought about by the closure of a garbage dump stands out as a singular event, I explore how this loss of work is part of a larger, ongoing process of privatization in Rio de Janeiro that has eroded the possibilities of self-employed labor for urban poor. Many of those who collected on the dump, for example, had previously worked as street vendors prior to neoliberal campaigns in the 1990s that policed unlicensed vendors as a way to bring “order” to public space. Taking a longitudinal perspective that draws on over a decade of ethnographic research, the paper follows the lives of workers from the dump as they create new livelihoods in Rio’s periphery. These trajectories show how urban poor must shuffle between various kinds of self-employment, suggesting that what are often studied as discreet livelihoods, such as waste recycling and street vending, need to be examined for the ways they interrelate within the course of a single life. These trajectories also complicate both celebratory and critical accounts of Brazil’s reduction in poverty and inequality in recent years.

Author

• Kathleen M Millar, Simon Fraser University