Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maureen O'Dougherty is a Research Fellow at the Institute on Race and Poverty, University of Minnesota.

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"An outstanding book. . . . The first extensive treatment in English of the problems of Brazilian modernity and consumerism."--Richard Wilk, Indiana University

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Consumption Intensified

Duke University Press

Chapter One

Home Ownership, Consumption, and (Re)definitions of Middle-Class Identity

The dream ended. Those who didn't sleep in a sleeping bag didn't even dream. The dream ended. It was heavy, that sleep, for those who didn't dream. -from the song "O Sonho Acabou" [The dream ended] by Gilberto Gil, 1972

Milton told me his situation would have been different if he had been born ten years earlier. Milton was an engineer employed for more than twenty years in a bank that served as the Brazilian government's office of housing financing. Given where Milton worked, it was sad but ironic that he and his wife, Aninha, did not own their home. They lived with their two grade-school-aged children in a rented house in Jardim Bonfiglioli, not one of the south-zone Jardins neighborhoods, but a southwestern suburban area (past Butanta) with two-storied houses on quiet streets. To explain his point about timing, Milton told me of his cousin: also an engineer, he had started his career earlier and came to have a firm with forty employees, a big house in Sao Paulo, a beach house, and a country home. Then, the firm lost during the 1980s crisis, he and one partner opened an antique store in the traditionally exclusive Jardins area, which relied on the labor of the partners' wives. Although this example somewhat contradicts what he was trying to illustrate, Milton nonetheless reiterated that starting ten years earlier, his family could have done well. This set him to recalling the 1970s economic miracle and Brazil's phenomenal growth, and the stagnant 1980s. It was as if he and Brazil could have made it together, but, as in the poem "Miniver Cheevy" by Edwin Arlington Robinson, he had been "born too late."

Perhaps Milton did have a point. Consider Joao, a graduate in civil engineering, about ten years Milton's senior, who built an ever more successful career in banking, most recently with Citibank. He lived with his wife, Wilma, a homemaker, and two college-bound daughters in a luxury apartment in Vila Nova Conceicao, the neighborhood of Sao Paulo then boasting the highest real-estate values. Joao repeatedly noted with satisfaction that graduates in the economic miracle period (1968-73) of the dictatorship enjoyed great ease getting jobs. "My whole class graduated employed. One could even choose jobs. The demand for educated professionals was great.... It was a golden age, the whole decade of the '70s." He later added, "We passed through a black political period, in an exuberant economy." I excluded this family from my study, but kept in contact with them for they were helpful in providing an outside perspective. Joao's high income, the family's living conditions, and his and Wilma's unfaltering optimism provided a usefully clear contrast to the middle-class people in my study.

This chapter introduces the question of Brazilian middle-class identity through discourse, first through discussion of informants' homes: those they owned, were paying for, were hoping to buy or to sell. I then turn to informants' explicit self-definition of the middle class and compare it to the media's. The final section considers unsolicited informant criticisms of the homes and consumption of others. This choice of introduction to some families in the study is doubly motivated: indeed, the commentaries and stories about consumption and homes were chosen because this was how these middle-class Brazilians (in a display of commonality) defined middle-classness. Although family history might be the more usual method of introduction, the recollections of my informants, often first- to third-generation immigrants (from Portugal, Italy, Japan, Spain and beyond), were lacking in detail, attesting perhaps to instability. When instead we turned to their homes, to their discourse on consumption and that of others, I received abundant description and stylistic qualities that allowed me to situate these families, if only partially, in the context of the economic crisis.

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

Irene and Heitor

Formerly a nurse, Irene was an active secretary for her husband, Heitor, a doctor. They had three young children and were living in an apartment in Vila Madalena bought in 1983 with government housing financing. Irene's buoyant good spirits were matched by her ironic humor, displayed from the very beginning. At our first meeting, Irene played on the etiquette of offering refreshments with a set formality, whether from a white, gilded-rim porcelain demitasse coffee service on a silver tray covered with a lace doily or from a plastic variant. She, too, offered me a beverage, but informed me impishly that it would be served on "Cica crystal," that is, recycled jelly glasses (the standard glassware of the poor). Walking to the kitchen, she tossed back that it would not be served on a tray either. She also reported that when he heard about our interview, her husband, Heitor, was horrified that it was to take place at their home. "Nessa porra toda?!" he exclaimed (the translation, "In all this mess?" doesn't capture the crudeness of the term porra). Later on, Irene told me without any drama, just with sheer energy, about their seventy-six-square-meter apartment (a mid-range size compared to those of other families in this study): "We are desperate to leave. As you can see, we don't fit inside it. As you entered, you could see the bookcase with things on top. The bedrooms are full of piles. We don't fit in here. But we can't get out of here either. The investment would be too high. We just have this apartment as capital. With the expenses of schooling-probably with that money we could make monthly payments on a new apartment. But I prefer to stay here and keep the children [at a school] we think is better."

Among the twenty-four families of the study, all but seven already owned a home, and thus had attained the essential status and means of building middle-class culture (see G. Velho 1980; DaMatta 1985; Frykman and Lofgren 1987; Blumin 1989; Wilk 1989; Halle 1993; and Colloredo-Mansfeld 1994). For most, homes had been acquired during the dictatorship (1964-85), a time of rapid economic growth, increase in middle-class employment for both men and women, and broader consumer opportunities. Almost all long-term, unchanging home owners told me, as if paraphrasing each other, that they were lucky to have acquired their homes when they did (often as many as fifteen years before), for they would never have been able to do so since the crisis. The stories of the next two home-owning families show that Brazil's miracle and crisis allowed for-even favored-some unexpected developments.

Maria do Carmo and Jose Claudio

Maria do Carmo, an immigrant from the Azores, started working at age eighteen. She taught for ten years, then stopped after having her fourth child. (This family had the most children in the study.) Jose Claudio built up a successful private practice as an obstetrician-gynecologist. They were living in a huge apartment (four bedrooms, five bathrooms) in Paraiso, an upper-middle-class neighborhood of the Jardins distinguished for being very close to the main uptown commercial avenue, the stately Avenida Paulista. To follow Jose Claudio's story, please note that correction refers to monetary correction, or increases in salary, savings, or prices...