Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil

Abstract

The ideologues of Brazil's industrialization have long advanced home ownership as a recipe for disciplining the work force. They argue that it brings social stability and moral development to the "dangerous classes." Over the last 50 years, however, millions of workers have become home owners through a radicalizing process called autoconstruction (autoconstrucdo), in which they build their own houses in the urban hinterland under precarious material and legal circumstances. These conditions politicize them, becoming core issues of grassroots organizations and social movements. At the same time, autoconstruction is a domain of symbolic elaboration about the experience of becoming propertied and participating in mass consumer markets, in which both ruling-class and working-class ambitions for developing new social identities intersect. This elaboration occurs in the context of what is for most autoconstructors their greatest lifetime project: the transformation over decades of an initial shack of wood or concrete block into a dream house-a finished, furnished, and decorated masonry home.