PUBLIC POLICIES AND THEIR AFTERLIVES: WORTHINESS AND HOUSING CITIZENSHIP IN BRAZIL

Economic and social policies paved the way for inequality alleviation and wellbeing improvements in the lives of millions during the 2000s in Brazil. Drawing from ethnography conducted among recipients of the housing program Minha Casa, Minha Vida [“My House, My Life”], this article examines the ways public policies intersect with upward mobility. Charting the public and private trajectories of dona Hilda [Mrs. Hilda] – a 97-year-old poor black woman living in the periphery of Porto Alegre – I argue that mobility arising from within the widened scope of state interventions produced multiscale alignments between local politicians, marketers, planners, community leaders, and desiring citizens. To navigate this political, economic, and communitarian terrains, dona Hilda engaged in a laborious work for housing citizenship and worthiness that converted her into the program’s exemplarycharacter. Unraveling the moral boundaries at the juncture of discourse, history and subjectivity, the cartography of subjective fragments is best suited to explore the lingering afterlives of public policies in present-day Brazil.