A young peasant woman migrates to Balduíno
Aged 29, Vanessa works as a cleaner at a smart bed and breakfast estab-lishment catering to European and North American tourists who prefer small, off- road places to crowded chain hotel resorts.68 She is single and lives by herself in one- bedroom accommodation in Balduíno. Two years ago she joined an evangelical Christian church and recently many new things have been happening in her life. For the first time Vanessa has a place for herself; she can own things like a laptop, a washing machine and an Android smartphone. The access to digital communication and social media in particular represents to her becoming part of the modern world of consumption and technology – a world that about ten years ago she could only experience through the glamourised lives of soap opera characters.
Vanessa’s story is not very different from those of her neighbours in the settlement. Many grew up as peasants in farms or small family plots, working first at home from the age of four or five (washing, clean-ing and carryclean-ing for younger siblclean-ings) and then croppclean-ing from nine years upwards. Schools in rural areas are often distant and in general Fig. 1.8 Diagram of a typical settlement in the region, separated by the Coconut Road from the gentrified coastal strip and retaining the old
‘villa’ and the recent areas of squatting
structurally poor. As Vanessa reached her teens in the early 2000s, she left the farm to move to a neighbouring small city and become a domestic servant.69 As is often required in this type of job, she slept at the homes of the families who hired her. (Even today Brazilian middle- class homes often include tiny rooms by the laundry area, designed to be occupied by these female servants.) She worked from morning until night washing, cleaning and cooking, as well as looking after the family’s small children. After some years, however, the long hours of work, the lack of privacy, the complaints made when she left the house after work to see friends, the difficulties posited when she considered going back to school at night and various instances of mistreatment she endured eventually piled up;Vanessa began to dream of alternative possibilities of life and work.70
The ticket to a new life arrived from a relative, who described a place near Salvador where there were abundant opportunities of work.
‘There, you are only unemployed if you want to be,’ the relative told her.
This sounded promising, so in 2010 Vanessa quit her job and took a bus to Salvador, travelling from there to the state’s north coastal area. She started living with her relative in Balduíno and working as a baby- sitter, but gradually moved towards formal employment.71
Fig. 1.9 An example of a hotel in which local people work
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The transition Vanessa is experiencing has advantages, but it does not free her from feeling abused and exploited. She now enjoys access to government benefits, for example being entitled to jobseekers’ allowance.
Her employer also provides private health insurance that is often better and more efficient than public health services. She recognises all of these conveniences and has thus remained in the same job for the past four years (Fig. 1.9). However, like others in Balduíno, she will refer some-times to her working conditions as a form of ‘modern-day slavery’. She now has money to rent a home, pay for a gym membership, buy things and to contribute a ‘tithe’ every month (a financial offering) to the church she attends.72 She is continuously in contact with friends and family living near and far. Yet there are still incidents that make her aware of her historical condition of social vulnerability. Having her bag occasion-ally searched as she leaves work – ‘just like a criminal’, she says angrily – brings forth the feeling of humiliation she had working as a domestic servant. Like others working at the same hotel, she defies the authority of owners in various ways, such as eating food that should be only con-sumed by guests. She explains, ‘I am not a lesser person than anybody;
why should I eat a lesser type of food?’
Christianity
73Roman Catholicism arrived during the early years of the Iberian colo-nial presence in the Americas through religious missionaries such as Jesuits. It was the official religion of Brazil until the late nineteenth cen-tury. According to the census, however, the popularity of Catholicism has fallen, from representing 91.8 per cent of the population in the 1970s to 64.6 per cent in 2010. Over the same period the number of Protestants has increased from 5.2 per cent to representing today nearly one- quarter of all Brazilians.74 The numbers projected by the 2010 census indicate that in 30 years Protestants and Catholics will have communities of the same size in Brazil.75
My informal estimate is that between 30 and 40 per cent of peo-ple living in Balduíno are Protestants.76 Yet such statistics only really come to life by walking around the settlement. In this relatively small locality I counted 24 different church organisations in operation.77 These include established groups such as the Assembly of God, one of the oldest Pentecostal churches in the country and the first to arrive in Balduíno in the 1960s, and various others of different sizes, including Baptists, Methodists, Jehovah Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists,
plus a number of neo- Pentecostal churches, the most important of which is the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.78
The religious shift from Catholicism to Protestantism follows the pattern of poor Brazilians relocating from rural areas in the Northeast to the peripheries of cities as mentioned above.79 Protestant Pentecostal conregations consist predominantly of urban, young, female and non- white individuals, who spend less time at school and earn less money than the average population.80 In Balduíno churches help both migrants and the younger generation of locals as they navigate the often challeng-ing and unhappy experiences of movchalleng-ing away from family- based support networks; the need to adapt to living in cities, to urban forms of violence and to different types of work and employment all contributes to the stress.81 In such contexts the adoption of Protestantism enhances the pos-sibilities of forging new social relations and renewing values.82 Conscious of the size and scope of the influence Protestants have gained in Brazil in recent decades, a friend who works as an executive market researcher informally describes such religious organisations as the country’s ‘non- official welfare state’: they provide the most vulnerable with material support as well as immaterial benefits such as care and attention.
Locally, the most successful of these organisations are the Assembly of God, whose local leadership manages around 20 small branches oper-ating in and near Balduíno, and a neo- Pentecostal (originally Baptist) church; the latter follows an aggressive apostolic strategy called Vision G12 that started in South Korea. Both of these more popular churches have up to or around 400 attendees during each of their main weekly services.
In Balduíno, having higher than average purchase power, evan-gelical Christians are buying computers to keep their children at home;
they also pay for them to have extra- curricular activities as they fear the influence of non- Christian values, particularly regarding exposure to sex and drug consumption. But the consequences of the growing pres-ence of evangelical Christianity are not restricted to those who choose to embrace these new forms of religion. Independently of their faith or religious views, young people in general perceive gospel as one of the genres of music they listen to regularly – and it is equally true that young Protestants also follow non- religious pop artists.83 So it is not strange to locals that young men include gospel hits in the music tracks they listen to while drinking alcohol during a barbecue party.84 And while in the past everyone in the settlement participated in candomblé ‘parties’ (which involve ritualistic dance and music, spiritual incorporation, sacrifice of animals, and free food for attendees), today many non- evangelicals
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have stopped going or letting their children participate in these events.
This has taken place following the continuous attacks of evangelical Christians, who systematically denounce Afro- Brazilian faiths as being inspired by the devil.85