Citizenship and inequalities: the everyday life of migrants in the city of São Paulo's periphery

• Grant number: 23/07114-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: April 01, 2024
• End date: March 31, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Bianca Stella Pinheiro de Freire Medeiros
• Grantee: Caio da Silveira Fernandes
• Host Institution: Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento (CEBRAP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Since the 2010's the municipality of São Paulo has been recognized nationally and internationally for the implementation of public policies that aim to foster and expand rights to international migrants. However, when observed from the everyday life perspective a series of obstacles such as language, documents, xenophobia, State bureaucracy, and distance from the public institution has been emerging for the plenty access to these services. Therefore, the research proposal aims to tackle this tension between "the right to have rights" and "the enforcement of the rights". More specifically, I pay attention to the mediation carried out by many formal and informal actors, linking this population to the general aspects of citizenship. As a method the research proposal is based on an ethnographic approach of migrants' trajectories who live in the urban periphery of São Paulo and make use of the Family Social Assistance Service (SASF). The main goal is to identify how the migratory inequalities constitute and reproduce themselves through the universalism of rights principle that is part of the municipality's public policies for migrants. For this, we aim to answer the following questions: What are the roles assumed by SASF in the mediation of migrant rights and inequalities of migrants in the city? Which other mediators are identified in the observation of migrants' everyday life trajectories? Under what circumstances do they operate? How does living in the urban peripheries impact the way migrants experience citizenship? This research proposal intends to contribute to the migration studies literature in two ways: i) to recognize the variety of scales, places, and actors that play a preponderant role in the way migrants negotiate inclusion and marginalization in the city. ii) to expand the field of studies on migration and citizenship from the urban peripheries' point of view. (AU)