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By Root 1686 0

rates during the 2000s was due not primarily to police enforcement or gang organization but to economic development. The emergence of legitimate jobs in the favelas encouraged thousands of gangsters to abandon the life. “They went into crime, but there was an attitude of ‘I don’t want this destiny for my son.’ You never had an ideology of maintaining this way of life—it was just a circumstance the second generation found itself forced into. It felt like a prison for them. There was no self-valorization. The third generation is much more integrated into the economy and the culture of the city. The transportation, the jobs in the city, the hip hop music movements—these gave them a past and a tradition, an ability to talk about their roots and their future. You always hear them saying, ‘I come from village roots, I come from slaves, native communities, and I have no interest in dying before I’m 25, because I’m a Paulista’ [São Paulo citizen]. They’re creating a new identity.”

The children of Pedro and Denise Magalhães have no sense of fear or desperation: They are aspirational teenagers of São Paulo, attached to the music and culture of Jardim Angela but utterly unconcerned with the economics or folkways of migration or the battle that was required to give them normal lives. Looking over the string of apartment towers that she will soon call home, I ask 17-year-old Kassia about the prospect of living in a high-tech castle of former neighbors, eight stories up: Does she look forward to the view? “No,” she tells me, “it’s not such a great view. There’s a park, but there are favelas in the way.”

This is fundamentally a book about social mobility. The move from village to city, we have seen, is always a calculated effort to raise a family’s living standard, income, and quality of life, using the arrival city as its main instrument. Urban poverty, despite its crowding and frequent humiliations, is an improvement on rural poverty, and no arrival-city resident considers poverty anything but a temporary necessity. But the creation of an arrival city is only the first step in a journey planned carefully by the migrant. Nobody invests their entire life, and a generation’s income and peace, simply to move from one form of poverty to another. The residents of arrival cities do not consider themselves “the poor” but rather successful urbanites who happen to be passing through a period of poverty, perhaps for a generation.5

The arrival city, if it is to function at all, must create members of a middle class: Families with enough earnings and savings to start businesses and employ others, to own and improve dwellings, to send children to university, to have a sustainable quality of life capable of moving them, and their neighbors, beyond merely surviving. An arrival-city middle class is important for a number of reasons. It creates social and political stability, because the middle class ties the neighborhood to the institutions of the wider city and thereby opens a pathway to something other than crime, marginal informal-economy employment, and dependency. The presence of an arrival-city middle class shows new arrivals and their children that the process of migration is not a journey into perpetual injustice, that sustainable prosperity is available to those willing to study and invest. It tends to generate employers and political leaders within the arrival city, improving the quality of life for others. And research has shown that the presence of a middle class raises living standards for those neighbors who remain poor.6 The economist Steven Durlauf has shown that a middle class, even a small one, within a poor community can generate “neighborhood feedback effects” in which investments in the higher education of children become a behavioral norm.7 And, significantly, the presence of a middle class within the arrival city helps improve the standards of living in the originating villages, financing non-agricultural industries in rural areas and creating a parallel rural middle class. By equalizing village and city, the middle-class arrival