Living and Dying in So Paulo

There is a saying in Brazil: Mosquitos are democratic: they bite the rich and the poor alike. Why then is bad health, from violence to respiratory disease and malaria to dengue, dispersed unevenly across difference social and national groups? In Living and Dying in So Paulo, Jeffrey Lesser focuses on the Bom Retiro neighborhood to explore such questions by examining the competing visions of wellbeing in Brazil among racialized immigrants and policymakers and health officials. He analyzes the fraught relationship between Bom Retiro residents the state and healthcare agencies that have overseen community sanitation efforts since the mid-nineteenth century, drawing out the connected systems of the built environment, public health laws and practices, and citizenship. Lesser employs the concept of residues to outline how continuing historical material, legislative, and social legacies structure contemporary daily life and health outcomes in the neighborhood. In so doing, Lesser creates a dialogue between the past and present, showing how the relationship between culture and disease is both layered and interconnected.