‘FARE MONEY’ STORIES: Transportation and Everyday Practices in the Peripheries of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This article contributes to ongoing debates on Southern urbanisms by arguing that taking money seriously—as a practical, moral and material issue and as an integral part of the production of infrastructures—can offer us new insights into the urban experience among the racialized poor in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using an ethnographic methodology, I explore ‘fare money’ stories shared by poor black poets, revealing the ways they invent new socialities—ways of living and being—and reshape everyday formations of urban collective lives. I argue that the experience of obtaining transportation tickets among the racialized poor is necessarily a collective one. In their case, transportation usages are anything but stable or uniform. They involve transitory negotiations and calculated mobilization of relations, the conversion of money, moralities, timing and knowledge of infrastructural spatialities. Moreover, everyday practices to enact fare money engender values and order, positioning it as a materiality that mediates between the legal, illegal, formal and informal, all of which are intertwined in the production of infrastructures. This analysis reveals the quality of an urban experience that is persistently precarious, multifaceted and unstable.