Living and Dying in São Paulo

Jeffrey Lesser is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University. He is the author of A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980 and Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil, both published by Duke University Press.

• A Long Set of Acknowledgments  xiAn Introduction: Selling a Gun  11. Naming a Death  312. Bom Retiro Is the World?  593. Bad Health in a Good Retreat  804. Enforcing Health  1025. A Building Block of Health  1306. Unliving Rats and Undead Immigrants  163A Conclusion: Light and Dark in a Saintly City  195Notes  201Bibliography 249Index  295

“Living and Dying in SÃo Paulo is methodologically innovative, conceptually powerful, and engagingly written. Jeffrey Lesser’s book has rare precision and creativity. Not only does he give an insightful reading of place and people, he also makes a bold case for historians to adopt new approaches and for those in the social and biomedical sciences to pose questions historically. This is the kind of writing I am sure most historians-myself included-wish they could do.” - Jerry Dávila, author of (Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950–1980) “Drawing on historically grounded and community-based research on public health in SÃo Paulo’s Bom Retiro neighborhood, Jeffrey Lesser outlines the close relationship between public health programs and racialized anxieties directed at poor Black and immigrant communities to show how class stigmatization and ethnic stereotyping have complicated official efforts to effectively engage with the community. Timely and urgent, Living and Dying in SÃo Paulo is a superior work of scholarship by a leading historian of Brazil.” - Christopher Dunn, author of (Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil)