Financing Poverty: Consumption and Debt Dynamics in Racialized Sao Paulo

This book examines how credit expansion has reshaped everyday life for Black residents of São Paulo’s peripheries, where consumer goods coexist with infrastructural precarity. Drawing on more than a decade of research and 150 interviews, Kauê Lopes dos Santos shows how low-income populations have been incorporated into financial circuits through installment plans, retail credit, and digital platforms. Rather than signaling social mobility, this process produces new forms of indebtedness and...