Financing Poverty

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 vulnerability, embedding financial logics in domestic life. Centering race as a constitutive dimension of urban inequality, Lopes dos Santos argues that the financialization of poverty reconfigures—rather than reduces—inequality. Bridging urban geography and Black geographies, Financing Poverty offers a powerful account of how capital penetrates the margins of the city and reorganizes everyday survival.

Kauê Lopes dos Santos is Professor of Geography at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil. He is author of Ouro por lixo: as inserções de Gana na divisão internacional do trabalho and Africano: uma introdução ao continente.