This post is part of a series on informality in practice, to be published at regular interval on the ATS blog.

n.3
FANTASIA PAULISTA
Or: building citizens, one brick at the time
Brazil is a country with a violent past – a Wild-West kind of violence.
Take Maria da Conceição Pereira Silva, for example. Born in 1945 in Afogados de Sertania, deep in the Brazilian Nordeste, one of her first memories was seeing a bunch of jagunços, thugs with guns, beating her father on behalf of the local fazendeiro.