This article constructs an understanding of the Brazilian middle classes using economic, sociological, and cultural factors. It argues that the so-called new middle class is actually an expanded vulnerable class, and that the middle classes are simultaneously conscious and in denial of injustice toward the lower classes. The argument is based on an accidental biographical ethnography: reinterpretation of a field journal and the use of one person to understand broader trends. The resulting textual product juxtaposes biographical passages with theoretical analysis, deviating from traditional article structures to share the voice of the biographical participant while also critically examining the implications of this voice.

This research note provides a detailed account of the development and implementation of a household survey conducted in 2016 as part of a larger investigation into the lifeways and political subjectivities of Brazil’s “once-rising poor,” the demographic sector comprising poor and working-class people who experienced various forms of socioeconomic mobility in the early twenty-first century. After reflecting on the challenges of maintaining a critical perspective on class labels and relations that were intensely contested at the time, the article introduces the survey sample (n = 1,204), highlighting variables captured. It then establishes the demographic profile, mobility experiences, political values, attitudes, and behaviors of the sample. The portrait that emerges for this sector is one of economic precarity, heterogeneous experiences of socioeconomic mobility (and nonmobility) over the past two decades, and significant alienation from formal politics.

Through shedding light on traditional Pentecostalism in Brazil this article reveals how middle-class people in São Paulo, Brazil, manage disappointment relating to current socio-economic conditions. Ethnographic research on Brazil's oldest Pentecostal church, which preserves an anachronistic style of practice, shows how people embrace a marginal identity and thereby critique social conditions in the country. In stark contrast to newer forms of Pentecostalism, people featured in this paper respond to an ‘anti-prosperity gospel’, in which failures and setbacks are construed as signs of spiritual purity and development. In a country where a ‘new middle class’ is supposedly finding prosperity, this study shows a religiously-oriented way in which people confront the disappointing gap between the promises of neoliberalism and the realities of jobless growth.