Carolina Maria de Jesus

Born in Sacramento, Minas Gerais, in 1914, Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914, Sacramento, MG – 1977, São Paulo, Brazil) moved in 1937 to São Paulo, where she worked as a housemaid and scrap paper collector. A voracious reader, she kept diaries and engaged in various sorts of writing (fiction, theater plays, short stories, songs, poems and proverbs) to record her everyday experiences as a scrap collector, her impressions about the city, and even her desire to change her life through writing. With an intense and continuous production, throughout her life the author filled 140 notebooks, totaling 4,500 pages.

A resident of the Canindé Favela, which arose in the context of the urban reforms of the 1940s, in 1958 Maria de Jesus made contact with the young journalist Audálio Dantas, who was writing a report about the expansion of the favelas in the city of São Paulo. Dantas decided to publish an article about her diaries, which was very well received by the journal’s readership. Two years later, Carolina’s writings were compiled in a book under the title Quarto de despejo [The Garbage Room] thrusting her into the limelight. For the author, the favela is the city’s “quarto de despejo” [a small back room for storing garbage before it is taken out] because “in 1948, when Dr. Prestes Maia began to urbanize the city of São Paulo, the poor people who were living in the cellars were cast out into the damp of the night”. In her texts, she evinces the awareness of her own life and the constant desire to transform it.

  1. Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
  2. Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
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