Rushing Around

In Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the peripheral youth often describe their lives as a rush (corre ), which represents a departure from long-lasting narratives of “struggle” that characterized previous generations of working-class people. This shift challenges the entrenched chronotope of “progress” underneath the works on experiences of the future for peripheral inhabitants. Drawing on the conditions of possibility of the practical category “artist” and critically exploring the meaning of work for a young, impoverished Black poet who migrated from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro in pursuit of a proper life, this article reflects on temporal and spatial reconfigurations of the enduring issue of upward mobility in the urban peripheries. The corre is a way of establishing agency over the future amid uncertainty, through movements and multiple temporalities, beyond and in between the fixation of autoconstruction, and assumptions associated with the “proper job.” It presents a complex agency over life in which holding one’s place in the city involves intensive and extensive mobility, fostering a sense of continuity while waiting and hoping for opportunities. Upward mobility is perceived as an individual pursuit, whereas togetherness remains a value and a collective strategy to project one’s own agency in joining collectives.