The labor of coexistence: urban rats and health inequalities in Rio de Janeiro

This article discusses the formation of the multispecies home through interactions among humans, rats, and infrastructures in domestic spaces in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Building on ethnographic observations and interviews in Nova Esperança, a complex of informal housing built on the ruins of a defunct steel factory, it traces how rats, through their disruptive presence, participate in the (un)making of the home. More specifically, it explores how rats’ incursions trigger forms of infrastructural labor that materially and symbolically shape the home. Residents engage in ongoing practices of sealing holes, improvising barriers, and monitoring rooms to contain rats and mitigate the health risks associated with their presence. We show how these efforts to counter institutional neglect and infrastructural abandonment paradoxically reproduce inequalities by normalizing the individualized responsibilities placed on residents to secure health and habitability. The article further demonstrates how this labor is deeply gendered, embedding pest management within the everyday work of social reproduction. In doing so, it expands understandings of the multispecies home beyond Western epistemologies of entanglement, foregrounding human–animal encounters forged through infrastructural precarity and uneven exposure to urban inequalities, and illuminates how residents labor to make the uninhabitable habitable amid unwanted cohabitation with urban rats.