Understanding everyday experiences of Vulnerability and Resilience in urban Latin America

She is nearly 50 years old, has a partner, and has three children: two adult daughters and a young son. She lives in a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Santiago. She lives in fear.

When I met Mariana, she was a nine-year-old force of nature. The third of four siblings, she was introduced to me by her younger sister Silvana, six at the time, who, with a serious expression, pointed at her and said “This is Mariana, she is not afraid of anything.”

“This is such a brave thing to do. Do you feel brave?” Upon first arriving in Salvador from their hometown in Rio de Janeiro, Arevik felt they were now free to seek practices to align their body with their vision of self-transformation towards a trans-non-binary individual.

Angie has worked for more than twelve years in the domestic work sector in the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico. She began as a cleaning employee and, over time, moved up to become a cook—a better-paid position that she learned on the job.

In the Valle de Aburrá, a sub-region of the department of Antioquia, Colombia, a diverse group of people meets periodically with a clear purpose: to transform their territory to protect human and environmental health.

Nahomy grew up on the outskirts of El Progreso, Honduras. "Honestly, I spent most of my childhood on the streets, the neighbours used to give us food because my parents didn’t cook," she recalls.

After attending one of the schools in Estación Central for a couple of months, I was finally able to delve deeper into certain themes related to urban space. I entered the field in the role of an analogue photography teacher. Each session included me and roughly eight or nine other students, all between the ages of 12 and 13.

In the early 2010s, Rio de Janeiro was internationally hailed as a model of the “smart city.” Yet, in the shadows of this hyper-connected city, another Rio persisted.

The instructions were: if the location designated for the survey is in a high-risk area, request a relocation from Antônio (the field research coordinator).

If you walk around the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, you’ll quickly realize ageing is not a process that affects everyone equally. Factors like gender, race, and class shape the experiences of people aged 60 and over.

Sara and her sister (aged 7 and 6 respectively) stayed at the casa hogar during the week while their parents worked, her mom cleaned houses, and her dad worked in construction. When I first met Sara in the classroom, some of the children approached me with questions. Others watched from a distance.

“But who would like to live there, along the river?” the engineer asked several times. I worked with the engineer for my fieldwork, but he found it difficult to understand what a human geographer would find out from working with the riverine communities close to the city.

Every morning is the same for Julia. She wakes up around four and opens the water tap. Then comes a wave of anxiety through her body: she never knows if water will come out.