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The ordinary that trusts and distrusts: aid and solidarity networks in a Special Shelter for the Elderly People in São Paulo, Brasil

Natalia Negretti

Résumés

Ce texte est le développement thématique d'un projet de recherche doctorale achevé, dont l'objectif était de comprendre l'émergence d'un sujet politique dans la ville de São Paulo : « les personnes âgées sans domicile fixe ». Le parcours analytique de la recherche s'est basé sur l'articulation des politiques publiques et sociales de cette même ville, qui ont donné naissance à un type spécifique d'établissement public : un centre d'hébergement spécialisé pour personnes âgées (CAEI). Ainsi, l'article aborde les conditions d'accueil institutionnel, le sans-abrisme des résidents interrogés dans le cadre de l'étude, et la relation entre les réseaux de soutien et la méfiance envers l'institution.

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Introduction

  • 1 Veia arada: velhices e situações de rua, uma etnografia (2023). The research was funded by Coordena (...)
  • 2 On this occasion, I will sometimes use the acronym of the public institution, “Centro de acolhida e (...)
  • 3 It's worth mentioning that not long afterwards the visits became interlocutors.

1This text seeks to address the thematic developments of a completed doctoral research1 whose aim was to understand the emergence of a political subject in the municipality of São Paulo: “the elderly person living on the streets”. To a large extent, the analytical path of the research was based on the articulation of public and social policies in the same municipality that led to a specific type of public facility: Centro de Acolhida Especial para Idosos (CAEI) - Special Shelter for the Elderly People2. Visits to this institution and dialogue with the inhabitants and staff began simultaneously with the start of the ethnography, which took place between 2016 and 20193.

2In that research, I sought to understand governmentality in the articulation of policies around ageing and homelessness, focusing on institutionalization processes and movements involving spaces for welcoming older people and homelessness. Its general objective is to understand how "seniors living on the streets" are signified in contemporary public policies and how these policies leave their mark on the trajectories of people assisted as “elderly people living on the streets” in public facilities—trajectories which also go beyond administrative categorization.

  • 4 The official name of SMADS did not include the phrase "homeless". However, in the city of São Paulo (...)

3The primary methodological strategy was to carry out an ethnography in a shelter for the elderly people living on the streets, named officially by the city of São Paulo as Centro de Acolhida Especial para Idosos (CAEI) – Special Shelter for Elderly People4 and in the aforementioned doctoral research with the pseudonym Estação Sentinela, which was managed by a non-governmental institution in partnership with the Municipal Secretariat for Development and Social Assistance (SMADS) in the city of São Paulo. With attention to forms of management at the institution based on internal rules and moralities, wrapped in conventions around gender, age, class, race and sexuality in everyday life, special attention was given in ethnography to the exercise of reconstructing the trajectories of the interlocutors, their movements between different institutions and the relations between care and control that were outlined in these paths. In the ethnography it became noticeable that social assistance policies, other city policies, and those of other federative entities, were intertwined, suggesting different meanings and memories about old age and situations of homelessness within the scope of State action.

4Such entanglements led to an additional methodological strategy, which was the investigation of the socio-historical processes that linked old age, streets, and prisons since the days of slavery, to problematize the idea that the encounter between old age and street situations is an absolutely new social phenomenon. In this way, when dealing with the simultaneity of processes of “welcoming” and “withdrawal” in terms of State policies, the study points out that if the problem is not new, the treatment given to it is.

5As a binomial, welcoming-withdrawing alludes, among other issues in the relational acts of welcoming and withdrawing, to the fact that if the first process is preponderant in the recognition that establishes a public institution and transforms the “elderly person in a street situation” into a subject of rights, the second continues to produce situations of homelessness. It is important to mention that the results of the research were organized into two volumes, one with the written thesis and one with visual material created during the fieldwork for sharing and dialogue, in order to offer other ways of approaching the interlocutors and their daily lives shared with the researcher.

6This article is based on volume I. Furthermore, on this occasion the material to be presented focuses decisively on ethnography and not on the documentary and historical material also present in the investigation in terms of methodological analysis. I will present some of the results linked to the period spent with interlocutors at the institution, since we had meetings and conversations not only there, with the aim of contextualization and with the intention of contributing to the dossier with regard to some of the issues addressed by the organizers.

7The main challenges faced by the elderly in the CAEI are structured by precariousness in multiple directions, while homelessness is linked to the aging process and the old age stage. In economic terms, it is important to mention that none of the interlocutors in the study, even if they had a pension, could afford to pay rent or continue to live in their own home. In addition, the alternative of living in a pension, where it would be possible to have a private room, was not something most of the interlocutors wanted. The lack of adequate resources to meet their specific needs must be understood in terms of both materialities and immaterialities. In addition, there are issues related to invisibility and stigmatization, which make it difficult to recognize others and oneself both as elderly people living on the streets and as people who also have rights, not only with regard to age and old age, but also with regard to living on the streets. Interaction with public policies is often limited, resulting in care that doesn't cover all their demands, both objective and subjective, in a comprehensive way: from not attending psychotherapy sessions and the few activities offered at the E.S. to difficulties in caring for them in terms of not only their expectations, but also social ones.

8On this occasion, from a qualitative perspective, with an emphasis on ethnographic memory, I will focus on theEstação Sentinela and on support and solidarity networks among elderly people classified by the public social assistance policy as "self-sufficient"—in other words autonomous—who lived in the institution during the research period.

The Estação Sentinela in a socio-historical context

9To consider homelessness as a global phenomenon, as the United Nations officially delineates homelessness and recognizes its local arrangements, is to recognize that this phenomenon is also marked by social and economic inequalities, linked to multiple dimensions, such as life expectancy, food and security in the Global North and the Global South.

10The Estação Sentinela was inaugurated by the Municipal Social Assistance Secretariat (SMADS) in 2009 and at the time of the ethnography it was managed by a catholic institution linked to the Municipal Social Assistance Secretariat through an agreement.

11The institution was opened as a Centro de acolhida especial para idoso (CAEI) - Special Shelter for the elderly - , one of the Centros de Acolhida Especial (CAE) - Special Shelter , which are part of the "special protection" services of the public social assistance policy in São Paulo. In one of the inauguration news items, the municipal department of assistance and social development presented the aforementioned CAEI as a "new concept of housing for the elderly (men and women), users of the social assistance network" and as "the first facility adapted to serve self-sufficient people".

12In Brasil, social assistance has its major milestone in the 1988 Constitution and the redemocratization process. Faleiros (2014) points out: "from the 1970s, among others, capitalism also financed the management of prisons and shelters.” The author also reminds us that "the segmentation of the public served also follows social norms, such as the priorities for whether men or women, children or the elderly, according to the pressures and acknowledgments promoted by social forces" (Faleiros, 2017, page 708

13Longer than the inauguration date of the Estação Sentinela and the 1988 constitution, the phenomenon of homelessness in Brasil, from more than one scientific perspective, is characterized as a product of historical inequality at the national level. The perspectives consider social and economic inequalities and a historical panorama linked to slavery, abolition and its legacies (Moreira, Cavalcante & Ferreira, 2021) and coloniality (Negretti, 2025).

  • 5 I'm referring to the aforementioned thesis (NEGRETTI, 2023) and the article Até onde a Memória (que (...)

14On this and other occasions5, I emphasize that old age on the streets in the country is not a new phenomenon, but it has taken on new contours and transformations in contemporary times. In this way, understanding old age and street situations in Brasil from a historical perspective is, in addition to being essential, an antidote to the modus operandi of “old stories about novelties and/or new phenomena”, which makes it possible to problematize the idea of “novelty” and foster the important notion of transformation. Overcoming old stories about old age and homeless people as a new issue starts from the same consideration of social memory around processes of long-lasting inequality. It must therefore take into account centuries-old colonialism and enslavement in Brasil. Social services and social movements, as producers of knowledge, are important in many ways and, as well as being fundamental to the consolidation of social awareness around the rights of the homeless population, they also operate in a didactic way by relating the phenomenon of homelessness, capitalism and the category of work. It is worth mentioning that the arrangements between this political-economic system and this category are not watertight either.

  • 6 According to Jane Cruz Prates, Flavio Cruz Prates and Simone Machado (2011) “Being in a street situ (...)

15 Contemporaneously in this country, old age has been highlighted in the process of rualização [rualization]( PRATES; PRATES.; MACHADO, 2011)6 that continues. The elderly homeless population and the visibility of the “elderly homeless person” have been gaining ground on the social assistance agenda in the municipality of São Paulo since the early 2000s. The elderly population and the homeless population in the municipality have a large place on the same agenda, which is increasingly politically linked to the fundamentals of human rights. As a set of international law norms, these can simultaneously refer to notions of difference, inequality, individuality, collectivity, justice and morality (Sousa, 2001). The notion of citizenship in Brasil was also given impetus by the 1988 Constitution and the Organic Law on Social Assistance (1993). At the same time, human rights began to shape the notion of vulnerability in the management of populations.

16Aging and the homeless population in the socio-welfare vulnerability agenda is a journey through the structures of contemporary rights (Sousa, 2001) based on the historicity of each theme. The category of work has been taken as central in public analyses of these populations. Thus, analyzing public agendas around these themes is also a journey through the different strategies aimed at managing certain populations, which differ over the course of life, which can be identified as governmentality strategies. Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality as a form of power allows the analysis of a “set of institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations and tactics that aim to exercise this very specific form of power, which has as its main form of knowledge the population, political economy and, through essential technical instruments, security devices” (Foucault, 1979, p. 291) and “the way in which individuals are directed and the way in which they conduct themselves” (FOUCAULT, 2021, p. 31).

17In this way, the CAEI was a key-place (França, 2010) for understanding policies aimed at the elderly and homeless population, institutions located in the social assistance sector; intergenerational relationships and, as the focus of this text intends, the power of the ordinary for understanding support networks and relationships marked by trust and distrust between elderly people and between elderly people and professionals at the aforementioned shelter.

18Understanding the Sentinel Station as a housing institution for homeless elderly people, where help and solidarity circulated, as well as trust and distrust, means understanding support networks as productions and relationships of care. In this way, the CAEI is an institution that also reveals territorialities not only of old age in social assistance but also of care, that is, of a web of production between care, old age and social assistance.

19The bibliography on ageing in the last years has been strongly configured with regard to care. Kathleen Woodward (2016) approaches this issue from the perspective of transnational flows and the idea of Public Secret as a key to pulsing the visibility of these two segments of an order that the author calls global care chains. In these and from Estação Sentinela, Fisher and Tronto's (1990) consideration remains powerful; the authors argue that Caring is social and conflictual:

we need an understanding of caring that allows for contradictions and encompasses the whole range of human activities that serve to sustain us […] On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (FISHER; TRONTO, 1990, p. 39-40).

20As we will see later the understanding of care, as a social practice, in social assistance raises many questions. Care and Social Assistance, although theoretically more separate than linked, is themed by Vicente de Paula Faleiros (2013) based on the notion of public care, which dialogues with the perspective of Human Rights:

"It is assumed, from this perspective, that the foundation of care is human rights, as a universal standard of human dignity. It is expressed in the social protection system. For example, the social assistance system must be structured to enforce these rights, resulting from political pacts, laws and norms, according to the correlation of forces in society organized in the legal-political superstructure in the rule of law, configuring protected citizenship (FALEIROS, 2013, p. 85).

21At the Estação Sentinela, care and social assistance services usually met and were accompanied by another vital dimension for and common to the users of that service: old age.In the next section, I will present the CAEI and, from there, one section about trusts and distrusts in aid and solidarity networks.

The Estação Sentinela - day to day and coexistences

  • 7 Amarílis was the only interlocutor who told me that she had lived on sidewalks in different parts o (...)

22Estação Sentinela (E.S) was configured as a Centro de Acolhida Especial para Idosos (CAEI) - Special Shelter for the Elderly People for the elderly people in homeless situation. At the time of the survey, there were 100 vacancies; on average, during the ethnographic study period, it consisted of thirty-five to forty women and around sixty men. Among the inhabitants, there was a wide age range; from 60 years old, the legal age for elderly people in Brasil and other developing countries, but without an age limit. In this sense, it is worth mentioning that among the group of interlocutors of the study, during the field period, ages ranged from 60 to 85 years old. Most of the study participants were born in the city of São Paulo and/or had lived in that municipality for a long time, that is, before they became elderly in age and legal terms; they grew old in the municipality. Regarding the length of time living on the streets, most had been homeless for around ten years and only one participant7 reported having spent a large part of her life living on the streets, sidewalks and porches. The other participants had been living in regular shelters and/or shelters for the elderly since the beginning of their homelessness journey.

  • 8 In short, in Brasil, "preto" and "pardo" refer to skin color categories, while "negro", as a broade (...)

23There were posters in the CAEI stating that racism is a crime. This was the only discriminatory practice publicly prohibited by the institution. Racism was present at CAEI in various forms and in different manifestations. An elucidation of this presence can be found in some ethnographic phenomena that I will briefly present. From plots of fights between residents that included racist insults and room changes and possibilities of expulsion from CAEI, there were silences and resentments in sequence. Luara and Salgueiro, the interlocutors, did not present themselves as “preto”, “pardo” or “negro”8 at the beginning of our conversation, but as time went by they mentioned racism as an issue at CAEI and in the world - she, during the ethnographic fieldwork, he, with emphasis only after the delivery of the study; Valquíria, also an interlocutor - accused of racism during the field period and who would be expelled from the Sentinel Station, but requested her own institutional departure shortly before - presented an ambivalent relationship with the marker of race, from uttering racist remarks to a roommate to not declaring herself racially while at the same time telling a story that articulated race, old age and aging, and beauty standards.

24Although other social markers of difference were also not explicitly reported by each resident who participated in the research, it is important to mention that the institution, like many others - linked to the homeless population and the elderly or not - had a cisheteronormative structure.

25Not all residents presented, at least publicly, drug addiction problems. On the contrary, presenting oneself as a smoker and/or alcohol user - the only substances discussed and, in this sense, tolerated among residents, since others, if used, were a matter of secrecy - was a challenge to sociability and also a facilitator. There were a specific number of smokers and regulars at a bar below the institution, as well as on the sidewalk. However, just as prevalent were stories about "not taking care of oneself" and "being irresponsible" that also came from residents of the institution.

26The use or not of substances in some lives was not an issue, but in others it shaped approximations and/or distances and made solid moral values. "Psychiatric disorders" and/or, according to the emic term, "head problems" were not presented or exposed frequently by service users when referring to themselves, but the same did not happen when the reference was to someone else. In this sense, having or presenting a detailed issue such as mental health fragility often creates plots of gossip, stigma and prejudice. These two topics were definitely mentioned more as accusations. When they were a reason for compassion for others, they were even silenced as a form of respect.

27The term self-sufficient, elucidated in the public announcement of its inauguration (on the SMADS website), was related to the idea of autonomy and functionality, concerning international parameters of healthy ageing, such as those disseminated by the World Health Organization. Thus, in an inauguration project, the foundation of Estação Sentinela was ideally placed - as in the projects - as a possibility for those who had the functionality and autonomy preserved, in contrast to the public in Long Stay Institutions for the elderly, whose entry reference is some degree of loss of autonomy; whose admitted frameworks are cognitive or physical. However, what we will see is that self-sufficiency is more fluid. And it was also in this context that the networks of help were established in the institution, while the rumors often referred to the daily life around the institution and relations with the employees, a topic we'll see below.

28The relationship with those served by the institution was established through internal regulations and a service provision contract, which stated in item 1 – “Identification of contracting parties: User in a situation of social vulnerability”. The document then continued with a space for the name of the elderly person and the address of the public facility. Clause I indicated to the person signing it:

The purpose of this contract is to provide the service at (Special Shelter for the Homeless Elderly - Estação Sentinela) intended for collective homes of elderly people aged 60 or over, with or without family ties, in conditions of freedom, dignity and citizenship, in accordance with the provisions of Law No. 10,741 of October 1, 2003 – Elderly Statute.

29In clause 2, the text stated that the “objective of this contract was to provide free services to the elderly in a situation of social vulnerability, in accordance with ordinances 46/201077 and 47/201078/SMADS”. Regarding this service, it is pertinent to highlight that the Compassion Agreement had a Program in which people who had previously been homeless – I sometimes heard the term “ex-homeless” – became volunteers and possibly employees in several shelters managed by this Institution. Thus, the institution sheltered elderly people in “social vulnerability” while at the same time employing some of the elderly people who passed through it as volunteers or employees.

  • 9 The extinct modality for elderly people in homeless situation , Casa-Lar, was structured in an arch (...)

30The differences between [Common] Shelter (CA) and Special Shelter (CAE) were defined by SMADS in terms of audience. In addition to Special Shelter for the Elderly (CAEI), during the Study period there were also shelters for families and women. The differences heard in conversations and interaction with interlocutors and professionals at CAEI were uninterrupted care, more space for storing belongings, lower turnover of residents, shared rooms, but with only up to three residents, and bathrooms in each room. Furthermore, as I heard in conversations about other facilities that interlocutors had been to and observed during some relationships with interlocutors who extended to visit them in other institutions, intergenerational coexistence in Centros de Acolhida [comum] (CA) - Common Shelter and Centros de Acolhida Especial (CAE) - Special Shelter, such as the one for Women that Amanda lived in for a few months, was a challenge. This same challenge was narrated prior to the study and such periods of relationship, by Roberta Boaretto (2005) when studying Casa-Lar, a pilot project of CAEI but which unfolded over time as an antithesis, considering the difference in epistemology, number of inhabitants and management concept9 among the two modalities of services.

31The author narrated in her master's dissertation that the queues in Centros de Acolhida [comum] (CA) - Common Shelter, at the time officially called Abrigo - Shelters, intergenerational environments, were, in the late 1990s, a problem. "the increase in the number of elderly people who used the service, in addition to the difficulties in facing queues to take a shower and eat, among other activities, were the markers of "differentiated needs" (BOARETTO, 2005, p. 79). Emphatically, Boaretto's approach (2005) demonstrates the generational conflict in shelters and in social assistance services as an empirical reality and as a builder of Centros de Acolhida Especial para idosos (CAEI) - Special Shelter for the Elderly People.

32The author narrated in her master's dissertation that the queues in Centros de acolhida comum (CAs) - Common Shelters, at the time officially called abrigos - shelters, intergenerational environments, were, in the late 1990s, a problem; "the increase in the number of elderly people who used the service, in addition to the difficulties in facing queues to take a shower and eat, among other activities, were the markers of "differentiated needs" (BOARETTO, 2005, p. 79). Emphatically, Boaretto's approach (2005) demonstrates the generational conflict in shelters and in social assistance services as an empirical reality and as a builder of CAEI.

33It is essential to analyze this trajectory, with regard to the most recent history of CAEI, which highlights the existence of intergenerational conflicts in shelters and among homeless people. In these, in order, situation and population, the conflict between generations also exists. In the field, I followed plots of gerontophobia (HENNING, 2013), on the part of interlocutors, both in complaints related to CA - Common Shelter that they lived in during the research period and in memories evoked when they told me about passages through other shelter institutions when recounting their trajectories.

34There was a clear presence and persistence of ageism (WHO, 2021), whose ends are youth and old age (NEGRETTI, 2023), in the coexistence between people "in institutional homelessness". This is because, when following in the ethnography, reports about difficulties in being respected in common shelters, between 2016 and 2019, that is, after the existence of CAEI and socialization of this type of institution among people in "institutional homelessness" in São Paulo, elderly people who were interlocutors of the study spoke in their stories told to me “natural characteristics of people they considered "young". Another aspect that permeates the institution is presented below.

35The region in which the Estação Sentinela was opened and maintained was extremely disputed in the city of São Paulo. The building, located in the Luz neighborhood and part of the perimeter known and referred as Cracolândia (crack land) since the 1980s , was once a hotel that housed several migrant groups that landed at the extinct Luz coach station. Taniele Rui (2012), in seizing and analyzing the category of noia (drug - mainly crack - addicted people), discusses the history and dynamics of this neighborhood. According to the author, "since the early 1990s there are records that the center of São Paulo, especially the streets of Luz neighborhood, attracts and concentrates crack users" (Rui, 2012, p 189). Rui (2014) points out the "great number of people who circulate around (and therefore constitute it), as well as the different uses, disputes and appropriations that can be made of this space" (Rui, 2014, p.94).

36The interaction between Estação Sentinela and Cracolândia was a reason of tensions and conflicts at different times. Interventions in the region assisted by residents of Estação Sentinela during this field reserch period were interpreted in different ways by the research interlocutors. The withdrawals of the so-called noia by the police and their returns to the door and sidewalk of the Estação Sentinela were subjects of narratives that mixed different opinions and feelings from a field of relations (Rui, 2012) that involves stigmas, such as dirt and danger.

37These stigmas and prejudices were evoked at Estação Sentinela. Relations with the neighbourhood, based on the heterogeneity of the public housed at the CAEI, also presented different possibilities. Some markers such as street experience - their own or that of a loved one - influenced the way residents dealt with fear and prejudice, with the different social actors who circulated in the area. In this way, the presence of crack users was feared at the same time as it aroused reflections, compassion and oral moralities among CAEI residents about these human beings, but also about the confusions that elderly people made about the very diversity of the street situation. This ranged from a link between crack users as synonymous with crack users in street situations to crack users as synonymous with people in street situations in public spaces ("street situation in the street"), in other words, a lack of understanding of the diversity of substance use and situations, including housing, homeless and diferent street situations.

  • 10 For further discussion, see FRANGELLA, 2005. The author, who focuses her analysis on the lives and (...)

38Just as important were the dynamics of differentiation and indifferentiation when it came to street situations in a broader sense, without taking substance use into account. Because most of them had not literally been on the street, there was the possibility in the institution of not identifying oneself as a person living on the street or of hierarchising street situations10. Those who had always been in an "institutional street situation", in these conventions, could be contrasted in moral terms and in notions of education considered "more worthy of being in the CAEI" than those who had been, in their trajectory, "in a street situation on the street". This revealed a hierarchy of prestige between different street situations.

39In addition, while the noise in the so-called crackland area was a collective frustration, relationships and opinions about the use of other substances, such as alcohol and tobacco, were diverse and common, since they were ‘admitted’ or ‘allowed’ to a certain extent. They weren't considered grounds for criminalisation, but because they were only allowed on the pavement, as well as being reasons for groupings and relationships, alcohol and tobacco also formed moral judgements among CAEI inhabitants. As residents who consumed cigarettes could only do so on the pavement, I followed the queue of smokers sitting on the pavement and frequenting the bar next to the institution. These occasions allowed me to forge other lasting relationships with the neighbourhood, with those who frequented the pavement and the commercial establishment. This doesn't mean that, given the Station's internal dynamics, these relationships weren't stigmatised and mistrusted. Even though this establishment and the pavement were not contexts for crack use, they were also considered impure and dangerous (DOUGLAS, 1985), as were the relationships that existed in such environments.

40Drogada(o) (junkie) and bandida(o) (criminal) were recurring offenses at Estação. The interaction with the environment of the institution establishment was diversified among the welcomed, whereas previous routes and experiences on the streets marked the way they deal with the perimeter and the Cracolândia.

41Rumors were frequent in Estação's daily life, a way of circulating information about the place, its inhabitants and its dynamics. They were also a way of producing reputations among those who participated in the elaborate plots and, ultimately, they also acted in the production of moralities in this field. Thus, “the criterion for the validity of a rumor should not be established by its actual correspondence with reality, but by its ability to shape and make shareable the experiences that affect and worry the community amid its doubts and uncertainties” (Menezes, 2014, p. 679). Rumors, their importance in the flow of information and daily life at CAEI and one of their potential analytical aspects - revelations about moralities - were perceived in the ethnography based on an event that will be recounted below.

42The first time I witnessed a dissatisfaction about the flow of information I was in the social service room. Maria Inez, a former social worker at the institution, called Everaldo, one of the welcomed, to talk. Everaldo was accused by other residents of paying people drinks. Maria Inez told him, "If you want to pay everyone a drink, including those out there, or not, you need the BCP (Benfício de Prestação Continuada, or Benefit of Continuous Provision) or you should use the money to pay a rent. Everaldo replied, "Everybody there needs two coffins, one for their body and one for their tongue."

43This talk would relate to the future events of the establishment, and also to the notions of deserving to be at Estação, as well as to receive and/or offer help. The information that flows mixes the past and the present events in this institution. Most of the contents that bring and inform different moralities become primary sources of articulation between daily life, coexistence and imaginary in a scenario of distrust in this public establisment, as well as with its transit with the neighborhood.

44The next section begins the theme of Trust and distrust in the institution.

Trusts and distrusts - Rumors of Exploitation

45The intertwined categories of accusation, as well as giving legitimacy to those who were taken in, referred to a notion of exploitation. As an emic term, the idea of exploitation informed different relationships and was used in different contexts, from rumors to gossip. It's important to mention that this notion cut across the range of feelings and emotions of the inhabitants with whom I interacted in the study. Exploitation could be a source of fear, but it also had a potential in the sense of otherness; feeling compassion for the inhabitant who was exploited. At the same time, it could be cited as a reason why I didn't think it was fair for an inhabitant to live there, linked to the idea of deserving. In this way, the exploiter and the exploited were triggered from the lack of recognition of the other when using the right to live in the public establishment, to pity for those who need help from the staff and don't receive it. These two categories were producers and were produced by sensitivities. In addition, together they presented a generification; it was much more common for men to be accused of being exploiters while the majority of women were counted as exploited.

46The third CAEI manager I met, Gilberto, had previously been an assistant employee before being promoted; little remembered for his management, the comments that began to compose the observation of rumors in the ethnography were those of his exit. At this moment, a need to think about the rumors of his dismissal arose while different events came to be presented as a result of confusion, admitted by the staff and welcomed.

47In the institution, due to layoffs and "a complaint" in the Public Prosecutor's Office, involving the transfer of money to employees, the dynamics in the coming and going of Estação was changed. Next I will stick to this event and its consequences.

48 Pedro was a former resident of ES who I never met in person, but his presence was felt in other ways over a long period of time, to the detriment of the events that follow. In some way, Pedro and other actors at the Station remained there after their departure from the institution, according to the events that will be recounted. Pedro allegedly gave R$50 (equivalent to U$12.5 today) as a gift to each employee at Christmas. The employees were divided into socio-educational workers, kitchen staff, cleaning staff, a technical assistant, a social worker, a psychologist and a manager. After the administrative religious institution asked the former manager to return the gift to Pedro, Gilberto did so. Pedro, however, allegedly said in the cafeteria that he had already borrowed more money, and this information spread.

49The result was the dismissal of some of the workers, including Gilberto and Maria Inez, and employees being prevented from accompanying the residents to banks and medical appointments. Combined with other rumors, such as the embezzlement of food, public money and donations, which would imply a reduction in the activities offered to the elderly, thefts by staff who participated in other projects of the shelter's administrative religious institution, and thefts among the elderly, the E.S. became a space of simultaneous distrust and help.

50According to Tiago Lemões (2017), in dialogue with Veena Das, the “rumors” can open paths in a plot of rights struggles, representing and re-elaborating the law in everyday experiences. According to this author, “generating fear and indignation, the rumors also circumscribe a space for the narration of real life "(Lemões, 2017, p. 20).

51Along with rumors of exploitation, aid was strongly present after the event of employee dismissal and prohibition of their presence in any activity involving finances and/or external activities.

52In this space of difference and differentiation (Brah, 2006), the aids also draw attention to gender and race relations, and also to age, since the chronological age range in this group of elderly people began in the sixty years old and goes on with people over ninety. Defined as a Pivot-Generation, Motta refers to younger people between the ages of 60 and 70 who play a central role in the family in relation to the body that helps both the older and the younger: "within the different elderly age groups (Britto da Motta, 1999a), so defined, for the "developing" countries, from the age of 60, a further sequence of differentiations has been highlighted, of a direct age/generational order, between elderly "young" and "older (Motta, 2010, p.447).

  • 11 The category ‘head problem(s)’ often appeared in relation to psychiatric medication and often in an (...)

53These were elderly people who were less frail in terms of health and mobility or even without ‘head problems’, ranging from notions of illnesses linked to memory loss to conventions of normality and abnormality11, who could be considered helpers to look after someone. However, the manner of the elderly person, their behaviour in moral terms, such as whether or not they used alcohol or cigarettes, influenced the notion of their potential; whether they were responsible, whether they weren't ‘naughty’; whether they could be trusted to go with someone else to the bank, to appointments and other activities. Going to the bank was a demand because there was a collective fear of robberies and financial fraud against elderly people. In this way, help went beyond an individual practice, albeit a dual one. Showing solidarity and going to the bank with someone from the same institution meant helping others, being able to expect help in return and feeling useful socially and emotionally. Accompanying people in health services also initiated a process of giving linked to care as a social practice, an affective bond and a collective awareness of old age, ageing and interdependence.

54The accompaniment also had different potential directions. As a relationship, both the person being helped and the person being helped were entrusted based on exercises of trust and mistrust - whether the person being helped was also helping; whether the person being helped was openly asking for a financial return, for example, whether they said they didn't need finances in kind, but asked for other materialities than money; what the past was like for the people being helped and the people being helped.

55These positions were not watertight. Help wasn't dynamised between those who offered and those who benefited, on the contrary; it was about who ‘was a beneficiary’ and who ‘was an offerer’. That's how the ordinary solidarity wheel of theEstação Sentinela turned. Solidarity with others brought the possibility of self-awareness during the ageing process and in the face of institutional homelessness.

56Furthermore, help in that context incorporated other non-practical spheres. Just as Piscitelli (2011) told us about the intersectionality of the relationships between the interlocutors in his study, in the ethnography I carried out it was also important not to reduce the social phenomena and their articulations studied to dichotomies; the simultaneity between help and mistrust was a marked presence in the coexistence in which I was involved. Both relationships of distrust and help were marked by "inequalities produced at the intersection of gender, class, age and race differentiations" (Piscitelli, 2011, p. 539). The networks of help and exchange informed solidarities in the group marked by differences sustained by gender, age, class - stimulated by the interlocutors' notions of knowledge of rights - education and affections.

57 In the economy of aid at the Estação Sentinela, aid was provided in cash, in exchange for immediate or medium-term favors, and often without an agreement on these terms, but with an obligation to reciprocate (MAUSS, 2003). None of these forms of relationship failed to produce subjectivities in the choice of who helped and who was helped, that is, in the acceptance, expectation, and practice of help. Brígida, interlocutor and resident of the E.S., and Teófilo, resident of the E.S., when they were outside the shelter for a walk, took turns paying for food. The relationship, which according to Brígida "wasn't so much a courtship" beyond the walks with Teófilo, included medical appointments and places to "relax" from the "energy of E.S." Friendships and other relationships between elderly people informed experiences in common and objective emotional exchanges based on the reality of living together in the shelter. The types of relationships were normalized and normative based on rules and "interweaving between traditional patterns and new forms of exchange" (Piscitelli, 2011, p. 539).

58In the ordinary life of the Estação Sentinela and its networks of help and solidarity, someone who has been helped or exploited in the relationships narrated, observed and experienced could have already been helped or exploited in other relationships. What unites these two issues - networks of help and solidarity and rumours - is precisely the overlap between them in everyday life. It was the networks of help in the entity that were very present in the ethnography, as well as the exchanges and those that incite the possibility of rumours of exploitation in a surveillance scheme. At the Estação Sentinela, the networks of help and the flows of information, which are of paramount importance for the positions of trusting and being trusted, shaped sharing and differentiation. In everyday life and interactions in the institution, many of the problems and discomforts were the product and source of collective moral production; in productions about oneself and others, notions of exploitation dealt emphatically with the risks of helping and letting oneself be helped.

59At Estação Sentinela, networks of help and information flows, which are of paramount importance for the positions of trusting and being trusted, shaped sharing and differentiation. In everyday life and interactions in the institution, many of the problems and discomforts were the product and source of collective moral production; in productions about oneself and others, notions of exploitation dealt emphatically with the risks of helping and letting oneself be helped. At the same time as the networks of help and solidarity were, as relationships, marked by conflicts and negotiations around distrust and trust, they emphasised that paying attention to one's own old age and the old age of others, far from being merely functional - for any link to be made or not made around help - was amalgamated with the meaning of ageing and old age in collective terms. And this collectivity emphasised another element: the double movement that accompanies the transformation of old age into a social concern in which people in the process of ageing, regardless of whether they are also in old age or in other periods of their life course, are involved. This is the simultaneity of the progressive socialisation of the management of old age (DEBERT, 2000) - old age as a public issue and not just in the family sphere - with processes of the reprivatisation of old age (DEBERT, 2000) - the transformation of old age into an individual responsibility -.

Considerations

60Networks and situations of help and solidarity, by producing and being produced by trust and distrust, also gave meaning to what could be characterized as exploitation – unequal and/or non-reciprocal relationships. These situations were part of the homeless and old age and aging situations experienced in the institution and were the content of the incorporated thoughts (ROSALDO, 2019) of the research interlocutors, homeless elderly people who lived in the institution.

61The main results in relation to support networks and mistrust were: 1. Both mistrust and trust were present in the participation in networks of help and solidarity among the residents of the institution, the elderly; 2. Far from the notions of dependence or autonomy, or even self-sufficiency, according to SMADS' notion at the time of the Estação Sentinela's inauguration, the relationships at the CAEI, woven daily over months and/or years, like most of those monitored, emphasised interdependence as the episteme of the elderly in collective situations, such as special care centres for the elderly (CAEI). In this way, the ethnography emphasises the need to: a. consider interdependence and care, according to the complexity and context of the ‘special care centre for the elderly’ (CAEI) itself; b. consider both the complexity of a routine marked by mistrust between residents and in relation to the technical team and, at the same time, the potential for help and exchange between elderly people in precarious contexts.

62In this sense, the ethnography carried out conforms to an understanding that it is of the utmost importance to carefully consider care and interdependence in the field and area of social assistance and that relationalities of care and interdependence must be considered from social contexts, in other words, from family environments, as well as with regard to institutions and services, from social assistance to other existing areas in the field of social rights and intersectorality.

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Notes

1 Veia arada: velhices e situações de rua, uma etnografia (2023). The research was funded by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), Brasil. Linked to the Postgraduate Program in Social Sciences at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), she was supervised by Isadora Lins França.

2 On this occasion, I will sometimes use the acronym of the public institution, “Centro de acolhida especial para idosos - CAEI - and an acronym for the institution's pseudonym, Estação Sentinela - E.S.

3 It's worth mentioning that not long afterwards the visits became interlocutors.

4 The official name of SMADS did not include the phrase "homeless". However, in the city of São Paulo, shelters, although they may be inhabited by people who do not identify themselves as "homeless", who are referred to these institutions not only by self-request but also by legal measures, such as those linked to cases of domestic violence, for example, are institutions linked primarily to the homeless population, understood in all its heterogeneity and diversity. Furthermore, it is essential to mention that the institution that managed it, through a public agreement with SMADS, kept "homeless" written in the contracts signed by the institution's inhabitants. In this sense, it is possible to consider that there was a variation in the naming of situations experienced by the institution's inhabitants, both of self-recognition and of hetero-recognition. This complexity certainly produced and was produced by the different institutional forms of naming the Special Shelter, since the responsible secretariat itself named the institution in one way and the managing organization in another.

5 I'm referring to the aforementioned thesis (NEGRETTI, 2023) and the article Até onde a Memória (quer) alcança(r) & lembranças prudentes: Old age in Brasil, the Sexagenarians Law and the not new trajectories of the homeless elderly population in the country (NEGRETTI, 2025).

6 According to Jane Cruz Prates, Flavio Cruz Prates and Simone Machado (2011) “Being in a street situation or inhabiting the street is different from being a street person. Seen as a determination, a social situation offers little in the way of prospects for overcoming it. The term rualização [rualization] process is based on the opposite conception, in that it recognizes it as a social process, a condition that is shaped by multiple conditioning factors, in a continuum, which is why preventive processes and intervention with those who have only recently been living on the streets seem to be fundamental in order to achieve greater effectiveness in terms of public policies” (PRATES; PRATES.; MACHADO, 2011, p. 194).

7 Amarílis was the only interlocutor who told me that she had lived on sidewalks in different parts of the city of São Paulo, that is, she was the only participant and member of the research work who had been “homeless on the streets” before being “institutionally homeless”. It is also worth mentioning that Amarílis had a long “trajectory of homelessness on the streets” before arriving at Estação Sentinela. This interlocutor even reported that it was because of the difficulties of continuing to live on the streets that she agreed to go, at the age of fifty-nine, to the first shelter she had lived in.

8 In short, in Brasil, "preto" and "pardo" refer to skin color categories, while "negro", as a broader term, includes both people who self-identify as black and brown, and can represent racial identity as a sociocultural, political and historical construction more broadly. Besides, no interlocutor, with the exception of Junquilho, self-declared in terms of color. Among others, in a set of bibliographies of Estudos Brasileiros – Brazilian Studies on race and racism in Brasil, see GONZÁLEZ (1985) and NOGUEIRA (2007).

9 The extinct modality for elderly people in homeless situation , Casa-Lar, was structured in an architecturally designed house. The number of inhabitants was up to 30 people. In the CAEI, opened in buildings, the number was much higher - Estação Sentinela - 100 vacancies, Alameda Damaris, 210.

10 For further discussion, see FRANGELLA, 2005. The author, who focuses her analysis on the lives and bodies of people who live or work in precarious situations on the streets, deals with the intersections between stigmas and barriers to accessing public space at the same time as the relationship between body movement and social isolation.

11 The category ‘head problem(s)’ often appeared in relation to psychiatric medication and often in another service; the Psychosocial Care Centres, part of public policies related to mental health. Junquilho, interlocutor, noted several times in our meetings the number of people on psychiatric medication at the CAEI and depression among elderly people, such as himself.

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Natalia Negretti, « The ordinary that trusts and distrusts: aid and solidarity networks in a Special Shelter for the Elderly People in São Paulo, Brasil »Sciences et actions sociales [En ligne], 25 | 2025, mis en ligne le 02 novembre 2025, consulté le 16 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sas/5798

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Natalia Negretti

(FCMSCSP|Pagu-Unicamp)

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