The story of Paraisópolis: a living example of Brazil’s inequality

At the beginning of the 20th century, a construction company decided to transform a large farm area to the southwest of São Paulo into a wealthy residential area. The city was undergoing a boom of industrialization and the group spotted the vast Fazenda Morumbi, with its abundant green space and undulating terrain, and planned to build São Paulo’s very own answer to Beverly Hills.

Roughly 2,200 large plots of land began being sold off in 1921, but the process of transforming the region into upscale housing was never fully completed. The result was a hodgepodge of lavish mansions and garden suburbs intermingled with completely abandoned patches of land, the owners of which never formally claimed ownership.

To build the luxury homes that were completed, São Paulo attracted swathes of migrant workers from the country’s poor North and Northeast regions. Seeing the abundance of empty land throughout what was designed to be the city’s wealthiest neighborhood, they began building their own homes and bringing their families to the metropolis.

This was the beginning of Paraisópolis, the second largest favela in Brazil’s most populous city. According to the most recent census, approximately 100,000 people live in the community, outnumbered only by the Heliópolis favela with a population of around 200,000.

In the early years, however, Paraisópolis was little more than a village of small wooden houses built by construction workers. By the 1950s, migrant Japanese families began moving into the neighborhood, building small farms where they planted cassava, sweet potatoes, and corn, before branching into cattle ranching.

What was a sleepy and bucolic part of town underwent a major transformation with the expansion of the...