In the middle of the 20th century, there was a massive movement of rural workers to the rapidly expanding urban centers in all developing countries. The growth of industry in the cities and the modernization of agriculture were the push and pull factors promoting this migration. In almost all cases, this migration flow outpaced the expansion of urban housing and led to ever increasing illegal squatter settlements in major cities. This was the case in Brazil, where these squatter settlements were known as favelas. In the 1960s, American social scientist Janice Perlman studied three such favelas and wrote a major critique of the assumed marginality of these migrants, arguing that they were in the documented labor force, were well integrated into the city and its services, and were only marginal in terms of housing. Her book The Myth of Marginality (University of California Press, 1976) challenged the dominant beliefs that these migrants were mired in poverty and marginality and were creating a culture of poverty. In 2008, Perlman returned to the same three favelas and interviewed about half of the subjects from her original sample in the 1960s, as well as their children and grandchildren, ultimately interviewing 2,500 persons. The results of this second study were published in her Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (Oxford University Press, 2010). Around 2011, she deposited with the Hoover Institution Library & Archives her original survey questionnaires, accounting for some 50 linear feet of material. In 2023, she deposited the open-ended interviews that formed the second part of her survey. These were saved both on tape and paper, resulting in about 30 manuscript boxes (12.5 linear feet) and 39 audio cassettes. These multigenerational interviews are an excellent source for the study of rural-to-urban migration and the institutions and mechanisms by which migrants were able to survive and prosper in Rio de Janeiro from the 1960s to the 2000s, when the favela population grew from around 400,000 to 1 million persons.
