As Chapter 6 demonstrated, neighborhood associations in São Paulo were less inclined to limit protest when their party ally won power than their counterparts in Mexico City, although small changes were observed. Yet the Brazilian movements were more organically linked to the PT than most of the Mexican movements were to the PRD. This chapter explores how the PT-affiliated movements largely escaped the decapitation effects that afflicted the AB despite similarly high levels of loyalty to their party. The organizational solutions are strikingly similar to those of the FPFV. The chapter concludes with a quantitative analysis of urban popular movement behavior more broadly in the two cities and a summary of findings from Chapters 6 and 7.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

As in Mexico City, membership in any neighborhood association is relatively rare in São Paulo. A 1999 study found that just 2.5 percent of metropolitan residents in Brazil participated in a neighborhood association as of 1996, compared to 15.7 percent who belonged to a union (Costa Ferreira, 1999: 98). There is also a long history of clientelistic relations between politicians and the urban poor, superseded only in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the emergence of a more independent and active urban popular movement sector. The central issues that motivate organization are similar: access to land and services for self-constructed shantytowns on the city's periphery (the favelas) and improvement of unsafe living conditions in the tenement houses located in the city center (the cortiços).