Geographies of Sleep Among Brazilian Street Youth

This chapter explores the temporal and socio-spatial aspects of sleep geographies of a young male street population in urban Brazil. It sets out by providing an overview of relevant academic debates on young people living on the street across the globe, related to issues of marginality, mobility, and belonging. It then narrows the focus to the less explored field of sleep geographies of young street populations, before it presents four different sleep patterns detected among boys and young men on streets of Salvador da Bahia. These patterns are closely linked to four collective identities available for young people in the street environment – menino de rua (street child), pivete (street thug), maloqueiro (vagrant), and favelado (resident of shantytown). The empirical material reveals that a range ofindividual and structural factors – such as drug use, crime involvement, physical maturity, and mainstream attitudes – influence the choices on where, when, and with whom to sleep. Sleep is thus shown to be socially constructed and spatially defined, and a life course perspective that embraces the dynamic character of street life is proposed.