Constructing a city, building a life: Brazilian construction workers' continuous mobility as a permanent life strategy

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of domestic labor mobility among Brazilian construction workers in the context of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. We start from the premise that mobile laborers are crucial for the physical development and expansion of cities. However, the importance of domestic migrants in this process is insufficiently addressed in mobility studies. Building on existing research on domestic population movements in Brazil, we argue that the current generation of mobile construction workers draws on the intangible and material infrastructure generated by previous generations of migrants to enable novel kinds of (permanent) labor mobilities.