On September 2, 2026, the Brazil Program hosted the second event of the series Societies in the Mirror, with journalist Tatiana Vasconcellos, host of CBN radio’s Estúdio CBN, and José Henrique Bortoluci, sociologist and author of Geração Democracia (Generation Democracy) and What Is Mine.
Societies in the Mirror builds on the premise that Brazil and the United States often illuminate each other’s changes, even when the comparison breaks down. The series looks past election results to changes in work, religion, family life, education, social mobility, and belonging, and asks how they are altering politics and representation in both countries.
The first Societies in the Mirror compared the two countries directly, asking how changes inside each society were showing up in voting, political identity, and democratic representation.
The second event focused specifically on Brazil, exploring aspects of the country that electoral maps alone cannot fully capture. Over the past four decades, work, education, family size, religion, connectivity, gender roles, and the routes into the middle class have all changed, along with Brazilians’ expectations of what a degree, a job, a marriage, or a democratic government should deliver. The conversation examined which of these changes now matter politically, which familiar ways of understanding the country may no longer fit, and what new demands and social divides are emerging as institutions evolve more slowly than the society they represent.
Growth Without a Sense of Progress
Bortoluci highlighted a mismatch between Brazil’s improving socioeconomic indicators and how Brazilians describe their lives. Inflation has been brought under control, unemployment has declined, and poverty has fallen. Yet many Brazilians describe a daily life dominated by high living costs, long commutes, debt, insecurity, and jobs that offer less stability.
Part of this mismatch reflects changes in Brazil’s working class. For decades, the emblematic worker was a man in an industrial job, closely tied to the labor movement and the politics of democratization. Today, Bortoluci argued, a more representative figure might be a Black woman living on the outskirts of a major city, often responsible for a household and working across multiple informal occupations. Labor-market reforms and the growth of self-employment have given some of this work a more formal status, without necessarily making income more predictable or work more secure.
Public health and the SUS
Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS) gave the discussion a concrete example of what large-scale public provision can look like. Bortoluci called it one of the most consequential decisions of Brazil’s constitutional process, crediting it with sharp declines in infant mortality and one of the world’s most successful vaccination campaigns.
Crime, perception, and violence against women
Bortoluci addressed the apparent disconnect between declining homicide rates and persistently high perceptions of insecurity. He identified several possible factors behind falling homicide rates, including demographic change, improvements in policing and intelligence in some states, and the consolidation of organized crime. He and Vasconcellos also discussed violence against women, noting that coercive control often goes unrecognized as domestic violence and may be significantly underreported.
Religion beyond electoral labels
Bortoluci challenged the common portrayal of Brazil’s evangelical population as a homogeneous conservative voting bloc. He cited recent Datafolha polling showing that only 35 percent of evangelicals identify with the right, while 42 percent identify with neither the right, the left, nor the center, and argued that evangelicals lean more conservative on behavioral issues than on economic ones.
Affirmative action and social mobility
Bortoluci described affirmative action as one of Brazil’s most significant social transformations of the past two decades, reshaping universities and professional spaces. Yet expanded access to higher education has not always translated into economic mobility, with many first-generation graduates struggling to find jobs that match their education.
What Brazilians still dream about
Asked to close on what dreams persist despite these frustrations, Bortoluci said he preferred responsibility and courage over hope, which he said implies passivity. He recalled the aspirations of several Brazilians interviewed for his work: among them, a transgender teacher who hoped her transgender students could imagine futures as ambitious as becoming astronauts, and a former inmate turned evangelical missionary who dreamed his granddaughter would never see a body lying in the street on her way to school. Neither future, he argued, can be achieved through individual effort alone; schools, public safety, work, and other institutions shape what becomes possible.
WATCH THE EVENT HERE:
