Tio Souza drove cars for famous people for eighteen years—doctors, diplomats, politicians, generals, and actors. He knows every important address in the Zona Sul—but his own address was erased in 1970 when Brazil’s military government razed the favela of Catacumba where Tio Souza lived for twenty-three years. An orphan raised by an army general, Tio Souza spent his childhood moving between military posts and attended Los Angeles high school in São Paulo—until at sixteen he moved to Catacumba to look for work as an electrician. In Catacumba, Tio Souza was not an anonymous driver—he was president of the resident’s association—and responsible for acquiring running water, electricity and other urban services for the community, and for resisting removal by the government. But since the forced relocation of Catacumba’s residents, Tio Souza has tried to forget those years in the favelas: "I don’t want to remember Catacumba—we had no rights as favelados (favelas residents). We didn’t have the right to say what we wanted or didn’t want—we just had to live however we could. We couldn’t even say the word companheiro (friend)."

After the favela’s violent removal, Tio Souza lived in a succession of different government housing projects. Since 1977, Tio Souza has lived in Padre Miguel, Rio de Janeiro’s largest housing project, built on the outskirts of the city in the early 1970’s to house the dislocated residents of razed favelas in the Zona Sul. Tio Souza says that living in legitimate—if crumbling (the water system for his apartment block hasn’t worked for twenty years)—housing is an improvement over the favelas: "[In Padre Miguel] we have rights—we are real people."