De Jesus spent a significant part of her life in the Canindé [pt] favela in North São Paulo, supporting herself and three children as a scrap collector.

De Jesus lends her name to community preparatory schools, theatre halls, saraus and collective action groups.

[4] The 2020 edition of the Festa Literária das Periferias [pt] (Outskirts Literary Festival) was held in honour of de Jesus' memory, on the 60th anniversary of the book's publication.

Maria Leite Monteiro de Barros, a wealthy landowner's wife who was also a benefactor to other poor black neighbourhood children, supported her for a while and paid for her schooling.

"[6] In 1937, the year her mother died, de Jesus migrated to the metropolis of São Paulo, which was experiencing a demographic upswing and witnessing the appearance of its first slums.

Among the materials she collected, there would be an occasional journal or notebook, as well as books, which encouraged her to start recording her day-to-day activities and write about life in the favela.

[9] In her diary, she gives details about the daily life of favelados (the inhabitants of favelas), and bluntly describes the political and social facts which impacted their lives.

She writes of how poverty and desperation can cause people of elevated moral character to abandon their principles and dishonour themselves to simply feed their families.

Dantas was covering the opening of a neighbouring city playground when, immediately after the ribbon-cuttings, a street gang stormed in and claimed the area, chasing the children away.

Dantas saw de Jesus standing at the edge of the playground shouting, "If you continue mistreating these children, I'm going to put all of your names in my book!".

"[This quote needs a citation] Despite the large amount of publicity and popularity caused by the diary, de Jesus continued to be a social pariah.

[16] Seeing as de Jesus raised concerns about conditions in the favelas, local politicians started wanting to meet with her to discuss possible ways to amend the situation.

São Paulo's governor Francisco Prestes Maia made a move to engage state agencies in providing poverty relief for favelados.

[17] Through interviews for The Life and Death of Maria de Jesus (see below § Further reading), second eldest Zé and daughter Vera provide vital information about her personality.

Violence in the favela made it dangerous for Vera and her brothers to be on the streets with her mother, so most of their time was spent idly, sometimes studying, in their shack waiting for her to return.

According to Vera, before the publication of Quarto de despejo her mother became obsessed with Audálio Dantas, her publisher, and was constantly anxious about him sending word about her diary.

Now that money was plentiful (it is estimated she made ₢$2,000 by selling her author's rights, as compared to a 20 cruzeiros income from collecting paper),[11] de Jesus began to spend it for no reason.

She had intentions of sending both Vera and Zé Carlos to Italy but soon changed her mind and decided to invest in a small ranch in far-flung Parelheiros where she ended up moving with her children.

The family was excited about living in a rural area and Vera saw her mother become hard-working again: growing crops, taking care of the household, and tending to her youngest João as his health grew ill.

Without a propagation of her status to provide income, she eventually was forced to move back to the favela, making the situation even more complicated for her sick son, João.

On the other hand, her second oldest, José Carlos was twice divorced, occasionally homeless and an alcoholic, and purportedly as smart, angry and erratic as his mother.

The activities she occupied her spare time with, her decision to avoid the many risks of a vulnerable life as well as her affairs, all indicated that while she was physically in the favela, her mind wandered free.

De Jesus was consistently able to provide for her children by recycling scrap material for money or diving through dumpsters for food and clothing.

De Jesus offers a non-academic perspective on poverty and exclusionary economic expansion in Brazil, which was then rarely made by someone who did not come from the educated classes.

Although it was not unusual for Black women at the time to seek light-skinned partners, since lighter skin was openly associated with higher economic status due to white systemic racism and anti-Blackness, de Jesus did not want to leverage relationships in order to improve her own situation.

In fact, her obituary in a 1977 edition of the Jornal do Brasil speaks of her blaming herself for not being able to take advantage of her brief celebrity status and states that her stubbornness led her to die in poverty.

Her book was read extensively both in capitalist areas such as Western Europe and the United States, as well as in the Eastern Bloc and Cuba, the wide range of the audience demonstrating how many people were affected by her story outside of Brazil.

By contrast, for communist readers the stories depicted perfectly the fundamental flaws of capitalist production in which the worker is the most downtrodden part of the economic system.

According to Robert M. Levine, "Carolina's words brought alive a slice of Latin American reality rarely acknowledged in traditional textbooks.

"[32] A biography about her was written by author Jarid Arraes as part of her 2015 cordel collection and book Heroínas Negras Brasileiras em 15 cordéis.