The main objective of this thesis is to analyze some economic and social transformations that took place in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century, with the main focus on the consolidation of communication and mass consumption. Based on ethnographic research, the work consists of interpreting the narratives about the past of a group of elderlies who live nowadays in a high-standard geriatric residential located in an upscale neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Merging interviews and participant observation, I propose an immersion in the informant s narratives to discover symbolic processes that fund some collective representations of these themes. Thus, I investigate the memories of a group of people born between 1924 and 1952, framing them as a repository of collective representations, in which imagined ideas about the period are brought to light. In this sense, if the decades from 1930 to 1960 are portrayed by historians and sociologists as of economic development and advance of the industrialization, in this work I intend to examine them from the point of view of the informants, that at that time were just curious young people, attracted by an increasingly diversified supply of goods and services. For that reason, new social dynamics were established and revealed through the images of everyday life reported by them, including habits of distinction and consumption rituals intensified by newspapers, radio, magazines, cinema, and television. In the period studied, it is possible to identify an intrinsic alliance between the expansion of mass communication and consumption, in which idealized images of development and modernization contributed to the consolidation of a life imagined by capitalism.