Far from presenting a univocal face, in Latin America, the public aspect of social policies and support for reproduction and care has been characterized by its ambivalence. Sometimes absent, sometimes present; operating remotely, marginally or arbitrarily; generating assistance support, focused or administered by intermediaries; with a benefactor but also criminalizing, authoritarian and patriarchal countenance. Reproduction in the State appears through agencies and agents that often operate in the same period under different and even contradictory logics. It is accompanied by private social work and other actors. The emergence of the community in the family, the neighborhood, the commune or the organization, as form of pressure on the public and simultaneously as an (relatively) autonomous construction of conditions of survival, reveals complex and changing resource articulations for the popular sectors. This text explores the applied logics of the public, the private and the common in the life of a street waste picker and her son with a health problem from birth. Through biographical interviews, I explore the multiple appearances and meanings that these areas acquire for the reproduction of health in relation to a life punctuated by precariousness and adversity. Inspired by the concept of expanded reproduction and the perspective on the margins of the State, I analyze the journey of class, gender and race of Mrs. Beatriz and her son.