Literacy discourses is an ethnographic study concerned with people's use and representations ofliteracy in two residential quarters in Distrito Federal, the federation district withinwhich is the capital city of Brazil. It is a detailed description of situated literacies inparticular domains such as home and community, and it involves knowing literacy practices at both individual and social level. Besides, it is a critical explanation of how theseliteracies relate to other domains such as work and school. Informal ways of learningliteracy are also given attention as part of the everyday use. An integration between the New Literacy Studies and Critical DiscourseAnalysis is made for the study of literacy as discourse in the link between local settingsand global practices. As a main proposition, these situated literacies are classified as lifeworld and systems literacies, derived from Habermas's theory. This classification is meant to show the advantage of providing ways to understandrelationships between vernacular and dominant literacies, which do not figure asdiscrete elements but exist in hybrid practices.