Oi gente (pela última vez)!
After weeks of searching for people to talk to for this project, I was so lucky that Theresa found three amazing people to speak to. Marcia and Luiz were visionaries for museums in their respective favelas that represent their history and resistance. Conceição was a lovely woman who was open to sharing her experience being the second to last person to leave Vila Autódromo with me and who my published interview will focus on.
First, I would like to take a second to reflect on what this experience has meant to me. I feel like I have undergone so much personal growth: feeling comfortable with my independence, stepping outside my comfort zone, allowing myself to embrace change and uncertainty. I could not be more happy with my experience this summer, and I can confidently say that this has been one of the best adventures of my life.
I would like to start off by talking about Marcia, a woman I met at the Favela Museum in Ipanema to discuss the new Favela Climate Memory exhibition, but who ended up sharing a lot of her experiences growing up in the neighboring Cantangalo favela with me. Marcia’s knowledge of the city was deep and enriched my own understanding of it. She went back further than the soldiers descending from the war in Candudos to explain that favelas were already across the city, mostly as homes for formerly enslaved Brazilians who were excluded from housing and jobs in the city. The story of the soldiers setting up Morro da Favela explains where the name “favela” came from, but not how these settlements began. She told me about how altered the land had been, that Ilha do Governador was a small little island that was only now connected through manmade expansion of the island. She told me about how her grandmother would walk several kilometers a day up and down from her favela to access clean water at the lake. She shared her experiences visiting other informal settlements across the world and realized how vibrant her own community was. Marcia was my first meeting with someone from a favela here, and I was so fortunate to have met her.
I met with Luiz and Conceição the same day. Because Conceição’s interview will be published, I won’t share too much about what we talked about, but I will just say that speaking to her was one of the most powerful experiences that I had in my life. She was so open about the hardships that she has faced since being relocated: the loneliness that comes when a community is so brutally separated, what it is like to watch your home be demolished, and other personal issues that she was having at the same time as these evictions. The interview with her will be linked to the poster I submit later this month.
Directly following my meeting with Conceição, I went to visit Luiz, one of the twenty families remaining in Vila Autódromo. Luiz warmly welcomed me with his wife, Maria da Penha, a face anyone would know if they read even one article about Vila Autódromo. Both of them were leaders in Vila’s resistance efforts, advocating for collective decision-making among the community and at the front of many of their public protests. Luiz took me to the church that he and Dona Penha slept in after their homes were demolished to show me a presentation about the story of Vila Autódromo. There were home videos and pictures of the spies the government sent into the favela to learn what they were thinking about, of the containers that they lived in while the city built their new homes, what everyday life looked like before the evictions. He showed me how they laid their own pipes in the ground because the City did not give them access to basic sanitation systems, the parks they built for the children, the art they made from the rubble of demolished homes that the city refused to clean up. It has been three days and I still cannot articulate how meaningful and powerful this experience was for me. There is not a single word that can explain how I felt while being there; it was surreal.
Maybe my upcoming final reflection will have a more articulate explanation of how this summer was for me, but for now I am still sitting with it. I do not think I will ever experience anything as touching in my life again.