Bom dia from Rio de Janeiro!
It has now been about two weeks since I first arrived in Rio, and I have had such a wonderful time. Besides interning with Catalytic Communities, I forced myself to recover from the cold I contracted when I first got here to spend time with a girl who sat next to me on the plane on the way here who is currently staying in a rainforest north of the city. She brought her friend from Argentina with her and invited her friend who was also staying in Rio who also turned out to be a Laidlaw scholar! We spent the weekend relaxing on Ipanema beach, shopping at hippie and farmer’s markets, and watching Brazil tie to Morocco during Saturday’s game. Once in your life, you need to go to Copacabana beach and experience the atmosphere of a World Cup, it was like nothing I had ever experienced before. We could not make it into the famous Copacabana beach watch party, but managed to stand in a front row outside of a bar with a massive television with about 100 other people filling the block corner with us. It was absolutely magical, just like the city itself.
This week, I tasked myself with learning more about this wonderful city and diving deeper into its history. Theresa informed me that ROW is considered the best resource for finding accurate information about favelas, that it was one of the first to begin reporting on the brutal World Cup and Olympic Games evictions, and that its reporting has resulted in less evictions across the city. So, for this week of research, I completely relied on sifting through ROWs articles from the last 16 years to get a better idea of the history, present, and future of favelas. The birth of favelas can be traced back to the Battle of Canudos (1897), when following their victory, Brazilian soldiers marched to the capital of Rio de Janeiro in search of better economic opportunity. The poverty-stricken soldiers found that there was little space for them to live, and only after a colonel allowed them to squat on his hillside did they create a settlement for themselves that they would call “Morro da Favela” (Favela Hill; now Morro da Providência). The name derived from the Favela bush that covered the Canudos hills. This name began the characterization of these informal settlements as “favelas”. Over the coming century, favelas would attract rural migrants and former urban and rural slaves who were interested in Rio de Janeiro’s economic opportunities and in need of affordable housing, prompting expansion of these settlements across Rio’s public lands. Here we can see how describing favelas as “slums”, “shanty towns”, or “ghettos” creates problematic misconceptions and completely ignores the history and reality of these settlements, which to this day remain attractive for their affordability, proximity to work, and vibrant, tight-knit communities.
Throughout the 20th Century, favela-dwellers faced extreme institutional and societal discrimination, in large part because most of the inhabitants were descendants of slaves and not viewed as full citizens. Favelas were deemed “illegal” occupations and therefore not entitled to urban improvements, yet the settlements were still allowed to remain as an option for “cheap labor nearby.” At the same time, within the city, there were persistent efforts to push poor, Black Brazilians and migrants to the periphery, as exemplified with the Pereira Passos reforms (1903-1906). At the turn of the century, Brazil was controlled by a European-descended and heavily European influenced and educated White elite, who sought to evolve the city to become a “Paris of the Tropics”. As Rio Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos observed Paris’s infrastructure modernization, he believed that crowded housing, such as tenement housing, must be eradicated to make way for neoclassical buildings and streets that resembled European boulevards. As such, the city would essentially criminalize tenement housing and demolish the housing, displacing families who had few choices for survival. Often, they would relocate to the favelas, rapidly increasing their size. We can see how popular narratives of favelas (“poor” and “undeveloped”, for example) that justified the removal of these families is still attached to ideas of what favelas are today and were created by a White elite who, according to Theresa (in her ROW series, “Not Everyone Has a Price”) have been “historically… finding ways to maintain the structure of a slaveholding society, even post abolition.”
I spent a lot of time reading through articles in ROW’s anti-racist series, learning how racism still lingers in institutions and within favela communities. Just like the United States, Brazil has a history of overpolicing Black, Brown, immigrant, and low-income communities, once again aligning with the idea that law enforcement, to some degree, serves the purpose of maintaining the status quo of the state’s long-standing social and racial hierarchy. In favelas, local militias, city police, and military all play a role in controlling and surveilling these communities, often conducting police raids and brutal, unnecessary killings to intimidate favela-dwellers. While it would be ignorant to ignore the reality of drug-trafficking that occurs in favelas, it would be equally ignorant to render favelas down solely to their issues. There is cyclical violence occurring in these favelas far more dangerous than drug-trafficking; State-sponsored violence has forced mass displacements in the name of progress and public interest, pushing already marginalized Cariocas further out of the city, providing them with little investment into public works to help their survival, and failing to address these root causes when their desperation leads them to drug-trafficking.
Again, there is always so much more to be said, but 4 more weeks remain for me to continue sharing these discoveries. See you next week!