Postcards from Rio: Favelas and the Contested Geographies of Citizenship

By Kátia da Costa Bezerra

Through the analysis of a variety of favela-based visual cultural productions by young people and contemporary theorists, Postcards from Rio examines the complex relationship between citizenship and urban space in contemporary Rio de Janeiro.

By analyzing videos and photographs, Kátia da Costa Bezerra illustrates how citizens of favelas are reshaping their sense of belonging as subjects and as a legitimate part of the city. A groundbreaking study that examines more deeply the relationship between urban space, citizenship, and imagery originating in the favelas, Postcards from Rio sheds crucial light on how contemporary lenses are defining and mediating the meanings of space and citizenship as strategies of empowerment. The city emerges as a political space where multiplicities of perspectives are intertwined with demands for more inclusive forms of governance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780823276561

Kátia da Costa Bezerra

Kátia da Costa Bezerra, Ph.D., is Professor and associate head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona. She has published in major journals and is a member of the Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World and The Rocky Mountain Review editorial boards.

Book preview

Postcards from Rio

Kátia da Costa Bezerra

Postcards from Rio

FAVELAS AND THE CONTESTED GEOGRAPHIES OF CITIZENSHIP

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS • NEW YORK • 2017

Copyright © 2017 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at http://catalog.loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America

19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

CONTENTS

Introduction. Favelas: Challenging a Perverse Policy of Exclusion

1. Photographs and Favelas: Toward a Process of Self-Discovery and Belonging

2. Videos, Favelas, and Childhood: Reclaiming New Symbolic Geographies

3. Favelas for Sale: Resisting the Easy Links between Democracy and Urban Restructuring Plans

4. Monuments and Consumption: Defying Mechanisms of Social and Spatial Stratification

Conclusion. Competing Discourses: Capital, Spatial Imaginaries, and Citizenship

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Postcards from Rio

INTRODUCTION

Favelas

Challenging a Perverse Policy of Exclusion

The stigma attached to living in a favela runs too deep to be obliterated by appearances.

—Janice Perlman, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro

There is no widely accepted definition of the term favela. In 2010, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics defined favelas as irregular settlements in subnormal agglomerates. A subnormal agglomerate is described as an area with a minimum of fifteen household units, lacking essential infrastructure, services, and legal standards, occupying one third of a public or private property and arranged in a disorderly, dense way. The 2010 census identified around 6,329 subnormal agglomerates with 11,425,644 inhabitants, making up around 6 percent of the total Brazilian population. Data from the census shows that subnormal agglomerates are mostly located in large urban areas. Approximately 43.7 percent of subnormal agglomerates in Brazil are located in the metropolitan areas of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belém. São Paulo, the capital, has 2,087 subnormal agglomerates with 2,715,067 inhabitants (11.42 percent of the city’s population). The state of Rio de Janeiro has 1,332 subnormal agglomerates with 2,023,744 inhabitants (out of the state’s total population of 15,936,268), while the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro has 1,393,314 residents living in subnormal agglomerates—constituting 68.85 percent of the state’s residents of subnormal agglomerates, and 22.16 percent of the city’s population-nearly twice that of São Paulo (Censo 2010). Some of these agglomerates are located near the wealthier areas of the city, promoting a tense proximity between populations who are socially very distant from each other.

The image of a Rio de Janeiro is that of a fragmented city, celebrated in national and international news and headlines, films, literature, and songs for its beauty but also notorious for its high rates of homicides and violence. Popular myths that have praised the city for its splendid natural resources, beautiful women, carnival, and cordiality were put into question when the arrastões in 1992 and 1995 and the Candelária massacre on the night of July 1993 received extensive news coverage all over the world.¹ The incidents sparked debates, dominated the headlines and daily news programs, and initiated a cultural production that deals specifically with the issue of violence in Brazil’s big cities. With the proximity of the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics and Paralympics Games in 2016, favelas became a major and growing concern in terms of urban violence.² The government announced plans to improve the life of favela residents and to keep drug dealers out of their communities. For this reason, many favelas were invaded by armed police, and Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) were installed as a strategy to reclaim the so-called criminal territories as part of the city. After the initial occupation, the government realized that other measures needed to be taken to guarantee a better quality of life for the residents. It created the UPP Social Program, which comprised programs in social services and an infrastructure that aimed to help the locals.

With the pacification process, favelas have become a seductive component of the city, attracting many interests, and a clear process of urban development is underway. As a result, most longtime residents are being pushed further from the city, to open space for a growing middle class who can pay higher leases and taxes. With the international events, the urban development projects of Rio de Janeiro have taken on a different scale. The projects have become more comprehensive, and they have acquired a strategic importance as they propose new models of organization of public spaces. All in all, the projects propose new experiences of the city, marked by the creation of new urban demands and uses. This is the case with the large-scale urban interventions in the Rio de Janeiro port area as well as in Complexo do Alemão, which have created policies that have resulted in the emergence of a process of displacement and new socio-spatial dynamics.

The pacification of Rio favelas should be considered as a necessary step in transforming favelas into commodities or markets for commodities (Freeman 100, 117). The economic potential represented by these territories has attracted supermarkets, cell phone providers, and tourist agencies. It is not by chance that newspapers constantly refer to the presence of inns run by foreigners in favelas such as Favela do Vidigal, Cantagalo, or Chapéu Mangueira, to cite just a few. Much the same can be said of the local bars (named botecos) located in the favelas in Rio’s gastronomic itinerary, as is the case of the annual restaurant competition Comida di Buteco. For example, the Bar do David, in the Leme neighborhood of Chapéu Mangueira, has had some of its appetizers selected as the best of the city for the last three years, thereby attracting a new domestic and international clientele (Bar do David; Araújo, Favelas cariocas viram; Albanese, Vidigal no circuito). Indeed, the inclusion of these sites in the tourist map of the city already shows the close link between an aesthetic concern (the city’s distinctive brand) and the political and economic considerations that are at the core of current urban regeneration plans. This demonstrates that the adoption of urban policies, characterized by the complicity and cooperation between city planners and real estate developers, results in the perception of the city as a consumable good. This emphasis on the commodification of public spaces leads to a devaluation of the needs and demands of the local population; that is, the city’s brand image becomes the government’s top priority.

Throughout this book, I illustrate how this process of commodification of urban space is marked by contradictions and tensions. These urban interventions have generated counternarratives, largely derived from groups based in favelas that reclaim their right to the city. Videos and photographs, making up a patchwork of multiple perspectives and experiences, question reductionist systems of representation and propose other ways of seeing. Counternarratives critically reflect on the impact of public policies on the day-to-day lives of local individuals and communities. It is a process that serves as a mark of identity and territorial affirmation, and their work dialogues directly with other favela-based cultural productions, such as funk and rap. In spite of controversies and criticisms, groups such as Racionais MC’s challenge a form of knowledge intimately connected with social structures of inequality, racism, and exclusion.³ In reporting on daily life in favelas, their songs become a valuable political asset to foster a sense of solidarity and mobilization. The difference between the work of musicians and our photographers is that everyone can take a photograph and, in a time in which digital cameras, cell phones, and Internet access are more widely available to a larger public, photographs have become an important tool for the construction of a gaze (or a multiplicity of gazes) that comes from the peripheries. The same is true of our video makers.

RIO DE JANEIRO AND FAVELAS

In population, Rio de Janeiro is the second-largest city in Brazil with 6,288,588 million inhabitants, and has the second largest gross domestic product (GDP) in the country (Censo 2010). Experiencing a serious economic crisis, the city is marked by wide social inequalities along class, gender, race, and age lines.⁴ According to the 2010 census, the city of Rio de Janeiro (and the country as a whole) is marked by the presence of well-paid jobs with a proliferation of minimum salary jobs and below-subsistence wages due to the massive presence of the informal economy (street vendors, for instance). The data also points to the fact that blacks occupy the lowest levels of the social spectrum with an average white-to-black monthly income ratio of 2:1. According to the Human Development Index (HDI) for Cities Report, there have been substantial gains since 1991, mostly in education, with an increase in middle school graduates from 0.483 to 0.719 in 2010 (Atlas do desenvolvimento). Data for the city of Rio de Janeiro shows that, in the last two decades, the HDI increased by 25.04 percent while the national average was around 47 percent, occupying the forty-fifth position in a list of 5,565 Brazilian cities (Rio de Janeiro, RJ). According to David Harvey, social cleavages such as these have been aggravated by the presence of an economic logic, characterized by the replacement of an already problematic welfare state, and by an equally exclusionary flexible accumulation economy.⁵ Broadly speaking, we can say that the adoption of policy reforms with a focus on the privatization and deregulation of the markets, and substantial budgetary constraints, has had a profound impact in areas such as education and health care. At the same time, although the adoption of social assistance programs to help the most vulnerable families has been established, with gains for some sectors of the population, the 2010 census clearly shows that much still has to be done to reduce income inequality in the country.⁶

When favelas first appeared on Rio’s landscape, they were mostly ignored. Brodwyn Fischer argues that isolated or small groupings of shacks were common throughout the nineteenth century, but it was only in the early twentieth century that favelas emerged as a socio-spatial category due to Brazil’s increasing concern with European standards of civilization, culture, hygiene, and race (A Century 16). The perception of favelas as spaces occupied by ex-slaves contributed to the implementation of policies that attempted to eradicate favelas. This is the case of Morro da Providência (first known as Morro da Favela), which was occupied first by ex-slaves and then by soldiers who had returned from Canudos.⁷ According to the 2010 census, there are around 763 favelas in Rio de Janeiro alone. The city’s favela population has increased more than 19 percent between 2000 and 2010 while the rest of the city’s population has increased by around 5 percent (Cavalliere and Vidal 6). The growing number of favelas in Rio de Janeiro is clear evidence of the ever-present shortfall of housing. It can also be attributed to the crucial problem created by low-paying jobs and a precarious and expensive transportation system, which forces many workers to live close to their workplace. The image of favelas, however, is closely related to a long genealogy of hegemonic discourses that have depicted the favelas as violent and unhealthy places. According to Alba Zaluar and Marco Alvito, this genealogy can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when a series of urban reforms attempted to develop the city according to a paradigm of modernity structured around the exigencies of the local elite, real estate developers, and foreign investors (9, 12–13). As a consequence, diverse state programs of sanitation and public health were implemented on several occasions to justify and legitimize policies that targeted low-income neighborhoods. At the same time, in periods of social unrest, favelas were perceived as a kind of safety valve, as was the case with Pereira Passos’s urbanization plan when people made homeless by the urbanization plan rapidly occupied hills in the city (Fischer, A Century 32). Also, with the increase in population, politicians, residents, and speculators became interested in the perpetuation of favelas (Fischer, A Century 22). Local residents could rent a room to make ends meet and politicians could attract favela voters with promises. Needless to say, these discourses and policies helped construct a simplistic and stereotyped spatial and social distinction between the morro/favela (illegally occupied, with poor infrastructure and a very high concentration of poor/criminal people) and the asfalto (asphalt—the legitimate city with paved streets, good infrastructure, and honest/decent people).⁸

Over the decades, successive urban remodeling plans have resulted in the eviction of many residents. All in all, we can say that one of the major goals of the different urban policies adopted in diverse historical contexts has been to civilize and modernize the city, which has resulted in the forced removal of those who do not fit in with a certain perception of the city. This process has promoted cartographic changes insofar as it has fostered growth and expansion of the city’s perimeters to the peripheries. The occupation of these new territories not only responded to a high demand for housing due to population growth, but also helped promote a large capital expansion in the real estate market. Since the beginning of the 1980s, however, high rates of violent crimes, mostly linked to drug trafficking, transformed major cities in Brazil into cities of walls, marked by increasing social and racial discrimination, asymmetrical segregation of space, and a culture of fear (Caldeira 254; Zaluar Violence). This process of militarization of the city has contributed to the adoption of policies that criminalize and stigmatize the poor (mostly young black males). In fact, the arbitrary use of force by police has led to human rights abuses, starting a vicious circle in which violence is increasingly accepted as a natural response to violence (Caldeira 210).

To make things worse, this complex sequence of stereotypical images and violent practices has been disseminated indiscriminately in spite of the fact that there are significant differences within and between favelas. Most of the time, favelas are represented as a violent reality characterized by either the cruel and vicious practices implemented by drug dealers and militia groups (the either you obey or you lose your life code) or the state-sanctioned violence carried out by the police.⁹ However, as Celso Athayde reminds us, this should not occlude the fact that there are those who live in the favelas and just want to work and live in peace (186, 190). At the same time, it is important to mention that these multilayered and exclusionary walls are marked by fluid borders. As we know, domestic workers or the security personnel who are employed in the condominiums and houses of the legal city come from the favelas, and the large majority of the drug dealers’ customers live in the legal city as well.

Of course, the active presence of drug dealers and militia groups in the large majority of the favelas scattered around the city can explain the high rates of violence and crime especially among young, low-income, less-educated, and black men between fourteen and twenty-nine years old (Zaluar Violence). But we cannot forget that the brutality and violence of the police in low-income neighborhoods has led to high homicide rates. The arbitrary use of violence by agents of the state, the cases of summary execution (death squads) or the crossfire between traffickers and the police are just a few examples. As expected, those more affected by the police violence are the residents of low-income neighborhoods. This is clear when we recall an interview given in 2007 by the State Secretary for Public Security, José Mariano Beltrane, when he affirmed that a gunshot in Copacabana ‘is one thing’ and, in [Complexo do] Alemão, ‘it is another’  (Nogueira, Para secretário, tiro). His statement clearly illustrates the differences in police action in a wealthy neighborhood and in a favela, implying that not all residents enjoy the same rights.

In his discussion on Jacarezinho favela, João Costa Vargas argues that the perception of favelas as low-income neighborhoods characterized by the presence of drugs, violence, and criminality is implicated in the construction of mutually reinforcing, socially constructed, and politically laden categories and experiences of race and urban space (51). Likewise, Ben Penglase refers to the media reports on drug trafficking when he introduces the issue of race and explains that

the target of both policing and media stereotypes is the marginal, or criminal, who occupies a position in the media’s folk taxonomy of crime which resembles the position of the darker-skinned inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro, but is somehow not quite the same. . . . If criminality is the marked category, non-whiteness is a corollary, though unmarked, category. Thus the fight against drug dealing is not depicted as racist, or even as organized around explicitly racial criteria. Instead, it is merely a sad coincidence that black and non-white youths, in the favelas or on the beach, share some characteristics with criminals. (320)

It is this silencing in terms of the racial component that is imbedded in hegemonic (racist) discourses on criminality that needs to be put into question, as Perlman describes it.

The monolithic portrayal of favelas and the presence of a war-like language in films and media coverage help create a more gang-involved image of the favela residents. The discourses on violence and criminality associated with favelas reinforce images of stigmatized territories inhabited by criminals. The first response has been the presence of fortified enclaves and police brutality to restore order. The city’s spatial division contributes to the racialization of favelas, without distinguishing between those actually involved with drug trafficking and the law-abiding citizen, reinforcing social exclusion. The increased public fear ultimately supports a series of state policies, such as increased police violence and the use of excessive force, further marginalizing a segment of the city residents. The fact is that this rhetoric of criminalization of favelas helps distract attention from a long-standing history of segregation and inequalities.

As Marcelo Baumann Burgos argues, to be able to overcome their [favelas’] original condition as antithesis of the city, aiming their effective integration into the city, presupposes a political process of dispute and conquest of the city by popular segments (53).¹⁰ The new social actors need to elaborate and encourage critical positionings that can unveil and denaturalize the very terms that define the contemporary city of walls . . . architecturally, discursively, economically and normatively (Shapiro 447). Henri Lefebvre considered the urban space as a form of mediation of daily life because all places are produced by and reproduce social relations. Lefebvre insisted on the centrality of daily life in the reproduction of capitalism not only at the macro-institutional level (work, schools, state), but also by means of the circulation of social conventions, images, and common sense notions (The Production 143–49). Lefebvre, however, also refers to the emergence of a differential space that resists the hegemonic forces of capitalism, stressing difference. This means the production of other forms of knowledge that may challenge hegemonic notions, denaturalizing a spatial order that has legitimated and justified regimes of exclusion and inequalities (27).

On this basis, one can argue that the struggle for the right to interfere in the reinvention process of a city functions as a vehicle of political empowerment that aims to forge a truly democratic society. As Mark Purcell states, the right to have control over the production of space involves the power to determine the rhythms of everyday life and producing and reproducing the social relations that frame it (577). As we know,