Rio and Its Slums

Rio de Janeiro is known as a post-card city throughout the world and recently was elected a world heritage site. Nestled between the Atlantic Ocean and the Brazilian mountains, Rio is renowned for its natural beauty and has served as the scene of numerous films and even more songs. At the same time, for years Rio filled the international headlines because of the city’s high violence rate. One of its most negative aspects is great wealth and poverty living together, even though this is not a specific characteristic of this particular city, but the reality in any great contemporary metropolis. Even so, Rio is a singular city because it incorporates urban slums in centrally located and wealthy neighborhoods, and despite the fact that most slums are located on the outskirts of town, this proximity between rich and poor creates an unforgettable image for any outsider visiting Rio for the first time.

The 2010 census data shows that around a million and a half residents in Rio de Janeiro live in favelas, meaning areas that the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) define as subnormal agglomerations. This population is distributed among 763 slums, located in different parts of the city.

In order to better understand what official statistics consider to be a favela, it is necessary to return to this classification of a subnormal agglomeration according to the Manual de Delimitação dos Setores (Manual for Demarcating Sectors) for the 2010 census. This document defines a subnormal agglomeration as each group of at least 51 housing units, most of which lack essential public services, and that until recently have occupied (or have formerly occupied) land officially belonging to someone else (whether public or private) and generally spread out in a disorderly and dense manner.

However, for inhabitants of the city, slums represent more than just places with peculiar attributes. Slums possess specific cultural characteristics and forms of sociability and at the same time, may be distinguished by the violence inflicted on their inhabitants, which is distinct from and more frequent than violence experienced by other inhabitants of the city.

This is an exceptional situation that marks slums in Rio and the subject matter of the two books here under review: Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro, by Janice Perlman, and Living in the Crossfire: Favela Residents, Drug Dealers, and Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro, by Maria Helena Moreira Alves and Philip Evanson. The intense empirical research of both leaves it clear that living conditions in these localities extend far beyond official statistics, as daily dramas and experiences are portrayed with both scientific accuracy and social engagement. This is why affectionate references made to interviewed slums dwellers are common in both studies.

Perlman takes us back in time, since her work recovers contact with families she interviewed in the late 1960s. From 1968 to 1969, she did fieldwork in three slums in Rio, using both surveys and life stories. The result was published in 1976, in the book The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. This study became an important reference for urban field analysis in Brazil and marked debates on marginality, slums, and migration. Exactly 30 years later, in 1999 Perlman returned to Rio de Janeiro in order to meet up with the same families she had interviewed in the 1960s.

We all know that societies all over the world went through dramatic changes during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Perlman came back to a totally different scenario in Rio. She called attention to the fact that urban infrastructure had improved in slums as well as general living conditions. Brazil was not under a military dictatorship anymore, but firmly on the way to consolidating a democratic regime. At the same time, slums dwellers were submitted to a different “order” and a different “State.”

It should be remembered that from the mid-1980s up to 2010, the city of Rio de Janeiro and especially its more poverty-stricken communities lived under an incredibly violent and cruel regime that went into effect because of an alleged war against drug trafficking. If on the one hand, drug traffickers imposed terror on the regions they dominated, on the other hand, public forces brutally treated any citizen indiscriminately, including during shootouts that often left women and children as the fatal victims, treated as “collateral damage.” As absurd as this may seem, political and police forces tried to, and succeeded in, convincing the local population that the city was going through a civil war.

These are the conditions under which Perlman revisited slums in Rio and pointed out changes that took place over this period of time. She registered in her book: “When I lived in the favelas in 1968–69, I felt safe and protected, while everyone from elites to tax drivers to leftist students foolishly perceived these settlements as dangerous. The community was poor, but people mobilized to demand improved urban services, worked hard, had fun, and had hope….When I returned in 1999, the physical infrastructure and household amenities were greatly improved. But where there had been hope, now there were fear and uncertainty. People were afraid of getting killed in the cross fire…” (pp. xxi–xxii).

Coincidently, crossfire is a word included in the title of the other book under review here: Living in the Crossfire, even though the two books are distanced by almost a decade in terms of fieldwork carried out (Perlman was in Rio in 1999, while Alves, Evanson and their research team carried out focal groups and interviews from 2007 to 2008). These were extremely brutal times in Rio de Janeiro, when the poor got caught up between drug dealers and the police. The government could not have cared less about civilian lives during those years, when the official discourse was to reestablish order by declaring war against drugs and international weapons traffic, and police were unmerciful and did not hesitate to use lethal force.

This explains why the two books use the same register and express almost identical impressions of slums. Yet, at the same time, the two studies use different methodologies, despite both basing their empirical data mostly on in-depth interviews and life stories. Perlman seeks to recover stories of people and families with whom she had contact in the late 1960s. As such, her work offers a great contribution, since she incorporates a longitudinal analysis over a long time span. She also makes use of quantitative data, such as surveys. Alves and Evanson did participant observation in three communities, besides focal groups and interviews with relevant political actors, among with ex-president Lula and the Rio de Janeiro governor, Sérgio Cabral.

Yet if both books clearly and vividly denounce permanent violations of human and civil rights, they also sketch an almost idyllic landscape in slums. The reader who opens either book will be left with a strong impression that violence is external to slums and that there is no tension or conflict among inhabitants themselves who, in the end, support each other and cooperate in perfect harmony. Perlman’s narrative on slums is pure delicacy and poetry when she portrays slums as places where friendship, affection, and popular culture prevail. Despite the fear and insecurity that the author found to be permanent aspects in these communities in the late 1990s, she claims to salvage, when she goes into residents’ homes, the same positive feelings that she felt upon making her first contact with slums in Rio in the late 1960s. According to the author herself: “Favela is life, favela is love; Favela is freedom, friendship and feijoada; It is laughter and tears, life and death—only a hair’s-breadth apart” (p. xxiii).

Alves and Evanson represent slums in a very similar way. They call attention to the communitarian spirit, ties among inhabitants, and their dedication to activities that represent public services not provided by the state. The authors see soccer and samba schools as integrating elements in these localities, where people may develop a sense of community and collective identities. The authors state: “So although one can say that people in the favelas have been shaped by a history of exclusion, exploitation, and resistance, one should also take note of these astonishing efforts of collective and individual creativity and the tenacious maintenance of community traditions. At their best, the favelas offer the rest of Brazil lessons in community spirit and the strength that comes from joining together with neighbors. They show people working together in a way that overcomes racial and regional ties. They promote a feeling of joy and energy that is contagious and marks what many refer to as the ‘spirit of the cariocas’” (p. 25).

Nobody would disagree that people living in poor communities often face difficulties that end up joining them together in order to help each other out. However, this does not mean that there are no conflicts among neighbors in slums and the social relations are always distinguished by peace and solidarity. Quite the contrary, several studies point out that gossip, surveillance on neighbors, and disputes are the recurrent among slums dwellers. Fights over demarcating land and public utilities such as water and electric power, and even personal issues, are also common in slums.

It is important to remember that even with its own peculiar characteristics, slum sociability is not drastically different from any other region of the city, especially lower-income neighborhoods. The fact is that contrary to certain romantic images that appear in films and songs, violent sociability often prevails in slums, the result of all the abuse to which residents are submitted. ¹

The literature on slums in Brazil is quite broad and remarkably solid, and the points covered above may be found in studies by Brazilian authors such as Licia Valadares and Luiz Antônio Machado. It is important to emphasize that nowadays living conditions and access to consumer goods in slums is similar to the rest of the population in Rio de Janeiro. As such, care should be taken with the representations and images of slums that have made their way into social-science investigations. One of the many myths created from these representations is the “favela/rest of the city” dichotomy. This parallel, dividing Rio into two different “worlds,” obscures heterogeneity within slums, as well as similarities between slums and other kinds of urban spaces. In her book A invenção da favela: do mito de origem a favela.com (The Invention of the Favela: From the Myth of Origin to Favela.com), Licia Valladares ² calls attention to the necessity of social researchers questioning this image, which should be repositioned as part of the wider urban transformations underway in contemporary societies.

It is even more important to consider economic growth in the last decade in developing societies, including Brazil, which gave working classes greater access to consumer goods. What kinds of meanings may actually be derived from a significant number of Brazilians entering the consumer market still is not clear, but doubtlessly, this represents a change in parameters that, until recently, divided social groups and lifestyles. Slums dwellers may be included among these consumers.

This is why it is worth emphasizing that slums have changed, and continue to change, together with reality in Brazil as a whole. Maybe it is time to rethink the idea that there is a gap separating slums from the rest of the city, or the “hill” from the “street,” as people say colloquially in Rio. ³

Finally, it must be mentioned that near the end of 2008, the Rio state government occupied numerous slums with Pacification Police Units (UPPs). ⁴ The occupations were presented as the key public-safety policy for combating violence in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Since UPPs are relatively recent, it is not possible to present an accurate analysis of their effectiveness and consequences on slums populations. A common criticism of this policy is that the UPPs were established in only a few slums, mainly in the more affluent parts of the city, while most slums still lack governmental support. Another important questioning of this policy regards the duration of the occupation: If the social reality in slums does not change and the initiative does not advance any further than mere police occupation, what will happen when these police units leave the slums? The insecurity and vulnerability portrayed in the two books is still valid for most slums dwellers, especially those on the outskirts of the city. Nonetheless, there remains a strong perception that violence has indeed decreased in communities where UPPs were established, as well as in the city as a whole.

Alves and Evanson mention the UPP experience, but their research came to an end in 2008 and the first UPP occupied the Dona Marta slum in November of that year, thus the authors could not offer much information on this policy. It is worth remembering that, even if doubts do still arise as to the UPP’s capacity to respond to the public-security problem in Rio de Janeiro, this issue was even more dubious when the book was written. Perlman did her research in the late 1990s so she did not have any opportunity to ask slum-dwellers about this new part of their daily lives.

All of these motives make the two books in question somewhat dated, nevertheless they do offer an important contribution to literature on the subject and offer a means of creating better living conditions in Rio’s slums. Greater worldwide transformations affecting life in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro and, yes, in slums, make it legitimate to affirm that we have arrived at a turning point. The two books reviewed here allow us to learn more about part of the story, presenting relevant topics for better understanding what could be waiting for us on the next street corner. It is fundamental to remember that the future is the result of decisions and choices, in both political and social arenas, made in the present time.