Three Books on the Favelas of Rio de Janerio

     In 2010, the Brazilian GDP rose a staggering 7.5%, the fastest rate of growth the nation has seen in 25 years.  Indeed, Brazilian economic prospects have rarely appeared better, especially given recently discovered off-shore oil reserves.  A recent New York Times article "Foreigners Follow Money to Booming Brazil, Land of the $35 Martini" described the effect which this upturn has had upon one of Brazil’s most important cities, Rio De Janerio.  The currently bullish climate has encouraged highly skilled immigrants to make Rio their home, helping to make the city one of the world’s most expensive places in which to live.  Despite these economic gains and important future prospects, Brazil remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, with Rio again leading the way.  The three books under review in this article help to explain this disparity, and just as importantly point to possible ways in which to militate against the worst of the socio-political effects of Brazilian capitalism.

     The curious geography and particular history of Rio have created a city in which the disproportion in wealth can be quite jarring.  Foreigners with Ivy League degrees are merely the most recent group to arrive to this city famously situated by the beach; for decades, and in increasing numbers, poor Brazilians from the interior of the country have arrived in search of the work lacking in their origin communities.  Limited finances coupled with discrimination from Caricios (as the residents of Rio are called), led these intrepid peoples to form their new communities on the steep hillside overlooking the downtown and beach districts.  These residences often began illegally, as squatters built on vacant land.  After a great deal of struggle, many of these favelas have since gained varying degrees of official sanction and government services.  And yet they provide a striking demonstration of the inequality to be found in Brazilian society.  Indeed, the US$10,000 a month apartment mentioned in the above New York Times piece most likely offers its inhabitants amazing views of both the ocean and this grinding poverty.

     Few academics would seem to have a better understanding of Rio’s favelas than sociologist Janice Perlman, a thoroughgoing knowledge much evidenced by her 2010 book entitled Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro.  The forty years of the title refer to the period Perlman has spent studying and living in various favelas, work which has resulted in several publications.  The most important of these works, often described by specialists as a “landmark,” is her 1976 The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janiero.  Perlman argued in The Myth of Marginality that Rio’s slums were not inhabited by backwards, lazy, or pre-modern peoples, as was often the contemporary viewpoint. Rather, she wrote, these peoples were integral components of Caricao society.  The poor worked exceedingly hard for paltry rewards, while being subjected to state sponsored repression.  Without this labor, Perlman showed, the wealth of Rio society at large could never have been generated.  The stigmatized slum dweller was thus every bit a Caricao as the wealthy of the central portions of the city.

     Favela represents this sociologist’s recent work upon her return to Rio’s poor districts in an attempt to follow up her earlier research.  Perlman labors quite hard to meet with the people she had known from the 1960s and 1970s, while continuing discussions with the contacts she did not lose.  As such, her book represents a singular chance to see how poverty is and is not transmitted between generations.   This sociologist is also able to follow up her earlier hypotheses regarding the “myth” of marginality.  Finally, the reader is presented with the changes, both positive and negative, to be found from the time of the Brazilian dictatorship to the today’s democracy.  This is done through exhaustive research of actual individuals in various stages of life, a remarkable source of evidence.

     Perhaps most importantly, Perlman discovered just how effective community solidarity can be.  Many of the areas she returns to study in Favela have changed a good deal only after such activism, with such essentials as plumbing , electricity, street lighting, and so on to be found in areas in which in such things were previously absent.  Further, many children of her first subjects had been able to effectively use programs fought for by their forerunners to improve their economic positions.  The legality of property ownership in favelas had also been seen to have become somewhat more officially recognized.  Further, the unrelenting work by residents to improve their environs had led to more stable places of residence, with brick, mortar, and concrete replacing less stable materials.  Unfortunately, Perlman discovered just how persistent the prejudice against residents of favelas continues to be.  Favela outsiders still often see their impoverished neighbors as criminals, or potential criminals, to be refused the full rights of other Caricaos.

     The most dangerous change Perlman describes is the rise of the drug trade in Rio, a form of criminality which became increasingly evident as the 1980s progressed.  Sociologist Enrique Desmond Arias makes this shift the topic of his 2006 work Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security.  In many ways, Rio’s shanty towns represent an almost over-determined location of drug related violence.  Geographically, the city provides a site of international shipment quite close to Andean centers of cocaine production.  Further, Rio’s wealthy inhabitants and tourists make for ideal consumers.  Finally, the maze of unnamed streets and the easily defended steep avenues of the faveleas coupled with a lack of a local police force represent ideal conditions for the drug trade.

     Much like Perlman, Desmond Arias argues that the current climate of drug fueled violence to be found in so many faveleas is integrally related to the citizenry found in the rest of the city.  He meets with a variety of individuals, from community and political leaders to those plying the drug trade, to better portray the relationships which have contributed to the violent social landscape.  Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro describes, for instance, how one community leader uses his ties to drug gangs to augment his power in relation to outside politicians while also using those very same outside ties to try to control the dealers.  Desmond Arias further displays the problems created by a corrupt, prejudiced, and violent police force whose actions often are by turns counterproductive and murderous.  Unfortunately, the violence is an outcome of power-elite machinations, something which again seems to argue for community based activism as the only effective solution.

     The final book here under review is an autobiography authored by Benedita da Silva, a favelea resident turned community activist turned senator.  In An Afro-Brazilian Woman's Story of Politics and Love the reader is treated to a life story which should be recognizable after a reading of the two previously discussed books.  Da Silva was born into an extremely impoverished family, living in a house made of cardboard, going to bed hungry, seeing her sister forced into prostitution, having a botched abortion; all of it depressingly familiar.  However, she was able to attend classes and begin a political career with the help of a supportive husband and her obviously extremely high intelligence rate.  Interestingly, she was also an earlier member of the Worker’s Party, which would go on to become the recently successful party of former President Lula De Silva and current President Dilma Rousseff.

     An Afro-Brazialian Woman’s Story of Politics and Love is of course a political work, however, and it does speak to some rather particular scandals involving Senator Da Silva.  There is also a great deal of material on her work, from fighting for indigenous people’s rights to her vocalization of feminism in a sometimes quite misogynistic society.  Surprisingly for a political leader, or at least surprising to a US reader, there are some fairly intimate familial and sexual details included in this piece.  Overall, though, the book once again speaks to the effectiveness of political activism and solidarity on the part of favelea dwellers.  Da Silva herself has benefited from the effects of such political consciousness, with her own political work continuing this positive influence.  Indeed, it would seem that little would change in Rio’s faveleas if it were not for such involvement. 

     These studies of Rio’s impoverished areas demonstrate the interconnected relationship between poverty and wealth; there are no wealthy without many more poor supporting their lifestyles.  In Rio, so far the only relatively effective way of countering this has been for the poor themselves to collectively fight.  This need not be the case, however.  Allowing poverty and violence on the scale experienced by favelea residents ultimately endangers the stability of the entire socioeconomic system, an especially dangerous outcome for those wealthy few benefiting most from that system's continuance.  It should likewise be pointed out that the case of this Brazilian city is aberrant relative only to its recent economic boom.  As environmental historian Mike Davis has shown in Planet of Slums, the growth of impoverished urban areas is a global phenomenon as “cities will account for virtually all future population growth…”  Thus, the residents of shanty towns should not be left to demand their rights as human beings alone; we should join them in their struggle for the good of all, in Rio and the world generally.

David Deutsch, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World"

"The only uniquely significant thing about humans...is our ability to create new explanations."
-David Deutsch, "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World," 2011.

Marcel Proust, "Time Regained: In Search of Lost Time Volume 6"

"Truth- and life too- can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, within a metaphor."
- Marcel Proust, "Time Regained: In Search of Lost Time Volume 6," 1951

Patrick Leigh Fermor, "The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands"

     "The local manager, a relation of Raoul's, was a friend of mine. 'It's wonderful stuff,' he said. 'The locals adore it. It keeps them off the rum.' It's true. An increasing number of the inhabitants of Fort-de-France circulate the capital in a permanent state of stone-cold sobriety, their insides awash with this strange brown liquid. The propaganda drive of this firm has been so intensive and so ruthlessly efficient in its execution, that never for a second are the words Coca-Cola out of one's sight. It is on a scale that nobody who has not crossed the Atlantic can hope to grasp. They are printed on almost everything you touch. Everywhere the beaming heroines of these giant advertisements smirk and simper and leer. It becomes the air you breathe, a way of life, an entire civilization- the Coca-Cola age, yoke fellow of the age of the Atomic Bomb.
     The bottles, when they are emptied, are sent back to be refilled, but the tin can capsules that seal them are littered everywhere. They clatter against your shoes in the dust and pile up in rusty drifts in the gutters. Bit by bit they will form a metal humus all over the western hemisphere, so that centuries after the bomb has done its work and made way, perhaps for a nobler detritus, archaeologists will be able to put a date to our buried remains with the help of this stratum of small round lids."
-Patrick Leigh Fermor, "The Traveler's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands," 1950

Jean Paul Sartre, "Nausea"

"I do not think, therefore I am a mustache." -Jean Paul Satre, "Nausea," 1938

Salmon Rushdie, "The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey"

      I asked my well-worn question: "What do you think the government should do, then? Should it try and make peace with the Americans?"
     "You said 'Americans'," she reproached me.
     "I'm sorry. North Americans. Unitedstatesians. Reaganians. Them."
     "It's alright," she forgave me quickly. "When I first came to Europe from Nicaragua, it would shock me to hear the US called 'America.' I wanted to protest, But we are America, not just them. But now I say it too: America, Americans. Europe teaches you a different perspective."
     "Yes," I agreed, "it certainly does."
-Salmon Rushdie, "The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey", 1987

Three Books on Native Americans in the US-Mexican Borderlands, 1700-1900

     In the early 18th Century, the Comanche Indians first began to enter the plains and desert regions of what would later become the southeastern United States and northern Mexico.  These indigenous peoples quickly adapted to their new home, transforming themselves in a matter of decades into one of the most dominant groups in the region.  By the 1800s, the Comanches had become successful traders, exchanging goods and raiding their neighbors for profit as part of the period's international capitalist system.  They had also been able to subjugate first Spanish colonists as well as later Mexican and US settlers.  By the later 1800s this extension of indigenous power had precipitously declined, but for a period lasting generations the Comanches had successfully wielded enormous power over the area.

     This is not the standard story of Native American decimation at the hands of various imperial powers, a story much engrained in US popular historical consciousness.  Even those quite sympathetic to the plights of indigenous peoples have often followed an account of their supposed irredeemable march towards socio-cultural doom, what more recent historians of the period have termed “declensionist” narratives (for a classic example of such a declensionist framework see Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History).  Beginning with the late 1970s and the early 1980s, however, historians began to complicate earlier ideas of inevitable indigenous dissolution, even in some cases quite refuting declensionist conclusions.  The three works here under review represent very impressive recent contributions to this continuing revisionist project.
     Historian Pekka Hämäläinen’s 2008 The Comanche Empire demonstrates the kind of surprising conclusions provided by such different historical frameworks.  Hämäläinen’s exciting argument is that the Comanche Indians not only resisted outside pressures, but that they actually were able to implement a “reverse” or “indigenous” imperialism.   He begins by portraying the Spanish colonial settlements of southwestern North America as being so harried by Comanche raids as to be willing to submit to a tributary system.  While these Bourbon Spanish settlers believed that their “gifts” might have a “civilizing” effect on their Indian advisories, the Comanches successfully maintained a great deal of power over their supposed overlords.  In fact, Spanish sources of the period often testify to the superior armaments and political organization which the Comanches wielded over them.  And, when the tributary system broke down, the Comanches began to use these Spanish settlements as a source of horses, food, goods, etc. to be raided at will.  Indeed, the Spanish were effectively allowed to remain by the Comanches, according the Hämäläinen, merely to serve as a source of trade-able commodities like horses and cloth. 

     The Comanche Empire holds similarly shocking material regarding the 19^th century, as well.  After Mexico had gained its independence, government officials in Mexico City proved unable and unwilling to maintain the earlier tributary system.  The Comanches proceeded to use their superior strength to take what had formerly been given, leading to decades of serious fighting and the semi-depopluation of northern Mexico.  So great was this prolonged crisis that several Mexican territories, most notably New Mexico and Texas, began to work actively against the central government’s policies.  Indeed, these state governments often worked against one another so great was their desperation.  And into this breach marched first US nationals looking to trade, and later the US government itself.  Thus, the US-Mexican War in many ways was prefigured by the Comanche form of “indigenous” imperialism.

     What factors impelled the Comanche subjugation of first the Spanish and later the Mexicans?  Hämäläinen provides several possible motivations, from raids as an outlet for ambitious young men to prove themselves, to environmental factors pushing the Comanches to locate ever larger sources of fodder for their huge herds of horses, to the economic incentives of trading stolen goods for foreign manufactured materials.  Most importantly, though, was the Comanche conception of goods; if one had a surplus of goods needed by another party, and if that surplus was denied a good faith request, then simply appropriating the products in question held no social stigma.  Thus, Comanche raids were not seen as thievery, but rather as a kind of socially sanctified leveling.

      Brian Delay’s 2008 War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the US-Mexican Border treats with similar material and themes as Hämäläinen’s work, but highlights other rationales behind Comanche raiding.  The period upon which Delay most focuses is that following Mexican Independence after peace between the Comanches and the colonists had broken down.  The resulting depopulated settlements became a "thousand deserts."  Delay highlights feelings of betrayal, and the cyclical and every increasing need for vengeance against the supposed betrayers, as one important source of Comanche violence.  While raids produced economic surplus, outlets for social pressure, etc., this historian sees the outsized violence as mainly a cultural byproduct of Comanche rage.
     Most helpfully, though, Delay makes the case that raids and warfare should be explained as political events with a history.  Rather than simply follow generalized sociological, economic, or ecological theories to explain Comanche and anti-Comanche violence, War of a Thousand Deserts attempts to explain the people and events behind systemic forces.  Seemingly an obvious historiographical tactic, but one not often enough employed when discussing indigenous peoples.  As difficult as it sometimes is, given the paucity of traditional historical source material, it is nonetheless important to rediscover the political figures behind Indian violence to truley understand the period.
     The War of a Thousand Deserts also makes an interesting argument regarding the differing reactions of US and Mexican citizenry to native deprivations.  Mexicans living in regions not directly in contact with the border regions often saw Comanches and other indigenous peoples almost as Mexicans that did not know that they were Mexican.  Theoretically, and contra contemporaneous US notions of who was "American", all those who were born within "Mexico" were officially "Mexicans."  While those who had experienced Indian violence often denigrated the notion, this theory of citizenship did much to limit Mexican counteroffensives.  Those from the US, however, held no such compunction and were therefore more amendable to ideas of violent "extermination."  Indeed, Delay demonstrates that the "thousand deserts" which northern Mexico had become served to reinforce US racist feelings both of superiority to Mexican inabilities to properly use the land and notions of Indian barbarity. 
     Finally, Karl Jacoby's 2008 Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History serves to demonstrate some of the reasons why conclusions like those reached by Delay and Hämäläinen seem so surprising to contemporary readers.  Jacoby takes as his subject an 1871 massacre of Apache Indians perpetrated by O'odham Indians, Mexicans, and Americans at a US military installation named Camp Grant.  Rather than create a single narrative, Shadows at Dawn presents the same story from four separate viewpoints; those of the perpetrators and the Apaches.  This is intended to reinforce the difficulty, or perhaps injustice, traditionally linear history can present in relation to mutually distinct conceptions of the same event.  The piece further highlights this theoretical concern with a quite nuanced use of language; the glossary at the back of the book is quite helpful, as Delay attempts to use his informants' languages as much as possible.
     Tracing the Camp Grant massacre to the present helps Delay show how the American viewpoint eventually triumphed, and from where later declensionist narratives partially originated.  This is of course much to do with power, as the US members of the raiding party successfully shaped the later depictions of this violence through a historical society, newspapers, etc.  Shadows at Dawn does depict the continued existence of dissident viewpoints, however, and perhaps even their proliferation in more recent times.  Lamentably, however, Delay does not focus more upon the trial of the perpetrators of the Camp Grant massacre.  The one point in which at least three viewpoints came together, and perhaps the initial mainstreaming of the US conception of the event, is given but a few pages.  Nonetheless, Delay has crafted an outstanding and very original piece.
      Taken together, these three works represent an exciting extension of work done in the past few decades upon the southwestern US and northern Mexico in 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries.  This is an almost fractal period of confusion and socio-political reformulation, and one which holds great potential for new historical conceptualizations.  As such, a great many interesting works have been coming out of research into this time and place, beginning with works like David Weber's 1982 The Mexican Frontier 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico right up to more modern works in the "Borderlands" tradition..  The pieces here under review represent an extension of that work into representations of a more forceful, "imperialist" indigenous population; a population yet poorly understood.