Moon Rise

I took this pic­ture last week of the moon rise on Copacabana.

I real­ized it wasn’t safe to be on the beach at night by myself, even at the early time of 5:45. Part of me feels embar­rassed for ven­tur­ing out like that. There were some peo­ple on the beach and it was early and the moon was so pretty! A lot of light from the street was spilling onto the beach and the police were close by. I guess that meant lit­tle though. Two girls grabbed me and tried to take my cam­era, but did not suc­ceed. They only made off with my phone. I hes­i­tate to write this here because I won­der about my par­ents stum­bling upon it. I know they worry a lot and that my mom likes to attribute her insom­nia and gray hair to me. I worry that being hon­est about my expe­ri­ences will cur­tail my abil­ity to inter­act with them. I would rather not sen­sor myself exces­sively on my blog because of them though.

The every day vio­lence and poverty here is not like any­thing I have seen. I guess my pre­vi­ous trav­els in Guatemala and India left me with a false sense of street smarts. The rules really are dif­fer­ent here. Since I’ve been shaken up by that expe­ri­ence, I have been less inclined to go out after dark by myself, even in the neigh­bor­hood. I always feel a lit­tle like this when I travel. The lone pasty girl so obvi­ously out of here ele­ment any­where but New York City is an easy tar­get. I make a space for myself just fine and enjoy it to a great extent. With time I will fig­ure out the rules here and get reoriented.

After I was jumped, I talked to some friends about it and was very reas­sured both by the casu­al­ness with which they treated the event and their own sto­ries of being robbed. Maybe this sounds odd. I guess it helped to not feel spe­cial, to feel like I had a shared expe­ri­ence, and to hear of sit­u­a­tions that were much worse, like Harmony’s mom get­ting robbed her first week in Rio and loos­ing every­thing includ­ing her pass­port, or Ser­gio hav­ing cam­eras stolen aggres­sively from him on two occa­sions, once one he had not even fin­ished pay­ing for.

The threat of vio­lence seems to loom in many peo­ple minds here in Rio. I have mostly been inter­act­ing with priv­i­leged peo­ple with sta­ble incomes and social net­works. They talk about the prox­im­ity of the fave­las, equat­ing these neigh­bor­hoods with vio­lence. I am going to talk gen­er­ally of what I have heard peo­ple say­ing, rather than recount spe­cific peo­ple in spe­cific con­ver­sa­tions. I know I might be prone to judge their val­ues and asser­tions, but that this judg­ment comes from a very dif­fer­ent notion of race, poverty, and urban­iza­tion that is prob­a­bly mis­guided when pro­jected onto Brazil. Since this is a pub­lic blog where I am recount­ing pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions, I will remain vague in describ­ing what peo­ple tell me. This will give me space to fig­ure how my per­cep­tions and judg­ments are work­ing while at the same time respect­ing the gaps between my knowl­edge and their more inti­mate and lay­ered knowl­edge of what is hap­pen­ing in this city, and the cir­cum­stances under which they shared that knowledge.

I hear peo­ple talk about an inevitable day when the peo­ple in the fave­las will come down and take over the entire city with vio­lence. This is where the con­ver­sa­tion often went when I described being attacked on the beach. One per­son described the rel­a­tive safety in São Paulo, where she has moved to from Rio, due to the fact that the slums are rel­e­gated to an outer rim of the city. More often than not, the peo­ple I talk to qual­ify their fear as sep­a­rate from the peo­ple liv­ing in the fave­las. The peo­ple in the fave­las are not bad, they say. But it seems that the image is of a homog­e­nized incu­ba­tor of vio­lence in which the other lay­ers of the lives and com­mu­ni­ties are lost. The ‘not bad’ part of the peo­ple liv­ing there is fogged over. The soci­ety seems very polar­ized. While I am con­cerned hear­ing the sweep­ing state­ments about the favela com­mu­ni­ties and the intense fear of the peo­ple liv­ing here, the hur­dles to pic­tur­ing the com­mu­ni­ties dif­fer­ently are great. The alter­na­tive voices from the com­mu­ni­ties and the points of access are sti­fled under the mixed real­ity and hype of violence.

One per­son shared with me a vari­a­tion on this image that was rooted in mis­guided city plan­ning and neglect in the 1960’s. In her view, it was the city planner’s fault for not man­ag­ing the com­mu­ni­ties bet­ter when they gave cer­tain com­mu­ni­ties the right to the land their houses were on and not just the houses them­selves. I remem­ber hear­ing about this in a con­fer­ence that I went to on social democ­racy and glob­al­iza­tion in Latin Amer­ica. Adri­ana Abde­nur pre­sented a paper called “Three or Four Things You Can Do with a Favela.” She out­lined the ways that earnest efforts to improve the con­di­tions in fave­las and pro­mote par­tic­i­pa­tion in demo­c­ra­tic processes dur­ing the 1960s were cre­atively under­cut and dis­em­pow­ered. The three things she saw gov­ern­ments doing with fave­las were relo­cate, ignore, or help. This is what the class I am start­ing a week and a half will get into more. So far, I am get­ting an idea as to what some peo­ple out­side these com­mu­ni­ties think and feel about them, and how they alter­nately help or ignore them. I had a fun peek at the cul­tural vibrancy and cre­ative human rights work that is hap­pen­ing in the fave­las with my trip to Viver e Crescer. I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing more of that.