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PACKAGING POVERTY: TOURISM, VIOLENCE, AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE IN RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL BY TOMI O’NEIL TUSIA DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Ellen Moodie, Chair Professor Alejandro Lugo Associate Professor Martin Manalansan Associate Professor Laura Graham, University of Iowa Abstract Based on ethnographic field research with tourists, residents, and community activists in/of Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on participant-observation at Rio de Janeiro’s State Ministry of Tourism, and on critical analysis of popular discourse and of federal and state urban planning policies and programs, this dissertation explores the packaging of poverty in Rio de Janeiro. It examines how particular kinds of spaces are produced, maintained, and offered up for tourist consumption, and it interrogates the connections between macro-level decision-making and micro-level practices in order to understand how and why “poverty tourism” arose and flourishes in Brazil. I argue that “poverty tourism” is neither accidental nor inconsequential, but rather that the relegation of the urban poor to the status of tourist attraction is intimately tied to the operations of class exploitation, problematic, and segregationist, spatial management policies, violent racism, and a linguistically enacted politics of hierarchical othering. ii Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the support of countless individuals. At the University of Illinois, I am especially indebted to Dr. Ellen Moodie, and to her I would like to express my deepest gratitude. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Alejandro Lugo and Dr. Martin Manalansan IV, and Dr. Laura Graham at the University of Iowa. All of them offered support and encouragement beyond the call of duty. At the University of Iowa, I had the opportunity to work with several faculty members whose research and guidance have served as inspirations. Most notably, these include Dr. Mike Chibnik, Dr. Laura Graham, Dr. Doug Midget, and Dr. Ellen Lewin. My fellow graduate students at both institutions offered invaluable support, both in the form of critical feedback and in the form of shared libations. Among those who merit a word of thanks are Jenna Grant, Tim Landry, Beth Duffy, and Antonio Massi. A special thank you to Michele Hanks for her generosity, intellectual acuity, friendship, and patience, especially with my incurable messiness. No other roommate could, in good spirits, have tolerated what she did. In Rio, too many people to name facilitated the research on which this project is based. Those who selflessly shared their time and thoughts with me include Raimundo, Eduardo, Ednilson, Dona Nilda, Branco, Kelly, Viviane, Ricardo, Malu, Pedro, and Sonia. More than anyone else, I owe a debt of gratitude to Ailton “Macarrão,” whose wit, humor, and kindness were integral to my understandings of both Rocinha and tourism. Without his insight, this would have been a markedly different, and decidedly inferior, project. I would like to thank my family for unwavering support and love, despite my lengthy absences. My mother-in-law, Priscilla Tusia, and father-in-law, Santo Richard Tusia, have been unfailingly kind and generous, and my human daughter, Gwyneth Anne Tusia, has offered iii nothing but encouragement. Also worth mentioning are my non-human “children,” both canine and feline, whose furry affections have kept me (more or less) sane throughout this process: Annabelle, Kelsey, Dexter, Maevis, Alice, and Mr. Oscar. Finally, my wife, Nikki Tusia, deserves a special thank you for having tolerated my absences with patience and for having motivated me to finish, even when what I most wanted was to quit. Without her, this dissertation would never have been completed. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………...vi PART ONE: INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION, ROCINHA, RIO DE JANEIRO…………………1 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW: TOURISM, SPACE, AND POVERTY………….……..………………………….…….16 CHAPTER THREE: DESCRIPTION OF RESEARCH METHODS……………………………………………………………..…65 PART TWO: SPACES AND LANGUAGES OF POVERTY CHAPTER FOUR: FAVELAS IN THE RIO DE JANEIRO LANDSCAPE AND POPULAR IMAGINARY………………………………………..92 CHAPTER FIVE: URBAN POVERTY AS A TOURIST ATTRACTION: PACKAGING POVERTY……………………………………………………………...120 CHAPTER SIX: OF SLUMS AND NEIGHBORHOODS: PRODUCING AND CONTROLLING URBAN SPACE IN RIO DE JANEIRO FROM FAVELA-BAIRRO TO ERECTING WALLS..………………..176 CHAPTER SEVEN: “POOR PEOPLE’S PORTUGUESE”: SURVEYING SPEECH AND SPACE IN ROCINHA………………………………....200 PART THREE: VIOLENCE AND POVERTY CHAPTER EIGHT: STORIES OF VIOLENCE AND THE VIOLENCE OF STORIES…………..………………………….………...232 CHAPTER NINE: THUNDERBOLTS OF THE DISENFRANCHISED: RETHINKING CRIME AND JUSTICE IN RIO DE JANEIRO……………………………………………….264 CHAPTER TEN: CONCLUSION……………………………………………………295 REFERENCES.….…..….….…..……………………………………..………………305 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: MAP OF RIO DE JANEIRO STATE……………………………………….11 Figure 1.2: MAP OF METROPOLITAN RIO DE JANEIRO...………………………...12 Figure 1.3: AERIAL PHOTO OF ROCINHA.………………………………………......13 Figure 5.1: DETAIL OF TOURS OBSERVED…………….…………………..………131 Figure 9.1: POLICE KILLINGS/POLICE FATALITY SUFFERED (2008).………….284 Figure 9.2: ARRESTS PER POLICE KILLINGS (2008)...……….……………………285 Figure 9.3: POLICE KILLINGS PER 100 HOMICIDES (2008)………………………287 Figure 9.4: HOMICIDES PER TOTAL POPULATION (2008) x 1000……………….287 vi PART ONE: INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW CHAPTER ONE Introduction: Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro In many ways, this dissertation is the product of a fortuitous error I made during the summer of 2003—four years before I began the field research on which this project is based. Courtesy of a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship I received while a student at Vanderbilt University, I was spending a second summer studying Portuguese at the Instituto Brasil-Estados Unidos (IBEU) in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. One afternoon in July, two American friends of mine and I left the Gâvea Shopping mall in Rio’s affluent Zona Sul, or South Zone, and went to catch a bus to Leblon, another affluent neighborhood in the south. Although we were all living either in Ipanema or Copacabana, the warm, sunny weather had prompted us to decide to ride only as far as Leblon and then to walk along the beach the rest of the way home. Had I possessed at the time a better understanding of Rio’s geography, I would have realized that we were standing on the wrong side of the street to catch a direct bus from Gâvea to Leblon, but I didn’t. As such, when a bus with “Leblon” listed as its destination stopped for us, we climbed aboard without hesitation. Only a few minutes later, we began climbing a steep hill through a part of Gâvea I had never seen; as we continued our climb, I began to suspect that we were heading not for Leblon, but for Rocinha—a neighborhood I had never visited, but about which I had heard plenty. After sharing my suspicion with my friends, I decided to ask the cashier on the bus to confirm where we were going. “Pra garagem,” he replied. “To the garage.” The 1 bus, which normally did run between Gâvea and Leblon (via Rocinha), was to be parked in the garage, located in Rocinha, for the night and would not be continuing to Leblon. The cashier went on to assure us that we would have no trouble finding another bus or van to take us home. He also apologized that the display on the front of the bus had not been changed from “Leblon” to “Garagem” and for the confusion it had caused us. Although I had been warned repeatedly both by my Brazilian hosts and by my Portuguese language instructors that favelas were dangerous places full of dangerous people, my first encounter with Rocinha suggested that their warnings were incorrect. Indeed, Rocinha seemed anything but dangerous. In fact, once my friends and I got off the bus—on a street I would later learn was called the Estrada da Gâvea—it took only a few moments for locals to begin offering to help us. I am not certain as to whether we looked confused, foreign, or simply out of place, but I was astounded by how many people asked if we were lost or needed anything. One woman even offered to walk with us to the van stop at the bottom of the hill and to make sure we got on the right one. Despite having been lost, map in hand, in various parts of the city on several occasions, I had never been offered so much assistance.1 Ultimately, we found our way back to our temporary homes and shared our experiences with our hosts, who, without exception, suggested that we were lucky to have emerged from Rocinha alive and unscathed. Although not one of our hosts had any direct experience with any favela, let alone with Rocinha, they were universally adamant about their superior knowledge of favelas. My own host dismissed my early, positive assessments of Rocinha as “innocent” and as a result of my being an American. I 1 I do not wish to suggest that Cariocas are not generally friendly or helpful; in my experience, they certainly are. Instead, I want to highlight how much more willing to help those I first met in Rocinha seemed to be. 2 continued my engagement with Brazil and conducted research elsewhere, but I never forgot my first, brief encounter with Rocinha. In particular, the disjuncture between the lively community and helpful residents I encountered, on the one hand, and the frightening, dangerous place described by the middle-class Brazilians I knew, on the other, stuck with me. It is, in part, this disjuncture that brought me back to Rocinha in 2005, to begin to investigate poverty tours, and that continues to shape my thinking about Rocinha, specifically, and about favelas, generally.

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