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Rios Favelas in Recent Fiction and Film: Commonplaces of Urban Segregation

marta peixoto

Marta Peixoto, associate professor of Brazilian literature at New York University, is the author of books on Clarice Lispector and Joo Cabral de Melo Neto, as well as several articles on Brazilian poetry and fiction. She is working on a book on Rio de Janeiro that examines urban segregation and class relation in literature, film, and popular culture produced since the mid-1980s.

he metaphor of the cidade partida (fragmented or broken city), which has been used to characterize Rio de Janeiros darker aspectits stark inequality, its class conflicts and vio- lenceis not new but has gained, in the last couple of decades, wide- spread circulation. Since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, when formal democratic practices such as free speech and open elec- tions were reestablished, it has become more obvious than ever that equal citizenship rights for all, de facto rather than on paper, are still an elusive ideal in Rio and in Brazil as a whole (as in many other places). The neoliberal economic policies of recent decades, with cur- tailed social spending and privatization of state-owned property, have increased poverty in Rio significantly. The arrival of the large-scale commercialization of cocaine since the late 1970s has deepened urban divisions and intensified violence. The retail end of the drug business often takes place in poor neighborhoods, or favelas.1 But the violence that prevails in Rio is not limited to warring drug factions or their conflicts with the police. It also inheres in unemployment and inad- equate education and health care for the poor, as well as in severely flawed security, judiciary, and penal systems. All in all, the urban experience is fraught with violence and the fear of violence for all residentsthough here too there is inequality, since this violence and fear affect some segments of the population far more than others. In Rioa city of six and a half million inhabitants, or over ten million if the entire metropolitan area is countedthere are currently some six hundred favelas and low-income projects, which continue to receive new rural migrants. They house about a third of the urban population and have been growing at a faster rate than the middleand upper-class areas. As a phenomenon parallel to the growth of pov-

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erty and violence in recent decades, physical barriers increasingly demarcate social spaces. To the degree they can afford it, middle and upper classes live in gated residences, blocked off from the street and protected by private security guards, and often shop and work in enclosed structures. With alarming frequency, the wealthy drive armored vehicles. As Teresa Caldeira argues in City of Walls, her book on the discursive practices that supported the building of walled enclaves in So Paulo of the 1980s and 1990s, those divisive barriers and discourses erode the citizenship rights of the poorer residents and diminish for all the vital- ity of the public space. Motivated by fear and mistrust, the walls of the city, material and discursive, in turn promote fear and mistrust. While the growth of slums, fortified enclaves, and divided cities is a global phe- nomenon (see Davis), it is nevertheless lived in particular ways, with a specific history, in each city. In Rio, this segregation and the discourses that surround it are not of recent date. Because of its topographythe city is hemmed in by the sea and interrupted by numerous abrupt hillsthe residences of the poor and the rich are and have been im- mediately juxtaposed in Rio. In many neigh- borhoods, the limited level space between sea and hills has been taken by the well-off, whereas the poorer communities occupy the steep slopes and the less desirable land, within as well as on the periphery of the city. Unlike other Brazilian and Latin American cities, where the poor live almost exclusively on the periphery, in Rio a marked segregation coincides with physical proximity. This situ- ation has a paradoxical double effect: it ac- centuates the perception of social inequities by the poorer residents but also fosters a selfprotective blindness among the middle and upper classes, a refusal to take full measure of the poverty that is obviously right there. In this context of increasing poverty, violence, segregation, and physical proxim- ity of disparate social and economic circum-

stances, fictional and nonfictional narratives about Rios less fortunate have proliferated. Although many of the well-off conduct their lives in gated and protected spaces, the film and publishing industries have found a thriv- ing market among them for cultural products that represent impoverished spaces. This situ- ation too is not recent. Since the 1920s, the favela has held an important position in the imaginary of the city. Its image tends to be double, having positive and negative sides. As Vernica Dias puts it, with regard to film, The Rio hills have already been portrayed in a wide variety of cinematic images, be- ing shown as a place sometimes close to heaven [ pertinho do cu] (as an old samba goes), sometimes close to hell (106). In its positive image, the favela is a vital place for the creation and performance of popular art forms. On the negative side, throughout the twentieth century, as Alba Zaluar and Mar- cos Alvito observe, the favela has inhabited the urban imaginary as a locus of illnesses and epidemics, as the place par excellence of bandits and idlers, as a promiscuous heap of people without morals (14). In the divided city of our day, the drug trafficker and his gang replace the vagabonds and idlers of for- mer years in this image, and violence is raised to new levels of sophistication. The positive and negative commonplaces about the favela have a basis in actual so- cial and cultural dynamics and even topo- graphic location. The favelas on steep hills have breathtaking views of mountains, bay, and sea and seem, to some, close to heaven. While the favela plagued by epidemics has mostly vanished, its role as setting for the figurative epidemic of violence makes the im- age of hell or war zone unfortunately not farfetched. The image of the favela as setting for lively cultural activities, such as the samba and Brazilian Carnival, is benign enough, although these art forms were co-opted and programmatically used to construct the myth of an amply inclusive national identity in the

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1930s under the Vargas regime. That the myth served to hide from view real rifts and inequities does not entirely undercut the role of popular cultural forms as an effective pal- liative for class and racial tensions. New art forms, such as rap and funk, have arisen in the favela, and its residents participate more actively in mainstream society and mass cul- ture. They form politically active community organizations that demand citizenship rights; they watch television, listen to imported mu- sic, and buy consumer goods as best they can. Yet the double image of the favela, heaven and hell, continues to permeate all kinds of fictional and nonfictional discourses. In this essay I consider the circulation and effects of these commonplaces, as well as attempts to go beyond them, in recent fiction and film. I examine two novels, a fiction film, and two film documentaries that have come out in the last fifteen years, all set in Rio, and I address issues that arise in aesthetic repre- sentations of urban territories of poverty (Bentes 122). On what basis do these works establish their claims to authenticity? What are the problems and limits of such represen- tations? How effective are such discourses as exposs of or interventions in lives marked by poverty? I will contrast stereotyped and therefore politically inert depictions and tex- tual or visual tactics that resist stereotyping and orient us toward praxis. Most of these works view the favelas from outside.2 Paulo Linss novel Cidade de Deus (City of God [1997]), however, offers a fasci- nating combination of perspectives, internal and external, on the community it depicts. It also merges the factual and the fictional. Lins, who grew up in the low-income proj- ect in Rio called Cidade de Deus, which he uses as his title and setting, draws material for the novel in part from his observations as a resident. But the novel also participates in a wider trend in Brazilian urban literature that Flora Sssekind characterizes as an intense neodocumentalism ... marked by a kind of

overlapping between the ethnographic and the fictional (62).3 As a research assistant who conducted interviews for projects of the urban anthropologist Alba Zaluar concern- ing the drug trade, Lins also draws on actual ethnographic work, as well as on research in archives of the main Rio newspapers. From this layered, multiple perspective, City of God narrates the prevalence and changing nature of crime in the housing project from the late 1960s to the 1980s, charting the growth of the drug business and the intensification of the violence it entails, including police corrup- tion and brutality. In 1997, at the time of the novels publication, such problems continued their unabated growth, so the novel indirectly comments on an enduring predicament. Lins observes in a 2003 interview that if I were to write about the way things are today, I would start the book with a pile of rubber tires, gasoline, and someone being burned alive (Rohter), a mode of killing used among traf- fickers in recent years. The afterword and the promotional mate- rial for the novel insist that it elaborates facts; they point to its reliance on interviews and newspaper accounts as a foundation for its claim to authority and underline the authors experience as someone who, if not a partici- pant or direct witness, lived in Cidade de Deus while the drug gangs grew. By crafting a fictional construct intended to throw a harsh light on a particular set of alarming social circumstances, Lins aligns his narrative with a long tradition of hybrid forms, beginning perhaps with naturalist novels, in which the line between fact and fiction cannot be deter- mined and which aim to have the impact of an expos. Curiously, however, although the novel- ist lays claim to a view from the inside, in the narrative the only voices inside the favela oc- cur in dialogues and passages that depict the interiority of the characters with little depth. The novel is told by a detached, nonpersoni- fied, third-person narrator whose educated

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Portuguese sets him apart from the idiosyn- cratic, slang-inflected street language of the favela youth and the drug gangs. While the precisely reproduced ghetto language cre- ates verisimilitude, the narrative voice, with its correct grammar and ample lexicon, em- phasizes social distinctions and establishes a disparaging perspective on the social uni- verse being viewed. The frequent and reduc- tive designation of characters as the outlaw, the criminal, the brute, the addict, and so on reinforces this separation. In its strong focus on sexual scenes, of- ten violent, involving rape and humiliation, the novels perspective is relentlessly male. Women characters, mostly sexual objects, dis- appear after their husbands or lovers die. The only female interiority the novel lingers on is that of a transvestite. While the drug traffick- ers devalue, neglect, and abuse women, the narrative focus reaffirms their perspective in its uninterest in female trajectories or subjec- tivities. The novel also disregards larger polit- ical forces; it makes no mention, for instance, of the dictatorship in effect at the time, which generated its own set of violences.4 By the end of the four-hundred-page novel, the reader feels confined in an airless world of repeated aggressive confrontations fueled by greed, re- venge, and troubled masculinity. The crimes committed by police officers are as glaring and brutal as those of the drug traffickers, and the proliferating collage of violent episodes confirms and expands on television and print media coverage of favela violence as spectacle, often performed by demonized actors. The sheer accumulation of grisly scenessome of them unrelated to the drug trade, such as the dismemberment of a newborn or the burying alive of a cheating wifeunmoors the novel from its literary project as expos. The pileup of graphically violent episodes, in its relent- lessness, takes on the character of a phantas- magoria, where the narrative voice itself is a further symptom of the social derangement inherent in the events recounted.

Fernando Meirelless film City of God (2003), among other departures from the novel that inspired it, features an internal view as a key structural element. Braulio Montovanis excellent screenplay assigns the narrative voice to a favela resident named Rocket. This good-tempered, nonjudgmental young man dreams of a career in photogra- phy and tries to steer clear of the drug gangs. Although he attempts some small-time rob- beries, his empathy for the targeted victims prevents him from going ahead with any of these crimes. Also reinforcing an inside view is the use, with only two exceptions, of actual favela residents, trained by the filmmakers, as actors. One of the story lines traces Rockets ex- ceptional trajectory: by a series of lucky cir- cumstances, his photograph of a drug gang appears on the front page of the newspaper where he works as a delivery boy, gaining for him a coveted internship and allowing him to escape the favela. Photographic images of the worst that the favela has to offer become his ticket for getting out of it. While the violence of the drug wars grows more and more intense as the film progresses (the control of one drug gang winds up in the hands of teenage and prepubescent boys in a final scene), the escape of our sympathetic narrator-guide provides a happy ending of sorts. The escalating violence of the drug business and diminishing age of those involved in it make a grim plot, but its impact is attenuated and somewhat neutral- ized by the parallel account of Rockets good fortune. The film also weaves in vivid strands of the positive side of the favela image. With its dazzling, fast-paced cinematography, gor- geous seaside views, enticing musical sound track, and color-blind erotic attachments, which reinstitute the myth of Brazil as a ra- cial democracy, the film includes a good dose of the paradise of an artistically creative, con- vivial, and vital favela coexisting with the hell of the drug trade. Absorbing, engaging, but ultimately unchallenging, the film repeats

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true, with consummate skillpositive and negative stereotypes about the favela. Another recent novel, Inferno, by Patricia Melo (2000), is also generally ethnographic in its intentto provide to outsiders a detailed, fact-based representation of a favela shaped by poverty and ruled by drug lordsthough not in its compositional methods. A seasoned writer from So Paulo (Inferno is her fourth novel), Melo brings to the task her skill in the craft of fiction and, it would seem, attentive reading of newspaper coverage rather than any sort of personal witnessing or ethno- graphic research. Plot elements, characters, and situations reproduce and elaborate on those of narratives featured in the news me- dia, such as children who are shot in the hand if they neglect their jobs as lookouts, teenage drug lords doomed to early death, or corrupt policemen who sell arms to traffickers.5 In Berimbau, her fictional community, Melo sets a broad and richly detailed pan- orama of contemporary favela life, with fig- ures who are male and female, old and young, engaged in a variety of occupations within or on the margins of the drug businessdomes- tic worker, prostitute, bar owner, maker of Carnival costumes, and of course every stripe of drug trafficker. The novels claim to authen- ticity depends on the crafting of a detailed and encompassing literary construct. Descriptions and the inner world of the characters rely on a rich array of sensory perceptions. Melos orchestration of characters, plot, and sus- pense results in a polished narrative but one that avoids disturbing preconceived notions about favelas and the kind of people who live in them. The title, Inferno (in Portuguese as in English a word for hell), makes the favela a space not segregated from the rest of the city but banished from it forever. The characters are caught in a web of determinism that re- calls a famous Brazilian naturalist novel, O cortio (The Slum), by Alusio Azevedo (1890). The factors that decide and constrict the fate of Melos characters are not drawn from the

theories of Hippolyte Taine and Auguste Comte about the determining power of race, environment, and historical moment, as they were in Azevedos novel, but are instead the ones considered disastrous by the common sense of our day: child abuse, absentee fathers, and the irresistible temptation for poor youths to join a consumer society that without the money from drug traffic would remain out of their reach. Melos characters, like Azevedos, are inescapably caught in a downward spiral of hardship and degradation. We have, then, a complex situation. Many recent works of fiction and film forcefully rep- resent, divulge, and denouncewith greater or lesser sensationalisma social dynamic of segregation and violence that is indeed a commonplace. Who could deny it? Yet the discourses that rely on that commonplace, including print and televised journalism, which often provide narratives and images that reappear in fiction and film, showcase violence and can have the undesirable effect of strengthening social segregation. When such discourses are directed as entertainment at middle- and upper-class readers and film viewers, they harm favela residents: by rein- forcing the commonplaces that equate favela residence with criminality and violence, they increase the urban paranoia that segregates the classes (Sssekind 65) and further erode the citizenship rights of those who already suffer race and class discrimination. The experience of poor urban residents, too easily, unthinkingly represented, often falls into age-old clichs that enforce segre- gating views and convert the predicaments of some into easily consumable entertainment. The witnessing of social crisis, certainly a di- mension of the purpose of the novels and the film discussed above, dissipates and loses its force. But effective witnessing, as Ross Cham- bers points out in a different context, like a w ake-up call, takes the form of seeking to cause some disturbance in well-established cultural regularities and routines of thought

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(or its absence), regularities of discursive hab- itus (xixxx). Since scenes of violence and sensationalism have become the discursive habits of our day, perhaps avoiding them and replacing them with other strategies of repre- sentation will offer the needed wake-up call. Two recent documentary films, Bus 174 and The Scavengers, while claiming to repre- sent territories of poverty, also disrupt discur- sive habits, challenge the spectator to discard preconceptions and to reach new understand- ings. Although Bus 174 is suspenseful, both films are programmatically nonsensational- ist, forcing the viewer to take a slower, more painstaking look behind what is usually seen briefly and superficially. Both incorporate con- ventional narratives or visual stereotypes in order to question their adequacy. The films are aware of competing claims to representation, which they explicitly address. With a critique that shows the damage caused by common- places, they avoid perpetuating them. This is not to say that they offer balanced or neutral views; they use these competing claims rhe- torically to establish their own perspectives. Bus 174 (2002), a feature-length docu- mentary by Jos Padilha, takes as its topic the actual hijacking of a bus filled with pas- sengers in a well-off neighborhood of Rio in June 2000. This incident, which lasted several hours, was followed closely by the news media and broadcast live on television. Some thirtyf ive million Brazilians watched the drama unfold on their television screens. The bus, having windows on all four sides, placed the hijacker and his hostages as if on a circular stage, making it possible to film them from all angles. The media coverage affected the duration and outcome of the incident. For an unknown reason, presumed to be the reluc- tance to display bloodshed on television, the commanding police officers on the site were instructed not to allow their men to follow the standard procedure of shooting the hijacker. This documentary intercuts the drama unfolding in the bus, extracted from televi-

sion footage, with a painstaking reconstruc- tion of the life and social circumstances of the hijacker. The television and newspaper cover- age designated the assailant only as a criminal with no known family, but an investigation revealed his name, Sandro do Nascimento. Research in police archives and interviews with those who knew him disclosed a life of immense hardship as a favela resident who as a five-year-old child witnessed the murder of his mother. He lived on the street and sur- vived an infamous massacre outside the Can- delaria church in 1993, where attackers, later identified as off-duty police officers, killed homeless youths sleeping near the church at night. Sandro was also a drug addict and an inmate of juvenile detention centers and jails. Padilha presents interviews with hostages, police officers, a social worker, a sociologist, and inmates of a jail (in an eerie scene shown in negative images), as well as friends of the hijacker and members of his family. The di- rector also draws on official records such as police reports and psychological evaluations of Sandro, using all this material to put to- gether a broad canvas in which the incident on the bus appears in a different light. While in the television footage of the hi- jacking Sandro figures as a violent, drugged, irrational criminal, a second narrative emerges from the investigative research, in which he appears not merely as an agent of violence but also as a victim of many forms of violence, as much a victim as the hostages he holds. This second narrative, interwoven with the first, skillfully permeates and complicates the firsts meaning and brings out the scandal of its de- nouement, in which Sandro is choked to death by the police inside a police car while, it was alleged, resisting their efforts to restrain him. Once safely away from the cameras, the police apparently did not hold back from killing San- dro. Most chillingly, they carried out the will of some in the crowd who gathered around to watch the event and who cried out, Kill him! Kill him! as the officers forced Sandro

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into the car. But Sandro is not made into any kind of a hero. The film ends with two fu- neral sequences. The first funeral, attended by a large crowd, is of one of the hostages, who was shot by Sandro and accidentally by the police. In stark contrast, Sandros funeral, the final sequence of the film, is attended by just one elderly female friend. Sandro is a victim whose actions, poignant though his life may have been, make more victims. The film as a whole, however, suggests that there is nothing inevitable about the process: effective political action can and should change it. Disturbing, difficult to watch, this documentary uses and questions the narratives and images of print and televised journalism and leads to a deeper understanding of the complex issues involved. It implies that the visibility provided by print and television media can be a form of invis- ibility, their modes of seeing and showing also ways of brushing aside. The Scavengers (1992), by the most re- nowned documentary filmmaker in Brazil today, Eduardo Coutinho, also incorporates and ultimately discredits clichs. Focusing on an assortment of people, young and old, who make a living from what they scavenge for resale and personal use at a dump across the bay from Rio, the film uses strictly delimited spacesthe dump itself and the nearby shacks of the scavengersand organizes its inter- views around open-ended questions: How do you manage? What is it like to work here? It offers no outside interpretation such as a nar- rating voice, images explained by voice-over commentary, or interviews with professionals.6 The appearance on-screen of the filmmaker, his team, and his equipment underlines the contingent nature of the encounter between crew members and the people they film. The Scavengers recognizes the impor- tance of media images for even impoverished people, who own television sets and are aware of the offensive way in which they are typi- cally portrayed. At the beginning of the film, the crew approaches people who hide their

faces and wave the camera away, mirroring the discomfort of the viewer, who is con- fronted with those caught in degrading and precarious circumstances. One of the films achievements is to overcome the resistance of both its subjects and its audience. By hand- ing the scavengers close-up photographs of themselves, Coutinho returns their images to them, a gesture of symbolic import that has the practical effect of eliciting their coop- eration. At the end is a scene where the scav- engers view the almost completed film. For Coutinho, the stealing of others images for sensationalist purposes is the original sin of the documentary and TV-reportage genres (Stam, Vieira, and Xavier 452). If the scaven- gers do not actually control the final product in which their images and life stories appear, they are at least offered the first opportunity to view it, and the scene of their viewing and of their responses is included in the film. In approaching the well-worn topic of extreme poverty, the film directly confronts some of its clichd aspects. The film opens, for instance, with a long shot of animals foraging in the dump: a pig, vultures, a skinny dog, and a white horse, all shrouded in white vapor. As a garbage truck pulls up to dump its load, a crowd of people arrive with picks and shovels, yelling and talking, sorting through the gar- bage just as the animals did moments before. The old equation is immediately summoned: Are these people like animals? Have they lost all dignity? The film quickly moves to under- cut this clich, as the interviewed characters emerge with names and unexpected life trajec- tories, revealing themselves to be vital people who use words well, have idiosyncratic takes on their situation, joke, laugh, ask pointed questions, and have adapted to difficult cir- cumstances. This territory of poverty is nei- ther romanticized nor likened to an inferno. The scavengers live in poverty but are not thereby reduced to their impoverishment. Although the film offers no solution, no way out, ending with a long shot of an adoles-

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cent turning over the garbage in the company of animals who do the same, the viewer is likely to see these images with a new under- standing. After the intervention of the film, the scavengers are left exactly as the filmmaker found them, yet their representativeness and the magnitude of their plight are encapsulated in the words that end the film: Filmed in the Itaoca Dump of So Gonalo, forty kilometers from Rio. Hundreds of similar dumps are lo- cated around Brazil, providing work for tens of thousands of scavengers. The film, as Con- suelo Lins observes, establishes a precarious balance between the rejection of the idea of an inferno for those who work there and affirma- tion of the intolerable. It refuses to point out causes or culprits but also
refuses any ready-made solutions or narrative options that would help the spectators toler- ate or endure the situation, by allowing them to leave the theater or turn off the television set with a tranquil conscience: we know who is at fault, something is being done, we can sleep in peace. ... In The Scavengers, what is unacceptable in the images suffers no reduction.... (96)

repercussion than those that reinforce them. The Scavengers won prizes in film festivals in Mexico, France, Germany, and Brazil but was not shown in movie theaters in Brazil, perhaps because of its understated approach and its refusal of easy perspectives or solu- tions. The director of Bus 174 recognizes that a film that addresses entrenched and severe problems can only hope to bring awareness and put pressure on local authorities. His film did accomplish these goals. As Padilha observes, it brought the BUS 174 affair back to all major Brazilian newspapers, not only in the art sections, but also in the political and national affairs sections. And this time San- dro, who initially had been characterized as a crazy bandit was taken to be a symbol of the way Brazil mishandles its street kids and mi- nor delinquents... (Bus 174). The limited reach of films or narratives that encourage thoughtful and critical engagement, empathy, and action rather than passive spectatorship is precisely why their repeated and patient in- tervention continues to be necessary.

While neither demonizing the scavengers nor sanitizing their lives into an engaging specta- cle, the film expands the urban imaginary by avoiding some commonplaces, like drug traf- ficking and its violence, and by using others critically. The film calls for political action only implicitly, setting the stage for it by encourag- ing a charged awareness in the figures who act in the film as well as in their spectators. Both Bus 174 and The Scavengers recog- nize the negative effect of the medias trans- mission of conventional views of poverty. The very different images of sensationalized violence and of a vital culture associated with music and Carnival have in common the encouragement of passive spectatorship. Unquestionably, however, films and narra- tives that counter stereotypes have slighter

Notes
1. About the impact of drug trafficking in favelas and its political implications, see Leeds. 2. The related question of self-representation by resi- dents of favelas and urban peripheries in Brazil has been addressed lately in criticism responding to the signifi- cant increase in the number of such works. In memoirs, fiction, poetry, and lyrics in samba, rap, and funk, they offer views from the inside of segregation, violence, and racial and class prejudice. See Sssekind 6163; Hollanda 24950; Kehl; and Lurie. 3. In her excellent article, Sssekind views these texts that combine ethnography and fiction in a critical light, observing that they tend to operate with clichs, to recycle a predictable repertory of figures and urban situations, which, contrary to what one would expect in a first approach to those works, actually underline social distinctions (instead of criticizing them), distinc- tions already demarcated with precision in everyday life (63; my trans. of this and other quotations from essays in Portuguese). Her insight is a point of departure for

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my essay, although my argument does not coincide with hers. Sssekind goes on to study poetry that blurs spatial territories, identities, and social lines in a way she finds more aesthetically and politically satisfying. 4. Roberto Schwarz points to other social and po- litical forces that make no appearance in the novel: the higher spheres of the drug business, the corrupt political and military administration that gives them space, ... the real estate speculation at the origin of favela segre- gation. He argues forcefully, however, that in literary terms, the limited orbit is a strength (166). 5. Melos imaginary setting also has a historical com- ponent. Her fictional community, Berimbau, occupies the site that once belonged to an actual favela, Catacumba: a hill rising steeply from Avenida Epitcio Pessoa in the affluent neighborhood of Lagoa. Catacumba was removed in 1969, in an attempt during the military dictatorship to eradicate all the three hundred or so favelas existing in Rio at the timean attempt that failed (Perlman 22333). 6. This is the second of four documentary films by Coutinho set in Rios favelas. The others are Santa Marta: Duas semanas no morro (Santa Marta: Two Weeks in the Slums [1987]), Santo Forte (1999), and Babilnia 2000 (2001).

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Works Cited
Azevedo, Alusio. The Slum. Trans. David H. Rosenthal. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Trans. of O cortio. 1890. Bentes, Ivana. The Serto and the Favela in Contempo- rary Brazilian Film. Nagib 12137. Caldeira, Teresa P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in So Paulo. Berkeley: U of Califor- nia P, 2000. Chambers, Ross. Untimely Interventions: AIDS, Testimo nials, and the Rhetoric of Haunting. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004. Coutinho, Eduardo, dir. The Scavengers . First Run / Icarus, 1992. Trans of Boca de lixo. Centro de Criao de Imagem Popular, 1992. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006. Dias, Vernica Ferreira. A Cinema of Conversation: Eduardo Coutinhos Santo Forte and Babilnia 2000. Nagib 10517. Hollanda, Helosa Buarque de. Two Poetics, Two Mo- ments. Trans. Shoshanna Lurie. Rocha 24553.

Kehl, Maria Rita. The Orphan Brotherland: Raps Civi- lizing Effort on the Periphery of So Paulo. Rocha 62541. Leeds, Elizabeth. Cocaine and Parallel Polities in the Brazilian Urban Periphery: Constraints on LocalL evel Democratization. Latin American Research Review 31 (1996): 4783. Lins, Consuelo. O documentrio de Eduardo Coutinho: Te leviso, cinema e vdeo. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2004. Lins, Paulo. City of God. Trans. Alison Entrekin. London: Bloomsbury, 2006. Trans. of Cidade de Deus. 1997. Rev. 2nd ed. 2002. Lurie, Shoshanna. Funk and Hip-Hop Transculture: Cultural Conciliation and Racial Identification in the Divided City. Rocha 64357. Meirelles, Fernando, dir. City of God. Ktia Lund, codir. Miramax, 2002. Trans. of Cidade de Deus. DVD. O2 Filmes and Videofilmes, 2003. Melo, Patricia. Inferno. Trans. Clifford E. Landers. Lon- don: Bloomsbury, 2002. Trans. of Inferno, 2000. Nagib, Lcia, ed. The New Brazilian Cinema. London: Tau ris; Centre for Brazilian Studies, U of Oxford, 2003. Padilha, Jos, dir. Bus 174. Felipe Lacerda, codir. THINK- Film; HBO/ Cinemax Documentary Film. 2002 . DVD. Hart Sharp, 2004. Trans. of Onibus 174. . Bus 174: Directors Statement. Bus 174 . 6 June 2006 <http:// w ww .bus174.com/ director .htm>. Perlman, Janice. The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Berkeley: U of Califor- nia P, 1976. Rocha, Joo Cezar de Castro, ed. Brazil 2001. Spec. is- sue of Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 45 (2000): 31758. Rohter, Larry. Out of the Slums of Rio, an Author Finds Fame. New York Times 26 Apr. 2003, late ed.: A4. Schwarz, Roberto. Cidade de Deus. Seqncias brasilei ras: Ensaios. So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1999. 16371. Stam, Robert, Joo Luiz Vieira, and Ismail Xavier. The Shape of Brazilian Cinema in the Postmodern Age. Brazilian Cinema. Ed. Randal Johnson and Stam. Ex- panded ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 389472. Sssekind, Flora. Desterritorializao e forma literria: Literatura brasileira contempornea e experincia ur- bana. Literatura e Sociedade 8 (2005): 6081. Zaluar, Alba, and Marcos Alvito, eds. Um sculo de fa vela . 3rd ed. Rio de Janeiro: Fundao Getlio Var- gas, 2003.