Marginality: from myth to reality in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, 1969-2002.

become interested in cityward migration as an undergraduate anthropology student doing fieldwork in Brazil’s northeast. Over the years I had followed the trajectories of families and individuals from fishing and agricultural villages to the squatter settlements and unserviced loteamentos (subdivisions) in Rio de Janeiro. The three communities I selected to study represented the various parts of the city where poor people could then live. They were Catacumba, a favela (squatter settlement) in the wealthy South Zone (which has since been removed and its residents relocated to more distant public housing); Nova Brasilia, a favela in the industrial North Zone (now a battleground between police and drug traffickers); and eight low-income communities in Duque de Caxias, a peripheral municipality in the Fluminense Lowlands (Baixada Fluminense). In each place I interviewed two hundred men and women (sixteen to sixty-five years old) selected at random, and fifty community leaders chosen by position and/or reputation. The locations of the three communities and the two housing project sites (Conjuntos de Quitungo, Guapore, and Cidade de Deus — City of God) are shown on the accompanying map (see figure 3.1). The data on these 750 people and their communities provided the basis for my doctoral dissertation, “The Impact of Urban Experience,” and after follow-up work in 1973, the research was also incorporated into my book, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. The book argued that the prevailing “myths” about social, cultural, political, and economic marginality were “empirically false, analytically misleading, and insidious in their policy implications.” Ten years later, in 1979, I returned to Rio with hopes of following up on the lives of the individuals I had interviewed, and began the process of relocating 9