With the World Cup and the Olympics coming soon to Brazil, tourist interest in the country's slums, called favela's, is on the rise. Host to 8 million residents, 20% of Brazil's poor, favelas were often hotbeds of gang, drug and other types of illegal and violent activity . . . till now perhaps. There is a growing awareness by the better-off of the favelas gritty music and art scene. With the scheduled global sports competitions shining a light, social and financial support from Police Pacification Units, known as UPPs, means that many homes now have electricity and running water. Local authorities too see a lucrative future in the tourist trade; Rio's favela is perched high on a hill with beautiful views of the city. Residents are now proud of their urban community. Through music and art, dancing, singing and murals painted on buildings in the slum, they display their colorful stories of poverty, hard work and resilience.
For those seeking an in-depth, ethnographic look at life, humor and survival in a Brazilian favela, I recommend reading Laughter Out of Place by Donna M. Goldstein. As the description on the UCPress website explains:
Donna M. Goldstein challenges much of what we think we know about the "culture of poverty." Drawing on more than a decade of experience in Brazil, Goldstein provides an intimate portrait of everyday life among the women of the favelas, or urban shantytowns. These women have created absurdist and black-humor storytelling practices in the face of trauma and tragedy. Goldstein helps us to understand that such joking and laughter is part of an emotional aesthetic that defines the sense of frustration and anomie endemic to the political and economic desperation of the shantytown.
I've used this book in my cultural and medical anthropology classes. Goldstein guides us inside the favela. We learn to care about the people in this shantytown, her friends and their families, and understand the humor they find in incidences that would send most of us to a state of despair.
If you want to see (and feel!) the action and the violence, to hear the laughter and pain of life in the favela, rent City of God, directed by Fernando Meirelles. I show this film regularly in my introductory cultural anthropology and sociology classes; it's a visually brilliant movie based on a true story. Watch the trailer above - in my opinion it's one the top films of the last 20 years. Both the book and the film will show you what's behind the scenes, culturally, politically, socially speaking, as we move towards the Olympics of 2016 and perhaps contemplate a visit to Brazil . . . or at least it will help flesh out the 'two minute' exposes of Brazil that network news will pass on as journalism.
For a BBC article on Rio's hopes for a tourist boom, read below or click here, 'Rio seeks to boost favela tourism.'
