‘I went to the City of God’: Gringos, guns and the touristic favela

Abstract

A regular tourist destination since the early 1990s, Rocinha - the paradigmatic touristic favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - has seen the number of foreigners visitors grow considerably after the successful international release of City of God in 2003. In dialogue with the new mobilities paradigm and based on a socio-ethnographic investigation which examines how poverty-stricken and segregated areas are turned into tourist attractions, the article sheds lights on the ways tourists who have watched Fernando Meirelles's film re-interpret their notion of “the favela” after taking part in organized tours. The aim is to examine how far these reinterpretations, despite based on first-hand encounters, are related back to idealized notions that feed upon the cinematic favela of City of God while giving further legitimacy to it.

Acknowledgements

This article was written during my postdoctoral appointment sponsored by the Getulio Vargas Foundation and The National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) at the Center for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University. I take the opportunity to express my gratitude to the above-mentioned institutions and to Prof. John Urry for his supervision, as well as to Marcia Leite, Machado da Silva and Paulo Jorge Ribeiro for providing bibliographical references and interesting insights.

Notes

 1 Cf. http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/sightseeing-international/favela-tour-rio-de-janeiro-brazil/1203629/#rev

 2 If until the beginning of the 1960s government policies towards the favelas oscillated between repression and tolerance, after the 1964 military coup the removal policy prevailed. Families were obliged to leave certain favelas and move to public housing complexes in remote areas. One of these complexes was Cidade de Deus, which Paulo Lins (1997) calls a neofavela.

 3 The most recent example of the direct effects of City of God is Dancing with the Devil (UK, 2009) – whose working title, dropped for unknown reasons, symptomatically added ‘in the city of God.’ Directed by Jon Blair and co-produced by the Guardian's Rio correspondent Tom Phillips, the documentary follows a police inspector from the narco-traffic division, a drug lord (killed shortly before the film was released) and a former drug-dealer who runs an evangelical church. It was severely attacked in Brazil for supposedly taking part in a list of international attempts to demoralize Rio's bid to host the 2016 Olympics.

 4 The research project ‘Touring Poverty’ involved long interviews with qualified informants (guides, tourism promoters, tourists, souvenirs producers/sellers and dwellers), field observation, participant observation in different tours, a photoethnographic approach, as well as brief incursions into the Cape Flats (South Africa) and Dharavi (India). Financed by CNPq and the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (FURS), it counted on a team of enthusiastic assistants: Alexandre Magalhães, André Salata, Andréia C. Santos, Cesar Teixeira, Joni Magalhães and Juliana Farias. I am grateful to all and especially to Palloma Menezes, Fernanda Nunes and Lívia Campello, who have been ‘touring’ the favela with me for all these years.

 5 The role of a cult film in spawning a wave of tourists toward non-obvious destinations is fairly common. Burkitsville, Illinois, and Forks, Washington, where The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Twilight (2008) were set, respectively, spring to mind.

 6 Although achieving unseen levels with City of God, the debates around the cinematic favela surpass it. As sociologist Marcia Leite (2005: 149) accurately remarks: ‘Film and documentary makers are finding themselves leaning increasingly towards the favelas, as they once did towards the northeastern sertão, in the eagerness and in the hope of rediscovering Brazil.’

 7 The names are quite eloquent in their appeals to exoticism, authenticity and adventure: Be a local, don't be a gringo; Exotic tours; Favela Tours; Jeep Tours; Indiana Jungle Tours; Private Tours; Rio Adventures.

 8 The script was based on the eponymous novel by Paulo Lins, who, besides being raised in Cidade de Deus, worked as a research assistant on Alba Zaluar's ethnographic project that led to a ground-breaking book in urban anthropology, A Máquina e a Revolta (1985). For interesting analysis on how novel and film dialogue, see Nagib (2004), Scharwz (2004) and Ribeiro (2005).

 9 http://matadorchange.com/the-favela-projects/

10 Interestingly enough, tourists spend very little during their visits and it is not rare to find them bargaining with the souvenirs sellers (Carter 2005; Dwek 2004; Freire-Medeiros 2009b). As for donations in cash or goods, they are not unusual, but still far from being a real antidote against poverty.

11 Cf. http://www.travelblog.org/South-America/Brazil/Rio-de-Janeiro/Rio-de-Janeiro/blog-46579.html

12 On the favelados's impressions on the tourist activities in Rocinha, see Dwek 2005 and Freire-Medeiros 2009a.

13 Photographs by tourists constitute a main feature of the favela tours and provide a rich archive of theoretical possibilities. Cf. Menezes 2007; Freire-Medeiros and Menezes 2009.

14 The well-known rapper, who was born and still lives in Cidade de Deus, was one of the main voices against City of God, which he classified as disrespectful towards the community and harming to their population.