Gringa tales in favela Santa Marta

ABSTRACT

This paper provides an autoethnographic account through tourist favela Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro. It aims to grasp the role of tourists’ practices and performances and their potential to re-signify and transform the physical, social, and cultural landscape of slummed communities at urban destinations. Tourism in informal urban settlements is a phenomenon studied from different disciplines and perspectives, mainly covering representational and ethical issues. The paper incorporates insights from the Performative Turn and relational studies to guide the author’s reflection over her cultural experience as a favela tourist/researcher. These stories compound the myriad of heterogeneous elements making and shaping the favelas’ complex and dynamic assemblages. They also unveil multiple underlying issues that could be further analyzed from different scopes. Finally, favela tourism is seen as an avenue to foster social change. Autoethnography was first being applied to slum tourism research, and it proved to be a useful method to embrace the subjectivities of the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Slum tourism
• performative turn
• favela tourism
• autoethnography
• social change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://riobyfoot.com/tour/favela-tour-michael-jackson-on-the-rio-de-janeiro/.

2 Dance parties organized in favelas and by favelados, playing funk music mainly. There was a time when locals and also some tourists ventured to enjoy these parties, but not as much after police break-ins became more regular.

3 How favela dwellers refer to people living in the formal city of RJ.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca del Departament d’Empresa i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya, the European Union (UE) and the European Social Fund (ESF). Grant number 2019 FI-B, file: 2020FI_B1 00102.

Notes on contributors

María Eugenia Altamirano

María Eugenia Altamirano is a Ph.D. candidate at the Leisure and Tourism program and lecturer at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain). She has extensively worked in tourist services worldwide before joining the academia to research slum tourism practices and their effects on people and places. Her research interests hover between urban tourism, cultural landscapes, and tourism governance.