Real Parque

[note: I am in the process of adding video to this post. My internet connection is making it hard to upload now, so check back later]

Aight, I need to get down to my day-to-day business. This will be the first of a few posts talking about the communities I have been working in lately.

Real Parque is one of a handful of favelas spanning Rio Pinheiros that together form the front line of class conflict over non-peripheral urban space in São Paulo. (Centro, where I live, is the second front line. But there the fight is over occupations of abandoned buildings rather than self-built favela communities). Along with Paraisópolis, Jardim Colombo, and Jardim Panorama, Real Parque sits on the west side of the river next to the rich neighborhoods of Morumbi and the an upscale residential area that shares the name Real Parque.

COMPOSITION

There are, very roughly, around 4,000 residents in Real Parque – 3,000 in favela structures and 1,000 in conjuntos habitacionais (public housing blocks) built to hold residents who were removed to make space for a building supply store - a sort of Home Depot. This is one example of a process called verticalização – stacking favelados into housing blocks to get at the valuable land they occupy. Here are the closest things to before-and-after pictures I could make with google. If you look closely you can see that the favela has grown, though I unfortunately don't know the time lapse on these photos:

CULTURAL LIFE

I got to know Real Parque through Paula, an activist and resident who I met at a housing rights meeting. She caught my attention for complaining about NGO complicitness in the December 2007 evictions on the northwest edge of the community, which I will get into later. She works with a group of residents called Favela Atitude that brings plays and cultural events to Real Parque and Jardim Panorama.

Through her I also received an invite to attend the Pankararú festival this June. The Pankararú are indigenous Brazilians originally from a reservation in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. But as paulistano construction companies started recruiting from the poverty striken area and non-indigenous peasant families grew to occupy the majority of their land, the Pankararú migrated to the favelas of São Paulo starting in the 1940s. Real Parque boasts two Pankararú community centers and one of the most active groups of migrants in the city. Here are highlights of the festival a friend and I recorded:

PHOTO CREDITS: Kristine Stiphany

Until recently, it was prohibited to display these private, religious dances to anyone not in the tribe, and children could not participate. But the Pankararú made them public and began including their children in order to claim more social recognition and rights.

I also have some stuff from two members of Favela Atitude doing a little freestyle rap/sapateado after the show:

EVICTIONS

On December 11, 2007 police were called to enforce an eviction order for land occupied by 80-140 families. A judge granted the order on behalf of the Empresa Metropolitana de Águas e Energia (Metropolitan Water and Energy Company), a mixed public-private company claiming to own the land underneath their homes. It was to be the first phase in regaining a larger portion of the land claimed by EMAE.

Residents were given 4 hours notice that their homes were to be bulldozed. Some scrambled to remove their belongings from their houses, others resisted and were forced out. In what has become one of the principle forms of protest by favelados, groups of residents began to block road traffic on the Marginal – a main artery that connects the high-end business and residential districts in the southwest to roads running toward the city center. To clear the roadway, the Tropa de Choque (Shock Troop) attacked residents – including mothers with children – with teargas and rubber bullets. You can see clips of the eviction in this movie by Favela Atitude, including how the Pankararú pitched in with the protests.

While EMAE was seeking the removal order in court, locals were finding it hard to organize fellow residents as eviction rumors spread, in part because NGOs operating in the community were not backing the call to resist. The president of the largest outside NGO, Projeto Casulo, was dismissed after publicly supporting a call to fight removals. A look at Casulo’s finances hints at who might have been behind the dismissal: its sponsors include BIM and JPMorgan (investment banks), Bradesco (largest private bank in Brazil), the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Unilever (consumer brands multi-national – think Dove soap, Axe body spray), and the Institute of Business Citizenship (a philanthropic consortium made up of Brazilian banks, advertisers, real estate developers, and construction firms whose mission is to support projects promoting “community development” and “business sensibility”). The remaining NGOs that did not have such deep pockets, some run by residents, were silenced with offers of office space in a new community center promised as part of the hazy plans for the bulldozed land.

As NGOs split the community, affluent residents from the non-favela side of Real Parque supported EMAE in court. Their neighborhood association hired a lawyer to draft a friend-of-the-court brief stating that removals were in the best interest of development in Real Parque. Unfortunately there is no clear neighborhood association on the favela side, and attempts to form one in the face of the EMAE threat are only superficially successful so far. Paula informed me that whenever they try to call meetings they are met with residents saying “I remember what happened last time we organized – the teargas and the rubber bullets. I’m not coming.”

At least for now, the eviction process is frozen. In January 2008 the São Paulo Public Defender’s office found EMAE was guilty of “bad faith litigation” in their pursuit to remove Real Parque residents. Turns out after having their request for removal denied by one judge, they changed some of the names and dates in their paperwork and illegally submitted the same claim to a court across the city. It was this court that granted the eviction order. The Public Defender sent the issue back to its court of origin where it is currently tied up.

REAL PARQUE AND MY PROJECT

So far I have mostly hang out – attended a few cultural events and interviewed Paula to get the back-story on evictions. I am making Real Parque a case study in how collaboration between government, business, and civil society explains the persistence of violent eviction (more common under dictatorship) even in conditions of democratic politics. Future plans are to do more visits and interviews, attend meetings once they start up again with the municipal government, and maybe give a few English lessons to residents. I'll keep posting...