Читать книгу Stolen Cars - Группа авторов - Страница 7

Gabriel Feltran

It’s November 2015. A white Suzuki Jimny moves slowly through the streets of Vila Mariana, a middle-class neighborhood in southwestern São Paulo. Inside, three researchers talk about the best way to get to Vila Cisper, an old working-class neighborhood in the East Zone. Vila Cisper was settled in the 1950s after a glass bottle factory was set up there. The factory belonged to Olavo Egydio de Souza Aranha Jr., scion of a family from the Portuguese nobility, who studied engineering and architecture in Europe. His employees were migrants from the Brazilian countryside, descendants of Christianized Indians or blacks freed from slavery, or even poor whites, especially Italians, who had come to São Paulo as beneficiaries of Government population-whitening policies. They were taken on by the factory as they came: mostly illiterate, no surname, no papers.

We don’t know the way for sure, so we decided to follow Google Maps directions. A cell phone fixed to the vehicle’s dashboard with the help of a plastic holder begins telling us the way to go. We continue on our way, talking about the fact that we are in a Japanese car, made in Brazil, with a cell phone from an American multinational company, powered by Google, one of the largest companies on the planet. Our conversation comes to rest on the subject of the plastic holder that allows us to attach the cell phone to the dashboard; it was made in China and bought at a São Paulo traffic light. Informal workers born in the favelas of São Paulo sell plastic supports, but so too do immigrants from the slums of Lagos and La Paz – they all sell them throughout downtown São Paulo.

As a collective of researchers, we have transformed everyday scenes in the Brazilian megalopolis into building blocks for ethnographic study, the results of which this book presents. Transnational industries, from the biggest names – Google, Motorola, the manufacturers of the satellites that let them work their magic – to the humblest – Chinese plastic products sold on the informal market – have long been mainstays of everyday life in the big cities in the Global South (Inverses Collectif 2016; Parnell and Robinson 2012; Robinson 2002 ; Simone 2013). From the high-flying world of transnational capitalism to the dusty backroads of globalization (Knowles 2011, 2014; Mathews, Ribeiro, and Vega 2012; Ribeiro 2009; 2010; Tsing 2005, 2015), urban conflict remains a hardy perennial, one of those grim certainties immune to the changes in the wider world. Urban conflict is fueled by inequalities and violence, and these are fundamental themes underlying this book (Feltran 2020a; Machado da Silva 1967; Peralva and Telles 2015; Telles 2013; Telles and Hirata 2010).

It was early Sunday afternoon, the sun was shining and traffic was light, and because of this we saw that we could get to Vila Cisper in 45 minutes. The place we were aiming for lies some 30 kilometers from downtown São Paulo. Since the middle of last century, São Paulo has grown into a sprawl. The periphery is where poor workers live, mostly third-generation internal migrants, and also unemployed and informal entrepreneurs who have occupied land without any proper urban infrastructure since the 1940s. By building their own houses there, decade after decade, the city grew with them (Cavalcanti 2008, 2009).

São Paulo’s demographic explosion of the 1950s to the 1980s resulted in rapid concentric urban growth across the “Paulista” plateau, and was in no way “disorderly.” The logic of this apparently disordered and brutal growth has recurred in practically all Brazilian cities, as indeed it has in most Latin American industrial cities (Fischer, McCann, and Auyero 2014; Fischer 2019), reflecting an uneven model of industrialization. In the 1970s, this “logic of disorder” was given the name “urban plunder” by São Paulo’s urban sociologists (Kowarick 1979). In short, it was argued that migrant workers themselves built the city in which they would live, on rural land; for this reason, with their labor, they simultaneously produced the industrial wealth that would drive the “country of the future” (Brazil has become the ninth largest economy in the world by the twenty-first century) and thus the cities that would symbolize its progress. São Paulo was the center of this economic growth, and for that reason the driver of the despoliation that produced such abysmal inequalities.

Fifty years later, the metropolis has 21 million people (see Table I.1) and its poorest districts have a life expectancy of 57 years while the richest people live, on average, to age 80 (Rede Nossa São Paulo 2019). Yes, the rich live, on average, 23 years longer than the poor in the city that produces one-third of Brazil’s GDP (see Figure I.1). If urban plunder is a fundamental starting point for us, the mechanisms of reproduction of these inequalities, which today see São Paulo simultaneously occupy the most disparate rankings of global poverty and wealth, need to be much better understood.

Figure I.1 Map of the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo, by income.

Source: The authors, with technical support form Bruna Pizzol, based on data from the 2010 Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE) Census.

In São Paulo, as in many other Latin American cities, inequalities manifest themselves in the form of violent crime. Crime, in turn, feeds the representation, shared between elites and workers, of “urban violence” (Kessler 2011 ; Machado da Silva 2010). The world of crime thrives in São Paulo, and as we will see, the networks of its main criminal organization, the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital, First Capital Command), are global (Feltran 2020a, 2016b; Willis 2015). Mapping (il)legal automobile markets through stolen cars’ journeys will be our empirical instrument for understanding the reproduction of inequalities and urban violence in São Paulo (Feltran 2019). Our city is not only these journeys’ scenario, nor our analytical subject, but our theoretical and analytical perspective through which we address transnational inequalities and global urban violences.

TABLE I.1 Population growth in the municipality and metropolitan region of São Paulo (absolute numbers)

	1950	1960	1970	1980	1991	2000	2010	2018
São Paulo	2,151,313	3,667,899	5,924,615	8,493,226	9,646,185	10,434,252	11,253,503	12,176,866
Metropolitan Region	2,653,860	4,739,406	8,139,730	12,588,725	15,444,941	17,878,703	19,683,975	21,571,281
Source: IBGE census and bulletins – compiled by the São Paulo City Government 1950–2010, first published in Feltran, 2020a.

We continued east and no longer saw luxury malls or tall skyscrapers through the window. Instead, we passed through huge avenues surrounded by auto-parts stores, evangelical churches, hypermarkets, car dealerships, and housing developments. We also saw overpasses with crack users camped underneath. Whenever we stopped at traffic lights, someone approached the cars to ask for change. Drivers responded with indifference, sympathy, compassion, or irritation. The fear of being mugged is almost always present in this range of reactions. Not many drivers opened their windows; not many of them ever would. We did open ours and apologized for having no change; the old man begging replied that his daughter lived in the town of São Carlos. Our Suzuki had São Carlos license plates.

We had considered going on public transportation. It would provide a different experience of the city. Exposure to the potential for violence is different when you’re not driving in São Paulo; contact with people is more direct. There is less risk of armed robbery, often aimed at the vehicles or the objects of those who are considered to be wealthy; on the other hand, on foot there is more exposure to the multiple forms of potential street violence. Above all, women are more exposed to sexual violence, from harassment to rape, when they walk the streets of São Paulo. At night, few of them walk alone. Still, the city in 2020 is much safer than it used to be.

The 1990s saw an explosion of violent crime in the city (Caldeira 2000; Feltran 2011; Hirata 2018), while the 2000s saw the consolidation of the PCC’s hegemony in the peripheries, which established order in the local criminal universe (Biondi 2018; Feltran 2018, 2020b; Manso and Dias 2018). In central regions of the city, private security has become de rigueur and the military police are better armed (Caldeira 2000; Feltran 2011; Hirata 2018; Telles 2010a). The city’s subway and metropolitan train networks have been modernized, expanded significantly and have become much safer since the 2000s (Requena 2019, Santos Silva 2017). Despite this, Paulistanos view buses, trains, and subways as much less efficient than their private cars. Using public transport, it would have taken 1 hour and 18 minutes to cover the same route we had just covered in 40 minutes; nor does the price of public transport make using it worthwhile. To give you an idea, a worker who makes only two trips a day in São Paulo, by bus or subway, will have spent 0.24 MW¹ by the end of the month. For many people, this represents a quarter of their monthly income.²

Therefore, the majority of Paulistanos live with very little mobility. In greater São Paulo not everyone moves around (Dennis and Urry 2009; Freire-Medeiros 2009; Urry 2004). It is still common, in field research, to encounter residents of the peripheries who have never, or only very rarely, left their neighborhoods. In any event, for those who don’t live in the city center and need to get around, the private car and more recently Uber and analogous applications are almost always the fastest, most practical, and safest alternatives. For this reason, the traffic in São Paulo is hellish: a 100-kilometer-long traffic jam on a weekday is nothing out of the ordinary.

In addition to practicality, there are other conditions that give the car immense symbolic power. Unlike other countries in North and South America, cars are extremely expensive in Brazil. A 2018 Toyota Corolla costs an average of USD 18,000 in the United States, or 13.8 US MW. In Brazil, the same car costs an average of USD 23,000 or 92.5 Brazilian MW. In relative terms, the Brazilian car is almost seven times more expensive. The middle classes and elites were, until the 2000s, the only ones capable of moving around the city by car.³ Therefore, cars have become potent signs of social differentiation and autonomy in Brazil, as in other North and South American contexts (Miller 2001).

To this day, São Paulo elites get around almost exclusively by car and almost never go to the peripheries – except when they live in gated communities, some of which lie some distance from the city center. The southwestern quadrant of the city of São Paulo, where these elites live, is the most affluent in the country, and it is there that the “official city” moves around, for the most part, by car. In Brazil, the richest 1 percent holds nearly 30 percent of the national wealth.⁴ There are two million super-rich Brazilians, many of them living in São Paulo. The city, therefore, has entire neighborhoods in which high-end markets (cars, boats, aircraft, jewelry, restaurants, etc.) are involved in active trade. The scale of these neighborhoods in São Paulo is unique in Brazil and, to a large extent, in Latin America. Much of our research was carried out from trips made in our own or rented cars, but we also traveled by bus, subway, and train. These trips almost always crossed extremely unequal locations.

***

In 2015, the 3G signal was never the best in the peripheries, but we could see from the map that we were approaching Vila Cisper and that we should soon turn right, leaving the main avenue. There were many narrow streets in that direction, and down each one we could see a favela. Yes, we were close. We turned. We went up a narrow, asphalted street, which became increasingly potholed, and could see ever more precarious houses through the windscreen.

The entire Vila Cisper region is self-built, with the exception of the huge glass factory of the same name and the social-housing buildings built in the 1990s (Bonduki 1994, 2009; Rolnik 2001). Many of the residents of the periphery, in spite of having lived in neighborhoods for more than 40 years, still do not have deeds to the houses in which they live. Favelas are almost always built on illegally occupied land. We should arrive at our destination in three minutes.

Wilson, a contact of many years’ acquaintance and the son of one of the thousands of migrants from the northeast who moved into the neighborhood, was waiting for us at the headquarters of one of the capital’s amateur football clubs.⁵ As we parked the car we could already hear the sound of samba music and found ourselves smiling involuntarily. We were in a good mood. Wilson also greeted us with a smile; we shook hands and hugged. He told us that the group gathered at the samba party was celebrating a victory on the part of the neighborhood team in one of the amateur championship games that year. A moment of joy.

During the samba, while the musicians took turns playing and many people talked, flirted, danced and drank beer, we were introduced to Aron, who went on to become a valuable contact for years to come.