I

According to the 2010 census by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística—IBGE), 1,393,314 people resided in Rio de Janeiro's 763 favelas, representing roughly 22.3 percent of the city's 6,323,037 inhabitants.Footnote ¹ Now that the practice of removing favelas once again threatens the city's poorer residents, the goal of recovering a “history of fighting for rights to the city,”Footnote ² expressed in a pioneering study completed in the 1990s, seems to be especially urgent.Footnote ³ Before beginning an analysis of the evidence of the resistance of favela residents to attempts by public powers in Brazil's First Republic to demolish their homes, we will present a summary of the main social, economic, and political characteristics of that period, with an emphasis on the history of Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil's capital and the main sounding board for national questions.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the city of Rio de Janeiro experienced significant transformations. The end of slavery (1888) and the decadence of the coffee economy in the Vale do Paraíba region in the state of Rio de Janeiro unleashed a massive influx of migrants to the capital of the recently proclaimed Republic (1889). Between 1872 and 1890, the number of national and foreign migrants who flooded into the city increased its population from 274,972 inhabitants to 518,292. Such population growth was considerable during the following decades as well: In 1905, the number of inhabitants in the capital rose to 811,443, and in 1917, it reached its first million.

Living conditions in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the Republic prompted a leading historian of this era to describe it as a “social hell.”Footnote ⁴ First, it was constantly being devastated by epidemics, giving rise to its title of the “febrile city”Footnote ⁵ in Brazilian historiography. Second, it suffered from the effects of heavy immigration, which accentuated the problems of supplying meat and goods in a territory where, in 1890, perhaps 30 percent of the residents were foreigners.Footnote ⁶ Third, the labor supply greatly exceeded the market demand, a situation that lowered salaries and increased the unemployment rate. In 1890, 50 percent of the city's economically active population belonged to the informal sector—domestic workers, casual and day laborers and people with an unknown or undefined profession.Footnote ⁷

Based on their relationship with official authorities, it appears that the city's poor faced a daily routine of neglect, contempt, and persecution. The elites of the time embraced the ideal of “Regeneration,” which included condemnation of the ways of a “traditional” society, the denial of popular culture, the expulsion of lower classes from the city center, and the promotion of cosmopolitanism.Footnote ⁸ In this context, it was believed that the capital city should play the focal role in civilization, serving as the nucleus of modernity, the theater of power, and the place of remembrance for the Republic.Footnote ⁹ It was a liberal order, although profoundly antidemocratic and resistant to efforts at democratization, whose rulers had done very little in terms of increasing civil and political rights.Footnote ¹⁰ Despite the many transformations that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, the lower classes continued to be excluded from the formal political arena. The hierarchies that subordinated a great part of the Brazilian population “to the interests and orders of those who directed the Republic”Footnote ¹¹ also remained.

From the coexistence of a liberal constitution with oligarchical political practices, an ambiguous and contradictory expression emerged to identify the political system of the First Brazilian Republic: “oligarchical liberalism.” With the introduction of federalism, the Constitution of 1891 (Carta republicana) strengthened the power of the states through the domination of local oligarchies: By favoring individualism, it set aside concerns for the common good and imposed a liberalism devoid of its democratic aspects. The result of the combination of these two premises was a Republic concerned with maintaining order, skeptical of popular sovereignty, and zealous in guiding the destiny of the nation—the mission of the elites.Footnote ¹²

The rigidity of the republican system and its resistance to allowing for an expansion of citizenship, even within the liberal logic, led to the dissipation of the initial enthusiasm for the Republic and gave rise to disappointment and discouragement. In addition to the majority of the population of the city being denied the right to vote, mainly due to literacy requirements (only 2 percent could vote for president in 1894), elections were dominated by fraud and candidate-sponsored violence. Voters generally did not act as part of a political society, but instead as dependents of a local boss whom they obeyed with greater or lesser fidelity. The practice of political bargaining and vote buying was especially common. The absence of electoral participation found its counterpart in a small number of parties and in the nonexistence of political organizations with a national scope.Footnote ¹³

It is worth noting that even with these limitations, popular urban sectors exerted pressure on the oligarchical system. Through the beginning of the 1920s, the anarchist-led workers movement in São Paulo and elsewhere presented political and economic demands amid constant confrontations between police and demonstrators and among the social movements of the time; the War of Canudos (1896–1897) stands out in the rural context.Footnote ¹⁴ Another important note is that the political dominance of state oligarchies did not signify that the national state was weak during this period. On the contrary, the interaction between public power and private interests favored the federal government because the national state became visible as a territorialized and centralized power.Footnote ¹⁵

Finally, it is relevant to mention that the city had experienced the implantation of a capitalist social order in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Recent studies show that the Rio de Janeiro economy was relatively autonomous in relationship to the fluctuations of coffee exports (the main product of the Brazilian economy) and the slave market. For this reason, we do not subscribe to the classic thesis that the decline in coffee production in the Vale do Paraíba, the rise of the Paulista West (the region that became the world leader in coffee production), and the internal and external pressures for ending slavery had released and redirected capital from the agrarian sector toward other sectors of the economy, notably urban ones. This is because, even before the 1880s, the process of capital accumulation was already occurring in Rio de Janeiro, which had the commercial function of distributing not only imported products, but also the products of its own industries. Finally, new economic demands emerged at the end of the Empire and intensified at the beginning of the Republic. This is evidenced in the economic transformations that occurred under the mandate of Rui Barbosa, minister of finance from 1889 to 1891, who expanded the offer of credit to large landowners (as a way to compensate them for the end of slavery in 1888) and national industry, which was then developing. As a result, the first years of the Republic witnessed a boom in manufacturing.Footnote ¹⁶

II

It is amid these social, economic, and political developments in Rio de Janeiro that we can also trace a process in which workers and other poor residents repeatedly reoccupied hills (“morros”) whose buildings had been demolished by the public authorities, demonstrating the first type of resistance shown by favela residents during Brazil's First Republic. Mauricio de Almeida Abreu reconstructed the successive demolitions and reappearances of the favela built on Morro de Santo Antonio in the city center. The favela was removed for the first time in 1901 when it was denounced by the Jornal do Commercio and condemned by Mayor Xavier da Silveira, who visited the location and lamented the appearance of the 150 structures then sheltering 632 people. The favela reclaimed its old space during the urban reforms of Pereira Passos and Rodrigues Alves (1903–1906), when the first large process of favela expansion in the city's urban areas occurred. In 1910, many of the houses on Morro de Santo Antonio were destroyed, although this time residents received authorization from the public authorities to erect new dwellings on Morro dos Telégrafos in the northern area of the city. Today, Morro dos Telégrafos represents a locality that includes the “Complexo” da Mangueira, where a favela named Morro de Santo Antonio still exists as a result of this past episode. However, when the precarious types of dwellings known as “barracões” and “casebres” reappeared on the hill at the center of the city in 1916, the residents were driven off by a fire, probably intentionally set, leading tragically to the loss of lives as well as homes. Three years later, in 1919, journalists were stunned to learn that the slopes of Morro de Santo Antonio were once again home to favelas.Footnote ¹⁷

This pattern of resistance can, at least partially, be confirmed in the initial occupation, in 1893, of Morro da Providência, a hill in the city center near the port area, which in time became known as Morro da Favela. After the demolition of the Cabeça de Porco tenement, located near Central do Brasil and sheltering almost 2,000 people, a group of former residents were authorized by City Hall to take wooden boards with them—many of the rooms there were similar to the “barracões” (shacks) of future favelas. The residents who were evicted walked only a few meters to the above-mentioned hill where they built new dwellings.Footnote ¹⁸ Another form of resistance employed by favela residents in the wider process of urban reforms was the use of the juridical system. In her study of the Courts of Public Health (“Justiça Sanitária”), the body that operated from 1904 to 1914 in the capital of the Republic, Eneida Queiroz found a 1906 lawsuit for the maintenance of ownership brought by Antonio Izidoro Gonçaves, a resident of Dr. Rego Barros Street in Morro da Favela. In this document, the applicant expressed himself as “surprised by an edict from the General Office of Public Health (Diretoria Geral de Saúde Pública—DGSP) from the Fifth Department of Health asking him to clear the building so that it could be demolished.”Footnote ¹⁹ The document shows that favela residents had existing knowledge of the norms and legal procedures they could use to protect their interests.

The residents of Morro de Santo Antonio also fought in the courts to remain in their dwellings. In 1911, the “workers' lawyer,” Evaristo de Moraes, was approached by a commission of residents of Morro de Santo Antonio who opposed the eviction order sent by the DGSP. This association between the lawyer and the residents of the favela was denounced by the Jornal do Brasil as evidence of a conspiracy against the federal government.Footnote ²⁰ After analyzing the process, the lawyer lamented that he was legally unable to help the majority of the Morro's residents. Worried about the possible negative consequences for a population that was a common target of police repression, and also remaining faithful to the principles of socialist reformism that advocated political action within the limits of the law and the respect of property,Footnote ²¹ Moraes stated that the Morro's residents were “orderly creatures and, in their majority, already ready to abandon their shanties if the government were to cruelly insist on the demand for immediate eviction.”Footnote ²²

What is interesting is that in the previous month, Moraes adopted a more forceful position, having referred to the possibility of Morro de Santo Antonio's residents reacting to the situation beyond the bounds of the law: “The cruelty [of legislators and administrators], in this case, would be judged a provocation to resistance justifiable from every point of view.”Footnote ²³ Remembering the details of the Revolt of the LashFootnote ²⁴ that had occurred one month prior, the lawyer added, “Care, calm and prudence are advisable in these harsh situations in which the poor have a right to demand that their own misery be respected, [a misery] mainly caused by the negligence of the powerful.”Footnote ²⁵ In 1916, the removal of the favela was postponed due to a resort to justice, but three months later, the favela houses were destroyed in the tragic fire mentioned earlier.Footnote ²⁶ In these last two cases, however, we have an indication of organized collective struggles that are different from what the documentation on Morro da Favela collected by Queiroz suggests.

The organized and collective action by favela residents can also be observed in pro-improvement associations, constituted since at least 1920. Although we have little information about this subject, we know that the Favela and Pinto Morros, located in the port region, had organizations of this type. Pinto's association dated back to 1925.Footnote ²⁷

III

The type of resistance that most alarmed the dominant classes was the use of street protests by favela residents. The population of Morro da Favela drew even greater attention from the ruling class after its notable participation in the Revolt against the Vaccine (1904), which was widely covered by the newspapers.Footnote ²⁸ As a result, in December of 1904—that is, one month after the conflict—an agent from City Hall sent to Mayor Pereira Passos “a short list of the main landowners of Morro da Providência, in the area known by the alias of ‘Morro da Favela.’”Footnote ²⁹ Imminently in danger of having their dwellings demolished, these residents held public demonstrations at least twice: once in 1907 and once in 1927.

We will examine this second episode first. The French urban planner Alfred Agache, one of the essential figures in the institutionalization of urbanism in France, was hired by City Hall to design a remodeling and beautification project for Rio de Janeiro. The arrival of Agache in Rio in July of 1927 consolidated the process of legitimizing the urbanism of Brazil, which occurred independently of the issues of citizenship and rights to the city. In practice, it was a scientific-based project that presented solutions to urban problems and set aside political clashes. In other words, the urbanism that Brazil imported from Europe came without its inclusive aspect, while in Europe it arose from concern about the so-called social question.Footnote ³⁰

The proposal to urbanize Rio de Janeiro was related, on the one hand, to an attempt to enhance the value of the city, which was then facing the ascension of São Paulo, and, on the other hand, to the ideal of societal control by public power through the controlled management of the growth of Rio's urban form. The capital of the Republic was becoming unmanageable for the federal government because of political agitation and resistance, as well as favela expansion into areas of interest to the elites.Footnote ³¹ With regard to this second aspect, it is significant that in the 1920s, urban projects and the articles published in the newspapers had insistently denounced the existence of favelas in the southern zone of the city, which is, even now, the region of the city most favored by the public authorities.Footnote ³²

In the 1920s, the expansion of favelas became “multi-directional and uncontrollable,”Footnote ³³ having increased due to the purchase of lots by suburban workers to build their own houses.Footnote ³⁴ Addressing the issue of urban space in this context necessarily meant approaching the subject of favelas, and this was what both City Hall and the majority of journalists expected from Agache, and Agache did not disappoint those sectors of society that were interested in eradicating these housing settlements.

Favelas were the main subject of a speech given by the urban planner in the Municipal Theatre on July 20, 1927, entitled, “Sprawling Cities and Satellite Cities: A Solution for Garden Cities.”Footnote ³⁵ Agache explained didactically that cities generally became sprawling, meaning that after having been formed around a central nucleus, they radiated like tentacles, often in divergent directions that were transformed by simple roads or railways.Footnote ³⁶ When these sprawling cities hit an exaggerated level of development and, as such, lost the characteristics of a concentrated agglomeration, they created a new urban form: the satellite city, an autonomous and organized city in terms of social life, but one that was economically dependent on a larger urban center.Footnote ³⁷

What was fundamental was that there would be differences between consciously generated satellite cities and those born spontaneously, with favelas being an example of the latter. Defined as “parasitic agglomerations,” favelas had, at most, a tenuous relationship with consciously generated satellite cities, which were themselves considered true urban creations.Footnote ³⁸ As Agache understood it, an urban planner would always prefer that a morro be occupied by a “somewhat nomadic” population, as in favelas, than by haphazard upscale residences, as in the Santa Teresa neighborhood, because “Urbanizing the city in areas where favelas are present will be easy, while it will be almost impossible to find a solution for Santa Teresa.”

Essentially, while the dwellings with “vernacular” architectureFootnote ³⁹ found in the favelas could easily be demolished, the same could not be said of the houses with “erudite” architecture located in the Santa Teresa neighborhood, even though the neighborhood left much to be desired in terms of urban planning, from Agache's perspective.

After Agache condemned the permanence of such housing settlements in Rio de Janeiro's urban area, the journalists began to believe that the demolition of Morro da Favela's structures would happen in a matter of time, forgetting that the constructions found on other hills with favelas had also been condemned by the urban planner yet were still standing. This misconception occurred primarily because Morro da Favela was the most well-known favela in the city after the removal of Morro do Castelo, initiated in 1920.

The emphasis that journalists gave to Morro da Favela can be explained by the idea that the favela was the territory of the city's “dangerous classes,” a concept that in practice classified the poor as dangerous.Footnote ⁴⁰ Contributing to its bad reputation, the Morro was located in the port region and was stigmatized as an uncivilized area because it had the highest concentration of black people in the capital even though they did not reach a numerical majority in any city parish.Footnote ⁴¹ Another aspect that was widely publicized in the 1920s was that the Morro was frequented by the popular artists of the capital, and its composers had become renowned figures in the world of samba.Footnote ⁴² The carnival associations and parties organized by Morro da Favela residents were highly regarded among the city's popular classes.

After the specialist on urban spaces had announced the goal of eradicating the city's favelas, Morro da Favela's residents organized marches aimed at remaining in their dwellings. One comic strip published in the magazine O Malho on July 23, 1927, simulated a dialogue between President Washington Luís and Mayor Prado Junior on top of Morro da Favela: “Prado—What about that march in Morro da Favela? […] Washington—I don't want to hear about it anymore, I don't want to hear about it anymore.”Footnote ⁴³ The text that accompanies the drawings was intended to codify its message by presenting the idea that the marches were happening in Morro da Favela and not in the city's streets, which would not make sense, as a protest on the hill would not be witnessed by anyone except the residents themselves. The title of the comic strip, “Never more!” suggested that the politicians were as anxious to demolish the Morro's dwellings as they were to rid themselves permanently of the agitation by its population.

In this context, chroniclers such as Anibal Bonfim sympathized with the cause of Morro da Favela's population. In addition to considering the Morro a city tradition, Bomfim's text mentions the symbolic value of the Morro, even if in an ironic way: “Discovering the favela, it's the latest craze!!!”Footnote ⁴⁴ In a more decided fashion, samba musician Sinhô composed songs through which he disagreed with the intentions of the urban planner and City Hall while promoting a positive image of the area.

In “A Favela vai abaixo” [“The Favela is Going Down”] from 1927, Sinhô addressed the episode using subtle poetics full of meaning in which, in an alternating way, the stanzas suggested the ideas of resignation, irony, and protest. The artist sang about the affective bond between residents and the area (“Oh how you will miss this turf”); emphasized aspects of the hill's landscape that had been reclaimed as national symbols by intellectuals enthusiastic about “popular culture” (“The tiny wooden house”); and criticized the plan to demolish the Morro's dwellings in the context of a growing housing crisis (“Imposing homelessness on the favela's people”).Footnote ⁴⁵

“A Favela vai abaixo” was a success at 1928's carnival, and in that year, it was recorded by Francisco Alves on an album released by Odeon. During the previous year, the samba provided the title for a theatrical play. Continuing in 1927, Sinhô also mentioned Morro da Favela in “Não quero saber mais dela” [“I don't want to hear anything more about her”]. Expressed in verses describing a marital spat between a Portuguese man and a mixed-race (mulata) woman, the samba musician used dialogue to promote a positive valorization of the Morro, singing, “Mulata, there in the favela/many good people live.” It is worth emphasizing that in the music, the phrase is pronounced by a Portuguese man, who at that time was considered the ideal of a good worker. Regardless, the most significant aspect was that the first version of the song, composed before the arrival of Agache in Brazil, emphasized the “disorder” of the Morro. Upon becoming a theatrical play, the lyrics were modified to emphasize a more favorable view of the area—as the inclusion of the above verse demonstrates. This shows that, in the period in which Morro da Favela's dwellings were especially threatened by demolition, part of Rio de Janeiro's population expected a more respectful treatment of its inhabitants.Footnote ⁴⁶

In sum, against the backdrop of an intensified search for and valorization of the national identity and “popular culture” in the 1920s, the residents of Morro da Favela had a solid social network composed of intellectuals and popular artists who had privileged access to the debate taking place in the public sphere. The Morro remained occupied by the working poor, whereas the so-called Agache Plan, published in 1930, was abandoned because of the high economic costs of its proposals and the political transformations unleashed by the Revolution of 1930 that placed populist Getúlio Vargas in power.

IV

The other episode of resistance implemented by the residents of Morro da Favela identified in this study occurred in 1907. The earliest news of that event dates to a meeting held on April 18 of that year. The meeting was attended by delegate Dr. Tamborim, representing Police Chief Alfredo Pinto; General Mendes de Moraes, representing the military police; the Director General of Public Health, Oswaldo Cruz; and Mayor Souza Aguiar. According to the Jornal do Brasil, on this occasion the authorities decided on the “complete sanitation of the morros of this Capital.”Footnote ⁴⁷

An addendum must be made to this statement, however, because according to the rhetoric of the time, “to sanitize” a morro meant to demolish its dwellings because they were considered unhealthy. Additionally, it is worth remembering that Dr. Tamborim was the delegate of the ninth division, which included the Gamboa neighborhood and, consequently, Morro da Favela. This fact leads us to suppose that the residents of the Morro were the main subject of the meeting, although all of the morros occupied by poor workers were targeted by the public authorities.

As mentioned, Morro da Favela was considered the territory of the “dangerous classes” of Rio de Janeiro. The first results of the 1907 meeting could be seen in the magazine O Malho on May 4, 1907, in a comic strip entitled “How are they doing, the Favela residents?”Footnote ⁴⁸ In the comic strip, the dialogue between a black couple insinuated that the DGSP ordered the eviction of the residents of the Morro within twenty days at the request of the police: “It comes from the place least expected: it was the chief of police that requested the term for our eviction from Morro da Favela; and the Higiênica gave twenty days[…]—Buzz off! Since when is twenty days enough time to find a house? Only if it is for us to move to the bishop's palace construction site, which the government bought for more than eight hundred ‘contos’!…”Footnote ⁴⁹ In this excerpt, we see criticism of the excessive spending by public authorities and satire of the type of language used by the favela residents, which was far from the educated norm of the Portuguese language. This type of mockery, which could be extended to the poor population in general, occurred constantly in the mainstream media of Brazil's First Republic, thus contributing to politically delegitimizing the worldview of favela residents and their daily claims. Regardless of the details, the Morro's residents seem not to have respected the twenty-day term of eviction.

On June 1, 1907, the newspapers announced that the Director General of Public Health, Oswaldo Cruz, had ordered the eviction of the residents of Morro da Favela within a mere ten days. When considering the situation, the Correio da Manhã published a disparaging article against the Morro's residents: “Morro da Favela is still a place of disorder. A shelter for vagrants, deserters and individuals pernicious to society, and it cannot go on without any notice worthy of its past traditions. And now that it is going to be sanitized through the demolition of its shanties, its residents will seek to take advantage of the last moments of an existence harmful to the public order.”Footnote ⁵⁰

We see in this quote the association between speech allied with order and that allied with hygiene, which had commonly been used in reference to tenements since the middle of the nineteenth century. The difference is that after the urban reforms, the favelas and their handmade shacks became the main representation of popular housing, replacing the slums' tenements in discussions of urban blight.Footnote ⁵¹ Another accusation that deserves commentary is that Morro da Favela sheltered deserters. In fact, the number of desertions in the city was large and related to popular aversion toward military service, explained, by among other factors, the continued application of corporal punishment to soldiers.Footnote ⁵²

What inspired the publication of such hostile remarks regarding the residents of Morro da Favela? It appears that a minor altercation, without weapons or serious injuries, involving Antonio Carvalho (the aggressor), Maria Silveira Nogueira (the victim), and Theotônio Coimbra, the defender of the aforementioned “vagrant,” who was “like her aggressor, a fan of Baccho,” was the reason. The daily attributed the argument to the “motive of drunkenness.”Footnote ⁵³ Thus, not only did the newspaper obscure the reasons for the dispute, but also treated the event as if it was spontaneous and further stigmatized the participants by blaming it on the favela dwellers' alcohol consumption.

The campaign against alcohol was constant in the media, as alcohol was perceived as “the greatest enemy of man, exercising the most harmful influence on the organism,” in addition to being “maybe the top factor in criminality, in the formation of delinquents.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The movement against alcohol included the mainstream media of the time and combined sanitary and policing concerns. The familiarization with an entire derogatory context could be found in the title of the article celebrating the announcement of the demolition of houses in the locality: simply “In Morro da Favela.”

What is curious is that the following day the contributors to that same newspaper adopted a more tolerant tone and began to treat favela residents like helpless victims of modernity. A report on the visit of a team from the Correio da Manhã to Morro da Babilônia was printed on the first two pages of its Sunday edition: “The mountain is becoming more populated. It is the earth's charity … there the poor withdraw to its heights, sheltering themselves in its hills, expelled by Grandeur, by the prosperous destroyer of the humble houses, by Progress that does not consent to a decrepit house remaining in the heart of the city. The mountain opens its green coat and welcomes the poor like saints in the gentle time of the hermits.”Footnote ⁵⁵

In this excerpt, the perception of the transformations resulting from the attempt to make the city more bourgeois becomes clear. In 1907, the mainstream media already widely publicized the idea that the urban reforms, completed the year before, had worsened the housing crisis. The idealization of favela residents in the previous quote (“poor people”) reappeared on June 4, 1907, in another article on the front page of the Correio da Manhã, which now dealt specifically with Morro da Favela: “[I]t is from that refuge, where they—banished from the lower, habitable city—fled to find a cave in which to shelter themselves and their children from the inclement weather and the beating sun that the poor workers now see themselves being violently evicted.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Despite the more tolerant language toward residents of Morro da Favela, the editor did not exactly disagree with the plan to demolish the dwellings: “Morro da Favela needs to be sanitized and, well, the director of Public Health, without attempting anything besides [satisfying] that urgent need, only now realized, unconcernedly, in a severe individualistic gesture, orders all residents to move out, within ten days.”Footnote ⁵⁷

In one respect, the editor defended the notion that the Morro needed to be “sanitized,” yet he found irony in the fact that Oswaldo Cruz suddenly realized it, thus giving the issue an exaggerated sense of urgency. In other words, what the editor criticized was not the goal of expelling the residents from Morro da Favela, but rather the way in which City Hall attempted to do it. The editor contested the inadequate notice these people were given to abandon the hill, not the idea that their houses needed to be demolished. The opinion of the Correio da Manhã was that Oswaldo Cruz could have given the Morro's inhabitants “ten times longer” considering that the medical-sanitary inspector had already gone many years without “seeing that necessity.”

We can now understand the broader meaning of this text, which, despite its apparent concern for the workers, ended with the statement that Morro da Favela “needed” to be and “should” be “sanitized.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The rhetorical strategy employed was that of agreeing while disagreeing—one tense, slippery argument defended the area's residents and criticized the government but eventually (and carefully) failed to disagree with the idea of removing the favela. Be that as it may, there was a considerable change with respect to the tone of the discourse from the previous day. The demolition of the Morro's houses was no longer being celebrated; rather, more time was being requested so that the population could better organize itself to deal with the consequences.

Despite continuing to report on the eviction order of Morro da Favela's residents, the media avoided mentioning the posture of the residents with regard to the process. One day after the deadline stipulated by the government had passed, the Correio da Manhã published a small yet significant note: “After hearing the reasonable arguments presented by the district officers, Dr. Oswaldo Cruz decided to prolong the eviction term for another forty days so that the poor residing in Morro da Favela can look for new housing.”Footnote ⁵⁹

It is worth noting that, in this situation, the residents of the area were called “poor” in the mainstream media, which set aside the more commonly used descriptive terms such as “assassins” or “criminals.” The most relevant thing to note here is that the extension was considered a fair concession by the powerful and not a result of the possible resistance of the Morro's residents.

The magazine O Malho repeated this formula: “A term extension of forty days was conceded thanks to generous and merciful interventions.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Only on June 29 did the mainstream media give a sense of the posture adopted by the Morro da Favela's population. They did so through a comic strip that showed the problems that buzzed around in the mayor's head. The following can be read in the text of the comic strip:

It would seem that the residents of Morro da Favela were making the mayor suffer; if they were “above,” then it was because they still had not left the Morro. It was not an exaggeration to suppose that if they found themselves “below,” it meant that they had descended from the Morro to protest. Let us now combine this text with the other evidence observed in this work: the Correio da Manhã's sudden change in its approach to the favela residents and, more specifically, those from Morro da Favela; the agreeing while disagreeing strategy employed by the newspaper; the insistence in qualifying the postponement of the eviction of favela residents as a generous concession of the government; and, finally, the silence of important newspapers that openly supported the government in this matter, such as the Jornal do Commercio and O Paiz.Footnote ⁶² Would all of this be enough to lead us to the hypothesis that the Morro's population had resisted the eviction order of the DGSP in a resounding and organized way?

Only on December 4, 1909, more than two years after the event, was the attempt to demolish the dwellings of Morro da Favela approached in a clearer manner by the mainstream media: “A director of public health, Dr. Oswaldo Cruz, intended to wipe out one of those [favela] neighborhoods, but its inhabitants came down, in a mutiny, to the newspaper rooms and the press, or some of it, clamored that they wanted to destroy the asylum of the poor, leaving them homeless.”Footnote ⁶³

In other words, despite the systematic attempt by newspapers and magazines to stigmatize the behavioral patterns of favela residents, there was a significant movement of resistance, which even used the “enemy's” weapons—the persuasive power of the mainstream media—to reach its goals. Fighting for the right to remain in their houses, Morro da Favela's residents went to the streets “in mutiny,” which is to say, in an organized fashion, and pressured certain newspapers to take on their cause.

We see in this episode that there was a breach in the exclusionary language promoted by Rio de Janeiro's newspapers, and this opening meant that the favela population could also take part in the public conversation. According to what we have read, a part of the mainstream media “claimed that [the authorities] wanted to destroy the asylum of the poor, leaving them homeless.” Specifically, within the regulatory action of the media, their discourse toward the favela residents became more accommodating. Given that the great demolitions of popular housing conducted during the urban reforms of Pereira Passos and Rodrigues Alves had worsened the housing crisis and the process of “favelization” of the city's morros, the reporters felt obligated to develop an alternative, more tolerant discourse toward favela residents. In 1905, in Renascença magazine, City Hall engineer Everardo Backheuser pointed to “laborers who, due to the scarcity or high cost of lodgings, were forced to resort to these high places” where a “breeze” would arrive to “sweeten” their rustic dwellings.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is worth noting that the discourse of charity, philanthropy, and favors was far from offering solidarity and recognition of their rights or their humanity.Footnote ⁶⁵

The new limit of forty days stipulated by Oswaldo Cruz, a benevolent gesture worthy of his name, gave the impression that it was the government that was making the rules and, even more so, that it was doing so in a fairer way. Despite the incisive action of Morro da Favela's population after the final date for the eviction had passed, the city's principal media entities no longer mentioned the topic.Footnote ⁶⁶

The actions of the residents of Morro da Favela recall E.P. Thompson's argument that it is necessary to reframe the concept of hegemony, removed from a static notion of history, and take into account that within and outside the hegemony of the dominant class, we can detect “innumerable contexts and situations in which men and women, upon confronting the necessities of their existence, elaborate their own values and create their own culture, intrinsic to their own way of life.”Footnote ⁶⁷

V

To conclude, we should emphasize the contemporary resonances of the history discussed in this text. Through Decree 32081 of April 7, 2010, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes, legally facilitated the removal of favelas, which allows efforts to access and appropriate real estate normally protected by ordinary legislation. In this vein, the mayor's office announced that it would remove eight favelas as an initial action.Footnote ⁶⁸ Simultaneously, the governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Sérgio Cabral, initiated the program “Live Safe” [Morar Seguro], which also regulates medium- to long-term removals through Decree 42406 of April 13, 2010.

In a broader context, with the preparations for mega sporting events such as the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, Rio de Janeiro has become a “city of exceptions,” in which business interests rule. Creating a generous legislation of exemptions and fiscal and urban favors, the mayor's office and town hall are together “transforming the urban exception into a rule.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Subject to the spontaneous movement of the market, the state acts as an enterprise that has been handed over to the capitalists.

As a result, the practice of favela removal is gaining force. Since Rio de Janeiro was chosen to host the Olympics in October of 2008, more than 8,000 people have been expelled from their houses, and tens of thousands more will be targeted. Up to this point, eight communities have been removed, while various others were partially affected, and more than eleven are under threat.Footnote ⁷⁰ Among the favelas whose dwellings were in part demolished is Morro da Providência, previously known as Morro da Favela. There, 134 houses have already been razed, and the goal is to demolish almost a third of its structures to install an aerial tramway that will transport nearly 3,000 people per hour during the Olympics. In addition to disrespecting its historical importance, this decision will destabilize whatever remains of the favela.Footnote ⁷¹

Facing the possible legitimacy of removal as a permanent policy, which would deconstruct the consensus that was built in relation to urbanization over the past thirty years, the favela population has already begun organizing itself. In fact, it has resorted to the power of persuasion of human rights groups and the international media. In this context, as the specter of urban exclusion gains ever more force in Rio de Janeiro, the historian can play an important role by pointing out the resistance tradition of the favela residents. As Bourdieu stated, “What we researchers would like to dream is that a part of our research could prove useful to a social movement, instead of being wasted.”Footnote ⁷²