In Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the entrance of the city, the Workers Party (PT)
implemented a re-urbanization project called the Entry of the City. This project
included an investment in urban infra-structure and formalization of “informal”
spaces where 3200 poor families live, most of them Black and Afro-descendent
people. These families were removed from their original places and were settled
in housing projects in the same neighborhood. This dissertation is a study of the
historical processes of inclusion and exclusion, and removal and resettlement of
Black families in Brazilian urban spaces. I use Porto Alegre both to discuss general trends of racial politics in Brazilian urban spaces and to discuss how poor
and Black people are continuously involved in historical processes of racialization
promoted by the Brazilian society. Based on ethnographic research conducted in
the Entry of the City, this dissertation analyzes different levels of racialization of
Black people and their spaces, as well as different levels of segregation within
segregated areas. This dissertation is divided in four sections in which I
demonstrate: a) the history of urbanization of Porto Alegre and the genesis of the
formation of this space as a process of removal and dispersion of Black families;
b) the contemporary processes of this history that disperse and segregate Black
people; c) how everyday life of the Entry of the City reinforces the processes of
segregation of Black people despite the generalized poverty that affects the
residents of that area; and d) how common senses about Black families and other
poor people are expressed in the local newspaper and contribute to racialize Black
people as well as poor neighborhoods. This dissertation presents three main
arguments: first, I argue that race is an independent category that must be used to
analyze urban segregation in Brazil. Second, Porto Alegre displays a disperse
segregation instead of configuring ghettos in its space. Third, the exclusion and
segregation of Black families within segregated areas is because of and
constitutive of the dynamics of the racialization processes of Black families that
are present in Brazilian urban spaces. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/7510 |
| Date | 27 May 2010 |
| Creators | Pólvora, Jacqueline Britto |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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