Pixacao can be seen all around Sao Paulo. It is very different from tagging and graffiti. Pixacao has its own symbols and people who do this type of artwork are usually from the peripheries. They use this art form to go into the city and express their minds. The messages are political and pixadores are making it noticeable that their neighborhoods do not have the same resources compared to the people inside the city. Pixacao is not meant to be a beautiful work of art, instead it is intentionally unpleasing to make city officials aware of their existence.

Alex went with Fernando who is a painter, rapper, and actor. Fernando began as a pixador and was a part of the pixacao movement. Fernando took me to Vila Flavia where the neighborhood is filled with amazing murals all around. The murals conveyed all types of powerful messages. There were murals about FIFA and how none of the residents in Vila Flavia were benefited in the new soccer stadium that was built nearby. Many murals were of single mothers who struggle everyday to raise and feed their children. Other graffiti artists from outside the community have came in and contributed their art skills by putting up murals that told a story from within. A graffiti artist from Brooklyn, New York drew a child from the community he met with his dog on a huge wall. Others from Toronto, Canada and other parts of Brazil have collaborated together to bring new artwork into the community. Many of the artwork is done from people who started as pixadores. Some of the houses are completely covered in beautiful murals and it brings a colorful vibrancy to the community.

I got to learn about the project Sao Mateus Movimento, which is a group of young guys who made all the artwork possible. The project has an office in Vila Flavia and aside from the powerful murals, they also create programs to get the community involved. They focus on the children and teach them art and music. One of their goals in the future is to cover a full block filled with murals. As more people start to come into the community, they want outsiders to see the truth of living in the poor conditions they do, but also that the importance that art can have to bring hope to the residents.  

For Alex’s neighborhood day, he explored Heliopolis, which is in the southeast end of Sao Paulo. This neighborhood is the largest favela in Sao Paulo and second largest in Brazil with around 200,000 inhabitants. The people built their houses illegally and as the population grew it became a neighborhood. Heliopolis was known for being a dangerous area, but then slowly that perception has been changing. The government bought a piece of land that was used for parked trucks and dumping waste. In 2004-2005, an architect came into Heliopolis and asked the community what they wanted in that space. He donated the project to the community and even helped with giving extra materials for people to use to build their houses. The land was transformed into a public space for the community and the walls were lowered down. The process was participatory and residents were even able to choose the colors of the walls. Within this public space there is a primary school and middle school. From walking around, the space was well maintained and respected by the community members. A technical school and sports facilities like swimming, basketball, and soccer were also built. City Hall funds the schools and the facilities and since this transformation the quality of the residents has been increasing. Recently two students from Heliopolis were recognized for completing medical school.

An NGO called UNAS also contributes to the community as well. The organization helps students stay away from the streets and get more active in school or sports. The organization built a soccer and basketball facility next to their office for the community to use. Also, UNAS helps fund and collaborates with the only public library in the community who encourages young children to read more. There is a computer lab for residents to learn how the basic of using a computer and they also help with legal issues like divorce. We encountered a project of thirty teenages who have decided that it is okay to go to parties and not drink. They take responsibility of the problems alcohol causes and they speak with each in a safe space.

About ten years ago, the houses finally received legal light and water services from the government. Before it was illegal and residents would have to steal these resources from nearby neighborhoods. The community is growing and most of the families know each other. As I walked around, people would wave to each other and help each other out. A lot of local owned businesses were in the neighborhood and whatever is needed in terms of food, clothing, house materials or mechanics were found within Heliopolis. The neighborhood has gotten a better reputation and it aims to keep progressing forward.

For Eli’s Neighborhood Day, she visited Bom Retiro, a neighborhood that has traditionally been immigrants’ first stop in the city. In the 1960s, Orthodox Jews were the neighborhood’s main residents. Koreans comprised the next wave and now Bolivians. She first learned about the neighborhood through a movie titled “The Year My Parents Went on Vacation,” which took place in the then-Jewish neighborhood when Brazil was under military dictatorship. Because of this film, she was excited to explore Bom Retiro and learn about how today’s immigrants and new political landscape shapes the neighborhood.

When Eli’s group arrived in the neighborhood, they met Angela, a Bolivian woman who immigrated to Brazil nine years ago. She told them that Bolivian immigrants like her typically work in sewing workshops six days a week, working long hours and receiving little pay. She explained that the majority of workshop owners are Korean and that before they began exploiting Bolivian arrivals, Jewish workshop owners exploited them. She also mentioned that today, a handful of Bolivian immigrants, have become workshop bosses, indicating a continuing cycle of exploitation by the exploited. Angela no longer works in a sewing workshop but shared that the most difficult parts of the experience were the effects her work had on her health and her family. Today, Angela suffers from poor vision, back and kidney pains because of the long hours she spent bent over fabric. As for her family, she feels that her children were neglected. She spent little time with them because her priority was earning money for their survival in Brazil. However, Brazil’s economic recession has made it impossible for her to continue living here and she plans to return to Bolivia with her children next month. She does not see this as a happy return but as a defeat. She is unsure of the work she will do in Bolivia, but hopes to open a bakery with her husband. The reason she shares her story with groups like ours is to raise awareness about the conditions immigrants work under in the city.

In each city we travel to, IHP hosts a social justice panel featuring men and women who view social justice as a core component of their work. In São Paulo, one of our speakers included Paulo Giacomini, the organizer of the first Gay Pride Parade in São Paulo.

In 1997, Giacomini organized the city’s first gay pride parade. As someone who had been involved in the National Network of People Living with AIDS and HIV since its creation two years earlier, he realized that São Paulo’s LGBT community needed the support of the city at large. The first parade he organized had an attendance of five hundred people. Just three years later, over one million Paulistas attended. In 2006, São Paulo’s Gay Pride Parade was named the largest in the world. However, these accomplishments came with struggles along the way. Giacomini said that in the early years of the parade, religious fundamentalists mobbed supporters. Today, members of the LGBT community have become more widely recognized as actors in the city. According to our speaker, their political involvement is large. This is partly due to their occupation of positions that place them near the city’s most powerful leaders.

Although Giacomini is proud of his achievements and those of the LGBT community, he recognizes that disparity exists between the LGBT community living downtown and in the periphery. He said that because those in the periphery are more likely to be poor and black, young black gays are the most vulnerable to AIDS. Although the health system in Brazil is public and free (meaning that expensive HIV medication is readily available to those who need it), those in the periphery struggle the most to benefit from it because of their distance from health care facilities. Giacomini recognizes this and fights to include the voices of the voiceless through his work with the National Network of People Living with HIV and AIDS.

SP Gay Pride Parade 2016

After a long journey from India to Brazil, Alex and I landed in São Paulo. Our senses quickly picked up on differences between the two; from rapidly spoken Portuguese to the smell of meat and coffee to tall concrete buildings squeezed together on every block, it was clear that we were no longer in Ahmedabad. We soon learned that the city of São Paulo has a population of eleven million people. The size of the population combined with that of the city contribute to make São Paulo a city of gross inequality. For example, millions of residents live in the periphery of the city and must travel two to three hours a day in order to reach their jobs in the center of the city. This greatly affects their quality of life in comparison to those who have the means to both live and work downtown. During a lecture titled “Race: the Brazilian Perspective,” we learned that those who live in the periphery are more likely to be black. This present reality that often goes ignored has partly been constructed by Brazil’s political history.

Map of São Paulo City

In the 1930s, racial democracy emerged as a term used to express the idea that people of all races live under social equality. Brazil was under authoritarian rule when the term surfaced. In reality, the government used it as a means to further stifle Brazilians’ rights. This was because when the idea that everyone was Brazilian, no matter their race, was in place, there was little room for people to claim that they were being treated unequally. Later, when authoritarian rule came under attack, so did racial democracy. This was partly due to a study conducted by UNESCO, wherein the organization found high levels of inequality between whites and non-whites across Brazil. Sadly, the total overthrow of racial democracy took decades because the government had successfully made it so that criticizing racial democracy became an expression of anti-Brazilian sentiment. A victory came in 1988 when the new constitution strengthened anti-discrimination provisions. Although racial democracy is recognized today as a fallacy, there continue to be persistent differences between white and non-white educational and occupational attainment levels, especially in São Paulo. As mentioned, this is best exemplified by racial patterns across the city.

As we continue to explore São Paulo, from its center to its periphery, it will be interesting to learn more about challenges faced by the periphery and forms of resistance used to combat these challenges.

Trinity students Alex Perez ‘17 and Elizabeth Valenzuela ’17 are posting their blogs as part of the School for International Training’s International Honors Program (IHP) in spring 2016. Perez and Valenzuela are traveling from New York to and through Sao Paulo, Ahmedabad, and Cape Town for the program “Cities in the 21st Century: People, Planning, and Politics.” They will send posts about these cities from the field that are posted on this page.

From the moment we stepped out of the airport in Ahmedabad, India, the city offered up a sensory overload. Cows, monkeys and the occasional elephant in the street, the smell of burning trash, and the hustle-bustle traffic on the ride to our hotel formed our first impression of the place where we would spend the next five weeks. 

While in Ahmedabad we have engaged with the concept of caste through our class lectures, on site visits, and in conversations with the many Ahmedabadis we have met along the way.

We read extensive literature on the Indian caste system as part of our coursework. In our Culture and Society (C&S) lectures with our travelling faculty, Carmen Medeiros, we learned that the caste system is far more complicated than any textbook would allow us to see. It is a hierarchical societal organization system based on occupation. The more that your work involves using your hands – the dirtier and more physical it is, the lower on the caste system you are. It divides the population into four labor oriented groups; with the most “pure” at the top and most “polluted” at the bottom. Then there is a group that falls almost outside of the hierarchy – the bottom of the bottom – the ones called “Untouchables” because higher castes are literally unable to touch these people.

In our C&S discussions we reflected that caste is almost racialized. It is seen as part of your biology. It is hereditary—the work your parents’ do will most likely be the work you do. The difficulty of breaking away from this inequality that been institutionalized for over 3,000 years overwhelmed us.

In our Politics and Development class with our travelling faculty, Juan Arbona, and in both formal and informal lectures from our brilliant country coordinators, Sonal and Persis, we further explored this issue. We learned that India’s grand Constitution states that no individual should be discriminated based on caste and makes the practice of “Untouchability” forbidden.

We learned that Dalits experienced caste discrimination in rural villages and migrated to Ahmedabad, in search of employment and a better life. Many workers found upon arriving to the city that because of their minimal education level, the only work they could do was clean. And so they became sanitation workers employed by the city to sweep streets, collect trash from door to door, and maintain manholes.

According to the sanitation employees we spoke with, they received minimal protective gear and tools for cleaning, and are only temporal subcontracted workers with minimal workers’ rights. According to a city solid waste management official, sanitation workers are provided with protective gear and tools, yet workers choose not to use the gear. We also spoke with street vendors and construction workers who encounter the same issues. 

Our experience has been polarizing as we have studied the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project in our Urban Planning and Sustainable Development class (UP&SE) with Juan. We got the chance to talk to the people involved with the project such as urban planners and developers. As well as the people affected by the project such as slum dwellers nearby the river and vendors who have been selling for 600 years on the riverfront. The lower caste people are being relocated outside the city and their land is being reclaimed to build new residential apartments and hotels. The slum dwellers are being relocated into areas that lack resources like clean water and schools. The people working have a difficult time as they are farther away from their jobs and now have commute for longer when before they were within walking distance.

As students, we were challenged to see the agency within the poor conditions that many people face in India. Juan, told us, “You see, American students have the tendency of feeling bad, of traveling abroad and victimizing people abroad.” Not this time. Juan challenged us to think deeply and see agency even in one of the most marginalized groups in India.

Our time in India has come to a close and now we prepare for new experiences and challenges in Sao Paulo, Brazil. We will carry on what we have  learned in Ahmedabad and see how the issues in South America’s biggest city compares and contrasts.

Tata Motors moved to Gujarat with the plan of manufacturing the world’s cheapest car, Tata Nano. The government allowed the factory to move as a plan of Chief Minister Modi to transform Ahmedabad into a car manufacturing hub and bring in other car companies as well. The factory was built in an agricultural village called Sanand. Many farmers feared the government was going to take away their land without compensation. Tata Motors currently uses land from Gujarat Agricultural University which was in the name of the Gujarat government. The villagers depended on the land to sustain their livelihoods. The villagers were forced to give 1,100 acres of agricultural land for industry. The government gave the farmers a reasonable amount of money for the land (It was sold at 1,200 rupees per square mile or $108,000 per acre). The issue there was that many farmers took the money and moved out of the village and the government easily reclaimed the land. Visiting the village and speaking to some of the people who still live in the area, they were saying that the government was not giving them an option. Either they took the money or the land was going to forcefully be taken from them. Many of the farmers spent their money right away on a new home, new car, or anything they could buy. A lot of those families are poor again and the villagers have lost their livelihoods.

In return for selling the agricultural land, the village was told they would get employment but in reality only forty to fifty of the people are employed by Tata. There were about ten thousand people who were working on the farms and now majority of them are jobless. The jobs at Tata are high skilled positions and the villagers do not have the skills to apply for the jobs. A lot of the villagers do not get employed because of the fact that the local village workers might form a union. Instead Tata was hiring people from outside the area to prevent a union from forming.

Tata cars were catching on fire and the factory closed down as a result. The vision of Ahmedabad being a car manufacturing hub was no longer a reality. Tata is not reaching the demand it hoped and therefore no other car companies are interested in moving to Gujarat.

The conditions of the villagers became more difficult to live in once the factory moved in. There once was a bus station that went into the village, but was then disconnected. They lack a source of clean drinkable water, which harms the overall health of the village. All they knew was farming and now that their land has been taken away, they do not know what to do. The community was left to be destroyed and they are neglected by the government and the factory. Thankfully, NGOs are working with the villagers to ensure that the ones who stayed do not sell their land. The NGOs help inform the people of their rights and help with getting access to basic amenities.

NGOs serve a critical need in poor communities. These villagers were forced to give up their land and at the end had everything taken away from them. The money perhaps sounded like a great deal, but now the villagers are economically and emotionally unstable. They need help to get back on their feet when they have no fault for the results of an unbroken promise from the government.

Construction workers working on a luxury residential complex

Different kinds of labor issues were explored this week in Indian society. The group learned about different groups, including sanitation workers, constructions workers, shoe makers, street vendors and teachers. Alex went with a group to observe the conditions of construction workers. We went to an intersection where about one thousand people having minimal skills to high-end skills stand starting at 8 am to find informal work for the day. They generally live close by so they walk to this area and wait until around 11 am. The workers wait for a contractor to come and pick them up and give them a job for the day or a few days. The majority of them are from a working class background and have minimal skills and education. As we stood, we talked to some of the workers waiting and learned that some of them started working the way they do since they were teenagers. Some of them actually prefered working informally because if they were to do formal work with a contract, they would have to work harder even though they would get a better pay. Skilled workers get 700 rupees per day (about $100) and unskilled workers get 350 rupees per day (about $50). The downside to informal construction work is that it is not guaranteed that they will find work every day, some people work for only half the month and the other half doing whatever they can to make some sort of money. Another issue is that they receive no benefits for doing informal work. After meeting construction workers, we met with someone who advocates for the rights of these workers. He wants more workers to be registered as construction workers and helps them with the registration process to achieve this. There is also a union, which is 20 rupees to register with plus an annual fee of 60 rupees. Another thing he does is helping workers get trained to improve their skills, but not many people do so because they lose days of work through training. Programs range from three days to three months and offer a small stipend of 150 rupees per day. About twenty percent do not make it through the training because it is physically and financially too difficult. Even if workers are trained, there is still no guarantee that they will get permanent work or even a higher pay.

Eli and her group visited sanitation workers. In Indian society, sanitation workers typically have this occupation because they are Dalits, or belong to the lowest class. Moreover, they are typically Balmikas, or belong to the lowest sub-caste within the Dalit caste. Sanitation workers perform an array of jobs, including street sweeping and drainage cleaning. In the community we spoke to, speakers shared that the government often takes them on as contractors. Similar to construction workers, their work is not guaranteed every day and their wages are not secure. Additionally, they are not provided with protection (such as face masks and hard hats) for their jobs, causing many to be hurt while working (in which case they do not have benefits to tap into) or die (in which case their families cannot claim widow pensions). Thus, sanitation workers feel that despite the outlawing of the caste system, the government reinforces this hierarchy in their lives every day. Sadly, the community feels that their future is bleak because of these conditions. Moreover, they said that they do not have time to unite as a community to form a union. Additionally, a large segment of the population does not see education as the solution because parents are not able to pay for private school beyond middle school. It was also commented by our guide that most individuals’ wages go to alcohol and temples. They drink to sedate themselves to do their work and donate to temples to pray for better conditions in their next life.

Interestingly, the central and Gujarati government has allocated a budget for the welfare of the Dalit community. But this is mostly on paper. In reality, this money is often re-routed to parks and other projects that contribute to Ahmedabad’s ambition to become a World Heritage site.
As with Neighborhood Day, a common theme has been that people in the lowest castes are those who are most disadvantaged by the government. As the construction workers and sanitation workers taught us, the government purposefully takes them on as contractor employees in order to pay them as little as possible. Moreover, in most cases these workers do not receive benefits and lack access to social mobility, essentially causing them to be stuck in their occupations. These cases have taught us that the government’s promise of a “developed” and “modern” Ahmedabad has further marginalized the poor.

During our first week, our group was split up and we explored five different neighborhoods in the city of Ahmedabad. Some groups went to the western region of the city while others went to the eastern region. Alex went to Rajpur-Gomtipur, a Hindu community that was established to house workers from the textile industries. Many of these people immigrated from rural areas and moved to this area because of work opportunities they might have read on the newspaper or heard from a family member or friend. When the factories were growing, workers were getting a good pay and benefits for themselves and their families. The community was flourishing and the infrastructure was being built such as schools, hospitals, road infrastructure, and food stands. Factories then began closing down and people were losing their jobs. The built infrastructure crumbled and is no longer maintained by the city. The nearby school is not as good and instead parents were sending their children to private schools. On my way there, a water pipe had burst because of a compilation of garbage and flooded the streets. As I walked around with my group, we met a man who worked at an active factory and he hired mainly women in the area to make handkerchiefs to sell in the market. A lot of the people from the community had to work from home to make some income and support their families. One woman had a salon in her home and another woman put buttons on pants.

This community self-sustained itself economically, but its members do not have any benefits in case something happens and there is no social mobility in what they do. In the community, everyone was very welcoming, people’s door were open and kids were out playing in the public spaces. While this community is a predominantly working-class area, many of these families took very good care of their homes and took pride in showing us their homes. The interesting part was that when we asked the kids, some of whom were in college, if they wanted to stay or leave, many immediately said that they wanted to stay in their community. That to me was very surprising, but that area has such a strong sense of community established that many of the people really love where they are from. Even though they are not making enough money, they are all willing to help each other out and would even borrow and lend money to each other because they would trust each other more than the bank.

Eli went to Juhapura, a Muslim community in the outer banks of Ahmedabad. She and her group began their visit at a private school, where their speaker shared that Juhapura was established in the 1970s, due to flooding that forced thousands of families to relocate. The neighborhood expanded when riots caused Muslim families to flee their homes in search of a safe haven. Juhapura has steadily continued to expand in recent years because it has the capacity to house growing Muslim families. The neighborhood’s reputation is that it is “mini-Pakistan,” a term that Indian Hindus often attach to predominantly Muslim neighborhoods that they perceive as dangerous. Additionally, this connotates an otherness to the people who live there. It asserts that they are not Indian. Interestingly, Ahmedabad’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system does not stop in Juhapura, reinforcing the idea that this neighborhood is too dangerous to have a stop or too poor to afford it. In reality, families’ income levels there are diverse. During their walk around the neighborhood, Eli and her group saw areas being developed for luxury real estate as well as makeshift homes. Unfortunately, the reality is that there is little unity in the community and the rich do not see a reason to help improve the lives of their neighbors. This is also due in part to the diversity of Muslim sects in the neighborhood. This difference creates dividing lines that keep people isolated from the reality of their community’s needs. Through our speakers we learned that the government does not provide the community with basic services such as water and drainage. People are forced to take toxic water from the ground and create their own drainage systems or illegally tap into surrounding localities’ resources. Additionally, there are no public schools in the area. Continuing tensions between Hindus and Muslims also trouble the people of Juhapura. There is actually a large concrete wall dividing the community from the Hindu neighborhoods that surround it. The police does not protect them, forcing them to defend themselves and then suffer the legal consequences.

Through our visits we observed that when the Ahmedabadi government does not provide communities with basic services, they will often have to create their own resources. One key difference is that the people of Rajpur-Gomtipur are united while Juhapura’s economic diversity and tensions with the surrounding community make unity difficult to achieve. As we continue to learn about communities in the city, it would be interesting to observe how NGO’s supports people like the ones we visit to alleviate the lack of resources.