The Favela and the Sea: Fishing, Urbanization, and Intersecting Violences in Rio de Janeiro

• In Event: Urban-Environmental Futures in the Global South

Abstract

The fishers of Complexo da Maré, Rio de Janeiro's largest conglomeration of favelas, have faced urbanization, militarization, industrialization, and environmental degradation for nearly a century. I use archival research, interviews, and ethnography to examine the challenges the fishers of Maré confront and how they have responded to social, political, and environmental upheaval since the mid-20th century. The economic precarity, threats to physical safety and security, racialized spatial discrimination, and degraded environment in which the fishers live and work contribute to a set of intersecting injustices—or what I argue should be called violences—that threaten their livelihoods. Despite these intersecting violences, fishers have persevered and protected a way of life that was once the focal point of their communities. Their stories reflect what successive urban and climatic upheavals do to individuals and communities and highlight how these communities survive and create a constantly changing cultural, social, political, and economic life in response to exceptional challenges.

Author

• Peter Taylor Klein, Bard College