Intersectional Ecologies of Risk in São Paulo

Keywords: Flooding, risk, hyperperphery, race, gender, topography, difference, Sao Paulo, Serra da Cantareira, Brazil
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 2

Abstract

Since the Brazilian dictatorship, illicit appropriations of public and private land have occurred in the Serra da Cantareira—the Atlantic forest that marks the end of São Paulo's municipality to the north. Land grabbers have illegally occupied, seized, and sold pieces of soil (chão) to people escaping the rental market and enduring a lack of low-income housing policies. These processes now involve what Marques and Torres call the hyperperiphery: areas of the periphery exposed to pressing migratory flows, where socio-residential inequalities overlap environmental vulnerability. Dwelling perched on the hills' slopes are at risk of landslides, while hydrological hazard threatens houses developed along creeks, canals, and rivers. I consider these dynamics in the Tremembé/Jaçana district, through the spatial narratives of a 1980s settlement, grown on a hill's slope, and a recently developed favela along a river, whose inhabitants are mostly black women. Landslides and flooding are just two dimensions of a more complex ecology of risk that escapes bureaucratic modes of accounting, census, and mapping. These include everyday bodily injuries, crumbling infrastructure, polluted waters, deadly mosquito viruses, hazardous objects, and now, COVID-19, affecting certain populations more than others. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Tremembé/Jaçana’s risk areas, I repopulate bird’s-eye views of risk dynamics with people and their everyday lives. The aim is to destabilize risk as a scientific category and re-articulate the debate on physical vulnerability in terms of racialized and gendered dispossession.