By J.J. Amaworo Wilson
Anarchist Review of Books
In the 1890s, Brazil was forging its path as a republic when word got out that an anti-government uprising was brewing in the northeast. The would-be revolutionaries, in truth a band of half-starved former itinerants, were led by a charismatic wandering preacher called Antônio Conselheiro. The government sent in the military not once but four times, and the so-called uprising was quelled in the War of Canudos. After massacring thousands of men, women, and children, and exhibiting Conselheiro’s head on a pike, the government soldiers decamped to Rio de Janeiro, then the nation’s capital, where they had been promised housing. The housing never materialized, so they cobbled together salvaged wood and tin and built makeshift lodgings on the hillsides overlooking the city. These lodgings would later become the sprawling shanty towns that are home to millions of the urban poor. Thus was born the favela. From its very inception, the favela was a paradigm of creativity and improvisation. Those with nothing found a way to make something. Samba came out of the favela. So did Brazil’s greatest soccer players. Some favelas, like Vila Cruzeiro and Santa Marta, became the locus of public art projects. While the favela is often associated with lawlessness, day-to-day existence in these communities was always about resourcefulness. Brazilian favelados don’t wait for government handouts. (Like the soldiers after the War of Canudos, they’d be waiting forever.) Instead, they organize.
The ability of the favelados to organize around the most important resource of all—food—is the subject of Favela Resistance. Between 2017 and 2019, the authors conducted a research project in the Maré region of Rio de Janeiro—a group of seventeen favelas. They called the project Nutricities. Their goal was to examine a number of questions related to food in the favela: what food is available to the people, e.g. fast food versus healthier options? What production patterns are prevalent, e.g. small farmers versus large agro-industrial corporations? And what are the impacts of grassroots rural/urban food networks?
The book consists of four chapters by different authors. The first, by Antonis Vradis, defines the favela
through its attributes: density, proximity, and movement, something that is “within sight but out of reach” to those looking from the outside. Vradis then describes grassroots activities and residents’ initiatives to self-organize. The chapter also identifies a key to the existence of favelas: access—who and what goes in, stays, and leaves.
The second chapter, translated by Alda Lima, is by Minhocas Urbanas (Urban Earthworms), the Rio collective that conducted action research into the nutritional habits of the Maré residents. This chapter describes the context of the research as well as its purpose: “how to investigate reality in order to transform it.” The great strength of this chapter is that the researchers are the protagonists who live, work, and eat in the favela and see their research as “a tool for struggle.”
The third chapter, by Timo Bartholl, looks at diverse resistance movements and how they relate to the battle for food sovereignty, and gives a theoretical underpinning for these struggles. The chapter concludes with an agenda for achieving food sovereignty. The content is valuable, but the essay sometimes slips into an academic register that demands rereading for the wrong reasons.
The fourth and longest chapter, by Christos Filippidis, deftly translated by Alexandros Vagenas, is a wide-ranging essay that describes the role of food in the nexus of global power relations. It expounds on the damage done by colonialism and the West’s heinous policies in places as diverse as Algeria, Vietnam, and Brazil. Sobering facts come thick and fast: eradicating global hunger was a major factor in U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War not for any altruistic reasons but because hunger breeds communism; many herbicides and pesticides were first invented as chemical weapons and vice versa; from the 1940s onwards, the innocent-sounding Summer Institute of Linguistics, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, operated in the Amazon region translating the Bible into indigenous languages while promoting neocolonial practices and siding with dictators. The chapter concludes by examining the oxymoron of “sustainable development” in reference to Rio’s favelas.
Overall, Favela Resistance provides an invaluable look at the role of food in geopolitical contexts in general and in the favelas of Rio specifically. It becomes clear that food sovereignty is bound up inextricably with other issues: “pacification” by the state, community solidarity, and grassroots organizing.
Noam Chomsky once said that when he gives talks on social justice issues to North American audiences, they ask him what they can do; when he gives the same talks in Latin America, the audiences tell him what they’re doing. It’s a dynamic borne out by this book. With no help coming from “above,” Brazil’s favelados help themselves. JJ Amaworo Wilson is the writer-in-residence at Western New Mexico University and teaches on Stonecoast’s MFA in Creative Writing. His most recent book is Nazaré: a novel.
