Rights of Way to Brasília Teimosa: The Politics of Squatter Settlement

Abstract

Rights of Way to Brasília Teimosa: The Politics of Squatter Settlement, by Charles J. Fortin, 2014

Rights of Way to Brasília Teimosa: The Politics of Squatter Settlement, by Charles J. Fortin, Sussex Academic Press, 2014.

This book is about Third World politics and politicians. The reader acquainted with them will feel intimate to Brasília Teimosa in many accounts. Others might sometimes be moved, sometimes cynical. Charles Fortin describes the long and resilient struggle endured by a squatter community located in Recife's prime land shore. Recife, the capital of Pernambuco State in Northeast Brazil, housed about 300,000 souls in the 1930s when this story started. Its metropolitan region grew to 3,000,000 people in the 1970s and is now close to 5.5 million. Notwithstanding such growth pressure combined with spotted gentrification processes, Brasília Teimosa lies in between the city business district and its most expensive neighbourhood. In Fortin's words 'the neighbourhood matters because poor people occupy valuable land in the city. It matters because residents have managed by and large to remain there, not by chance, for over 50 years', (p. xii).

'Stubborn' Brasilia's story is generalizable to Brazil and the South insofar as it is similar to a number of favelas - except for its prime location and land tenure imbroglio. Favelas are always stubborn, be it geographically, geologically or politically. As the reader will discover when reading the book, in 1831 property located along ocean shorelines in Brazil was declared federal public domain; in the 1930s the State of Pernambuco together with Recife's Port Authority acquired the rights of use to the favela land in order to implement a port and an airfield that were never built; in 1953 President Vargas granted the very same rights to the State Fisherman Federation, giving rise to a never ending quarrel among these two sets of actors and the people who had already arrived there due to the yearly droughts in the hinterlands. At times Brasília Teimosa was the focus of intricate national and international interests, as the Recife political scenario grew more and more communist during the 1950s and 1960s. If national policies seemed more lenient towards favelas and neighbourhood associations beforehand, the military (1964-1985) evicted people from entire favelas, arrested community leaders, local politicians and the communist governor of Pernambuco, while concentrating investments and resources in upperincome neighbourhoods. Brasília Teimosa's land was targeted to house a tourism complex up to the mid-1970s, but technical problems together with right of use issues ended up sending the plan to the shelf. During the military years the famous planner Jaime Lerner designed a plan to promote the removal of the community, which was finally rejected when counteracted by a communitydesigned plan in the 1980s.

Politicians at all levels and neighbourhood leaders, with few exceptions, took advantage of situations and of people's faith in this neighbourhood. The military president of the country paid himself a visit to the community in order to give land titles to residents - which were later proved to be false. But resilience seems to be the hallmark of this community and the few exceptions meant a lot: the initiatives of missionary Father James were decisive to the maintenance and intensification of group activities and to the foundation of the Residents Council; young people trained in church meetings became important and hard-working Council presidents, and Dom Helder Câmara's (Catholic Archbishop of Recife and Olinda) support through the Church's Justice and Peace Committee offered valuable legal assistance to the community. Thus, in the most erratic ways, Brasília Teimosa managed to break through the military dictatorship and make it to the 1980s. And so did Fortin's story - because is when it comes to an end. And that is precisely when the book frustrates the reader: two of the most arresting moments in the story are leftunanswered. When the author finally does meet Dom Helder Câmara, the book's most famous personality, he does not tell us what the interview was about. By finishing the story in 1988, the reader does not know what happened to the community movements: there is not a word on the neighbourhood's fate.

To the reader used to chronologically and/or thematically organized ethnographies or reports, this book will come as a surprise. It is an urban romance which goes back and forth in time and whose main character is the author himself. Not being acquainted with Brasília Teimosa, as will be the case with most readers, one feels like Fortin unveiled the story as it came to him, not as it happened in reality. In the concluding remarks Mr. Fortin ends the story telling the reader how he evaluates his years in the Peace Corps in the state of Bahia, a whole different and personal story. Due to the absence of a logical organization, the text reads choppy and repetitive. As the author sheds more light on actors than on facts, he keeps shifting focus and points-of-view. Maps, charts and figures do not present subtitles (not even titles sometimes) or explanations. Sometimes the reader will find it hard to understand what is being pictured or told. Although somewhat romantic or naïve at some points - certainly throughout chapter six and particularly when Fortin depicts military governments as 'frustrated and desperate to do something that would relieve social pressures by paying more attention to the "civic wounds" of poor people' (p. 76) - it is a worthwhile reading for those concerned with poor people's struggles, resilience and accomplishments in a world where petty politics play the most powerful role.