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City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paulo, by Teresa P. RL Caldeira. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 487 pp. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-52022142-7. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 0-520-22143-5.
Because of its scope, style, and methods, City of Walls is a challenging book. With a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data stretching over a number of years, the book elicits a key aspect of the dark side of Brazilian modernity and late modernity, which is the experience of violent crime and the contradictory discourses about it. In doing this, the book pays attention to both the singularities and the common aspects with other regions of the world. The case of Sao Paulo is certainly paradigmatic for Brazil: Over the last decades, and especially in the years after redemocratization after 1983, in most Brazilian cities the discourse about violence has been pivotal in both highbrow and popular versions of political culture, especially in the electoral context. Teresa Caldeira goes beyond that and sees the fear of violence as creating a new urban habitus centered on the killing of public spaces and the public sphere, and on the construction of fortified and segregated enclaves.
The book entails an autobiographical dimension, with the emergence of the firstperson style at different levels, making the description certainly easier for the layperson and the foreign reader, since, after all, this book is destined for the U.S. market. Unfortunately, together with that style goes a certain nostalgic touch, which is at odds with the endeavor to single out the specificity of Brazilian modernity and to indicate the...