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Stolen Cars


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came: mostly illiterate, no surname, no papers.

      We don’t know the way for sure, so we decided to follow Google Maps directions. A cell phone fixed to the vehicle’s dashboard with the help of a plastic holder begins telling us the way to go. We continue on our way, talking about the fact that we are in a Japanese car, made in Brazil, with a cell phone from an American multinational company, powered by Google, one of the largest companies on the planet. Our conversation comes to rest on the subject of the plastic holder that allows us to attach the cell phone to the dashboard; it was made in China and bought at a São Paulo traffic light. Informal workers born in the favelas of São Paulo sell plastic supports, but so too do immigrants from the slums of Lagos and La Paz – they all sell them throughout downtown São Paulo.

      It was early Sunday afternoon, the sun was shining and traffic was light, and because of this we saw that we could get to Vila Cisper in 45 minutes. The place we were aiming for lies some 30 kilometers from downtown São Paulo. Since the middle of last century, São Paulo has grown into a sprawl. The periphery is where poor workers live, mostly third-generation internal migrants, and also unemployed and informal entrepreneurs who have occupied land without any proper urban infrastructure since the 1940s. By building their own houses there, decade after decade, the city grew with them (Cavalcanti 2008, 2009).

      São Paulo’s demographic explosion of the 1950s to the 1980s resulted in rapid concentric urban growth across the “Paulista” plateau, and was in no way “disorderly.” The logic of this apparently disordered and brutal growth has recurred in practically all Brazilian cities, as indeed it has in most Latin American industrial cities (Fischer, McCann, and Auyero 2014; Fischer 2019), reflecting an uneven model of industrialization. In the 1970s, this “logic of disorder” was given the name “urban plunder” by São Paulo’s urban sociologists (Kowarick 1979). In short, it was argued that migrant workers themselves built the city in which they would live, on rural land; for this reason, with their labor, they simultaneously produced the industrial wealth that would drive the “country of the future” (Brazil has become the ninth largest economy in the world by the twenty-first century) and thus the cities that would symbolize its progress. São Paulo was the center of this economic growth, and for that reason the driver of the despoliation that produced such abysmal inequalities.

      Figure I.1 Map of the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo, by income.

      Source: The authors, with technical support form Bruna Pizzol, based on data from the 2010 Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE) Census.

1950 1960 1970 1980 1991 2000 2010 2018
São Paulo 2,151,313 3,667,899 5,924,615 8,493,226 9,646,185 10,434,252 11,253,503 12,176,866
Metropolitan Region 2,653,860 4,739,406 8,139,730 12,588,725 15,444,941 17,878,703 19,683,975 21,571,281
Source: IBGE census and bulletins – compiled by the São Paulo City Government 1950–2010, first published in Feltran, 2020a.

      We had considered going on public transportation. It would provide a different experience of the city. Exposure to the potential for violence is different when you’re not driving in São Paulo; contact with people is more direct. There is less risk of armed robbery, often aimed at the vehicles or the objects of those who are considered to be wealthy; on the other hand, on foot there is more exposure to the multiple forms of potential street violence. Above all, women are more exposed to sexual violence, from harassment to rape, when they walk the streets of São Paulo. At night, few of them walk alone. Still, the city in 2020 is much safer than it used to be.