I began working with people in Vita in March 1995. At that time, I was traveling throughout several regions of Brazil documenting how marginalized and poor people were dealing with AIDS and how they were being integrated into programs based on new control measures. In Porto Alegre, I interviewed human rights activist Gerson Winkler, then coordinator of the city’s AIDS program. He insisted that I visit Vita: “It’s a dump site of human beings. You must go there. You will see what people do to people, what it means to be human these days.”
I had grown up in an area outside Porto Alegre. I had traveled through and worked in several poor neighborhoods in the north and south of the country. I thought I knew Brazil. But nothing I had seen before prepared me for the desolation of Vita.
Vita did not appear on any city map. Even though the existence of the place was acknowledged by officials and the public at large, it was not the concern of any remedial program or policy.
Winkler was right. Vita is the end-station on the road of poverty; it is the place where living beings go when they are no longer considered people. Excluded from family life and medical care, most of the two hundred people in Vita’s infirmary at that time had no formal identification and lived in a state of abject abandonment. For the most part, Vita’s staff consisted of residents who had improved their mental well-being enough to administer care to newcomers and to those considered absolutely hopeless. Lacking funds, training, and the proper equipment and medication, these volunteers were as ill prepared as the institution itself to deal with Vita’s residents.
Some fifty million Brazilians (more than a quarter of the population) live far below the poverty line; twenty-five million people are considered indigent.1 While in many ways a microcosm of such misery, Vita was distinctive in some respects. A number of its residents came from working- and middle-class families and once had been workers with families of their own. Others had previously lived in medical or state institutions, from which they were at some point evicted and thrown onto the streets or sent directly to Vita.
Despite appearing to be a no-man’s-land cut adrift, Vita was in fact entangled with several public institutions in terms of its history and maintenance. On many levels, then, Vita was not exceptional. Materially speaking, Porto Alegre contained more than two hundred such institutions, most of which were euphemistically called “geriatric houses.” These precarious places housed the abandoned in exchange for their welfare pensions; a good number of the institutions also received state funds or philanthropic donations.
I began to think of Vita and the like as zones of social abandonment.2
Catarina stood out from the others in Vita, many of whom lay on the ground or were crouched in corners, simply because she was in motion. She wanted to communicate. Adriana, my wife, was there with me. This is the story Catarina told us:
“I have a daughter called Ana; she is eight years old. My ex-husband gave her to Urbano, his boss. I am here because I have problems in my legs. To be able to return home, I must go to a hospital first. It is very complicated for me to get to a hospital, and if I were to go, I would worsen. I will not like it because I am already used to being here. My legs don’t work well. Since I got here, I have not seen my children.
“My brothers and my brother-in-law brought me here. Ademar, Armando. . . . I exercise . . . so that I might walk. No. Now I can no longer leave. I must wait for some time. I consulted a private doctor, two or three times. When it is needed, they also give us medication here. So one is always dependent. One becomes dependent. Then, many times, one does not want to return home. It is not that one does not want to. . . . In my thinking, I see that people forgot me.”
Later, I asked the volunteers whether they knew anything about Catarina. They knew nothing about her life outside Vita. I repeated some of the names and events Catarina had mentioned, but they said that she spoke nonsense, that she was mad (louca). She was a person apparently lacking common sense; her voice was annulled by psychiatric diagnosis. Without an origin, she had no destiny other than Vita.
I was left with Catarina’s seemingly disjointed account, her story of what had happened. As she saw it, she had not lost her mind. Catarina was trying to improve her condition, to be able to stand on her own feet. She insisted that she had a physiological problem and that her being in Vita was the outcome of various relations and circumstances that she could not control.
Catarina evoked these circumstances in the figures of the ex-husband, the boss, the hospitals, the private doctor, the brothers, and the daughter who had been given away. “To be able to return home, I must go to a hospital first,” she reasoned. The only way back to her child, now living with another family, was through a clinic. The hospital was on the way to a home that was no more.
But adequate health care, Catarina suggested, was impossible to access. While seeking treatment, she had learned about the need for medication. She also implied that medicine had worsened her condition. This form of care operated in Vita as well: “When it is needed, they also give us medication here.” She was referring to a pharmaceuticalization of disarray that made persons in Vita “always dependent.”
Something had made it impossible for Catarina to return home. But the desire was still there: “It is not that one does not want to.”
The reality of Vita and this initial encounter with Catarina left a strong impression on me. As I wrote my dissertation on the control of AIDS in Brazil (1999b), I was constantly reminded of the place of death in family and city life, and of this person who was thinking through her abandonment. Over the years, Vita and Catarina became key figures for me, informing my own thinking about the changing political and medical institutions and new regimes of personhood in Brazil’s urban spaces. The AIDS work I was chronicling included heroic governmental and nongovernmental attempts to contain the epidemic’s spread through daring prevention programs focused on safe sex and efforts to halt mortality by making AIDS therapies universally available. Along with this formidable work and the establishment of new institutions to care for vulnerable and poor populations not routinely slated for intervention, I also saw zones of social abandonment emerging everywhere in Brazil’s big cities—places like Vita, which housed, in inhuman conditions, the mentally ill and homeless, AIDS patients, the unproductive young, and old bodies.
Neither legal authorities nor welfare and medical institutions directly intervene in these zones. Yet these very authorities and institutions direct the unwanted to the zones, where these individuals are sure to become unknowables, with no human rights and with no one accountable for their condition. I was interested in how the creation of these zones of abandonment was intertwined with the realities of changing households and with local forms of the state, medicine, and the economy. I wondered how life-enhancing mobilizations for preventing and treating AIDS could take place at the same time that the public act of allowing death proliferated.
Zones of abandonment make visible realities that exist through and beyond formal governance and that determine the life course of an increasing number of poor people who are not part of mapped populations. I was struggling to make sense of the paradoxical existence of places like Vita and the fundamentally ambiguous being of people in these zones, caught as they are between encompassment and abandonment, memory and nonmemory, life and death.
Catarina’s exercise and her recollections, in the context of Vita’s stillness, stayed in the back of my mind. I was intrigued by the way her story commingled elements of a life that had been, her current abandonment in Vita, and the desire for homecoming. I tried to think of her not in terms of mental illness but as an abandoned person