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.
As a collective of researchers, we have transformed everyday scenes in the Brazilian megalopolis into building blocks for ethnographic study, the results of which this book presents. Transnational industries, from the biggest names – Google, Motorola, the manufacturers of the satellites that let them work their magic – to the humblest – Chinese plastic products sold on the informal market – have long been mainstays of everyday life in the big cities in the Global South (Inverses Collectif 2016; Parnell and Robinson 2012; Robinson 2002 ; Simone 2013). From the high-flying world of transnational capitalism to the dusty backroads of globalization (Knowles 2011, 2014; Mathews, Ribeiro, and Vega 2012; Ribeiro 2009; 2010; Tsing 2005, 2015), urban conflict remains a hardy perennial, one of those grim certainties immune to the changes in the wider world. Urban conflict is fueled by inequalities and violence, and these are fundamental themes underlying this book (Feltran 2020a; Machado da Silva 1967; Peralva and Telles 2015; Telles 2013; Telles and Hirata 2010).
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.
Fifty years later, the metropolis has 21 million people (see Table I.1) and its poorest districts have a life expectancy of 57 years while the richest people live, on average, to age 80 (Rede Nossa São Paulo 2019). Yes, the rich live, on average, 23 years longer than the poor in the city that produces one-third of Brazil’s GDP (see Figure I.1). If urban plunder is a fundamental starting point for us, the mechanisms of reproduction of these inequalities, which today see São Paulo simultaneously occupy the most disparate rankings of global poverty and wealth, need to be much better understood.
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.
In São Paulo, as in many other Latin American cities, inequalities manifest themselves in the form of violent crime. Crime, in turn, feeds the representation, shared between elites and workers, of “urban violence” (Kessler 2011 ; Machado da Silva 2010). The world of crime thrives in São Paulo, and as we will see, the networks of its main criminal organization, the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital, First Capital Command), are global (Feltran 2020a, 2016b; Willis 2015). Mapping (il)legal automobile markets through stolen cars’ journeys will be our empirical instrument for understanding the reproduction of inequalities and urban violence in São Paulo (Feltran 2019). Our city is not only these journeys’ scenario, nor our analytical subject, but our theoretical and analytical perspective through which we address transnational inequalities and global urban violences.
TABLE I.1 Population growth in the municipality and metropolitan region of São Paulo (absolute numbers)
| 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 continued east and no longer saw luxury malls or tall skyscrapers through the window. Instead, we passed through huge avenues surrounded by auto-parts stores, evangelical churches, hypermarkets, car dealerships, and housing developments. We also saw overpasses with crack users camped underneath. Whenever we stopped at traffic lights, someone approached the cars to ask for change. Drivers responded with indifference, sympathy, compassion, or irritation. The fear of being mugged is almost always present in this range of reactions. Not many drivers opened their windows; not many of them ever would. We did open ours and apologized for having no change; the old man begging replied that his daughter lived in the town of São Carlos. Our Suzuki had São Carlos license plates.
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.
The 1990s saw an explosion of violent crime in the city (Caldeira 2000; Feltran 2011; Hirata 2018), while the 2000s saw the consolidation of the