Choreographing exclusion: protest, race, and place in São Paulo

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay considers how street protest, a nearly ubiquitous presence in the past decade during Brazil’s political turmoil, deconstructs twentieth century mythologies of racial mixing while potentially generating new myths. I analyze protests that dramatize racist and elitist attitudes over public space in São Paulo, Brazil. Demanding access to public transportation and luxury shopping, protestors use sites of exclusion as a dramatic element essential to their messages. From white hipsters to black university activists, to adolescents on the urban periphery, these urban actors perform various choreographies of exclusion, using their bodies to dramatize class and racial differences that they are protesting. While protests exposes and sometimes disrupt the entrenched arrangements of interracial and cross-class encounter within spaces of mobility and consumerism, protest choreographies recruit protestors and spectators alike into contradictory relationships.