Collapsed

Abstract

SummaryAs part of a larger ethnographic project that approaches urban migration to São Paulo, Brazil as modes of racialized presence, I offer a fictionalized account of the tragic collapse of the Wilton Paes de Almeida Building (Fig. 1), an occupied, squatter settlement, on May 1, 2018. The narrative point of view represents the tension between the omniscient narrator and local actors, using an imaginative opening to examine migrant aspirations and fears. However, it is inescapably partial, its own kind of collapse. After the event, I was unable to locate the “real” people on which the characters were based. I did, however, revisit the area of destruction repeatedly and sat with the ruins (Fig. 2), the built environment playing its own role in memory and migrant experiences. The story follows Sembene, a Senegalese trader, his wife, Grace, and Flávio, a low‐level mafia operator, for twenty‐four hours leading up to and immediately following the collapse of building. We also glimpse their memories and longings as we move between their precarious residence in the building and a Senegalese commercial presence nearby. Ultimately, multiple collapses show the entangled forces of (il)legality, the urban, fortune, and belief in an understudied destination of contemporary African migration.