Urbanization, ruination, and refusal: racialized geographies in 1920s Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This article focuses on a community located in downtown Rio de Janeiro that was destroyed to make way for the commemorations of Brazil’s Centenary of Independence in 1922. Morro do Castelo was once a space customarily inhabited by Afro-descendants, but Italian and Portuguese immigrants predominated there by the time of its destruction. I argue that whatever Castelo’s racial heterogeneity it was imagined and treated as a black space by planners and policy makers, hence its disposability. In Castelo's neglect during the colonial period and in the urbanization projects that sought to destroy it in the first two decades of the 20th century, one can discern the continuity of imperial processes of ruination of racialized spaces and bodies. The article examines ways in which residents of Morro do Castelo established territory and engaged in various forms of refusal when faced with the ruination of their neighborhood. The spatial practices of the hillside’s diverse population suggest that its various racialized and ethnic groups mapped difference onto a palimpsestic site that defied official classificatory systems and troubled official mappings of the concept city.