A Favela That Yields Fruit: Community-Based Tour Guides as Brokers in the Political Economy of Cultural Difference

Abstract

Reversing decades of fear and neglect as no-go zones for outsiders, Rio de Janeiro’s most iconic favela communities have become tourist attractions offering a glimpse of the purported “other side” of Brazilian society as well as panoramic vistas over the Marvelous City. Since 2010, tourism has become a vehicle and justification for security, infrastructure, and capacity-building projects in Rio’s favelas. Promoted as an exemplary favela in this social uplift scheme, Santa Marta has received thousands of tourists per year. In an unprecedented step, Santa Marta guides organized themselves into a committee to collectively manage the tourism enterprise and to promote themselves as a brand of community-based tourism in contradistinction to outside commercial tour operators. Their authority and authenticity as local experts hinge on the emergent perception of the favela itself as a resource and that their labor makes that value economically productive. This article analyzes the work of these guides as cultural brokers to think through the semiotically overdetermined yet shifting status of the favela as space of cultural alterity from the perspective of those who are both targets and agents of its transformation. Exploring how community-based guides have emerged as political and economic brokers, this article suggests that their performances as local experts, as well as their modes of organizing, shape tensions and contradictions of the favela as a commodified place. It demonstrates how collectivist and competitive interests among guides embody differing perspectives on state intervention in their community. The discussions and conflicts among tour guides themselves embody the tensions over the future of communities long marginalized by state and capital yet suddenly targeted for economic investment and cultural valorization.