Favela/Asfalto

This chapter explores how the exotifying outsider gaze shaped my first encounter with Rio de Janeiro's favelas and the people living there. It shows how reified accounts the favelas imagine them as a series of problems to be solved through outside interventions. These accounts are challenged through ethnographic descriptions that focus on the changing demographics of the favelas and the diversity of opinions, experiences, and subjectivities among people from the favela as well as its other, the asfalto. The chapter concludes that the pacification project and urban development projects implemented prior to the 2016 Olympics largely catered to the needs of the population on the asfalto, intensifying militarized policing in the favelas and perpetuating a logic of war against populations and spaces symbolically coded as black.