Graffiti in Rio is different than LA’s graffiti. In LA, graffiti is vibrant and colorful signatures intermixed with 15 feet high, 25 feet across paintings of Optimus Prime looking people with guns. A graffiti expert I have walked around LA with (my mom) told me that graffiti in LA is about identity. People sign their names “artistically”. I asked Juliana, one of our guides, what graffiti means in Rio. She said most of it was teenagers signing their names, or drawing gang signs. The signs are a notice to everyone walking by which drug lord reigns on that street. But among the danger symbols are monkeys and kitty cats and Scooby-doo elaborately decorated and smiling at passers-by.
The favela schools mean safety. Two older boys walked into CEACA today to give Dona Anna a hug with guns tucked into their waistbands. We made about four hours of tape with interviews of key people: Dona Anna, Leco, and coordinators of CDI in Rio. All of them, men and women alike, had deep, deep smile lines around their eyes. I looked at pictures from the fifteen year olds we interviewed yesterday, Daniel and Fabrìcio, and they had the same creases fanning their eyes.
What had struck me about the city yesterday was the fragility, but these laugh lines suggest quite the opposite. Laugh lines cannot be broken, stolen, or lost; they are testament to years of smiles and laughter. Drug trades and shoot-outs cannot scare away the lines; once formed they are there forever. Even with a constant threat of a police raid, each person who I have encountered in the favelas has laughed long enough in their lives to be physically affected.
Gang signs and Scooby-Doo, machine guns and laughter: the nature of the favelas is intrinsically dualistic. Every member of the favela knows that they live in slums and are discriminated against by the urban Brazilians. Yet in spite of the danger and discrimination they find time to laugh. The drug lords don’t want their little brothers and sisters to have to live the same lives they did. The work at CEACA that Dona Anna is doing is respected by the entire community. The kids that go to school are protected from the gunfire as well. There is nothing that the gangs would like more than to see one of their own community members go make a name for him or herself in the world outside the walls.
Unfortunately, as much as there is support for their members to get out, there is as much trepidation about outsiders coming in. We weren’t able to film outside of the school at all because the drug lords did not give their approval. Instead of getting more comfortable as the days wore on, I felt as if at any moment the drug lords would get tired of our presence. While filming in CEACA today we were approached by Vivian, who introduced herself as a spokesperson for the community in solid English. She asked why we were there. We explained, and she started to look more open. Why, she asked. Do you think that your video will get our message out? We have had many, many people come here from all over the world. They come, they leave, and that is the end of what we hear. People take what they learn back to their country, but what good does that do us?
Frustration is there, but the lady was hopeful that our message, or a future one, would make all the difference. I can tell you any facial lines I was creating were the worry ones that go between my eyebrows. But the favela continues to hope that someone will be successful in breaking the stereotype. If anything is for sure, it’s those laugh lines- they run deep.
-Dani