No Carnival Here: Oppressed Youth and Class Relations in City of God
Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale, Nathalia Jaramillo, Juha Suoranta, and Peter McLaren
Introduction
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.
—Benito Mussolini
To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That’s just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them.1
—Michael Parenti
1.1 We
have entered into a new era of corporate-led globalized capitalism characterized
not only by international flows of capital and technology but by an unrestrained
military-industrial-media complex that serves to propagate and enforce
the views, values, and ideologies necessary to sustain it. While the transnational
ruling elite retreat into their gated communities, protected from the
very people whose exploited labor-power has supplied them with their super
profits, we are continuously reminded—most recently by the thousands of
protestors who took to the streets of Cancun, Mexico during failed World
Trade Organization negotiations—that class struggles are still active
across the globe. Clearly, certain nation-states—most notably the United
States—have not, as some critics predicted, yielded their sovereignty
to transnational firms and international structures such as the WTO, World
Bank, and IMF. The military-industrial complex—object of derision par
excellence among the global left and some of its more thoughtful conservatives—is
more dangerous today than ever before, not the least because it has become
the sword arm, via the permanent war on terror, of its administration's
geopolitical strategy to colonize the remaining untapped markets of the
world.
1.2 Framed
by its cardinal imperative of full spectrum dominance, the new militarism
is witnessing far-reaching changes in the U.S. armed forces and their
role in world affairs. As Carl Boggs (2003) has made chillingly clear,
the military component of U.S. hegemony (a hegemony which encompasses
economic, political, diplomatic, and cultural agencies of power) has become
predominate. No rival centers of power or countervailing military forces
exist—or will likely exist in the foreseeable future—that can contain
this behemoth which strides so arrogantly across the world’s stage, threatening
sovereign states and waging war against human freedom. Within the historical
convergence of the end of the Cold War, the rise of the U.S. as the single
superpower, high-tech warfare, the expanding Pentagon system, corporate
driven globalization, the growth of domestic corporate power, the decline
of the public sphere, and terrorist attacks of September 11, the U.S.
continues to organize and manage crimes against peace, which are among
the most egregious of the twentieth century. It is in this framework that
class struggle today can be rendered more intelligible and our efforts
to participate in it more potent.
1.3 Class,
defined as a "social category that can explain inequalities of power
and wealth in the 'free world'" (San Juan, Jr., 2003: 1), has become
increasingly relevant for interpreting the modern portrait of capitalism.
As a conceptual category, which designates a relationship of exploitation,
it is "indissociable from class
conflict, from the specific historical struggle of social groups divided
by unequal property relations" (San Juan, Jr., 2003: 5). Further,
youth as a social category typified by age are also implicated in class
struggles through their constant subjugation to the imagery and needs
of capital flows. This is made clear by the United Nation's declaration
that "more than one billion young people in the developing world
are now living in conditions of severe deprivation" (Frith, 2003:
12) as a result of globalized trade and a decrease in 'aid' packages.
While countries willingly surrender themselves (or are militarily subjected
to) the free market, the milk of capital nourishes only a minority of
the world's population—those who are not dependent upon selling their
labor-power to survive.
1.4 In
the current context of global corporate domination, neoconservative policy
is rapidly being replaced by Hummer pedagogy of the power elite. Hummer
pedagogy refers to the progressive militarization of U.S. society, to
its infusion throughout the realms of education, politics, science, technology,
the media, and popular culture. Hummer pedagogy is a major state apparatus
in legitimizing and naturalizing the use of military force to resolve
domestic and international disputes; hummer pedagogy plays a distinctive
role in the U.S. military's current exercises of pre-emptive and
endless war against terrorism and the working classes throughout the world.
Hummer pedagogy is implicated in twisting and compressing complex political,
social and cultural realities into oracular generalities: capitalists
are good, socialists are evil. Hummer pedagogy creates a 'habitus' that
is most congenial to the ascendant bourgeoisie whose robust faith in the
market is superceded only by their faith in the power of the cruise missile.
1.5 One
flagship program for Hummer pedagogy is the State Department's International
Military Education and Training Program. It is a program that arms and
trains U.S. satellites and dependencies, preparing foreign soldiers to
do the bidding of the United States without risking direct U.S. casualties.
According to Chalmers Johnson (2003), in utilizing such a strategy, "[r]esponsibility
is displaced and consequences diffused. This dislocation has roots in
a much older phenomenon, in which empires sought to 'outsource' the enforcement
of their political will" (54). Johnson (2003) describes the
development of this program over recent years:
In 1990 it was offering military instruction to the armies of 96 countries; by 2002 that already impressive number had risen to 133 countries. There are 189 countries in the United Nations, which means that this single program "instructs" militaries in 70 percent of the world’s nations. We train approximately 100,000 foreign soldiers each year—most of them officers who then can pass on American methods to their troops. In 2001 the U.S. military taught 15,030 officers and soldiers in Latin America alone. The Pentagon does this either by bringing them to one of the approximately 150 military educational institutions in the United States or by sending military instructors, almost always Army Special Forces, to the countries themselves. The "war on terror" has only accelerated these programs, in many cases replacing the "war on drugs" as a justification, with no discernible difference in pedagogy. The United States claims that such training promotes American values. (55)
Hummer pedagogy also refers to the
Schwarzeneggerization of American internal and foreign policies. As California
transforms itself into a Terminator state, the 'preventative' wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq serve as litmus tests for the establishment of a
new world order predicated on the use of preemptive military force.
1.6 Manifestations
of a predatory Hummer pedagogy permeate the culture and can be discerned
in various levels of discourse—from declarations in the National Security
Strategy of the United States to the streets of Beverly Hills. Indeed,
as LA Weekly journalist Nikki Finke (2003) reports from the Hollywood
front:
The signs of war are everywhere. Standard-issue Hummers, especially the new H2 model in Sunset Orange Metallic, hurtle down Wilshire. Valentino-designed army fatigues, including khaki and camouflage tracksuits with elastic cuffs, are all the rage on Rodeo. Communications are erratic: That Motorola T722i cell phone in the Oscar goodie basket may have been free, but it’s impossible to mobilize the troops when the damn thing only picks up static on Pico. (17)
In the era of an expanding and accelerating
military-industrial-media complex, the biggest multinational corporations
are expanding their monopolies in the sphere of economic enterprise. New
information and 
simulation
technologies have become part of military education and human-machine
experimentation like never before. Hollywood and the television industry
both provide patriotic spectacles and pay uncritical homage to the military
in various films (Giroux, 2003: 17). Sports broadcasts of football and
baseball games recite the patriotic mantra through symbolic gestures including
majestic bald eagles soaring in air. Of course there is nothing particularly
new in such formulas; only the global scope of the logic of domination
is unprecedented. As critical theorist Herbert Schiller (1989) has asserted,
today’s big business military-industrial complex, with the generous support
of the entertainment and culture industries, is the locus of systematic
power:
It is the site of the concentrated accumulation of the productive equipment, the technological expertise, the marketing apparatus, the financial resources, and the managerial know-how. It is a tangible reality, not a metaphor. Moreover, the interests of big business are most powerful in the formulation of national and international policy. (19)
Now,
more than ever, a large portion of the "huge message and image flow
that circulates is originated in this complex in one way or another"
(Schiller, 1989: 20).
1.7 The
woeful neglect that social science research has given to the role of the
military-industrial complex in the larger totality of capitalist society
is equaled only by the academy's shameful role in discrediting Marxist
analyses of social class. Today in the social sciences as well as in public
and popular discourse, we are confronted by an iron wall whose purpose
is to further ghettoize Marxist conceptions of class from less combative
Weberian and neo-Weberian conceptualizations. As well, we are surrounded
by a motivated amnesia with respect to the efficacy and strategic potential
of Marxist analyses of class. Not only have Marxist theories of class
been disowned historically (no doubt for fear that it might become common
currency for millions of disenfranchised peoples the world over), they
have more recently been relegated to the dustbin of history given the
fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries. While Marxism
has been accused of class reductionism or equated with productivism or
determinism, a careful study of Karl Marx’s own work unequivocally refutes
such accusations. In the social sciences today, the facile notion that
dynamics of social class can be adequately captured by its common equation
with lifestyle, voting preference, income, status, or some nominal aspect
of personal identity—or that it is overdetermined by racial identity—continues
to hold sway. Or concerted efforts are made—often as a result of a lack
of understanding of Marxist theory rather than a lack of scruples—to reduce
class to one social characteristic that "intersects" with others,
such as race and gender, and which cannot be fully understood without
reference to them. One central mischaracterization of class is that the
class system is predicated on "unequal exchange" of material
resources, or that it is located in the sphere of market-exchange, or
that it is linked to stratified systems of resource distribution. E. San
Juan, Jr. (2003) has recently and compellingly articulated why we need
to reject a market-relations approach to class analysis that locates discrimination
by race in biased monopolistic practices, and why it is ill-advised to
conceive of racial inequality in the sphere of unequal exchange. We reject
both the notion that ideology and politics determine the labor market
and that racial dynamics (as ideological formations and practices) determine
class relationships.
1.8 Our
understanding of class is centered on the primordial condition of alienation
of the process of production under capitalism. As San Juan, Jr. (2003)
notes, as a relation of class antagonisms, class constitutes the salient
or fundamental relation for explaining the social totality. Exploitation
is part of the total political economy in specific historical periods
or conjunctures. Social class is connected fundamentally to the development
of the productive forces and designates a relation of exploitation; consequently
it cannot be considered apart from class conflict. Social class is not
a discreetly bounded expression of agency outside of the production process
and the social division of labor; rather, it is a relational process and
must be seen in conjunction with the means of production and located in
the central antagonism between capital and labor. In other words, social
class is historically determinate, arising from the complex dynamics of
historical development, and overdetermined by modes of production linked
to the contextual specificity of historical moments and stages of the
formation of the modes of production within the social totality intimately
bound up with the historical specificity of social groups who are divided
by unequal property relations. One's location within the ensemble of social
practices certainly affects issues of race. While racism assigns imaginary
generalized values to real people, the process of assigning these values
rests upon the brute reality of class-divided societies and nation-states
with unequal allocations of power and resources (San Juan, Jr., 2003).
We situate racial differences within the process of class conflict operating
within a complex and evolving class system. Race comes into play here
in terms of the alienation of human labor, which mediates and adjusts
racial dynamics to the level and stage of class antagonism specific to
the social formation (San Juan, Jr., 2003).
1.9 San
Juan, Jr. (2003) argues that racism arose with the creation and expansion
of the capitalist world economy and that race relations and race conflict
are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy
of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the
world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of production
has articulated "race" with class in a peculiar way. He is worth quoting
at length on this issue.
While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or caste-like rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily "racialize" the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor-power—unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or pariah removed from the domain of "free labor." In the capitalist development of U.S. society, African, Mexican, and Asian bodies—more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy—were colonized and racialized; hence the idea of "internal colonialism" retains explanatory validity. "Race" is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class relations, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accented and operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination-subordination invested with an aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such "racial" markers enter the field of the alienated labor process, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable circumstances. (8)
According to San Juan, Jr.:
Class exploitation cannot replace or stand for racism because it is the condition of possibility for it. It is what enables the racializing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain, deepen and reinforce alienation, mystifying reality by modes of commodification, fetishism, and reification characterizing the routine of quotidian life. Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination. (9)
For San Juan, Jr. (2003), racism and
nationalism are modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves
at strategic points in history. He maintains, rightly in our view, that
racial or ethnic group solidarity is given "meaning and value in
terms of their place within the social organization of production and
reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism
as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural
constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these
'racial' solidarities" (9-10). Much like San Juan, Jr., we are committed
to the subversive core of Marx's writings and for diffusing it among a
broader constituency of social critics.
1.10 In
this article, we seek to articulate a position which links critical cultural
studies to a Marxist humanist tradition of revolutionary critical pedagogy
(McLaren, 2000; McLaren and Jaramillo, 2002). Such a theoretical stance
suggests that critical, dialectical analyses of films such as City
of God can undress the deeper political, social, and economic relations
and consequences impacting youth, which may not be obvious at the surface
level of cultural products. Here we are reminded of Walter Benjamin’s
(1968) metaphorical comparison of the magician and the surgeon: whereas
the magician acts upon the surface of reality, the surgeon cuts into it.
The relative value or adequacy of the solutions advanced by Marxist humanism
to the problems under its purview is not our concern here. It is rather
the need to advance a dialectical analysis of youth culture rooted in
historical materialism. Unlike the overly textual (and often one-dimensional)
foci of "ludic" cultural studies which are generally unable
to cut deep into the flesh of the social, unable to discern what Steven
Best and Douglas Kellner (1991) refer to as the "depth dimension"
(274), dialectical analyses enable us to name and map the general organization
of social relations and to make connections between the different domains
of social reality. Furthermore, such analyses enable the possibility of
cultivating conscious resistance to the oppressive structural and social
conditions that give rise to and shape the logic of the military-industrial-media
complex under the dictatorship of the rich. We agree with Kellner (1995)
about the necessity of promoting "readings" that can advance
new solidarities, new forms of struggle and revolutionary transformations.
In what follows, we first provide an overview of the film City of God,
situate it within a local-global nexus in order to contextualize its
dramatic narrative, locate the lives of the favela dwellers in
the dialectical contradiction between capital and labor, and then broaden
our analysis in order to explore the landscapes of youth popular culture.
City of God (Cidade de Deus)
2.1
Rio de Janeiro conjures up images of elaborately festooned and lively
carnival-goers, sun-drenched beaches, and a mélange of diverse cultures
in most travel brochures. The promise of fun and sun entices would-be
travelers to a city that some have dubbed the friendliest in the world.
This portrait, however, stands in vivid contrast to the images provided
in City of God (Cidade de Deus), a Fernando Meirelles-directed
Brazilian film largely adopted from former favelado Paulo Lins’
700 page autobiographical novel of life in Rio de Janeiro’s most populated
favela (so-called slum). This cinematic creation renders into view
life where poverty governs and where youth live out their existence constrained
by the conditions of a highly policed shantytown residence.
2.2 The
film begins with the lurid scene of a chicken that barely escapes its
slaughter whizzing through the dust-ridden corridors of City of God. A
group of young gun-waving and gun-firing boys and men chase the animal
until it stops at the feet of the movie's central protagonist, Rocket
(Alexandre Rodrigues), who then finds himself standing not only with a
freedom starved feathered chicken escaping from the favelados,
but also in between a collage of stark-eyed youth and saber-rattling police
preparing to engage in an internecine killing match. The ensuing battle—that
does not rear its demise until the end of the movie—has its origins and
is endemic to how life in the favelas is documented across three
generations—corruption, drug-trafficking, 
justice,
injustice, and most vividly, death. This is the life trajectory that the
movie portrays. The young kill as a sign of maturation; the young are
killed as a sign of law and order. Children between the ages of 6 and
12 who engage in cold-blooded and callous murderous assaults stalk the
human imagination. Given the dire, dystopian images portrayed in the film,
one may be inclined to dismiss them as unrealistic and perhaps even excessive—as
devices used by the filmmaker merely for dramatic effect. That would be
a mistake since Cidade de Deus is a story of youth experiences
in the favelas—indeed, many of the key actors are youths who currently
reside in the shantytowns and they themselves wrote the script which paradoxically
offers a glimpse into the inhumane possibilities of lives lived
on the edge. While scenes of unflinching acts of murder evoke poignant
pains in the pit of audiences' stomachs, there is an attempt to leave
them with a glimmer of hope: that while these youth are inexorably born
into the grim favelas, they might, ultimately, find a way out.
2.3 Meirelles'
storyline dates back to the 1970's when a bellicose trio of male youth
vies for their means of survival through petty theft and midnight raids
on local establishments. But of central focus is the development of Li'l
Dice (Douglas Silva) who later becomes Li'l-Ze (Leandro Firmino De Hora
Phellipe), the key antagonist and future drug czar of the city, and Rocket,
an innocent youngster captivated by the power of images who aspires to
become a "distinguished" photographer.
2.4 Li'l-Ze,
who some may characterize as a boy "ambitious and hardened by the
harshness of his life and the harshness of his DNA" (Hunter, 2003),
initiated his bloody fate at the bequest of a handgun at the tender age
of 7 or 8. On an evening where he was to innocuously stand guard while
the 'older boys' robbed a local brothel, Li'l-Ze trailed in afterwards
and chillingly assassinated all patrons. Although Li'l-Ze was never publicly
charged (or associated) with the murders, that event unleashed the ruthless
growth of a ringleader. Li'l-Ze quickly ascended the social hierarchy
and secured his position as owner of the favela's growing drug
trafficking schemes building up to the 1990's. The character captures
this phenomenon best when he states, "Listen man, I smoke, I snort…I've
been begging on the street since I was just a baby. I've cleaned windshields
at stop lights. I've polished shoes, I've robbed, I've killed…I ain't
no kid, no way. I'm a real man" (City of God, 2003). This
is a story of a child's development, one who has stripped himself from
the thwarted nostalgia and neutrality of childhood and transformed into
a hardened and seemingly undefeatable "man." It is a process
that does not take place in isolation of Li'l-Ze's surroundings, but is
informed by the conditions that encapsulate his movement in the favelas
across three generations. From the late 1960's through the early 1980's
we witness how poor youth initially earn their wages through petty theft
and intimidation. Petty theft ripens into an elaborate drug trafficking
cabal where youth in the favela, led by Li'l-Ze, split into opposing
factions—merciless drug fiefdoms—fighting over a tight drug market. It
is gang warfare in a city where the
law was created unto itself. The fruits of their labor are made acutely
clear. Draped in gold-linked chains and toting AK-47s instead of tote
bags, the youth demand respect from their patrons and intimidate anyone
that breaks their code of ethics. Service boys line up for a share of
the notoriety and in one of the most deranged spectacles Meirelles pieced
together, we witness how one young boy is hazed into Li'l-Ze's fiefdom.
Taken by the hand onto a street corner where three boys huddled together,
Li'l-Ze ushers his new recruit to "pick one and shoot." The
tear-jerked boy trembles while he makes his selection but he completes
the initiation process by firing a shot into a small life-breathing figure
that could be no older than six.
2.5 Contrast Li'l-Ze to Rocket—a wide-eyed comical virgin portrayed from an early age as the moral figure, the entity embodying hope and aspirations to participate in the world of "opportunity" outside the favelas. He is characterized as "too weak and smart to be a gangster (his brother's trade), yet too imaginative to be a fishmonger (his father's trade)" (Hunter, 2003: 6). The hope we witness in Rocket has no material basis aside from the one-time scene of a father who urges Rocket to be "something" (something in relation to his "gangster" brother). Aside from attempted armed robbery and the occasional overindulgence of reefer while sitting on the white-sanded beaches of Ipanema, Rocket is portrayed as an innocent bystander to the mishaps of poor favelados. Through the fish-eye lens of an inherited camera, Rocket crosses over into the middle-class world of Rio by riveting the ordinary with explosive and acutely clear images of life in the favela to a local newspaper. The main subject is of course, Li'l- Ze. His photographs of favelados—of western-style gunmen wielding their Saturday-night specials and Cold War armaments—draw Rocket deeper into a ring of tumultuous relationships, but they also fill him with the aspiration of succeeding the life expectancy of his photographed subjects. This is undeniably one of the most fictional accounts of Meirelles' film. Whereas Rocket initially hid his camera lens, Li'l-Ze eventually embraced the photos as reigning family portraits. The subjects posed willingly and unabashedly created images that spoke to their level of perceived independence and their resistance to the likes of poverty. But in reality, Meirelles himself could not film inside of a favela due to the threat of the imperious. Camera men/women that attempt to photograph favelados are far from welcomed. But Rocket is truly an aberration in all respects. In the final scene, Rocket seeks refuge while the corrupt police and armed gang led by Li'l-Ze fire at one another with brute force. With camera in hand he captures the bloody death of his co-patriots, of Li'l-Ze fleeing unharmed until a pogrom of child-aged provocateurs slay him. As the boys walk away from their victorious assault, one can only imagine that the cycle will begin all over again. Rocket, on the other hand, walks away from the precincts of his poverty-stricken existence.
The Necessary Lens of Historical
Materialism
3.1 City
of God shocked audiences nationwide. As part of a series of Brazilian
films where the common plot centered on children's chronic degradation
in poverty, it generated fervor across the globe. In the U.S. context
it
was deemed as appalling, full of sensationalism, and compared to the cinematographic
likes of The Matrix and GoodFellas (Howe, 2003). In the
Brazilian context, it delivered a powerful and dismal glimpse into the
lived experience of the poor that the urban middle class prefers to ignore
(Rohter, 2003). But ultimately, City of God, about a real-life
favela that houses millions of poor as swiftly as a coastal breeze
along the blue chipped tide of Rio's tantalizing bare beaches, is more
than a story of good versus evil, of hope versus despair, of cinematography
versus politics. Yet we would contend that in the absence of a historical
materialist analysis, representations of violence in City of God
can easily be subsumed into a fictional lifeworld secured far away from
the day-to-day grind of human consciousness. Taken, however, as a depiction
of how the underclass is lived through youth at a particular historical
juncture where globalized capital and the social relations of production
confer an abstract calculus of the human condition, it becomes a more
powerful heuristic for understanding how hundreds of millions of youth
across the globe make sense of and participate in society.
3.2 While
historical materialism has generally fallen out of favor among those who
have succumbed to the numbing logic of TINA ("there is no alternative"),
we stubbornly believe that the insights of those working within the broad
parameters of this tradition still have something to say despite postmodern
proclamations to the contrary. Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects
of an historical materialist approach is the attention it accords to class
relations and capitalist social organization and the trenchant challenge
it poses to neoliberal orthodoxy. It is important to note that at a global
level, the imposition of neoliberal orthodoxy was, in no small part, linked
to the conscious strategy "pursued by successful American administrations
in order to maintain U.S. hegemony in the post-Cold War era" (Callinicos,
2003: 3). As Callinicos (2003) further notes, the "very name attached
to those policies—the Washington Consensus—is symptomatic of the role
played in their implementation by the institutional complex binding together
the U.S. Treasury, the IMF, and the World Bank" (3).2
Moreover, James Petras (2003) suggests that part of the current empire-building
apparatus of the United States will necessarily involve the "re-colonization
of Latin America" (23-24). Hence, it is imperative to understand
the conditions foregrounded in the film within the broader context of
globalized capital and historical American influence in the region
that has played a part in accelerating the gulf between the rich and poor.
As Petras (2002) aptly notes, "The U.S. military-political offensive
is manifest in multiple contexts in Latin America" and has been for
quite some time (15). In Brazil, the United States government has worked
intensely to counter the resistance to the FTAA and other economic policies
promoted by the United States (and Europe) via the IMF, the World Bank
and other like-minded "international" institutions. Ellen Meiksins
Wood (2003) contends that U.S.-led global capital cannot allow for the
growing disaffection generated "by neoliberal globalization all over
the world" (155), including the less-than-revolutionary recent electoral
change initiated by the election of Lula da Silva.
3.3 Brazil
has been referred to as the "country of the future" for at least
50 years and yet it is stuck in an economically moribund present as it
faces the inexorable advancement of neoliberal capitalist relations. At
this current historical juncture, Brazil is facing "a critical situation
in its history" (Boron, 2003: 1). The hopes of the people, buoyed
by the election of a party from the "left" in the form of Lula
da Silva are quickly being dashed as Brazil experiences increasing impoverishment
in the face of contemporary political vicissitudes. Dismal old policies
sanctioned by the IMF and implemented by the previous (U.S.-backed) government
of President Cardoso remain largely intact.3
On the other hand, new policies like "zero hunger" previously
championed by Lula have yet to be established (Boron, 2003). Brazil is
the ninth largest economy in the world. Geographically it is almost as
large as the United States and boasts a population of nearly 200 million—75
percent of whom live in its largest cities. The country has the reprehensible
distinction of having the worst income and land inequalities in the world.
Despite the fact that Brazil has, by and large, dutifully followed the
neoliberal script prescribed by the IMF, miserable destitution characterizes
large pockets of Brazil and indeed Rio de Janeiro.
3.4 Nearly
one-fifth of Rio de Janeiro's 7 million residents live in the baked clay
shantytowns with zinc-foiled roofs and dirt wrought corridors. Hundreds
of thousands live in favelas in surrounding metropolises. There
is 
no
plumbing and there are no public phones. Tetanus and the spread of other
deadly diseases often affect thousands of children living side-by-side
like cigarette packed residents. Single women typically run households
and children are often pushed onto the streets due to overcrowding or
the need to contribute to the household's income. Boys (most often) spend
a portion of their day on the streets working to supplement their family's
income. An ethnographic study of favela children in Brazil by Nancy
Scheper-Hughes and Daniel Hoffman (1994) found that when asked why poor
children often beg or steal, the children (mostly boys) often replied
that they were doing it to help their mother. For favela girls,
the plight of domestic servitude for ironclad bourgeoisie maidens as a
form of wage labor is considered more a case of slavery than liberation
(Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman, 1994). Liberation for the girls interviewed
is the ability to control and own their existence through the use of their
sexualized bodies. Scheper-Hughes and Hoffman (1994) document:
While most of those who actually live in the street are boys, young girls may also enter the anonymous space of the street, often escaping exploitative work as junior domestic servants or abusive homes. The vehicle of their "escape" is generally prostitution. Domestic work in the context of semi-feudal flight to the "streets" and even to "prostitution" can be seen as acts of self-liberation. "The first time I sold my body was the first time I felt that it belonged to me," said one young "runaway" from the rural Northeast who chose "the streets" of Sao Paulo and prostitution over domestic servitude in Pernambuco. (3)
3.5 This
is a form of class consciousness that a film like City of God neglects
to fully capture. For millions of favelado youth, otherwise referred
to as moleques (ragamuffins) and menino de rua (street kids),
the economic, personal, and social plight of fulfilling the ranks of domestic
wage labor is a straight-jacket confined existence. In response, narco-trafficking,
theft, begging, and prostitution become the linchpins of their economic
survival. The ethnographic work of these youth points towards an astute
understanding of their likely function as an underclass in relation to
the bourgeoisie. It is an alienated relation that is further exacerbated
through the violent and vile reprisals that youth face when they walk
on the streets outside of their shantytown compounds. In Sao Paulo the
elite avoid the poor through aerial traveling. With over 240 helipads
in the city, "Skyscrapers tops are aerial parking. Executives buy
into helicopter collectives, hop between buildings and retreat at night
to homes in walled mini cities" (Lester, 2003).
3.6 Further,
there is the case of the Candelaria Massacre of 1993. While a group of
homeless boys slept on the steps of the Candelaria church, a fleeting
death squad showered the youngsters during the morning rise with rounds
of bullets, leaving 7 dead, 2 wounded and several survivors. One survivor
in particular, Sergio, age 14 at the time, hijacked a local bus 8 years
later. Prior to losing his life and that of a female passenger, he yelled
out the window: "I was at Candelaria. I know what it means to die.
This is no action movie. I will begin killing at 6 p.m." It took
yet another film, Bus 174, to document Sergio's journey and to
provide the public with an explanation—no less gruesome—of the conditions
that led Sergio and an innocent passenger to their graves. Through Bus
174, audiences came to realize that the men that cruised in a taxi
that early morning were police officers hired by the business elite as
a move to eliminate city squatters that presumably deter proverbial investors
from fully enjoying the Brazilian thrust. Louis Proyect (2003) suggests:
Since homeless children are linked with petty crime, begging and other "anti-social" acts, powerful businessmen often hire hit squads to clean them out of neighborhoods like Candelaria. The social dimensions of this ongoing conflict amount to a one-sided civil war. Considering that about half of Brazil’s 60 million children survive on less than $1 a day and three-quarters do not finish primary school, it is not surprising that the country is swamped by feral youth. (4)
City of God captured a violent
and repugnant view of youth living in the favelas. And while violence
through homicide, theft, rape, and narco-trafficking does occur on a wide
scale (nearly 10,000 youth were incarcerated in Brazil in 2002 for such
offenses), youth were isolated in the film and it offered no indictment
of the broader societal context. Although the film tackled some issues
with a critical eye, to some extent, it was ultimately infected by the
new manners of Hollywood's pedagogical machine and bolstered by postmodernized
screen writing motifs—namely that of hyper-real violence. Hyper-real violence
is, at least in part, an end in itself since it "exploits the seamy
side of controversial issues" while it concomitantly "appeals
to primal emotions" and "captures the actual violence"
(Giroux, 1996: 64) that people encounter in the streets of Cidade de Deus.
As Henry Giroux (1996) further notes, films in the hyper-violent genre
are "filled with an endless stream of
characters who thrive in a moral limbo and define themselves by embracing
senseless acts of violence as a defining principle of life legitimated
by a hard dose of cruelty" (64). If anything, City of God
might have employed documentary violence—which has a long cinematic tradition—which
"does not become an end in itself" (Giroux, 1996: 62). Rather,
it serves to "reference a broader logic and set of insights"
and "probes the complex contradictions that shape human agency, the
limits of rationality, and the existential issues that tie us to other
human beings and a broader social world." It attempts to provide
contextual understandings that invite "critical and meaningful commentary"
(Giroux, 1996: 62-63). Such a cinematic approach to the stories of life
in the favelas could have facilitated a more complex and historical
understanding of the material conditions which shaped the emergence of,
and continue to impact, the experiences of the favelados.
3.7 Borne
out of the 1940's when agricultural laborers in the masses flocked to
industrial precincts in search of work, the favelas overtook the
presence of slums and nowadays play a functional role in economic society.
As Julio Cesar Pino (2003) documents:
The favelas, or shantytowns offer proximity to the workplace, saving the laborer costly transportation fare and hours of travel. There is a political advantage to favela residency as well; so long as they stay within city limits, squatters can claim the right to public services like education and health care. (6)
Over the years the favelas
have sprouted in close proximity to middle- and higher-class zones where
Whites have bought homes or set up their factories (Pino, 2003). Blacks
and people of mixed race origin occupy a greater proportion of favelados.
They primarily work in either domestic service (women) or construction
(men), which leads Pino (2003) to surmise, "favela residents are
likely to see themselves as a community of the downtrodden, not a racial
enclave," and favela politics are dominated mainly by concerns of
"social class" as opposed to those of "race" (6).
This perception, we would argue, is quite telling for it undermines the
general claims of various postmodernists, poststructuralists, and post-Marxists
who have, over the years, suggested that "class" analysis and
"class" understandings are best subsumed under the category
of "difference"—be it racial or ethnic. As some of us have argued
elsewhere (cf. Scatamburlo-D'Annibale and McLaren, 2003[a]), and as alluded
to in our introduction, it is imperative to understand the construction
of difference in terms of analyses of class formation and capitalist social
relations rather than severing "difference" or "race"
from the totalizing power of capital. From Pino's (2003) observations,
it is clear that the oppressed populations occupying the favelas
understand that class is not merely another form of "difference"
as some post-Marxists have implied. Rather, class denotes "exploitative
relations between people mediated by their relations to the means of production"
(Gimenez, 2001: 24). Nevertheless, it remains important not to overlook
the reality of racism in Brazil since such a focus could have helped to
identify the specific ways in which capitalist social relations in Brazil
provide the conditions of possibility for celebrating miscegenation and
the "mixed-race" status of Brazil's population while at the
same time privileging lighter-skinned Brazilians in every realm of Brazilian
life. Very little attempt was made in City of God to draw attention
to the racism that pervades Brazilian society or to address the structural
racism that perpetuates Third World underdevelopment. Here, the work of
Paulo Freire could be utilized to unpack the race/class dynamic as it
is dialectically mediated in the day-to-day existence of the favelados.
It is important to note that Freire's work is now celebrated by favelados
throughout Brazil, as illustrated by the samba school, Leandro de Itaquera
in Sao Paulo, that composed a song in praise of Freire for the 1999 Carnival.4
3.8 In
a growing world where the distinction between the haves and have-nots
continues to become virulently clear we must consider the current status
of youth in relation to their material conditions: half of the world’s
one billion poor are youth; 11 million children under the age of five
die each year due to malnutrition and the spread of disease; 110 million
school-aged youth are not in school; 250 million youth work—half of which
have never seen the inside of a classroom (The International Conference
against War and in Defense of Public Education, 2003); millions of others
are subject to the free trade of child pornography, vital organs, and
sex; and others are inculcated in armed conflicts around the world (UNICEF,
2000). Further, of the 6.3 billion people that currently live on the planet,
almost half of them are under the age of 25 and over 1 billion are between
the ages of 15-24. The burgeoning population of youth will impact the
development of society. As reported by Joaquin Oramas (2003):
Throughout the world, millions of girls and boys are being deprived of education, resulting in serous consequences for their individual prospects and those of society as a whole. The vast number of young people without access to these services heralds devastating consequences. (3)
Everyday life for a growing majority
of youth is defined by class warfare. Theirs is a lived experience that
is both bought and sold. When we are confronted with blood-soaked images
on film, it should not cause us to 
cringe;
rather it should propel us to consider the diffuse social paradigm informing
relations of youth both between and within class fractions. To understand
how class is lived is to understand the primordial relations that undergird
society and reproduce its conditions of possibility. While the U.S.
tries to hold the neoliberal economic model as the model for all countries
to embrace, it fails to disclose its own dirty secrets regarding the status
of youth. Youth living in poverty in the U.S. amount to twelve million,
the overwhelming majority (80 percent) of whom live in working households
(Children's Defense Fund, 2003). Overall, youth have higher poverty rates
than adults and the elderly (U.S. Census, 2003) and are vulnerable to
increased policing in neighborhoods that are plainly segregated by race
and class. With 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. boasts the
greatest number of persons in prison (over 2 million)—25 percent of the
world's prison population (Street, 2003). The prison population reflects
an alarming trend for poor youth of color in the nation. Blacks in particular
and a growing number of Latino/as are incarcerated. On any given day,
30 percent of African-American males ages 20 to 29 are under correctional
supervision—either in jail or prison or on probation or parole (Street,
2003). The incarcerated most frequently come from poor communities, lack
high school degrees, and when released return to a low-skilled job market
where they are likely to receive wages 10-20 percent lower than their
non-incarcerated counterparts (Street, 2003). Poor youth in the U.S. are
told that if they follow the neoliberal economic principles of "individualism"
and "effort" then they will succeed. The ideology that informs
the myth of the "American dream" (a myth which has been globally
exported) is belied, however, by harsh material realities both in the
United States and abroad.5
Global Media Culture: Selling the "Myth" of Prosperity
4.1 Today's
youth are living extremely unequal lives in terms of food, health, education,
employment, and social security. And yet they are, in principle, equally
hit by the global media culture with its popular images of youthful exuberance,
success, and prosperity. The notion expressed by Paul Willis (2000) seems
to ring true in this respect: "The modern communicative imperative
is not to do you good, to educate you, to inform you, to develop you,
but to sell your buying power and buying capacity on the largest possible
scale" (49). In contrast to the wide variety of living environments,
there exists the ideological power of global media culture to bring unity
and forge consensus with respect to the imperatives of capital. It is
hardly necessary to dwell on the fact that the majority of the content
of current media culture is of Western origin and is produced mainly in
the United States by the all-powerful and pervasive Hollywood entertainment
industry. Its contents are blind to the cultural, economic, and educational
background and status of the young consumer. It is crucial, however, to
recall the fact that the majority of young people in the world do not
live according to the Western conceptions of "youth" and presentations
of self. As Cara Heaven and Matthew Tubridy (2003) note:
The market place of dominant youth culture produces experiences which are enabled by the disproportionate levels of surplus capital being supplied to the West by the economically and politically marginalized countries of the developing South. The youth of these latter countries are, for the most part, excluded from the youth experience that their economies make possible in the developing world. (151)
According to UN documents, the majority
of the world's youth live in developing countries and estimates suggest
that by 2025, the number of young people living in the global South will
increase to 89.5 percent (UNESCO, 2002). Yet, the very category of "youth"
as it is commonly understood in the West is largely inappropriate when
invoked in such contexts. Johanna Wyn and Rob White (1997) contend that
if "youth" is understood as "constituting the period between
the end of childhood, on the one hand, and entry into the world of work
on the other, then it is manifest that youth does not exist" (10)
in the aforementioned contexts of the global South.
4.2 For
young people living in those locales, youth in its Western sense exists
only indirectly through the presentations of media culture. Thus across
the globe they are dreaming about the glamorous life of a pop star or
a top athlete and wishing for the life of a stereotypical Western youth
preoccupied by whether to drink 
Pepsi
or Coke and other life-shattering decisions. While global media culture
is not homogenous and is read differently by individuals in different
cultural, geopolitical, and historical contexts, it does have a "free
market" saturation effect. Its dominant message to young people,
among other things, teaches that individual effort is preferable to interaction,
collective action, and sharing; free trade capitalism is the best economic
system in the history of the world; private monetary gain and profit making
are central objectives of life; the problems of society are caused by
individual malefactors and not by anything in the economic system; U.S.
military force is directed only towards good purposes and laudable goals;
and that U.S. military might has been, and continues to be, a civilizing
force for the benefit of poor people throughout the developing world (Parenti,
1992). In this regard, the global media are truly the "new missionaries
of corporate capitalism" (Herman and McChesney, 1997: 23) for they
peddle the ideologies conducive to global corporate rule and new forms
of imperialism. As Petras (2003) has pointed out: "The state, the
mass media and the corporate world encourage mindless, passive engagement
in mass spectator entertainment…and reinforce the empire world view of
'good' and 'evil', where the 'good guys' defeat the 'evil doers' through
violence and destruction" (19).
4.3 Moreover,
the attitudes pushed forward by global media culture have functioned to
mould young people into compliant future consumers. Naomi Klein (2000)
has observed that brand-name corporations which have targeted their offers
and goods to young people are abandoning youth "at the very moment
as youth culture is being sought out for more aggressive branding than
ever before" (275). Equipped with skills and attitudes necessary
for survival in media culture, young people have become the targets of
gross exploitation unparalleled in the past: "Youth style and attitude
are among the most effective wealth generators in our entertainment economy,
but real live youth are being used around the world to pioneer a new kind
of disposable workforce" (Klein, 2000: 275). The ideology of flexibility
promoted by the market has placed young people in a difficult position.
By attaching their identities to popular cultural messages, they have
adopted some of the ideals and ways of thinking promoted by media culture.
Yet they are currently finding themselves in a situation where it is impossible
to feel secure enough to make any long-term plans, let alone model their
lives and futures according to the ideals adopted from the media: "A
hit soap opera is generally the only place in the world where Cinderella
marries the prince, evil is punished and good rewarded, the blind recover
their sight, and the poorest of the poor receive an inheritance that turns
them into the richest of the rich" (Galeano, 2001: 301).
4.4 In
stark contrast to the glossy images perpetuated by the dream factories
of global media culture, we are witnessing the rebirth of sweatshops where
children labor for a pittance, an ever-increasing disparity between the
rich and the poor, and a global climate dominated by the military might
of the United States. As Nancy 
Snow
(2002) has argued, the United States is now "the Schwarzenegger of
international politics: showing off muscles, obtrusive, intimidating"
(47). Much like the boorish, predatory behavior of the groping new governor
of California, the United States is seeking to establish Pax Americana
(i.e., America's vision of a "peaceful" world). The drive towards
"American empire" may not constitute a classic imperial mission
for control of another territory; it may not be about establishing a set
of colonies around the globe. But it does reflect the use of political
and military power on behalf of an ideology—a radical pro-corporate, anti-government,
free market fundamentalism—that mainly benefits the global economic activities
of the capitalist elite (cf. Scatamburlo-D'Annibale and McLaren, 2003[b]).
It is a vision of a world where democracy is reduced to the freedom to
consume commodities and media spectacles. It is a world where alternative
visions are demonized and denigrated and where TINA reigns supreme. Those
seeking to establish global American hegemony would have us believe that
the only "choice" available to us is 
between
their version of empire and the "axis of evil"—or to paraphrase
the leader of the world's only superpower—"you are either with us
or you are against us." According to Bush, the United States has
been called upon to defend the "hopes of all mankind." This
perversion of "humanism" must be challenged at this critical
juncture in history and critical pedagogues must work towards revealing
the specious nature of the aforementioned "choice." The march
towards endless war must be exposed for what it is—a cover for corporate
interests that are fundamentally at odds with the interests of working
people the world over. We must be relentless in revealing that the real
source of terror today is the "market" itself as Eduardo Galeano
(2003) has aptly noted. The conditions of possibility for using terror
as a smokescreen for imperialism by means of 'preventative' and permanent
war is rooted in capitalism and any alternative must necessarily be a
socialist one. While the challenge ahead is multifold and multiform, part
of a progressive strategy must necessarily entail a radical interrogation
of global media apparatuses and the cultivation of radical media literacy.
However, the confounding complexity of capitalist social relations cannot
be erased by the mere realization of its existence. Nevertheless it needs
to be branded with the designation it has deservingly earned: exploitation
and alienation.
Conclusion
5.1 Films
such as City of God reflect not just anxiety surrounding our own
lives, and the lives of people close to us, but also concern for the state
of the world under the jackboot of the current U.S. economic military
apparatus. In the discourses and practices of critical pedagogy we should
not forget the ugly political picture behind the cruel circumstances of
the street described in City of God. The discussion on youth and
representations of youth at the altar of global media culture should be
broadened to cover the general political conditions and structures of
life in a world ruled by global (media) corporations, and military juntas
(including the U.S.). This would, in our view, be best served by utilizing
a Marxist analysis of class. Today, in Brazilian society, there is a growing
consciousness of racism, and it is important that an understanding of
race is not relegated to nominal factors of identity politics, but linked
to the social division of labor within Brazilian capitalist society, a
condition so brutally displayed in City of God.6
5.2 It
is sometimes claimed that people, especially young people, are natural
born media critics and media savvy by nature. Following this line of reasoning,
it is also believed that media awareness is the end result of the pure
fact that we are living in the midst of media culture and subjected to
an unprecedented flow of commercialized images and ideological sounds
which penetrate our consciousness as well as our public and private places.
It is true, as Kellner (1995) has put it, that "new virtual worlds
of entertainment, information, sex, and politics are reordering perceptions
of space and time, erasing distinctions between reality and media
image, while producing new modes of experience and subjectivity"
(17). But it does not follow that we can transform our consciousness and
experiences in isolation from these new symbolic and material qualities
of our environment. It should be self-evident that commercial image bombing
neither informs nor educates people. Corporate media culture does not
foster critical awareness or carry with it forms of radical media literacy—it
carries only reified ideological messages. Thus we must remind people
of the fact that radical media literacy does not come easy in these times
of economic horror.
5.3 This
is the reason why, as critical educators, we need to emphasize again and
again the importance of historical materialist analyses that can expose
the deeper political, social, and economic consequences and relations
which do not flow about the surface of cultural representations. In the
words of Kellner (1995), this sort of analysis
reads films politically in order to analyze the opposing political struggles and positions and their relative strengths and weaknesses. It attempts to discern how media culture mobilizes desire, sentiment, affect, belief, and vision into various subject positions, and how these support one political position or another. (121)
Thus current pedagogical practices
must move in the direction of developing forms of radical media-economic
literacy which not only invite students to read and interpret multi-layered
representations of the cultural industry, but also encourage them to explore
the capitalist economic relations that characterize the systematic operations
of a military-industrial complex. A radical media literacy must, then,
move beyond the mere surface level of representation—it must cut into
the flesh of the social, reveal fundamental contradictions, and ultimately
provide the groundwork for articulating a vision of what a social universe
outside of capital might look like. We know that this is a difficult route
to go, but we also believe that it is one of the ways to turn the tide—to
move toward transforming dystopian popular images into utopian ones which
enable us to see eruptions of hope and struggle even in mass cultural
texts like City of God. Echoing the words of Marx (and Zygmunt
Bauman, 2002), to change the way media works calls for nothing less than
changing the world. And changing the world for us means understanding
the dynamics of class struggle in order to bring forth such a world.
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Notes
1
Quotes cited from <http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Fascism.html>
10 October 2003.
2
We would add that the drive for U.S. corporate controlled global hegemony
has only been exacerbated by the far right, free market rhetoric of the
current Bush administration. Indeed, should anyone doubt the imperial
ambitions of Bush and his minions, one need only peruse the unsettling
canon of PNAC (Project for the New American Century —
<www.newamericancentury.org> 10
September 2003). There, in plain sight, one will find Bush's blueprint
for the establishment of Pax Americana penned in September 2000
by a cabal of far right intellectuals and think tank mandarins. For more
on this see Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale and Peter McLaren (2003) "Operation
Human Freedom."
3 During Cardoso's eight-year reign, Brazil's public debt soared
from 29 percent to more than 65 percent of gross domestic product.
4
(Translated from Portuguese.) Wake up Brasil. Arise to happiness. I want
love. I want love (refrain). In freedom. And today? Today beautiful Leandro
asks permission. To play
its part and show. The naked, raw conditions. On the blackboard, our struggle
continues. My school takes a
leap into the future. And comes to the war with pen in hand.
The red and white asks for education. Without prejudice and discrimination.
Inspired by divine light. We
sing with one voice. Paulo Freire is here by our choice. Young
man. I do not let go of my rights. I also have faith in my insights. In
the created universe. Minds
are imbued with virtue and power. Just open the doors you'll see them
flower. The world, where magic
shapes ideals. And knowledge, is not divided by social class.
Let reflection play its part. And make conscious every heart. Relight
the flame of change. All hail
the youth the child. Let faith illuminate the creation. A happy future
for our Brazilian nation (McLaren, 2000: 205-206).
5
Even the "middle" class in the United States is growing somewhat
skeptical of the myth of the American dream as unemployment ratchets upwards,
as manufacturing jobs are
increasingly outsourced to Latin American and China, as social services
shrink to near invisibility,
and as medical insurance costs rise out of reach.
6 Furthermore, as Brazilian universities begin to enact policies that will ensure the admission of more Black Brazilians, the question of race and racism needs to be grounded not in simplistic concepts of race relations linked to identity politics, but in an understanding of the complex dialectic of race and class related to the larger social totality of neoliberal capitalist globalization.
Author Notes
Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale, an
award-winning author and educator, serves as Chair of the Graduate Program
in Communication and Social Justice in the Department of Communication
Studies at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Nathalia Jaramillo
is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Education and Information
Studies at UCLA. A former elementary school teacher in Riverside California,
Nathalia's current interests include the ideological underpinnings of
domestic and international education policy and their relation to the
transnational capitalist class. Juha Suoranta is a Professor of Education
at the University of Lapland (Finland). In 2003, he worked as a senior
researcher in the Academy of Finland, and as a visiting Professor at the
University of California at Los Angeles. His research interests include
research methodology, critical media education, and life-long learning
in the information society. He has published 200 scientific articles and
ten books of which the latest is Children in the Information Society.
Peter McLaren is a Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, Graduate
School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California,
Los Angeles. He is the author and editor of forty books on a wide range
of topics that include Marxist theory, critical pedagogy, and the sociology
of education.
