• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1736 0

corpse in the small park. He killed 30 more people in the next year, mostly classmates, before he, too, wound up in the park. As the violence reached world-record levels, Pedro repeated a year of school because of bad grades and, he says, incompetent teaching. Then, at 18, he learned that his girlfriend, Denise, was pregnant. He was unemployable, without any prospects. He was about to drop out of school. The only possible source of employment was the Bronx gang. “I didn’t want to join,” he says. “I’d have to kill for them and they were all on drugs, but it was the only thing there was. They were trying to recruit me, and I didn’t have any choices.”

Pedro and Denise recounted this story to me one Saturday morning as they drove their family, crammed into the back seat of her Peugeot, from their house in the middle of Jardim Angela to the nearest indoor shopping mall. It has become a family custom to spend Saturday mornings shopping at the mall’s department stores, then to have lunch in the food court. Their daughter, Kassia, 17, a freshman at a private college who wants to major in fashion design, gets her lunch from Panda Express. Vitor, 14, enrolled in a private high school, eschews the usual McDonald’s for heartier Brazilian fare. They practice their English, learned from private tutors, on me, discussing their favorite brands of mobile phones and preferred social-networking sites. Tuition for the two of them costs $800 a month, eight months a year. Denise talks about the family’s next big move: She and Pedro have just put a one-third down payment on a $63,000, three-bedroom condominium on the eighth floor of an 18-story building beside this mall, on the edge of the favela cluster that includes Jardim Angela. The development contains government-funded “favela rehousing” apartments, squat, turquoise-painted blocks with small windows, as well as large flats like theirs, in modern, glass-walled towers with broad balconies, marketed to people who want to stay in their original favela surroundings, near their friends and relatives and businesses, but with modern amenities and more security. For the next few months, they will continue to live in the whitewashed shantytown house on the edge of the park, which belongs to Denise’s mother. There is a property boom taking place within Jardim Angela, as the people at the top of the favela move into new apartments and people living lower on the hill purchase their vacated houses. The proceeds of this boom are financing business start-ups.

Pedro is a member of Brazil’s new arrival-city middle class. For the past decade, he has owned and run an information-technology consulting firm, based out of Jardim Angela, which currently provides network-hardware services to a multinational branding company. His earnings, combined with his wife’s pay, amount to between $30,000 and $35,000 a year—a comfortable middle-class income by the standards of the developing world. It is a salary that allows them to send both their children through private education, to have two cars and all manner of modern appliances, clothes, toys, and a broadband connection, and to save enough money to become property owners. Like many arrival-city dwellers, they managed this by moving in with relatives during their child-rearing years to save housing costs.

I have not chosen Pedro and Denise because they are rare and miraculous exceptions but because they are fairly characteristic of a sizable minority of people in Jardim Angela today. In the years since the favela’s collapse into violence, a thriving middle class has emerged; depending whom you believe, between a fifth and a third of the neighborhood’s population have “made it” enough to become homeowners. It remains a poor neighborhood, with most of its population employed informally as delivery drivers, domestic servants, builders, or call-center operators (there is little unemployment), and drug abuse remains a visible problem in some quarters. But there is a fundamental change now. The main street, once a strip of forlorn drinking establishments, now teems with