Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [138]
Yet it was becoming abundantly clear to a group of committed people living in Jardim Angela that this was not its natural or inevitable state. They had the desire and the will to do better, but there was nothing to provide the capability. As the violence peaked in 1996, and with no sign of an improvement, people began to meet and came to a shared conclusion: that Jardim Angela’s problem wasn’t the presence of evil; it was the absence of normal city institutions and functions.
Pedro Magalhães learned this earlier than most. At 18, with Denise pregnant and his school career jeopardized, he teetered on the edge of gang life. He had no interest in crime—in fact, it inspired a moral revulsion—but he would do anything to secure his daughter’s future, and no other options were presenting themselves in the barren economy of Jardim Angela. Then his oldest brother stepped in with an offer: a job cutting hair in his barbershop, which he had opened in the better years and was one of the few arrival-city businesses still standing (in large part because haircutting requires little capital and no links to the city outside). “That job saved me,” Pedro says. “It allowed me to keep out of trouble, and it gave me enough savings that I could borrow the money to study computers.” Through the dense network of mutual connections that defines the arrival city, Pedro was able to weave a new sort of life, one built on education, financial credit, and entrepreneurship. He found his pathway to the middle class, and it led through the middle of the arrival city.
Was it possible that all the residents of Jardim Angela were attempting something similar? That was the question the favela’s community leaders began asking as the violence peaked and they began holding emergency meetings at the school to talk about the neighborhood’s grisly problems. After having been ignored for years by the larger municipal, state, and national entities outside, the favela developed its own grassroots municipal government, at first as an emergency response to the deaths of hundreds of children and then as a larger, more potent institution. The meetings at the school became known as the Forum for the Defence of Life. As the favela became infamous for its violence, these meetings were first attended by school officials, some police, and Father Jaime (who was the first to organize the meetings); then by members of international aid organizations, which took up the favela cause as news of the violence spread; and, finally, by representatives from municipal and state governments. Soon, hundreds of residents were attending. The citizens of Jardim Angela were unanimous in their descriptions of the neighborhood’s needs: first security, then education, then a proper link to the larger city, physically and economically.
“The school became the first really neutral territory, the first public space,” says Jucileide Mauger. Before, her school had offered four hours per day of the most basic sort of teaching—like many arrival-city schools, which are either private or minimal, it offered few handholds for social mobility. Lobbying the government and the aid organizations for funds, they engineered a school better attuned to arrival-city needs. “We had to cultivate the idea that the school is a government body, that it’s an authority, that you have to come and follow rules. We made it part of the community. Then we started evening classes for adults and older teenagers with a seventh- or eighth-grade education who wanted a new start.” These were so successful that the school had to open all 15 classrooms at night. Education proved popular, not just to the kids who wanted to avoid the life of gangs and drugs but to those who lived that life. “Many kids had dropped out, started drug dealing at 12 or 13—then, at 20 or 21, realized that it’s not such