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At first glance, Devanil’s life fits into a standard narrative surrounding Brazil’s favelas, or self-built slums, one popularized in movies like City of God and endless magazine and television reports, which portray them as places of perpetual violence and depredation, populated by a lost and victimized underclass. It is a more severe and violent version of the story that surrounds migrant-dominated urban enclaves everywhere. But this vision of the favela as a fixed commodity, a fallen and immutable population of “the poor” living at the bottom end of “the system,” to be dealt with as victims, misses the larger story of the arrival city, the journey being taken by the families who have built and propelled it. The violence and deprivation are an interruption on that journey, an unnatural and sometimes terminal incursion. People here are not “marginal” but rather central actors in the economy, momentarily locating themselves on the sidelines to attain a higher goal.

Devanil’s father was born in Paraíba state in the far northeast of Brazil, where his parents had worked as sugar-cane harvesters, an extremely poor life in a wooden shack with no security. They came here in the 1970s, part of a human wave moving into Rio, which swelled Santa Marta, a 1930s hillside shack settlement, into a full-scale arrival city, a chaotic, vertical mass of teetering mud, wood, and tin shacks on an otherwise uninhabitably steep and inaccessible tongue of land, filled with families whose adults worked in the tourist-packed city below as porters, doormen, cleaners, and hotel staff. Despite its tough conditions and the mudslides that killed several residents every few years, Santa Marta functioned well as an arrival city: until the end of the 1970s, it sent thousands of people each decade out of its truly squalid confines into more comfortable, sometimes even middle-class, surroundings. It was governed by an effective neighborhood council, which won it electricity, water, and some sewage lines in the 1980s and seemed to promise pathways to proper citizenship.

Then, as Brazil’s economy teetered into bankruptcy and its military government imploded in the 1980s, people stopped moving in and out, the favela grew more isolated from the city, and, as the Brazilian state withered away, the narcotic gangs took over. They governed totally and violently, usurping the community council. The Comando Vermelho became the sole source of employment for males, a dangerous life, which sent alarming numbers of Santa Marta’s youth to their graves before the age of 21. Still, almost nobody in Santa Marta considered returning to the village, even though this would have been easy. They had a sense of secure ownership of the land beneath their shacks and a better living than their rural cousins. In exchange, Santa Marta’s people effectively led a segregated existence within a violent narcotics factory. Unlike thriving arrival cities throughout the developing world, the gang-controlled favelas of Brazil lack the busy hodgepodge of shops and small businesses on the ground floors of houses; with the exception of drinking establishments, Santa Marta was almost devoid of commerce, or non-drug opportunities for work. Devanil’s father was sucked into this vortex, and Devanil felt certain that he would be holding a pistol by the time he was 14.

At the end of 2008, this all changed, dramatically and violently. Shortly before Christmas, Devanil found himself cowering on the dirt floor of his house one night, his mother screaming in fear, as hundreds of heavily armored military police invaded his favela in a commando raid, charging up the 788 steps, firing hundreds of rounds from assault rifles and machine guns, shooting and arresting all members of the drug gang and many bystanders. In itself, this was merely a hyper-intense version of the military-police raids that occurred almost every year. What happened next was different, though. Five weeks later, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited Santa