From providência to favela: workers and the occupation of a hillside in the port region of Rio de Janeiro (1856-1901)

Abstract

Located in the port area of Rio de Janeiro, the Morro da Providência plays a central role in the usual analyses of the development of the favelas in the city. Generally associated with the arrival of troops returning from the Canudos War in the mid-1890s, the formation of the community that settled there has often been taken as the starting point of the phenomenon that would come to define the stigmas that have marked this type of informal housing in the city’s hills ever since. Since they are thought primarily from the perspective of the State, however, these analyses leave aside the experience of other groups involved in this history, such as the low-income workers who began to see that hill as an alternative for a home from the second half of the 19th century on. By following their experience, this article intends to bring new elements to think about the process of social construction of that space throughout that period.