The Research Setting

Based on two years of ethnography in a sub-proletarian squatters’ settlement, I examine how, in the absence of any influence from the formal law system, the code of honor es­tablishes an uneasy balance in social relations.

In the analysis of a group of urban poor, violence, considered in the light of the no­tion of “honor,” appears as a constitutive element of the social order. Violence in this group is not a “spontaneous” reactive impulse. It is undeniably linked to economic and political discrimination to which the poor have been submitted for generations. However, to reduce the phenomenon to such a deterministic dimension, to see it as merely the re­sidual product of dominant society, is to overlook the fundamental creativity—even in the most adverse conditions—of human culture. I propose, therefore, to look into the “in­ternal” mechanisms that attribute a meaning and regulate the use of physical violence in an urban squatter settlement in the south of Brazil.

Our commentaries are based on ethnographic field research carried out in the early 1980s in a settlement of around 750 squatters—Vila do Cachorro Sentado (Sitting Dog Vila)—planted in the middle of a middle class neighborhood about seven kilometers from downtown Porto Alegre (approximately 1,000,000 inhabitants), the southernmost state capital in Brazil. The terrain, belonging to a neighboring state mental hospital, has been alternately occupied by and then cleared of squatters two or three times during the past three decades. While some are rural migrants, most of the vila dwellers have long acquaintance with urban living. Of mixed ethnic origin—including Italians, Portuguese, German, Polish, native Indian, but principally black African—the adult men, mostly illit­erate, earn their living as rag pickers, junk dealers, night watchmen, handymen, and oc­casionally as construction workers.

It is hard, impossible even, to maintain any sort of privacy in this teeming settlement wherein mingle seven to eight hundred people in a lot which measures little more than a football field. The tiny one- and two-room shacks are not designed to shut people in, and, particularly in summer, the front doors close only at nighttime, when dwellers are inside at rest.

Most people have few daily engagements outside the vila and spend their days at the vila’s informal gathering places: women wash their clothes at the vila’s single public spigot, men squat in front of the general store sipping the traditional chimarrao (tea in a gourd). On the main dirt-covered road, just wide enough for a small truck, children play soccer, or putter with homemade go-carts. Here, anonymity is totally out of the question. Knotted paths may change shape—with a new house sprouting up here, an old shack torn down there—witnessing incessant additions and transformations. But the changes stay within the limits of the familiar world. Newcomers are usually brought in by a friend or relative already living in the area. Even people who move away seem to follow a pre­dictable circuit, moving to neighborhoods where other ex-residents of the vila have pre­ceded them, and then back again.

Hand in hand with the intense social activity, comes a functional interdependence be­tween neighbors. Legal access to water is the privilege of a handful of residents who live along the front edge of the vila, near the highway. Other residents manage the money and know-how to tap the main lines, providing pirated services to their own homes and, often at an exorbitant rate, to nearby “clients.” The dispute for the internal regulation of these vital commodities is inevitable and unending since only the very few can get along with­out depending on neighbors.

Despite its poverty, this group, should not be considered “marginal.” The neighbor­hood residents participate fully in an urban economy, acting within the informal sector of the economy as well as occasionally being employed. Vila residents are fully conscious of the fact that, because of their miserable living conditions, their low level of education, and the irregular or even shady character of their economic activities, they are considered by the dominant sectors as repugnant dregs of society. However, this group has grown used to a certain symbolic autonomy—not only because they are “excluded” from the conventional system of prestige, but also because they live in a small, well-delineated enclave, shut in by walls built by cautious middle-class neighbors whose back yards would otherwise give onto the vast “empty” lot. In this relative autonomy, where formal law has very little influence, violence plays a key role in maintaining order.