Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Grad School Glamor Days

The most nourishment that I got post-noon today was from a packet of Splenda that I sucked dry and the wood coffee stirrer that I chewed on after to satiate my hunger (both nabbed from the department's Tuesday lectures refreshments table). This was all ravenously consumed while I gave my usual section lecture to the MAs....I'm grad school glamorous!

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

"Why is there so much wretchedness, so much poverty in this fabulous land...? Ah, says one - it is the priests' fault; another blames it on the military; still others on the Indian; on the foreigner; on democracy; on dictatorship; on bookishness; on ignorance; or finally on divine punishment."

- Daniel Cosio Villegas

Friday, October 11, 2013

When slum tourism is too much - or was it always?

As I was walking home from grocery shopping one day, I literally stumbled into a now mundane sighting in Rocinha, and in many slums and favelas of the first and third worlds. On a corner near the entrance to my neighborhood loitered a very blonde group of Europeanish-looking people who were laughing and gesticulating wildly. What looked like the teenage daughter of one of the middle-aged couples was mounting the motorcycle of one of the local PMs (Military Police). The two PMs, who were usually stationed on that corner, thought it was rather funny too, and went posing next to the blonde girl on the motorcycle.

What struck me as memorable about this scene was that I found it, well, rather vulgar - vulgar in that it caused a sense of revulsion in me on the part of their apparent innocence.  The blonde Europeans had no pretensions about what they were doing. The scene could have been taken straight from Orlando, with the young girl being marveled at while sitting in the car of some ride. But instead of being surrounded by Disney characters and sand, she was framed by the bulk of the PM’s machine guns and body armor while standing near some leftover sewage from the previous night’s heavy rains.

Who knows why they were there. They could have been there to see the “real” slums that they had probably seen in the film The City of God, or maybe they had fallen into a tour promoted by their hotel. They were there to take pictures, satisfy their curiosity about a world they believed so inconceivably different from their own, and then leave. No volunteer work or missionary yearnings involved, that was certain. (I’ve become pretty accurate at this point in stereotyping the gringo foreigners here, myself included). They were definitely not there for one of the Favela Funk ragers. Those happen at night, and the transition to the presence of PM in favela life and the reorganization of social services has made them scarcer, anyways.

I have no real contributions to this ongoing debate on slum tourism. I just find it hard not to gawk at slum tourists, as they gawk and point their cameras at the environment in which they've swiped their visas to insert themselves. I like London Times columnist Alice Mill’s labeling of Slum Dog Millionaire as “poverty porn,” because it succinctly captures the voyeuristic pleasure which many people get from this form of consuming poverty. We can pay for it without getting our hands dirty, and fold it into a memory that we can later exchange with others. I was hit on in a bar once in New York by a Princeton grad who claimed that the Favela Funk party that he went to during his travels in Rio was the most “eye-opening” experience of his life, while a homeless woman begged outside of the bar…

When I’m not in Brazil I live in Harlem, New York City, and the voyeuristic industry of
poverty tourism has also reached the home of the Apollo Theater. Tourists are taken down 125th Street in those big double-decker red buses to take pictures of all the “important” landmarks of Harlem, such as the Apollo, maybe Bill Clinton’s old office building. Hit-it-and-quit-it would be an appropriate addition to Mill’s denunciating alliteration, since a commonality in these anecdotes is the ephemeral interactions with the poor that happen behind glass windows, or within the planned narrative of the tour guide, which many people really do “get off” on and later insist to friends or strangers to have had profound effects on their personal development, spirituality, etc., etc.

Does a slum tourist become a “better” person, once the tour is over? What about people living in first-world poverty? Will their experiences be of real value only when somebody can curate their poverty for them, and they can pay for it?