Life, Death, and Art

All photos from Grupo Cultural Afro-Reggae's website: www.afroreggae.org

Beto Pacheco is trying to get the youth of Vigário Geral to pay attention. It's not an easy task to accomplish in a room of 25 energetic 11-year-olds, especially on this sunny Wednesday afternoon. The room is bustling with people; as usual the mothers chat in the back, staff members pass in and out, and siblings linger in the doorway that opens out to the street. But when the music starts up, the room of chatty girls and one boy springs into action.

The kids throw themselves into routine, a high-energy mixture of hip hop, jazz, samba, and African dance steps. Pachecho, for the most part, stays back by the boom box, observing the routine unfold. "I treat my classroom like a kind of laboratory to explore all different kinds of movement," he says. "I bring what I know to them, but each of them has their own way of expressing themselves."

On the surface, it may seem like just another after-school dance class, but the class is happening here in Vigário Geral, infamous throughout Rio de Janeiro and Brazil for being one of the city's most violent neighborhoods. As Pacheco counts off the steps, nearly half the room of on-lookers mouths the words to the music -- the band Afro-Reggae's "Capa de Revista" ("Magazine Cover"). In a burst of conga drums and electric guitars, the song speaks of the neighborhood that the newspapers and magazines call "the terror of Rio," becoming "a new crowd / that no one will hold back," a new "explosion of Rio / that has come to stay." The air vibrates from the chorus of overlapping drumbeats, palpable evidence, it seems, of the force of the Grupo Cultural Afro-Reggae.

Life and Art in the Favelas

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the Grupo Cultural Afro-Reggae (GCAR), one of the most active and well-regarded non-profits working here in Rio. Its home base and cultural center still in Vigário, the GCAR currently runs over 16 sub-groups in four different favelas, offering free workshops for youth in music, dance, circus arts, video, and radio production. It is home to a health information service, a health-issues theater troupe, four distinct music groups, and, most prominently, the professional hip hop band Afro-Reggae.

GCAR's objective is clear: to use arts and culture to provide youth in the favelas with an alternative to the drug trade. Favelas -- usually translated as "slums" or "shantytowns" -- developed over the past century in Rio de Janeiro as the poor were forced out of the more desirable parts of the city and into the hills. Beginning as illegal settlements, favelas still often lack the most basic kinds of infrastructure such as paved roads, enclosed houses, and reliable electricity.

In Rio de Janeiro, one of the most economically divided cities in one of the most economically divided countries in the world, 25% of the 5.5 million inhabitants live in favelas or favela-like neighborhoods. While Brazil is a far more mestiço ("mixed race") society than, say, the U.S., the racial disparities are marked: the darker your skin, the more likely that you will be poor, living in a favela, and subject to violence.

With many residents lacking basic health care, food, and education in the favelas, social services hardly exist and welfare is unheard of. "Everyone here in Vigário knows about the daily shoot-outs, of the misery, the poverty, and the hunger that exists here," says Carlos Eduardo Vasconcelos, the community coordinator of the GCAR.

One of the most recent and extreme episodes of violence in Vigário occurred this past July 17. 11 people were massacred within 48 hours in or near Vigário, an event that called the attention of the international press. The deaths were the result of the on-going war between the two drug cartels that dominate Vigário and the neighboring Parada de Lucas. After an intense gun battle between the rivaling drug traffickers, seven local residents were sequestered, tortured, and killed. The following day, four traffickers from Vigário were killed by the police during an organized invasion of Parade de Lucas.