{"id":10736,"date":"2013-08-15T11:01:25","date_gmt":"2013-08-15T14:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=10736"},"modified":"2016-12-22T23:12:12","modified_gmt":"2016-12-23T02:12:12","slug":"morro-do-tuiuti-the-hill-that-tells-the-story-of-rio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=10736","title":{"rendered":"Morro do Tuiuti: The Hill that Tells the Story of Rio"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

If hills could speak, Morro do Tuiuti (Tuiuti Hill) would have a lot to say. It has borne witness to many of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s key physical and social transformations over more than two hundred years.<\/em><\/p>\n

A lost history<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Maracana\u0303<\/a>When the Portuguese royal family\u2013in flight from Napoleon\u2019s invading army\u2013docked in Rio in 1808 the city was transformed, almost overnight, from sleepy colonial backwater into imperial metropolis. The new seat of power became the royal Pal\u00e1cio de S\u00e3o Crist\u00f3v\u00e3o, in the Quinta da Boa Vista, a stone\u2019s throw from Morro do Tuiuti. Popularly known as the \u2018Versailles of the Tropics,\u2019 the palace originally lay outside the city limits. However, gradual urban expansion, accelerated by the opening of a train line in 1858 and a new bonde <\/em>(tram) system in 1870, brought it into the city proper. The aristocratic character of that settlement process is still visible in the faded opulence of much of the neighborhood\u2019s architecture.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Curiosity led Gleice Valadares, born and raised in Tuiuti favela, to delve into the city archives to uncover the history of the hill. She discovered an old map showing a reservoir at the far end of the hill and a road running alongside Tuiuti that connected it to S\u00e3o Crist\u00f3v\u00e3o. It must have been the water source for the surrounding area and presumably the Palace itself. \u201cThe hill’s a part of local history, but no one connects this to the history of the hill,\u201d says Gleice. From childhood she also remembers a large old mansion on the hill, which was left to deteriorate and was eventually taken down. She believes it must have been from the same era, but there seems to be no record of what it was used for. \u201cThose of us who are here\u2026 who are a part of this history, could have worked to preserve it a bit better. But we (in Brasil) have a serious problem with memory, of recording memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

In imperial Rio aristocratic decadence mixed in brutal oppression in the form of domestic slavery. However, with abolition in 1888 and the creation of the Republic in the following year, inequality took a different form. Former slaves and poor migrants crammed into corti\u00e7os<\/em> (slum tenements), which became notorious as dens of poverty and Yellow Fever. In the first decade of the twentieth century growing elite concern about public health culminated in the urban reforms of Mayor Pereira Passos. The corti\u00e7os <\/em>were destroyed and replaced by the grand boulevards, plazas and buildings that structure central Rio today. Informal settlement of the Morro do Tuiuti began around this time and although there is no written record of who first occupied the hill, local accounts have it that it was the poor construction workers who rebuilt the city.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It was not long after this that Dona Margarida arrived on the hill. At 97, she is a living record of the changes it has seen. \u201cI arrived here from Minas Gerais with my mother when I was 7 years old.\u201d The year was 1923. \u201cAt the time there was nothing here, only grass and some shacks.\u201d Just a few years later Dona Margarida went to work as a bab\u00e1<\/em> (nanny) in the house of a middle-class family in Lapa, traveling to work on the long-since vanished bonde<\/em>. She liked the job as she was well treated by her employers and because it allowed her to travel around Rio and get to know the city center and the South Zone. \u201cRio had fewer streets, less conditions,\u201d she recalls, \u201cit was dangerous, but not as much as today.\u201d It was already an exciting place. During the 1920s and 30s samba was beginning to flourish and she remembers attending samba parties on neighboring Mangueira hill, hearing legendary musicians like Cartola and Jamel\u00e3o.<\/p>\n

Industry and the housing question<\/strong><\/h3>\n

As early as the 1890s, following the overthrow of the monarchy, S\u00e3o Crist\u00f3v\u00e3o had begun to lose its aristocratic feel. Wealthy Cariocas were opting for the coastal neighborhoods of the South Zone. Instead, with its good transport connections, sturdy buildings and proximity to the port, S\u00e3o Crist\u00f3v\u00e3o became the obvious location for Rio\u2019s emerging industrial sector. As innumerable factories and workshops sprang up, the \u2018Bairro Imperial\u2019 (\u2018Imperial Neighborhood\u2019) became the \u2018Bairro Industrial\u2019. Tuiuti\u2019s residents benefitted from the abundance of employment opportunities and when she was in her twenties Dona Margarida went to work in a drinks factory. \u201cI stacked the cacha\u00e7a bottles day and night, but never drank a thing,\u201d she laughs. It was hard work, but it was stable and paid enough to live on. She spent most of her working life with the same company.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Rio\u2019s industrialization and the inward migration it attracted drove huge population growth between the 1940s and 60s, producing a serious housing crisis. At the start of this process a brief but ambitious house-building program left its mark on the Morro do Tuiuti when the Minhoc\u00e3o (\u2018big worm\u2019) housing project was built to house low-income public functionaries in 1946. Designed by renowned architect Affonso Reidy and including a school and leisure facilities, it is widely regarded as the high watermark of public housing provision in the 20th<\/sup> century. Two decades later, as the crisis rumbled on, Brazil\u2019s military regime adopted a new approach to the housing question. Central areas were to be freed up for land-value capture through a brutal favela removal campaign. Tuiuti was spared thanks to S\u00e3o Crist\u00f3v\u00e3o\u2019s cheap land and consolidation as an industrial hub. Across the train tracks, in wealthier Tijuca, Favela do Esqueleto was not so lucky. It was removed to make way for UERJ (Rio\u2019s State University).<\/p>\n

The long-standing economic stability of the area, which had protected it from the upheaval inflicted on other parts of the city, was shattered in the early 1980s as Brazil entered a period of prolonged economic crisis. Many of Tuiuti\u2019s residents lost their industrial and public sector jobs and moved into less secure service work or the informal sector. In this context of economic hardship and high unemployment, a new problem reared its head. Tuiuti was pulled into a citywide dynamic of territorial conflict involving competing drug-trafficking gangs and a military-style police force. \u201cWe suffered tremendously,\u201d says Gleice, who grew up during this era. As in other favelas, residents had to live with the dominance of drug traffickers, periodic police incursions and ongoing violence.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But despite the economic and social turmoil of the era, the quality of housing in Tuiuti had become unrecognizable from the precarious wooden barracos <\/em>of Dona Margarida\u2019s childhood. Successive generations had painstakingly improved and expanded their homes, first rebuilding them with bricks, then adding additional floors. The favela\u2019s upgrading was completed with the belated arrival of the state in the 1990s, bringing paved roads, drainage systems and landscaped public spaces. To this day residents call the central area of Tuiuti, with its terrace offering spectacular views over Rio\u2019s North Zone (see photo), \u2018Favela Bairro<\/em>\u2019 after the government program that built it.<\/p>\n

Still standing<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n

As ever, Tuiuti today is at the heart of the changes occurring in Rio. Along with neighboring Mangueira it received a\u00a0Police Pacification Unit (UPP)<\/a>\u00a0in November 2011. Although there have been bumps in the road\u2013including a double murder and the robbery of a UPP officer\u2019s gun earlier this year\u2013most residents seem to view pacification positively. They are less enthusiastic, however, about some of the changes that have followed in its wake. Light, the electric utility, recently arrived in the favela, placing a sudden squeeze on household budgets. Meanwhile, many key services continue to underperfom and there is an almost total absence of educational and leisure activities for children and young people in the area. Indeed Tuiuti seems to encapsulate many of the frustrations that drove\u00a0hundreds of thousands onto Rio\u2019s streets<\/a>\u00a0in June. For the first time in over a century S\u00e3o Crist\u00f3v\u00e3o\u2019s land values are rising rapidly and Tuiuti\u2019s residents can look down on a glistening new Maracan\u00e3 stadium. Yet if the \u2018Bairro Imperial\u2019 is regaining its crown they themselves are not feeling any richer.<\/p>\n

Whatever happens, Dona Margarida is happy on the hill she has called home for 90 years. \u201cI was thinking the other day, that I’ve gone up and down this hill so many times.\u201d But it has been worth it. \u201cIt’s a good place. It’s a hill that knows how to receive people, and we’ve never seen despair, thank God.\u201d For all that life has thrown at her, Dona Margarida, like the hill itself, is still standing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas If hills could speak, Morro do Tuiuti (Tuiuti Hill) would have a lot to say. It has borne witness to many of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s key physical and social transformations over […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":10840,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1268,1271,335,329],"tags":[188,485,37,962,15,685,961,145],"writer":[911],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-10736","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-favelaculture","8":"category-favelaqualities","9":"category-policies","10":"category-solutions","11":"tag-history","12":"tag-light-electricity","13":"tag-north-zone","14":"tag-oral-history","15":"tag-pacifying-police-unit","16":"tag-sao-cristovao","17":"tag-tuiuti","18":"tag-upp-social","19":"writer-matthew-richmond"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10736"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=10736"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=10736"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=10736"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=10736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}