{"id":35823,"date":"2017-04-03T11:34:29","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T14:34:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=35823"},"modified":"2017-04-08T14:02:14","modified_gmt":"2017-04-08T17:02:14","slug":"local-roots-initiative-in-alemao-brings-history-to-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=35823","title":{"rendered":"Local Roots Initiative in Alem\u00e3o Brings History to Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

On Saturday, April 1, the community project Ra\u00edzes Locais<\/a> (Local Roots) led a group of visitors on a historical tour of the Complexo do Alem\u00e3o<\/a> in Rio\u2019s North Zone<\/a>. The visit brought together favela residents and news organizations as well as teachers and researchers from outside the community, part of the project\u2019s effort to create \u201cdialogue between academic and popular knowledge<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Among\u00a0Rio\u2019s largest favelas, Alem\u00e3o has a rich history. One of the first stops on the tour was Travessa\u00a0Laurinda, one of the oldest streets in the complex, where twice last year and again in January this year, the community organized\u00a0a mutir\u00e3o<\/em><\/a>, or collective action, to plant trees and install stairs up the steep hillside. As longtime community organizer Alan Brum Pinheiro recounted, in the 1920s the land that is now Alem\u00e3o was owned by two families, who eventually sold some of the land to a Polish immigrant, Leonard Kaczmarkiewicz. \u201cO Alem\u00e3o,\u201d or \u201cThe German,\u201d as he came to be known thanks to his European looks and distinctive surname, began renting parts of his land to locals in a system known as aluguel do ch\u00e3o<\/em>, or \u201crenting the floor,\u201d in which tenants were allowed to build houses on plots of land without becoming its formal owners. From its origins on the \u201cGerman\u2019s Hill,\u201d or \u201cMorro do Alem\u00e3o,\u201d the favela spread out over neighboring hills in subsequent years, eventually evolving into the complex that it is today.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The visit stopped by sites with recent significance to\u00a0residents. A cross near the top of the hill, originally built by the Catholic Church, was torn down in 2007 by occupying police forces<\/a> who wanted to stop it from functioning as a landmark for drug traffickers, until the intervention of a local priest forced the State to rebuild it. In another location, on the edge of a green space\u00a0reforested by residents<\/a> beginning in 1997<\/a>, residents pointed out an abandoned building in the middle of a field. Ra\u00edzes Locais guides\u00a0revealed that the space used to be a soccer field, closed by the State to build a bike park for the Olympics\u2014abandoned six years ago\u2014and recalled how, in the old days, residents from all over Alem\u00e3o used to frequent the field on Sundays, playing in the community\u2019s soccer league<\/a> or riding bicycles and socializing.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Ra\u00edzes Locais is a project of Instituto Ra\u00edzes em Movimento<\/a> (Roots in Movement Institute), a community\u00a0organization<\/a>\u00a0founded in Alem\u00e3o in 2001. Seeking to bring together favela residents and scholars from outside the community<\/a>, in the coming weeks Ra\u00edzes em Movimento will host visits focusing on the topics of sanitation<\/a>, urban mobility<\/a>, and on the\u00a0legalization and decriminalization of drugs, as well as preparing reports on religion in Alem\u00e3o and the community\u2019s African roots.<\/p>\n

The Ra\u00edzes Locais initiative seeks to document the memory of the occupation of space that led to the formation of Alem\u00e3o. The project matches young people in the community with older residents to conduct interviews about their memories of earlier days. These interviews are especially timely given that the first generation of residents are now reaching old age. Ra\u00edzes Locais tries to conduct as much of its work in public space as possible, in order to create awareness of and interest in the project among residents.<\/p>\n

\"Hearing<\/a><\/p>\n

Pamela, 17, joined the project in February after finding out about it through her friend Gabriela, 15, who has been participating since December. \u201cI was at her house, and she had to go to work on a Saturday,\u201d Pamela explained. \u201cSo that she didn\u2019t leave me alone, I went with her. She went to a mutir\u00e3o<\/a>, and I ended up liking it, so I joined the project.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a resident of Olaria, a neighborhood bordering on\u00a0Alem\u00e3o, Pamela has enjoyed getting the opportunity to learn more about the complex. She recalled hearing stories from an older member of the community about recruiting neighborhood children for soccer games in his youth and gathering with neighbors under the shade of a tree in his backyard to catch a breeze during the hot summer. \u201cBack then, there was friendship and closeness between neighbors, everybody helped each other out. Nowadays, everyone has a TV, a cell phone, the Internet, and everything is just transactions.\u201d Lorrana, also 17, a resident of Alem\u00e3o, agreed that her interview with her grandfather had given her a chance to learn and think about the past in a way that had never occurred to her. \u201cBefore, I never had time to ask about his life. The project is helping me do that, as well as learning to communicate more with people here.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Brum\u2019s encouragement, both Pamela and Lorrana shared some of the information they had learned in their interviews at points during the tour. As he explained, \u201cIt\u2019s a good way to help them start talking about memory in public. The goal of the project is to get more people in the conversation, sharing the history of Alem\u00e3o. These girls are the new protagonists of this process. They could grow up to be professors, activists, community leaders. It\u2019s all about reaching that critical mass of participation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas On Saturday, April 1, the community project Ra\u00edzes Locais (Local Roots) led a group of visitors on a historical tour of the Complexo do Alem\u00e3o in Rio\u2019s North Zone. The visit […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":35847,"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":[1288,1290,1333,1268,1271,329,1329],"tags":[771,364,32,674,188,37,962,1539,1871,259],"writer":[2385],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-35823","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-highlight","8":"category-civilsociety","9":"category-event-reports","10":"category-favelaculture","11":"category-favelaqualities","12":"category-solutions","13":"category-by-international-observers","14":"tag-community-pride","15":"tag-community-based-organization-cbo","16":"tag-complexo-do-alemao","17":"tag-memory","18":"tag-history","19":"tag-north-zone","20":"tag-oral-history","21":"tag-raizes-em-movimento","22":"tag-tour","23":"tag-youth","24":"writer-claire-jones"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35823","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\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35823"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=35823"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=35823"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=35823"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=35823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}