“Favelado ain't no sucker”

In the summer of 2007, in addition to the field observations and the frequent informal conversations which were part of our research routine, a team of 11 enthusiastic assistants ¹ and I worked through 178 semi-structured questionnaires with residents from different parts of Rocinha, including those tourists visit and those they ignore. We started with contextualizing questions: when they had begun to see tourists in Rocinha, how (or if) this presence changed their daily lives, and if they had had any contact with a favela tourist. We then asked their opinion about the tourists' presence and gave them an opportunity to speculate on the tourists' motivations to visit the locality. The third block of questions placed the residents as tourism promoters: “if you could be a tourist guide for Rocinha, what would your tour be like?”; “how much would you charge?”; “if the tourists wanted to buy souvenirs, what would you recommend?”