ABSTRACT

The inability of the state to include and incorporate entire sections of the populace concentrated in marginalized urban spaces and the latter’s inability to identify with it offers an opening for alternative discourses on identity (differentiated from national discourses) to capture local perceptions and subjectivities. In turn, these alternative collective identities offer a sense of ontological security for favelados and gang members providing a degree of social legitimation of gang rule or, at minimum, tacit acquiescence with the structural arrangements that gangs provide. To illustrate this recursive process, the chapter proceeds by surveying how, below the fragile surface of the imagined national community described in Chapter 4, a fragmented landscape of collective identities in contemporary Brazilian society is conducive to the development of more localized forms of social boundedness and collective imaginaries. Herein, I demonstrate how the endogenous construction of three discourses on collective identity – territorial, racial, and socioeconomic – serve to demarcate the favela ‘self’ from the mainstream ‘other’. Second, I discuss how these collective identities provide a sense of ontological security for gang members that create alternative lifeworlds, including systems of social status and prestige, that lead to opportunities for drug gangs to co-opt favela communities and generate legitimacy. Finally, I briefly corroborate these insights by demonstrating how the UPP program and civil society sought to combat this process of gang legitimation with social, discursive, and ideational approaches of their own.