ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Rio’s autonomous blocos as vehicles through which revelers reinvent citizenship in a repressive urban environment. It describes a portrait of the organizational practices of Rio’s brass band movement and how HONK! Rio would come to manage its own organized chaos. The organizers and founders of HONK! Rio emerged from the unofficial blocos, as well as the larger world of carnival brass blocos. During the rise of street carnival in the 2000s, the city of Rio de Janeiro initiated a new plan of urban development motivated by a neoliberal strategy of investing in the cultural capital of the city with the goal of capturing profits for the global capitalist system. To protect their modes of festivity, the blocos manage to demarcate an affective space of encounter and construct a space of popular autonomy, that is, they participate in creating new forms of urban citizenship.
