ABSTRACT
On July 7, 1961, a 46-pound, 12-year-old, malnourished boy from a Rio de Janeiro favela—or slum—stepped off a plane in Denver hoping to escape the shackles of poverty and longing for a life free from the struggle to breathe. It was just one week after photojournalist Gordon Parks’s exposé of life among Latin America’s urban poor appeared in Life magazine. Flavio da Silva had been living with his family in Catacumba, one of the many squatter settlements of Rio. The family had fled the rural poverty of northeastern Brazil in search of a better life, but had found instead—like many of the favelados, or slum dwellers, that made up roughly 10 percent of the city’s population—an equally harsh existence in the urban environment. Illness, exacerbated by poverty, had taken its toll on the eldest da Silva son. At night, or when the smoke of the open cooking fire filled the da Silvas’s six-by-ten-foot home, Flavio would succumb to violent coughing. With heaving chest, blue-tinged skin, and throbbing veins, his whole body would be consumed in the fight to breathe. This fight with bronchial asthma had left a visible mark on the boy; when doctors at the Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital (CARIH) in Denver saw Flavio in Life, they recognized his expanded chest and knew its cause. Convinced that the boy, in their institution, could be saved from the death that would soon meet him in his Rio slum, CARIH doctors wrote to the magazine’s editors and offered free treatment. Other concerned and inspired Americans also reached out, sending hundreds of letters and donations to Life to help rescue Flavio from a life without hope. 1
