The Urban Quilombo of Cracolândia

Abstract

This text offers a political reading of the Cracolândia neighborhood
in São Paulo, Brazil. As one of the largest areas of drug trafficking and consumption
in the world, this urban area is marked by immense violence, driven
by the state’s actions against it and then daily incorporated within it. The aim
is to contextualize this violence within the broader dynamics of governance
in the Brazilian state, particularly through the lens of race. Following the
insights of anthropologist Amanda Amparo, this paper proposes expanding
the concept of Cracolândia as an Urban Quilombo: a technique through which
a Black population seeks to escape the death policies imposed by a racist power
structure. Compared with Amparo’s work, this article emphasizes the political
– both practical and symbolic – importance of Cracolândia’s spatial location,
not in a peripheral area or favela, but in the very heart of the city.