Introduction

“I don't defend classes, I want to unite what the city has separated, because this city made this favela.” This is how Robson, a community leader from a favela called ‘Morro do Palácio’, likes to define his work. Since 2016, I have been following his trajectory as a ‘community leader’ and wannabe ‘politician’ from Niterói, a municipality located in the Metropolitan Area of Rio de Janeiro, in the southeast of Brazil. Repeated to exhaustion during his campaign to become a councillor in 2020, Robson's catchphrase translates to perfection his deep sense of the forces in place when it comes to producing the favela as a ‘margin’ (Das and Poole, 2004) in the city of Niterói.

In the current chapter, I describe the efforts of Robson to become a legitimate representative of Palácio, a position that is defined by the authority to ‘speak on behalf of the community’, intermediating the relationship of the favela, an ‘illegal settlement’, with public and private agencies to improve the lives of the inhabitants. I show how Robson's efforts to become a favela politician, moving from being a community leader, can dramatize the complex social processes implicated in the construction of Palácio as a ‘place’ (Bourdieu, 1997). I argue that the constitutive tension between his capacity to mobilize resources located ‘outside’ the favela, and the symbolic and material manipulation of insignias of ‘belonging’ that connects him to a place tainted by the stigma of violence, illegality and social disorganization are key to the understanding of his ‘political tactics’.

I’m calling political tactics the manoeuvres applied by the community leaders to ‘bring improvements’ to the favela (such as street paving, electricity or a creche for the kids), ‘pressuring the authorities’ for adequate service delivery, using the personalistic power of political mediators (as the ‘politicians’) to reclaim some participation in what Chatterjee (2004) called the ‘practical helms of citizenship’. By doing so, I explore the relationship between violence, mobility and inequality, developed in previous works (Albernaz, 2018; Albernaz and Pires, 2021), as an insight into the concept of ‘global South’ as a moving border, where the ambivalent coexistence between connection and separation produces zones of intense exchange and conflict promoting the ‘subaltern integration’ of Palácio in the cultural, political and economic life of the city of Niterói.