In Rio de Janeiro, Indigenous people fight to undo centuries of erasure

[Judi Lynn]

Rio de Janeiro is home to Brazil’s fourth-largest Indigenous population in an urban area, but the presence and history of native people in the city has been relentlessly “erased” since colonization. Now, the Indigenous people are fighting to reclaim their heritage and their place in the city.

BY KARLA MENDES ON 30 JUNE 2021
Mongabay Series: Amazon Conservation, Indigenous people in Brazilian cities, Indigenous Peoples and Conservation

Rio de Janeiro holds a special place in Brazil’s history, but many of its residents are unaware of the city’s Indigenous — from the names of iconic places like Ipanema and Maracanã, to the Indigenous slave labor that built some of its most recognizabheritagele structures.

Nearly 7,000 Indigenous people live in Rio, the fourth-biggest population among Brazilian cities; a unique interactive map by Mongabay shows how they’re spread across the city, as well as their living conditions and ethnic groups.

Despite their presence, and Rio’s famed diversity and laidback culture, Indigenous people in the city continue to face prejudice and a “silencing” of their traditions and culture that they attribute to centuries of efforts to erase them and make them invisible.

But Indigenous people are pushing back, agitating to get their rights on the political agenda, and working through academia to unearth the Indigenous history of the city that has long been hidden.

RIO DE JANEIRO — Maracanã, Ipanema, the Lapa Arches, the Church of Our Lady of Glory of Outeiro … Millions of the visitors who flock to Brazil’s most famous city every year will be familiar with these places and with local expressions like carioca, the word for a native of Rio de Janeiro. But what most visitors, and even cariocas, don’t know is that all these places (and the word carioca) have an Indigenous root — whether through the slave labor that built them or from the Indigenous lands that they displaced.

“Many people pass by Arcos da Lapa [the Lapa Arches] but they don’t imagine that that monument that is now a heritage, a symbol of the city of Rio de Janeiro, was built by Indigenous slave labor,” says historian Ana Paula da Silva, who has a Ph.D. in social memory and is a researcher at the Program of Studies of Indigenous Peoples (Pro Índio) at Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ).

The arches, in the bohemian Lapa neighborhood of old Rio, were built in the 17th and 18th centuries to support the Carioca aqueduct bringing water to the city center from the Carioca River. Today, Lapa is the beating heart of the city’s nightlife, and instead of water the aqueduct ferries a popular cable car to the uphill neighborhood of Santa Teresa — leaving those who toiled and died to build it largely forgotten, da Silva says.

“Today we don’t have that memory, [or that] history in books, in the media, nobody tells this story,” she says. “There isn’t [even] any sign saying that [in the monument].”



Image by Halley Pacheco de Oliveira via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).



Lagoa do Boqueirão and Aqueduto da Carioca, by Leandro Joaquim (attributed). Image courtesy of Fundação Biblioteca Nacional.

More:
https://news.mongabay.com/2021/06/in-rio-de-janeiro-indigenous-people-fight-to-undo-centuries-of-erasure/