CARE AND CONTROL IN URBAN BRAZIL : The Subaltern Archive of Portarias

Abstract

Security infrastructures permeate everyday life in Brazilian cities. Although security guards and doormen play an important and omnipresent role as social and technological mediators, their practices and perceptions have received little attention. Based on our ethnographies of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, we conceptualize entry halls and porters’ lodges— portarias— as a crucial yet disregarded subaltern archive of Brazil's deeply unequal and violent urban fabric. This archive conveys how condominium workers, who are part of the infrastructure of portarias , understand, co‐produce, and contest urban hierarchies at the confluence of colonial legacies and neoliberal governmentality. We ethnographically analyse the shifting socio‐techno‐material arrangements to show how cordiality and control become embedded in the workers’ provision and understanding of care. The workers’ continuous response to disrespect and possible humiliation reveals their nuanced engagement with the colonial legacies of racism and servitude and the omnipresent permeation of neoliberalism. In line with subaltern urbanism, our ethnography challenges the limits of archival and ethnographic recognition of the longstanding and current reproduction of racialized, gendered, and classed urban hierarchies. The socio‐material worlds of portarias and the knowledge possessed by their staff provide an invaluable key to understanding the persistent and changing socio‐material hierarchies of urban Brazil.