SÃO PAULO — Blue and red lights flash in the street behind me as I duck under a half-closed security grill to the sound of laughter. Nice is holding court in her bar, aptly named Bar da Nice, which moonlights as the favorite gathering place for local harm reduction advocates in the heart of Cracolândia (or “Crackland”), a central neighborhood so called for its rampant public drug use. The walls are covered in black and white collages depicting local activists and phrases such as “Reduce Harm.” A former prostitute-turned-community leader, Nice watches my entry with a skeptical look, a cigarette on her lips. She offers me a beer; I stick to water but accept a cigarette.
Giordano Magri, my local guide and a PhD student at the University Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo researching the politics of Cracolândia, introduces me to a half-dozen women sitting in a circle. They are a mix of local advocates and health workers enjoying a moment of respite from the uninterrupted chaos of the streets outside. They welcome me warmly even though the language barrier restricts our conversation.
It is here that I meet Nana Silva Foster, a trained psychologist pursuing her own PhD at the University of São Paulo on the power of art to engage people who live on the street or in otherwise marginalized conditions. I am here to see how such an initiative works in practice and what impact it can have on the lives of those living in precarious conditions and struggling with substance abuse in a place as chaotic as Cracolândia, the world’s largest open-air drug market.
“Ready?” she asks. As ready as I’ll ever be, I answer, having arrived from Lisbon only the night before. With that, we walk out into the night.
Men and women cover themselves in blankets, others carry trash bags full of empty cans, but most walk in an agitated rush with only the clothes on their backs to call their own. We are in o fluxo, the flow, as locals call Cracolândia. An ever moving, never patient, stream of human activity. A Times Square of squalor where love hotels abut one-room churches whose open doors look onto the street, from which the faithful judge the homeless as each side trades benediction for ephemeral solace while local businesses next door sell cheap cakes to anyone with two reais.
Where is the government in all this?
Flashing lights seem to illuminate every street corner. It’s hard for a novice to discern the alphabet soup displayed on each vehicle but Giordano has taught me the ropes. There’s the Guarda Civil Metropolitano (GCM), the municipal police that answers to the mayor and drives around in brand new blue-and-white SUVs. The GCM, which recently opened a police station in the area, acts as a civil investigation force.
There are also various units of the Policia Militar do Estado de São Paulo, military police who report directly to the governor. Since the conservative Republican Party’s Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas won the gubernatorial election in 2022, the military police have substantially increased patrols in the area and have a reputation for dispensing beatings. A couple months after my visit, two military police officers fatally shot an unarmed homeless man in his 20s and are now facing homicide charges.
Interspersed between the law enforcement units, and wholly outnumbered by their show of force, are outreach workers from Brazil’s national health service, O Sistema Unico de Saúde, SUS for short. With their blue jackets and first aid kits, they walk the streets checking in on their patients and providing help as best they can under the demanding conditions.
The government is here in less obvious ways, too. A couple blocks from Bar da Nice and the main street of o fluxo stands the Sala de São Paulo, the high-end concert hall acclaimed as one of the best in South America. Next to it is Pinacoteca de São Paulo, the oldest art museum in the state and one of Brazil’s most prominent. Both are supported with government funds, part of a long-standing effort to gentrify the area.
Familiar with the scene, Nana walks through the clammer unperturbed. Her first experience with o fluxo was in 2016. At the time, she was working with a project named Casa Rodante, whose work involved bringing art, gardening, music and cinema to people living on the street. The aim was promoting activities that fostered relationships between those living in precarious conditions and the health and social workers trying to serve them.
Today, Nana works with a similar nonprofit called Cineflux. The association projects movies on the street to attract people to areas where it can serve water and meals. Water alone can be a powerful harm reduction technique as many people experiencing homelessness may go for days without access to proper drinking water, which increases the risk of psychotic episodes and erratic behavior, especially when smoking crack.
Nana’s team also gives workshops to teach people living on the street how to use their mobile phones to record small movies. “Movies might be a strong word,” she answers with a chuckle to my question about how they pick who will be directing and acting. It’s more about showing how to document their lives and those around them, she says. That, in turn, encourages their interest in watching movies by raising their appreciation for the complexity of coordinating any one scene.
While exposing people who use drugs, live on the street or struggle with mental health problems to art and culture might seem like an eccentric indulgence for Americans, here in Brazil—land of Samba, Carnival and Capoeira—art in all its forms is considered a fundamental aspect of life. Brazil’s Psychiatric Reform Law of 2001 de-institutionalized mental health from long-term asylums in favor of community-based services, and, according to Nana, included access to culture in its guidelines. “It’s also a great way to build trusting relationships with vulnerable people without the formalities of medical and social work,” she explains.
A few minutes after setting out, we hear the distinct tones of a boombox and Nana steers us in its direction. We find a group of a dozen men and women who live in o fluxo crowded around a microphone. They seem to be mostly in their 30s and 40s. Two local musicians, a man and a woman, direct the impromptu show. They chant a chorus as a portable speaker lays down the beat, then turn the microphone over to those waiting to take turns rapping. Those too shy to freestyle stand around, bobbing their heads to the rhythm, shouting their approval at particularly witty verses.
When a woman whose ragged clothes and missing teeth suggest she’s spent her fair share of time sleeping on the street this year hogs the mic, her compatriots joke and tease her until she gives it back. The atmosphere is joyful. Guests at nearby food stalls look on, intrigued by the commotion. From across the street, two police officers from the GCM observe the scene, seeming utterly baffled and slightly amused. As the local artists keep the good vibes rolling, Nana and her fellow outreach workers speak with those milling around or waiting to sing—getting updates on their lives and the situation on the streets.
Nana explains that this street performance is the project of another organization that has teamed up with the Brazilian superstar rapper Edi Rock and his outfit Racionais MC’s to promote rapping and songwriting among people living in the vulnerable conditions of o fluxo. In a few weeks, the organization will hold an event in collaboration with Rock where folks will be able to show off their skills, so everyone’s taking tonight’s practice very seriously.
With my European features and Patagonia jacket, I stand out like a sore thumb, but thanks to my association with Nana, everyone readily accepts me with a handshake and clap on the back. As the street party heats up, I join the fun and dance along with the group that has now swelled to two dozen.
The mood change comes suddenly. I see it first in the eyes of the local artist as her gaze turns to the street. I also look, along with the others. One by one, half-a-dozen GCM police cars slowly roll past us. Their occupants don’t look too friendly. Although their lights aren’t flashing, they come to a stop down the street from us. The organizers quickly shut off the boombox, party’s over.
They have good reason to be scared. Giordano, my original guide, had earlier explained that what I’m seeing tonight is but the scattered remnants of the real fluxo that I had seen in various YouTube videos prior to my arrival in Brazil. Here, a block from Bar da Nice, thousands of people had set up camp in the streets, creating one of the largest open-air drug markets in the world, primarily for crack cocaine known locally as basuco. State and municipal law enforcement have cleared the main streets of Cracolândia’s neighborhood and are actively dispersing any group of a dozen or more with the ends of their batons.
It’s important to understand this new wave of law enforcement violence in its larger political and historical context: The city and state governments of São Paulo have tried to gentrify the neighborhood in the heart of the largest city in the Americas for over 40 years. First, they collocated cultural centers like the São Paulo concert hall in the hope of spurring economic activity and local interest. When that didn’t work, they subsidized the building of middle-class residential apartments. O fluxo persisted.
Governor Tarcísio, formerly infrastructure minister under then-President Jairo Bolsonaro, plans to relocate the state government’s administrative buildings to the area in the next five years and is using every tool at his disposal to dismantle o fluxo once and for all. It is a masterclass in the use of state power that Robert Moses would respect.
Government officials are closing love hotels, restaurants, residential buildings and any other business or property deemed undesirable through eminent domain and by finding building code violations during ad hoc inspections. Public parks have become public gardens, meaning they can be fenced off and their entry guarded—one can admire the cruel subtleties of municipal administrative nuance.
Like Amsterdam’s Zeedijk district in the 2000s, as I described in one of my dispatches from the Netherlands, urban renewal here is playing a critical but brutal role in the neighborhood’s gentrification. Unlike in the Netherlands, however, the violent displacement is not coming with additional public health and housing services that would help people living on the street improve their lives, nor is it improving public safety. Instead, Cracolândia’s inhabitants have dispersed across the city.
A friend of mine told me that she was seeing homeless people for the first time on the streets of the Pinheiros neighborhood 8 kilometers (5 miles) away. Unlike in the Netherlands or Portugal, it is not due to a lack of housing. São Paulo has over 550,000 vacant housing units—12 times more than the number of people living on the street or in quasi-legal arrangements such as squatting.
The repressive approach, while newly vigorous, has defined the government’s response to o fluxo for most of its existence. Still, there have been times of real change. In 2014, Mayor Fernando Haddad implemented harm reductionists’ dream under a program called Braços Abertos—“Open Arms.” People living on the street were given housing at local hotels, three meals a day and assistance with social and health care services without a requirement of abstinence.
The initiative is worth its own dispatch, but in brief, Braços Abertos served around 460 people during its three-year existence before the subsequent mayor shut it down. Studies showed that within a year, 88 percent of people in the program had reduced their crack use at an average rate of 60 percent—from 42 crack rocks a week to 17. In addition to a reduction in their drug use, half the targeted people reconnected with their families and many took steps toward reintegrating into society, with over 70 percent employed.
Cleiton Ferreira, whom the streets baptized “Dentinho,” was one of the lucky participants. When we sat down to talk over a video conference, he explained that Braços Abertos helped stabilize his life but it was art that saved him. A former club promoter sporting rectangular glasses and dreadlocks, he recounted how he had ended up living on the streets for a few years after encountering difficult times. The art program offered by Braços Abertos provided a gateway to connect with himself, his experiences and those of people around him. “Harm reduction is about turning the focus from talking about drugs to talking about lives, and art is the best tool people have to express themselves about their life,” he told me.
Like Brazil’s famous Carnival, where floats and pageantry mix with the costumes and excesses of boisterous crowds, Dentinho’s art is participatory and collaborative. The small theater he co-founded in the heart of Cracolândia, Teatro do Contêiner Mungunza, is a place of exchange where the traditional barrier between those on and off the stage is blurred. He recently starred in a play there as himself. He also works as a harm reduction worker with the non-profit É de Lei, where he uses art to engage those he encounters on the street.
Dentinho is the exception rather than the rule; most Braços Abertos participants didn’t become successful artists. But his story and his continued work in o fluxo demonstrate the power of art to engage and stimulate people living in precarious situations or struggling with substance use. “Everyone has culture,” he says. “It may look and sound different than the culture you’re used to, but it’s there and it’s a powerful force for connection.”
I had seen another example of art’s potential for engaging people with substance use problems 3,000 kilometers from Cracolândia in Brazil’s northeast metropolis Fortaleza, where Angela Moraes sat me down on her couch and opened a large spiral notebook. For six years between 2012 and 2018, Angela, a former art teacher, engaged patients through art at the local Centro de Atenção Psicossocial Àlcool e Drogas, an outpatient center that cares for adults suffering from substance use disorder under Brazil’s national public health service. The notebook, one of many we sifted through, contained hundreds of drawings and pictures of crafts made by patients.
Most of those in the program were adult men from working-class backgrounds, artisans used to working with their hands. “The most important thing is teaching them to look at everyday objects through a different angle because it opens a door to looking at themselves differently,” Angela explained to me through her daughter, Ruana Moraes Vasques, who translated. By learning to value the art they made in class, they learned to value their efforts outside of it.
When possible, she would bring her group to local art museums. Although many of the institutions are open and free to the public, her students had never considered them places they themselves could enter.
Her one regret? That there was never a strong collaboration between her arts and crafts work and psychologists at the facility, which research has shown can improve engagement with verbal therapy. Particularly when it comes to projects such as self-portraits and family trees, Angela said patients were expressing feelings and sides of themselves that mental health professionals should have been incorporating to better assist them.
Back in Cracolândia, the group of impromptu street performers disperses as the police vehicles idle menacingly within earshot. I say goodbye to Nana and order an Uber in front of the police station a few blocks away. Minutes later, I am dropped off at a dancing bar for Forro—a traditional partner dance from Brazil’s northeast. Here, too, people wiggle and jiggle together as a five-man band plays to its heart’s content with no intention of stopping. The blue and red lights of o fluxo are replaced by the bar’s green and orange hues. The crowd is different, a colorful mix of São Paulo’s middle class from across the country, but the joy is the same.
While art—be it writing, drawing, crafting, singing, playing or dancing—will not put a shelter over one’s head or fill one’s belly, it can offer solace, stimulate creativity, build bonds and foster relationships in ways social service checklists or health care checkups never will.
Top photo: Rapping in the streets of Cracolândia
