Problematizing alterities for a feminist and decolonial understanding of One Health of Peripheries ¹

Abstract

In this work, we reflect on how different figures of alterity are targets of marginalization and what this implies in terms of recognition in political grammars that establish who can become a subject of health. Based on feminist and decolonial contributions, we discuss some ontological assumptions about the relationship between humans, non-humans, and nature to broaden the understanding of the One Health of Peripheries. We also incorporate some narratives of adolescents who live in the Jardim São Remo favela (São Paulo, SP) and act as One Health of Peripheries Young Agents. In dialogue with them, we explore the process of constitutive exclusion of favelas, based on rhetorics that do not recognize the plurality of collective configurations and reinforce the figure of favelas as a threat to public security. In contrast to this project, we bring the principles of reforestation and confluence of significant alterities to reinforce the multispecies justice promoted by the praxis of One Health of Peripheries.

Keywords:
Alterities; Peripheries; One Health; Feminisms; Decoloniality

Resumo

Neste trabalho, refletimos sobre o modo como diversas figuras de alteridade são alvo de marginalização e o que isso implica em termos de reconhecimento nas gramáticas políticas que estabelecem quem pode se tornar um sujeito da saúde. A partir de contribuições feministas e decoloniais, discutimos algumas premissas ontológicas acerca da relação entre humanos, não humanos e a natureza, para alargar o entendimento da Saúde Única em Periferias. Também incorporamos narrativas de adolescentes que moram na favela Jardim São Remo (São Paulo, SP) e atuam como Agentes Mirins da Saúde Única em Periferias. Em diálogo com eles, exploramos o processo de exclusão constitutiva das favelas, apoiado em retóricas que não reconhecem a pluralidade das configurações coletivas e reforçam a figura das favelas como ameaça à segurança pública. Em contraposição a esse projeto, trazemos os princípios de reflorestamento e da confluência de alteridades significativas para reforçar a justiça multiespécie promovida pela práxis da Saúde Única em Periferias.

Palavras-chave:
Alteridades; Periferias; Saúde Única; Feminismos; Decolonialidade

One Health of Peripheries: some assumptions

The discussion about health is linked to the reflection on the ontology of the political subject that constitutes the target of institutionalized actions, which will account for their care. Depending on the assumptions about the nature of the being, tactics and strategies will be developed to materialize the promises of care and well-being. Thus, what is meant by health, who is entitled to it, and what are the urgencies in terms of health policies are issues with important political implications, which involve tensions and disputes that reflect the prevailing social order where such issues are inserted (Baquero, 2021a).

Among the areas of study that cover this debate is collective health, which has been assuming a central concern with the social determination of health, expanding the approaches marked by biological and individualistic reductionism. However, some limits have been pointed out to collective health, among them the fact of establishing equivalence between the social and the human, leaving out animals and other social actors, usually aggregated under the nature label. This limitation is not insurmountable in social theory and much less in indigenous cosmologies, as can be seen in the statement of Ailton Krenak (2020), a thinker and activist of the Krenak ethnicity: “I do not understand where there is something that is not nature. Everything is nature. The cosmos is nature” (p. 16-17, our translation).

It is from this troublesome view alienating human beings from the rest of nature that One Health of Peripheries - OHP - (SUP - Saúde Única em Periferias) emerges as an epistemological, ethical and political framework, interested in marginalized multispecies collectives. These collectives have a particularity: they are formed by individuals of different species who relate to each other and to other elements of the environment, giving way to complex environments in which political decisions and social relations do not involve only humans.

Thus, one of the most radical turns the OHP perspective brings is the criticism of the narrative of a universal subject of health, disconnected from the framework of power relations in which multiple beings are inserted. It deals with the decentralization of the human as exclusive target of health policies and care, recovering knowledge and practices from the margins to inspire cosmopolitics of good living (bem viver). At the heart of this reflection is a conception of the individual, or even of the being, in its relationship with significant alterities, as Haraway (2021) points out. The author uses this notion to oppose the nature-culture dichotomy, emphasizing the relationality between these domains. Thus, Haraway thinks in terms of partial connections, in which the actors are neither whole nor part - but as what she calls relationships of significant alterities.

For the OHP perspective, within which we position ourselves, it becomes central to reflect on animals, plants, rivers, air, etc., and other beings of a relational environment, which materialize ways of life determined both by collective agencies from the peripheries, and by biopolitical management from other instances.

One of the theoretical keys that condenses this discussion is, precisely, the biopolitics of the more-than-human (Baquero, 2021a), which problematizes how to inscribe in culture “animal life and the ambivalence between human and animal as a way to think about how our societies draw distinctions between lives to protect and lives to abandon” (Giorgi, 2015, p. 12) or exploit. This biopolitical perspective has been advancing in relation to other approaches in public health that, despite considering the social determinations of health, conceal the role of non-human lives in the understanding of health and its management. This is a framework of reflections that develops a critique of marginalizing apparatuses creating and reproducing hierarchies with pathological effects in certain multispecies collectives (Baquero, 2021a).

Adding to this more-than-human biopolitics that bets on a destabilization of individualistic premises to conceive One Health of Peripheries, this study will briefly dwell on some developments of these reflections, proposing theoretical alliances between One Health, feminisms and decolonial and anti-colonial knowledge, as a way of working two of the seven decolonial promotion actions of One Health of Peripheries, namely, the deconstruction of marginalizing apparatuses and the enrichment of the ecology of knowledge (Baquero; Fernández; Aguilar, 2021).

Therefore, our focus in this text is to situate a feminist, decolonial and anticolonial reading of the health of multispecies collectives, seeking to point out new directions, namely, the connections between colonial regimes and health in urban peripheries and how relationality and co-constitution between species can become a locus of health agencies. Although the peripheral cartography worked by OHP involves geographical and symbolic spaces that exceed cities (Baquero, 2021a), the notion of peripheries in this text will be focused on favelas and other biopolitically excluded urban territories.

Our proposal is based on what João Manuel de Oliveira (2010) designates as hyphenation of knowledge, a form of hybridization of critical knowledge that, in the case of this work, aims to question situations of social inequity, adding to the theoretical-political efforts that have been carried out by OHP, as well as in other research that address multispecies collectives in dialogue with the Humanities (Cruz, 2020).

One must highlight that bringing the discussion on ontology of being to locate our viewpoint on the One Health of Peripheries is not a mere philosophical question. By critically looking at the ontological assumptions that guide biopolitical strategies in health in the peripheries, we seek to explore the power regimes that make certain lives prioritized in health matters, while others are treated as outcasts and, therefore, neglected and placed on the margins of the right to health.

This choice is also based on the plurality of knowledge advocated by One Health of Peripheries (Baquero; Fernández; Aguilar, 2021). In this scope, feminist contributions and decolonial and anti-colonial studies are relevant because they are practices of questioning about systems of domination - such as gender, “race” and class, imposed in modernity and maintained in the current relations of coloniality. Also as part of the problematization of these regimes of domination, one should question the very primacy with which humanity is treated, bringing other existences to the discussion.

Thus, One Health of Peripheries constitutes a critical interstitial space, problematizing colonial hierarchies that, being based on distance in relation to what is counted as human, end up inducing processes of health precariousness in certain multispecies collectives.

Seeking to contribute to this dialogue, in the following section we propose some reflections on multispecies collectives. To this end, we use contributions from the post-structuralist feminism of Donna Haraway (2021), from the Guarani anticolonial perspective, by Geni Núñez (2021), and the quilombola view by Antônio Bispo Santos (2015), for being in the counter-hegemonic line of thought, which problematizes the logics of modernity/coloniality (Krenak, 2020). These contributions help us in the task of rethinking another ontology of the political subject of health: of being with others, of constitutive relationality between species (Haraway, 2021; Núñez, 2021; Santos, 2015) that are target of the decolonial promotion of One Health of Peripheries, which implies, among other things, “deconstructing, through the ecology of knowledge, the marginalizing apparatuses underlying the health inequities suffered by multispecies collectives” (Baquero; Fernández; Aguilar, 2021).

In the third section of the text, we focus on the narratives of adolescents who are members of the One Health of Peripheries Young Agents - OHP-YA - (AM-SUP - Agentes Mirins da Saúde Única em Periferias) project, which in 2021 and 2022 took place in Jardim São Remo and Serra Pelada, favelas in the West and North Zone of Sao Paulo city in Brazil, respectively. OHP-YA is a project coordinated by the OHP Network, in which children and adolescents, similar to Community Health Agents, work to promote the health of the territories in which they live. In this period, the OHP-YA worked to promote the health of multispecies collectives with a group of students from various courses at the University of São Paulo, researchers, community organizers and socio-educational institutions working in Jardim São Remo and Serra Pelada, in an effort to integrate academic and peripheral knowledge to break the epistemic solipsism (Grosfoguel, 2013) that gives visibility only to the productions of the former.

Aiming to distance ourselves from any attempt at (apparent) neutrality in the proposed reflections, in this text we adopt a policy of localization (Rich, 2002), considering that the knowledge we produce is affected by the places we inhabit, starting with our own body as the nearest territory. Therefore, in the production of this text several bodies-territories converge.

We, who wrote this text, act as academics of USP, are racialized and foreign people from Cuba and Colombia living in Brazil, markers that imply at the same time some places of privilege, especially academic, and some vulnerabilities. Our geopolitical location influences the text because our foreign bodies make up the landscape of alterities that, in Brazil, are considered, among other things, as invasive or dangerous. It is no secret that inhabiting the Brazilian territory as a white foreigner from a so-called developed country guarantees a welcome that is not the same when it comes to people coming from Haiti, Colombia, Venezuela or Cuba. The swearing “go to Cuba” reflects not only an anti-communist stance, which is striking in Brazil, but exposes that the welcoming policies are different for the various foreign bodies that inhabit the country.

In this sense, our condition as migrants from Cuba and Colombia is a vector that runs through our analysis, because it is a place of departure that conditions what we see and what escapes our perceptions. Hence, even if our positions were different, they would still not be neutral.

Regarding the territory in which our analyses are located, it is necessary to point out that Jardim São Remo is a community in the West Zone of the municipality of São Paulo. The territory is bordered by the University of São Paulo City campus (USP) in the east and southeast, by the 16th Military Police Battalion in the north and northwest, and by residential neighborhoods in the west and southwest. It currently comprises an area of 64,000m² and houses more than 3,000 families. The history of the formation of São Remo is similar to that of other favelas in the São Paulo metropolis. Its constitution was marked by the search for improvised forms of access to land and self-management of housing, in the absence of formal policies that enabled access to dignified living conditions. Currently, it is an established neighborhood that continues to compete for recognition. Its social dynamics is intense, involving businesses, leisure options, sport and cultural manifestations that put it on the map of the city (Grinover; Zuquim, 2019).

São Remo is one of the territories that are part of the OHP Network’s OHP-YA Project, which, in 2021, was started with eight adolescents aged between 13 and 16 years, six of whom are female. The totality of adolescents was considered racialized according to the racial intelligibility milestones that operate in Brazil (Schucman, 2012). Except for one of them who, in his words, came from the “interior of Brazil” to live in São Remo, the rest of the group was born and has grown up in São Remo and Serra Pelada. For the purposes of this text, we will focus mainly on narratives of adolescents from São Remo, which were recorded in meetings by videoconference and in WhatsApp groups during the Covid-19 pandemic, although we also relied on speeches from OHP-YA from Serra Pelada.

The discussions listed point out ways to think of One Health of Peripheries as a social justice project that, on the one hand, refuses the reproduction of colonial hierarchies that subjugate certain lives, territories and knowledge, and on the other, is interested in ways to promote the flourishing of significant otherness (Haraway, 2021; Núñez, 2021). We have outlined some of these paths in the closing remarks, without any pretension of making them a manual.

An ontology of being with others: feminist, anti-colonial and decolonial inspirations of multispecies health

“The trillions of microorganisms that coexist in me, in us, do not let me claim the individual authorship of the being that we are,” says a fragment of the poetry of Geni Núñez (2021, p. 5, our translation), one of the interlocutors we bring to this analysis. The verses are a synthesis of anti-colonial assumptions of the Guarani indigenous cosmogony. We consider that the latter can inspire productive readings about multispecies collectives, because the author questions individualism, in addition to the ontological binary that naturalizes the division between human and non-human. In addition, Núñez problematizes the violence resulting from this colonially-rooted social classification system. It is precisely this centrality of the white human, cisgender, heterosexual, without disabilities, middle class and resident of the city, seen as a representative of a higher order, “civilized” and opposed to the offense that would become the animal, that creates a hierarchy that reifies the human, and, with it, authorizes the violence, extermination and exploitation of other beings (Núñez, 2022).

This ontology of being that ignores that we are not self-sufficient and that we need air, water, land, and food has excluding effects (Núñez, 2021). Certainly, the sciences have scrutinized metabolic processes and ecological relationships involving humans, showing that we depend on other beings. However, the instrumentalization of these sciences and the limitation of their domain of validity have preserved the myth of human superiority and sophisticated exploitation of non-humans and sub-humans. In other words, the sciences are also used to preferentially serve the interests of those who best fit the capitalist and racialized model of the human, while their superiority is reinforced, without offering scientific grounds on the desirability of choosing such anthropocentric criteria (if the criterion is adaptability, strength, sensory capacity, etc., the superior being would not be a human - think insects, buffalo, bat…). Thus, we are encouraged to think of One Health of Peripheries and its biopolitical management as a process that does not begin or end in the human, but that goes against colonial logics.

The very ways of life that emerge in the peripheries and have been mapped in various research and academic productions have shown us the more-than-human configuration of marginalized collectives that get sick. A multispecies census carried out in the Jardim São Remo and Jardim Keralux favelas showed that, in households, companion animals were more numerous than children and both residents and field researchers referred to the status of family members in relation to non-human animals, mainly canines and felines (Baquero; Peçanha, 2021). Thus, “insisting on the imposition of a purely human portrait of peripheral families is another act of disregard for the way in which these families understand themselves” (Baquero; Peçanha, 2021, our translation).

It is necessary to take this act of disregarding of the forms of family organization of the peripheries as a gesture that exposes the colonial violence that affects subordinate subjects, who have their knowledge and forms of life disqualified, inferiorized and exposed to a kind of cultural genocide (Santos, 2015). The insistence on a portrait of the peripheries that does not match their relational arrangements, erasing non-human species that are part of these family configurations, shows the contemporary echoes of colonial regimes. The call for homogenization as a form of symbolic extermination of the various ways of life is one of the pillars of colonial thought.

According to Antonio Bispo Santos (2015), one of the techniques of colonial training is the non-recognition of the symbolic and cultural matrices that different groups use to define themselves. In this regard, the author demonstrates that imposing generalized denominations is a way of breaking the identities of peoples who do not understand themselves from the Eurocentric matrix apparatuses. In this case, the attempt to impose on the peripheries a family model that would include only humans is part of this colonial training project in which the primacy of the human implies the constitutive exclusion of non-human animals and the separation between society and nature.

Contrary to this colonial training project, the decolonial promotion of One Health of Peripheries seeks to operate in the direction of what Foucault (2000) named as an exercise in desubjugation of knowledge from the margins, those permanently subjected to various forms of erasure by the established knowledge. In this case, we are interested in the accumulation of experiences and knowledge that circulate in the peripheries of São Remo on various ways to build territories of care, health and support, with emphasis on the collective. We understand there is knowledge in peripheries that, as praxis, challenge the Eurocentric civilizing project and its limited menu of Western monocultures (Núñez, 2021). Likewise, we seek to reflect on how this peripheral knowledge helps to rethink, refute and expand our understandings of One Health in Peripheries.

In the Report “Experiences of the pandemic in São Remo: a collective discourse” (Faria, 2021), it is evident that the relationships between species become relevant not only as part of counter-hegemonic family arrangements, but with regard to the construction of reception spaces in situations of vulnerability, such as that of the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the records contained in the collective discourse of this report expresses that:

Living with animals has become essential in combating the virus, […] They are companion animals, docile, […] who are there in the hours of happiness, sadness, joy and good times. Therefore, we have to welcome them, give them more attention, since what they do to us is reciprocal. (Faria, 2021, p. 21, emphasis added, our translation)

We can derive from this some inspirations to rethink health not as something that comes later, as a consequence, but as something that is interwoven in the very artisanal fabric of everyday relationships between species. If within a colonial logic the centrality of humanity is the starting point of the neglect of multiple lives from regimes of racialization, we believe that the decentralization of the human and the attention to alliances that are woven between various figures of otherness that occupy the margins of the body politic, show that it is in these relations of co-constitution that there are greater possibilities to build territories of care and health.

Thus, understanding the contingent foundations between species and how they create possibilities of cohabitation guided by good living allows us to point out new directions to conceive the health of multispecies collectives from broader perspectives. One of the threads that connects the ontological and ethical-political dimensions of multispecies health is the forest principle described by Núñez (2021). As a Guarani cosmological inspiration, the forest principle leans on the idea that:

It is only possible to exist in the coexistence of many plural worlds, in relations of co-dependencies shared and concomitant with the infinity of beings that makes life possible. In this we see the power of decentralization, not only in the field of interpersonal relationships between humans, but also in the decentralization of the human as the center of the world. We are only part, one of many elements that constitute life. (Núñez; Oliveira; Lago, 2021, p. 85, our translation)

The forest principle bets on the power of human decentralization, recognizing the relevance of concomitance as a political and ethical horizon of relationships between species. The principle of the forest thus involves the creation of new imaginations about the world, which distance themselves from hegemonic imaginations that, when based on the coloniality of being and knowledge, impose hierarchies between living beings, epistemicide, ethnocide and cultural genocide. As mentioned: “we also base the importance of decentralization, collective interdependence, concomitance and coexistence as principles of an existence beyond monocultures” (Núñez; Oliveira; Lago, 2021, p. 86, our translation).

Núñez’s (2021) proposal, located in the field of Guarani anticolonial cosmology to tension gender colonialities, proves useful to also question monospeciesism. The emancipatory character of this proposal consists in the affirmation of the radical right each being has to exercise life. Thus, this principle is the basis for health policies that do not imply the neglect of any living being or the environments where they are inserted. Therefore, the forest principle, in addition to being elaborated in the current Brazilian context, composing the Guarani indigenous cosmogony, constitutes “an important ally to other anti-colonial struggles, in connection with the fight against capitalism, sexism, racism and ecocide” (Núñez; Oliveira; Lago, 2021, p. 86).

The forest principle dialogues, in our view, with what Antônio Bispo Santos (2015) names as the principle of confluence, present in the ways of life of quilombos in Brazil. The confluence is part of the polytheistic worldview that defends the relationship of respectful coexistence between vital elements, considering nature, human, and non-human (Santos, 2015). Both principles fall within the scope of counter-colonial efforts that make up the trajectory of indigenous peoples, quilombolas, peasants, and popular classes, such as the Brazilian peripheries. Regarding counter-colonization, Santos (2015, p. 48) points out that it is about “all the processes of resistance and struggle in defense of the territories of the peoples … the symbols, meanings and ways of life practiced in these territories (our translation)”. The author adds that these worldviews are present in everyday life and are part of the organizational process of collectivity of these peoples.

As pointed out by Núñez (2022, p. 54), “when we are not networked, we get sick, something that life in cities and its individualistic rhythm compels at all times (our translation)”. These networks are usually thought of within the restricted scope of humans, ignoring that human existence is inscribed in the world through multiple relationships with other living beings. Based on the ideas discussed so far, we can ask ourselves: how can these principles - forest and confluence - add to the decolonial perspective of One Health in Peripheries?

Even if an exhaustive answer to this question is not possible within the limits of this text, the very reflections we take here as guides seem to open the way. As stated:

The birds, the wind, ladybugs, rivers, the land also count as a support network, health, charm and affection […] Reforestation here matters as a healing process […] also of our imaginary […] to cultivate, artisanally in our collective singularities, means of relations not mediated by property, control, hierarchy”. (Núñez, 2022, p. 58, our translation)

The OHP-YA project presents itself as a favorable scenario to put into practice the reforestation of our imaginations around health. This is because the implementation of this project enables the collective exchange of knowledge that has as its end, among other things, the criticism of the political and social processes that marginalize the favelas, aiming at the construction of long-term public health policies.

Regarding the involvement of quality relationships between species as a condition for the production of healthy existences, some considerations are worth considering that, for now, open more questions than they propose answers. If it is in this multispecies web that health has ample possibilities to be cultivated and collectively acted upon, what this premise seems to indicate is the need to pay attention to the ways in which colonialism and its mechanisms of reproduction capture multispecies diversity.

This capture highlights, on the one hand, the insistence on the primacy of the human as the only intelligible subject in hegemonic political grammars that establish who can be cared for or become a central figure in the portraits of the Brazilian family. On the other hand, to paraphrase Santos (2015), the attempts to symbolically annihilate the polytheistic worldviews of marginalized peoples are remarkable. These worldviews involve the elaboration of knowledge that organizes the various forms of life and community resistance, in which the intrinsic relationship with elements of nature is fundamental. Faced with attempts at symbolic annihilation, resistance involves the desubjugation of these knowledges.

One Health of Peripheries, from the multispecies perspective and inspired by the dialogues previously brought, also considers the agency as a process that is built collectively, based on the vulnerability and power implied in multispecies relationships. As a result, we consider health in the peripheries as an articulation based on the alliances between different forms of life. One Health of Peripheries implies a gesture attentive to the way multiple species walk together, to the infrastructures that make life possible in confluence relationships, considering the various supports that are created in the face of state policies of precariousness of these lives. There are, in this understanding of health, important feminist inspirations arising from the work of Judith Butler (2006) and some of her interlocutors, such as Espinosa, whose Ethics, according to the author, defends the anti-individualist understanding of life, not least because “according to Espinosa, the conatus (the effort that each thing makes to persevere in its being) is increased or decreased due to encounters with others” (Oliveira, 2017, p. 124). It is up to us to make an ethical commitment to continue observing how colonial regimes obstruct these encounters.

Policies of purification and precariousness: the others of favela São Remo

The disregard of the territories and what they mean for their inhabitants compromise the viability of health policies and reinforce marginalization. In the OHP-YA project, adolescents contribute to the understanding of territories based on their experiences. In working groups via WhatsApp and weekly meetings, OHP-YA reflected on these experiences amid dialogues with various actors that contrast, affirm and expand the meanings of the São Remo and Serra Pelada favelas.

In this section, we bring as a cutout the border category present in the descriptions of the favela São Remo given by its OHP-YA. We are inspired by the work of feminist Gloria Anzaldúa (2005) on borders, understanding them as political fictions that not only demarcate the geographical boundaries of a territory, but involve socially established recognition milestones. Borders define possibilities of existing and circulating in certain spaces, policing processes of these spaces and symbolic and political exiles. Even when borders are not directly instituted to separate humans from other animals, the marginalization of certain human groups has repercussions on the multispecies collectives in which they participate, since the ways of life imposed on humans determine the relationships of their collectives (Baquero, 2021a).

The procedure we use to produce this critical reflection is recursive problematization (Fernández, 2007), consisting of an elucidative work of narratives. Ana María Fernández (2007, p. 105) states that it is about “making visible and enunciated the crystallizations of meaning a collective builds” (our translation). For this, a set of operations is carried out with the textual material, such as denaturalization, deconstruction and genealogical tracking, widely described in his work (Fernández, 2007).

One of the initial activities carried out by the OHP-YA was the description of São Remo. All agents referred to the location and geographical borders, indicating avenues and the 16th Military Police Battalion, but omitting USP. The identification of a military institution and the absence of the university in its narratives opens ways to problematize both the way certain figures of alterity - which we find here as the bodies of the periphery - find possibilities to inhabit public spaces, such as the double condition of proximity/distance of USP.

The absence of USP in the narratives of adolescents who live in a favela separated from it by a wall, makes us think of such a condition as an effect of the biopolitics of public order, in the terms that this notion has been debated by Pérez Navarro (2021). The author has mobilized this theoretical apparatus within the framework of gender and sexuality policies and here we consider it useful to problematize this game of presence/absence, which causes bodies from the periphery not to perceive themselves as part of a public space such as the university city. What could that be pointing us to?

Since USP is a public institution, it is not exempt from border regulation processes based on policing social markers such as “race” and class, which condition an unequal distribution of access to public space. This process of regulation is mobilized through an ideological construction of public order, in which the surveillance of cultural borders implies the exclusion of certain bodies and practices from the public space as a way of producing an illusion of internal homogeneity (Pérez Navarro, 2021).

According to testimonies collected in the research by Albejante (2015), until the mid-1990s, USP was regularly occupied by people from São Remo, especially children and adolescents who found, in the squares and other spaces of the university city, leisure options. However, according to the researcher:

There were some problems with the university’s infrastructure. Also, if an accident happened to anyone who was on campus, the legal responsibility would lie with the university. Therefore, USP decided to restrict the access of the entire population of São Paulo to the campus, building a concrete wall. (Albejante, 2015, p. 43, our translation)

In an interview conducted in the aforementioned research, a resident reports his impressions about the wall, associating it with the death of an adolescent from São Remo in the Raia of USP (a water body for rowing). The testimonies collected in the aforementioned research show the negative impact of the wall, a symbol of the exclusion of public spaces suffered by the residents of the peripheries (Albejante, 2015).

In our perspective, this “absence” of USP in the narratives of the OHP-YA signals a process of expulsion under the mantle of institutional security policy, which permeates USP’s relationship with the people who live in the São Remo favela. Achille Mbembe (2018) reflects widely on the ways in which the relationship with this Other is managed, whose presence is perceived as an attack, danger or threat to one’s own existence, to the security of a territory. For this argument, it is worth thinking here that the construction of this wall, as a policy that aimed to “legally protect USP from possible legal implications and damage to infrastructure”, operates as a biopolitics of public order, in which “the production of what we call public space depends on the prior definition of what counts, and what does not count, as a body fit for cohabitation” (Pérez Navarro, 2021, p. 332).

Who is this Other, anyway? How do these peripheral bodies - read thus on the basis of a matrix of racial and class intelligibility - disturb this public order? Bodies that, as Grada Kilomba (2019) states, are always read as “being out of place”, in the name of a public order that needs to be protected. It is important to understand the phenomenon analyzed, locating the historical processes of marginalization production via racism and classism that characterize the Brazilian State, specifically with regard to favelas.

As the work of Marielle Franco (2018) showed - focusing on the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, but which we can take as input for the analysis we propose - the adoption of security strategies represent a mark of the Brazilian State in promoting policies of punishment of poor and racialized people who inhabit the territories of the favelas. The rhetoric of “social insecurity” that defines favelas as “dangerous” and/or territories where “criminals live” operates as an ideological instrument to establish policies aimed at repression and control of their populations. These issues reveal a city project in dispute (Franco, 2018).

Those who live in the favela and the favela itself, while stereotypes of the criminal and the den of bandits, are targets in this dispute. The collectives of mothers, grandmothers, children, workers, companion animals, urban fauna, gardens and squares and other actors are marginalized by the homogenizing figure of public enemy and the dismal space where he hides. With only enemies, the wall does nothing but protect public property. However, when crossing borders and entering favelas, the collective multiplicity and effects of the wall are revealed. In the first meetings with OHP-YA, when placing visits to USP as part of the planned activities, one of the adolescents reacted with apprehension because she felt that she did not have clothes of the level required to enter an institution of this size. Without being criminals, these OHP-YA, together with thousands of residents of São Remo, perceive the wall as an obstacle to their belonging to the university community. USP is present as an inaccessible place, absent as a reference from the place where they live.

The relationship between the University City and São Remo is not only through the wall. There are efforts to make USP more inclusive and integrated with its neighborhood. However, the wall and the borders are still present and the work of OHP-YA helps to problematize them. Although the purpose of this article is not to reveal the borders present in all the agendas worked with the OHP-YA, it should be noted that their statements show them when referring to other relations with the State and even to situations that they identify since the emergence of the community in which they currently live: “at that time many battles were fought against the government to obtain their rights [regarding residents of the time]. Water, energy, this thing is, like, today, yet this battle was not concluded because we, like seven, eight o’clock at night we are... not having water in the taps [...] sometimes the neighbors fill bottles” (OHP-YA of São Remo, our translation).

The urban peripheries are territories historically neglected by the State and the agencies that take place in them are strategic in the identification, denunciation and deconstruction of marginalizing apparatuses. Health policies cannot assume that something as elemental as access to water is a guaranteed and uniquely human need. In the peripheries live multispecies collectives and this collective life gets sick when it is precarious.

One of the most striking portraits was the phrase of one of the OHP-YA, a black girl who said “she didn’t even have clothes to go to USP”. If a black girl, living in a periphery, believes she does not have clothes to go to USP, how could she even dream and imagine herself studying and being part of this institution? It should be remembered that USP was the last of the universities to adhere to the implementation of Affirmative Action Policies through quotas for access to undergraduate courses in public universities, a process that began in 2002 (Louis, 2021). As stated by Jota Mombasa (2021), it is through the control of the transit of people of African descent that the modern version of the Brazilian colonial project materializes, ensuring the safety of white elites in contrast to the policy of demonization of black and impoverished communities.

Final considerations

The reflection of this study involves issues such as alterities, borders and assemblages of multispecies collectives marginalized by the colonial regimes still prevailing in Brazil, whose effects become clear in territories such as the favela São Remo, the territory of our analysis. In the process of listening to narratives of adolescents who live there, we come across some portraits that go beyond São Remo itself, showing the grammars of colonial domination in a Brazilian manner.

The tentacles of this colonial project affect not only racialized populations and favelas, but other alterities that coexist in them, as companion animals that, even occupying the status of relatives in the family configurations of São Remo, are evaluated by the compass of the human as self-reference in hegemonic discourses. The imposition of elitist and humanizing cultural matrices on the reality of favelas such as São Remo operates as a form of cultural genocide and denies the agency of others living in the co-constitution of multispecies relations. If the people of San Remo practice counter-hegemonic ways of relating to animals, why would this have to be subjected to humanizing sanitation? As one of the OHP-YA assured in one of the activities carried out, “I did not choose to have a dog, I chose to be well accompanied” (our translation). The decolonial and feminist contributions, as well as those of the OHP-YA, allowed us to work two of the seven actions to promote SUP (Baquero; Fernández; Aguilar, 2021) - the deconstruction of marginalizing apparatuses and the enrichment of the ecology of knowledge - to critically welcome the relationships of confluence between species.

Precisely, one of Haraway’s (2021) bets on the Manifesto of companion species is to think: how could an ethics and a policy committed to the flourishing of significant otherness be learned if we took seriously the relationships between dogs and humans? We share this same concern - not only in relation to dogs - every time we understand One Health of Peripheries as a process that involves experiences, understandings and praxis articulated by multispecies collectives, which tension colonial logics and aim to build forms of organization based on confluence, reforestation. These relationships emerge as possible ways to build territories of health and resistance.

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• 1
  We thank the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel - Brazil (capes) - Financing Code 001. We also thank the Tide Setubal Foundation for funding the grants of One Health of Peripheries Young Agents.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  31 July 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  24 June 2022
• Reviewed
  24 June 2022
• Accepted
  22 Aug 2022