From the pier to the port

The racialization intrinsic to the development and the ordination and sanitization practices of the Porto Maravilha Project

Abstract

This article aims to explore the way in which “race” is reproduced in the interstices of development from the identification of everyday practices that have legitimized the operations of power to hierarchize and depreciate racialized groups, societies and nations. The Porto Maravilha Project was chosen as the specific context of analysis, in order to locate certain reproduced racialization practices. At a methodological level, an analytical stance was adopted that re-centered the idea of race to investigate typical developmental processes. The analysis explored, first, the racialized construction intrinsic to the production and accumulation of capital in a broader historical perspective and another focused on the Rio de Janeiro port area. Then, the constitution and reproduction of practices of racialization in the context of the Porto Maravilha Project were located. It was concluded that development is not accidentally racialized, but does so in a historically pragmatic way and that the Porto Maravilha Project produced the dehumanization and combat of the autonomous public life of the local, black and poor population, and promoted the erasure and annihilation of traditional and cultural ways of life and the memory and history of marginalized groups through ordination and sanitization practices.