A rua não passa fome: gestão racializada da vida e a circulação em Volta Redonda (RJ)

Abstract

This research seeks to understand how assistance practices aimed at feeding, sheltering, referring, and rehabilitating homeless people simultaneously produce care, control, racial hierarchies, and patterns of permanence and circulation within the city. I investigate how hunger is managed on the streets of Volta Redonda, a municipality in the southern region of Rio de Janeiro, through the assistance networks that organize routes, define stopping points, create bonds, demand moral performances, and participate in the daily management of racialized bodies. In this process, two analytical categories constructed in the field take center stage: the racialized grammar of gratitude, which names the expectations of recognition, merit, and deference directed at those who receive food; and the unfolding, understood as a practical strategy through which people living on the streets negotiate access, refusals, displacements, and possible forms of survival. The analysis is based on an ethnography conducted between 2020 and 2024, spanning the Covid-19 pandemic, built upon monitoring the Street Clinic, the emergency shelter, engagement with the Pop Center, analysis of interactions in a WhatsApp group dedicated to organizing food distribution, outings with charitable groups, conversations with people experiencing homelessness, and visits to a Therapeutic Community. Social cartography and attention to movements, stops, schedules, and distribution points guide the interpretation of the city and the circuits of survival. In a Volta Redonda marked by the memory of coffee, slavery, the railroad, the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional, and the image of a planned, clean, and developed city, the presence of people living on the streets reveals tensions between progress, charity, urban order, abandonment, and control. The thesis argues that food sustains life, but it also governs: state and charitable assistance keeps bodies alive on the brink of survival, without necessarily transforming them into subjects fully recognized by rights.