Presentation given by Rosemeire Barboza da Silva, University of Coimbra, Portugal at a FEANTSA Research Conference on "Rethinking Homelessness Policies", Lisbon, Portugal, 2007

1. Conference: “Rethinking homelessness policies”
Feantsa and Centro de Estudos para a Intervenção Social
September, 28 — Lisbon
The process of collective and political organization of the homelessness
in Brazil: notes for a thorough debate in public policies1
Our paper will try to confront and to analyze such dimensions from a diverse and interdisciplinary
perspective, questioning the historical evolution of the homeless in Brazil. From a population
perceived in the 90s mainly from an individualist and charity point of view, we go as shown by
empirical observation to a population able of collective organization, a population whose rows are
filled with an increasing number of long term unemployed who see in the collective organization
some ways of performing and being visible in the public space, as shown in the case of social
movements such as the MNPR.
In this direction, this coming out of the homeless population, as a collective one "from the bottom"
ends by imposing new perspectives and new forms to conceive democracy, now reviewed and
extended in its participation forms.
Science therefore also assumes a different role, being understood much more in a perspective of
citizen science or of the situated knowledges, that entails involving citizens in its debates and
extending the active participation as well as the commitment of these citizens in the construction of
a public and engaged science that favours the diversity of knowledge and the gradual construction
of a society more equitable and fair.
Keywords: Homeless, Public Policies, citizen science and social movements.
1 Rosemeire Barboza da Silva is a student in the PhD Program in Governance, Knowledge and Innovation of
the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra and a scholarship from the International Fellowships
Program of the Ford Foundation. E-mail for contact: rose.bs@uol.com.br
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2. The public power gives us “assistencialism” and
clientelism. “I give you a place in the shelter and you
keep quiet”. We want dignity and respect for the
homeless, which is a right. This population contributes in
paying the taxes of the city each time they buy a simple
sweet or a piece of bread.
Anderson Lopes
Recently, from year 2000, we perceived movements that question, by its nature
eminently political, what has been produced until then, scientifically and in the fields of
public policies, on the impossibility of organizing the population living in the street in
Brazil. The «catadores» of materials you recycle (part of the population living in the street,
and that do not appear in the above presented definitions, for being characterized
essentially in relation to the centrality of the work) suggest for the entities that work with
the adult population in street situation and organize a national meeting, in the month of
June of 2001. Two encampments of the “Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST)”
initiate an experience known as “urban-rural” and promote what is known in São Paulo as
the program “From the street to the land”, where the street population are the main focus.
Also in São Paulo, the experience of the Councils and the Forums and the election of
representatives of the population living in the street for the programs of Participative
Budget in the capital, São Paulo, among other actions, give notice of an organization that
consolidates itself more and more in initiatives anti-hegemonic and emancipatory, in a fight
against oppression, preconception and discrimination.
Two of these initiatives seem to be narrowly related to the emancipatory possibility
of who are or live in the streets. The first one is the creation, in September of 2003, of a
Forum of University Students about the homelessness (that will become in 2004 the
“Forum of Discuss about the homelessness of the city of São Paulo”); The second,
retaking and magnifying, in 2004, the Forum of the Homelessness, that in 2005 will
originate the Movement of the Homeless of the city of São Paulo, undertaken by the
population themselves and currently known as Movement of Fight in Defence of the
Rights of Homeless (MNPR in portuguese).
In 2004, few months before the Day of Fight of the Homelessness, old and current
participants of the Forum, who also frequent the meetings of the Forum of Discuss,
articulated themselves and demanded the independent organization of this date. The
entities until then responsible for the formatting of the claims stands against this request,
and, in that year, the non-participation of the homeless in the Day of Fight does not
demonstrate that a divide appeared in the relation assistance/population and that the
autonomy and protagonism on the part of this population it is a burning issue.
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3. The tone of the claims also diverge: while the entities fight for programs of
provisory housings, the population fights for proper housing; while the entities fight for
more vacancies in shelters, the population fights for access to education. And the
exaggeration follows, not only in demanding speeches anymore: we witness an increase in
the questioning and the claim for better services given by the entities as well as the
transparency, the accountability and the governance of the public power that is
characterised by a logic of social control, a logic that drives to keeping this population on
the sidelines.
Still in 2004, a slaughter perpetrated against the population that slept in the streets,
with great international repercussion, mobilizes more than two thousand people in a walk
through in the city centre of São Paulo. The murders had not only shocked the society, as
they seem to have been one of the crucial points for the post organization of the
population. The speech of the heterogeneity of the street, that always was between the
question of the equality and the difference - who is the homeless? Who is the unemployed?
Deepens itself, and the population try to change the nature of its claims: public policies,
yes; but what is the content of these policies? How are they organized? Social recognition is
demanded and as people penetrates in hegemonic spaces, such as the public power. They
elect representatives of the population to a council, named by the government “Council for
the monitoring of the Services that act with the Population leaving in the Street”.
In our opinion, these victories and these possibilities to perforate the hegemonic
system act positively in the organization of the population, that, in a creative and
independent form, commemorates in December, in the Praça da Sé (known as the stage of
some popular mobilizations in São Paulo), a Christmas with shows, music, theatre, sales of
artefacts, etc. In this day, the traditional food distribution and donations were substituted
by the opened microphone, through which some exposed blatantly the reality of the
streets, the inefficiency of the public policies and the contradictions of the economic
system.
Inaugurating the year of 2005, one more time the population joins together around
common problematic. The heterogeneity, that at some moments served to strengthen a
negative identity, a will of remaining unidentified, is respected, but is questioned: until
which point are we different? If, on one side, the affirmation of equality, with universalistic
principles, can strengthen and lead “to the discharacterisation and negation of the
identities, the cultures and the differentiated historical experiences, especially to the refusal
of the collective recognition” (SANTOS, 2003:63), on the other hand, the movement of
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4. the population strengthens the idea of thinking about oneself by means of a group to
which we belong and conjugates itself with the idea that is possible for a social movement
to stem from the proper population.
In May of 2005, new moment: the population, that already ripened the idea by
means of some representatives, mobilizes more than 200 people for a voting of the
commission agents (three bearers and three substitutes) to the Council for the Monitoring
and divulges the formation of a social movement of the homeless that, with penetration in
instances of the public power, NGOs, cooperatives and university, will fight for the rights
of the population.
From then on, the MNPR has participated in debates and conferences, in diverse
places of Brazil and even in international commissions. This multifaceted character of the
movement is emphasized by Anderson Lopes, in the same interview mentioned above:
“Today the street population is even participating in the Conference of the
Cities, which was not designed for the people of the street but for other
movements, the so-called social movements. But we see that who makes the
city is the one who lives in the city and who uses the city is also the people
of the street, they live in the city, they use the streets of the city, they use the
marquees of the city and plus it to understand that city and to help to inside
make the public policies of that city. The street population knows how
much the situation is difficult when while they are sleeping there is a car
passing to shed some water on them on of it or when the banks places
chuveirinho to shed water on them or when the police is ostensive, then it
has that to participate in public policies.”
This emergency of the citizen as social movement also discloses the access and the
conquest to the recognition that the creative appropriation of the nomination allowed
throughout the years, acting and contradicting the obstacles: “Different forms of
oppression or domination generate forms of resistance, mobilization, collective subjectivity
and also distinct identity [...]In these resistances and their articulation global / local reside
the impulse of the anti-hegemonic globalization” (SANTOS, 2003:61).
In this globalization against an established order and in search of identities that can
be alternated, it is possible even though, in the fluidity of the flexible identities, to call
oneself former-inhabitant of the street, to have domicile, but to also continue fighting, as
Sebastião Nicomedes, member of the National Commission of articulation of the MNPR,
says in an interview,: “Much people were in the street, obtained job, left and forgot
everything. I am more collective, I do not want to leave alone. Some that lives in the street
do not know anymore who they are, they do not know anymore that they are people, they
are even ashamed of raising the eyes.”
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5. Thus the MNPR undertakes its search of identity in the border of the partial
connections that they establish with the diverse actors of the public arena. The population
in street situation, that now assumes the identity of social movement, imagines itself “at the
same time as a social conflict and a cultural project” (TOURAINE, 2002:254). The subject
that speaks, from the street, identifies himself with who is in the street; even putting in the
Other, the preconceptions of the social imaginary, perceive himself as the fruit of a process
of who was in the streets and is not anymore: “The Subjects constructs himself
simultaneously by the fight against the bodies and by the respect of the other as subject; the
social movement is the class action of defence of the citizen against the power of the
merchandise, the corporation and the State. Without this change, the citizen runs the risk
of dissolving in the individuality” (TOURAINE, 2002:302).
We believe that, as emergency, social movement and securing themselves on the
flexibility of its identities, the street population is walking for the construction of a future
that, if it appears as agonistic and contradictory, also itself as full of possibilities.
Notes for the debate in the construction of Politics: The engaged
involvement of the researcher
We saw throughout the first pages that our discussion, based on an existential,
cognitive, affective and political experience with the homeless of São Paulo and that also
goes through years of activism next to this collective one, is a way undertaken and
mediated by the perspective of the “situated knowledge” ” (from the place from which we
speak), of the “partial connections” (because any knowledge only makes sense when
recreated and reinvented, and the connections with such collectives are never total, our
involvement, even when we are part of the field, is always a flexible involvement) and of a
“incarnate objectivity”.
In this way, sharing with the readers an experience means to place it in the public
space, even in a partial and incomplete way, so it can be reformulated and recreated,
expanded and creatively incorporated to the necessities of each one of the citizens or if the
collective that access this experience, always starting from an objectivity embodied (cf.
HARAWAY, 1991) - or, in other words, from what is considered as politically excellent.
Going from this perspective, the knowledge production is understood as a
collective and political action, because the starting point is “we”: that “we” constructed and
reinvented in the daily relations. Hence our perspective, for already having in itself a
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6. political positioning explicit and marked, differentiates our epistemological proposal, in
accord with what is proposed by Donna Haraway in the text “situated Knowledge” (1991):
“to speak from a place is clearly a proposal of affective involvement,
political and cognitive that redimensionate the knowledge proposal: it is
known from what it is lived deeply; e if constructs knowledge from what
witness. In these circumstances, we try “to produce not so much effects
of aloofness as effect of connection, incarnation and responsibility with
some other location imagined that we can already see and construct”
(HARAWAY, 1991:122).
Therefore, our objective, explicit since the beginning, is based in the idea of “not
speaking for the collective ones, but articulating with them” (cf. HARAWAY, 1991), being
this skeleton that supports and supplies the structure for a partial connection that allows us
to examine the proposal of flexible identities, in direction to a discussion that aims “to
contest the science that represents the other, reflects the other, gives him a voice; or else
not departing from semiotics politics of the articulation” (CEDEÑO, 2006:69).
When we speak about articulation, we have the perspective that “it is always a non-
innocent, challengeable practice. The companions do not establish themselves once and for
all. Here there is no ventriloquist. The articulation is a product and can fail” (HARAWAY,
1991:141). However, it can start again and rearticulate itself as many times as necessary. In
this way, it is in accordance with what Santos (1987) call a science of the emergent
paradigm - “the science of the emergent paradigm [...], being analogical, is also presumably
translator, that is, stimulates the concepts and theories locally developed to emigrate to
other cognitive places, in order to be used outside of their context of origin” (SANTOS,
1987:77) - and it attempts to place in this space of debate a co-construction carried through
with the population in street situation: by means of the experience, we understand that the
deficiencies and the low intensity of understanding of the phenomenon of the street that
the concepts on this population bring with them (cf. BARROS, 2004) do not act as
impeditive of the action, but, many times and in different spaces, they are used alternatively
as a strategy of fight and resistance.
The collective subjects the emergency of which we witnessed appear together with
their negotiated and flexible identities, in the genesis of collectives articulated and full of
potentialities. Our objective, as we write down regarding the partial connections and the
reflectivity, is
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7. to struggle to see differently, not to fit in the conventional, to support
the reinforcement of people or groupings that do “not fit”, generating
what Haraway calls `others inadequate/inadequately when practising and
to potentialyzing new forms of subversion (CEDEÑO, 2006:67).
The subversion brought about by a critical theory that allows to identify in the
citizen its “future trends” (cf. SANTOS, 2002), beyond allowing to diffract “meanings
embodied in daily actions” (CEDEÑO, 2006:66), also provide a theoretical-methodological
skeleton inventive and creative, in which it is possible not only to use our body, our
sensations and experiences, in order to understand them as situated knowledge, but also to
question the concepts to see their meanings reformulated.
E as to work the participation of the street population, in view of its
emancipation? The contribution of the “translation of the practical ones”
But which are the notice of organization and articulation that this movement
presents, how are they configured? For Melucci (2001: 33), “a social movement is not the
reply to a crisis, but the expression of a conflict”. We perceive in its expressions possible
forms to remove from invisibility (even when this invisibility can be an advantage) the
population that lives in the streets. This invisibility is part of the flexible identities and of
the border of who is/lives in the street: who is there, mistaken many times for the urban
landscape and, many times, hastily, can see without being seen (cf. BHABHA, 2005) and,
therefore, can develop forms and possibilities of answers that we, as sheltered people,
cannot understand without an adequate translation of the practices of these collectives.
For Santos (2002: 262), “the translation is the procedure that allows to create
reciprocal intelligibility between the experiences of the world, available ones as much the as
the possible ones […] this is about a procedure that does not attribute to any set of
experiences neither the statute of exclusive totality nor the statute of homogeneous part”.
In this way, it is possible to glimpse in the translation work a possible way, as much for the
understanding of the possibility of interchangeable and inserted identities, proposals for the
flexible identities, as to look at the experiences of the world, by means of the cut and of the
clipping: “The experiences of the world are seen at different moments of the translation
work as totalities or parts and as realities that do not get exhausted in these totalities or
parts” (SANTOS, 2002:262). In this in case, the translation work would be based in the
translation of the social practices of the movement emerging from the street: “When]
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8. impacting the practices [… the translation work aims at creating reciprocal intelligibility
between forms of organization and objectives of action” (SANTOS, 2002:265).
Being this work pragmatic in so far as it confers existence not only to the street
movement, but also searches in these practices specific tensions, we are conscientious that,
“when we speak about a social movement, we refer, generally, to a collective phenomenon
that presents itself with a certain external unity, but that in its interior, contains meanings,
forms of action, ways of organization very differentiated and that, frequently, invests an
important part of its energies to keep the differences united” (MELUCCI, 2001:29). In this
perspective, “the translation work aims at clarifying what unite and what separates the
different movements and the different practices in order to determine the possibilities and
the limits of the articulation or aggregation between them” (SANTOS, 2002:266).
The translation of the practices of the collectives of the street means believing that
“in due time we will demand the impossible in order to pull out of it what is possible.”
(Handsworth, apud BHABHA, 2005:220).
The M.NP.R for example, recently started to join efforts with historical fights for
habitation in the city centre of São Paulo, with the movement “without-ceiling” and
NGO’s that stand against the processes of gentrification. That is, even if those are one-
time initiatives, the process of translation of practices was already in March.
More recently the federal government also incorporated the activities of the Inter-
ministerial Group that deal with social issues and policies directed to the population living
in the street, leaderships and representatives of the M.N.P.R. Such a conquest can also
bring about a new way of articulation between the diverse social actors, the opening of the
dialogue and the possibility of a real form of emancipation route to a truly active
citizenship.
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