Social Memory and Black Resistance: Black Women and Neighborhood Struggles in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

In Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, the 1990s initiated the rapid transformation of the urban center into profit-making cultural sites for leisure tourism. Forcing the removal of traditionally black communities in the area, this process unveils the relationship between urban “redevelopment” and “renewal” and racial and class spatial segregation. In this article, I discuss the specific experiences of Gamboa de Baixo, a black coastal community in the center of Salvador, and its political movement against urban renewal programs. The government’s displacement of nearby communities through “slum upgrading” programs during the mid-1990’s galvanized the women in Gamboa de Baixo. These women mobilized their community to contest the city’s plans to transform their community into an historical site and tourist attraction after removing its inhabitants. Despite the city’s efforts, the population of Gamboa de Baixo remains intact as a community and continues to fight against government officials’ attempts to remove and relocate them to the periphery of Salvador. The case of the Gamboa de Baixo neighborhood reveals one aspect of institutional racism in Brazil and the formation of an anti-black racism resistance movement to contest it.