Both irreverence and the carnavalesque were on display this week in one of São Paulo’s leafiest, loveliest, and wealthiest old residential bairros: Higienopólis.
Sprawling between the city’s bustling Centro and Consolação, whose main thoroughfare is the iconic Avenida Paulista, Higienópolis came into being during the 1890s. Relative to the already crowded Centro, the elevated heights of this region offered a “hygienic” alternative to the frequent floods and epidemics that put an increasing damper on life in the city’s downtown. By 1900, Sampa’s most moneyed families were flocking to “Higienópolis” en masse where they constructed opulent mansions. Many of their descendants have never left.
Concerned about increased traffic, noise, and the arrival of undesirables, a group of local residents protested the implantation of the planned Avenida Angélica station.Although only a few of Higienópolis’ lavish residences remain, many strikingly streamlined mid-century deco and modernist apartment buildings are still standing, and the neighborhood itself remains one of São Paulo’s most traditional and wealthiest residential enclaves. Hence the small uproar that greeted the announcement that a new station for the new (and urgently needed) Orange Metrô line was going to be constructed in the heart of the neighborhood.
Concerned about increased traffic, noise, and the arrival of undesirables, a group of local residents protested the implantation of the planned Avenida Angélica station. However, all hell broke loose when one concerned citizens confessed to the Folha de São Paulo that the new stop would be a magnet for “drogados, mendigos, gente diferenciada…” (“drug addicts, bums, a ‘differentiated’ crowd…”).
The thinly veiled, daintily euphemistic “diferenciada” was hardly lost on the millions who read the city’s largest paper, the same millions who spend hours daily battling insane traffic jams and stuffing themselves like sardines into the rush-hour Metrô cars that zip up and down the woefully inadequate quintet of existing subway lines. Overripe for parody, the term “gente diferenciada” spread like wildfire on the Internet and became a rallying cry as well as a catalyst for an inspired event that took place on Saturday, May 14, in the heart of Higienópolis, near the site for the planned Metrô station.
Billed as a “pro-Metrô” protest, “O Churrasco de Gente Diferenciada” (“The Barbecue of the Differentiated”) reunited hundreds of “differentiated” Paulistanos, among them Higienópolis residents sympathetic to the cause. Although 50,000 supporters had confirmed their presence via Facebook – at the last minute, fearing a mob scene, the organizers tried to cancel the event – an estimated 700 people showed up.
Aside from signs and banners, they came bearing all the basic necessities of a “popular” barbecue: Styrofoam coolers filled with beer and cheap brands of soda pop; portable barbecues on which to roast skewers of meat (one of which was a subway turnstile), and drums on which to pound out sambas and pagodes whose lyrics were often customized to the cause.
Even though the newly baptized “Churrasqueiros” (Barbecuers) didn’t win the day – the São Paulo government has decided to abandon the proposed Avenida Angélica site “due to technical reasons” – they certainly had their say. They also had a hell of a good time. Like most Brazilian protests, this one ended up turning into a street Carnaval that continued all afternoon and into the early evening.
