I first met Monique at the Colegio de Michoacán, when she was doing fieldwork in Jalisco for her doctoral thesis. We shared interests in both Mexican land reform communities and political anthropology generally and continued to exchange ideas back in Europe. I felt privileged to be invited to be one of the examiners of her thesis in Wageningen, which was awarded a far-from-routine cum laude distinction. I reported to the committee that I judged her work equally outstanding for its depth of ethnographic enquiry and for its theoretical contributions. It reached a much wider audience than specialists on Mexico after being condensed into her book Power, Community, and the State. Here, however, I want to focus on some of Monique's later research, on the urban periphery of Recife, Brazil. By a happy coincidence, our mutual interests converged again in Brazil, where I was working on the urban periphery of Salvador, Bahia, in collaboration with Dr. Maria Gabriela Hita of the Federal University of Bahia; but it is not because of professional links or the deep personal affection that Monique inspired in all her friends that I want to discuss her Recife studies. It is because they confirm that she remains a “presence that does not end,” the wonderful title chosen for the online event paying homage to all her contributions that the Colegio de Michoacán organized in March 2021. Monique's research is highly relevant to the current conjuncture in Brazil, shaped by the 2016 “parliamentary” coup and subsequent election as president of Jair Bolsonaro, whose regime is now regularly accused of being genocidal as well as ecocidal. Since Bolsonaro's popularity is waning and the Supreme Court has drawn a line under the “lawfare” that blocked ex-president Lula of the Workers’ Party (PT) from standing against him in the 2018 election, the return of a more civilized government under Lula's leadership now seems a possibility. Yet for that very reason, Monique's critical analysis of the PT in power in Recife offers us vital lessons about the limitations such a government would need to transcend to eliminate the enduring structural foundations of social injustice.
Monique's ethnographic research in Recife focused on an urbanization project through which residents of an irregular settlement at the edge of the river were relocated to new houses in a settlement planned according to modernist principles. The PT local administration responsible for the project spoke a discourse of participatory democracy and the inclusion of the poor as citizens. An enduring structural legacy of Brazilian slavocracy is that poor citizens of the urban periphery suffer a double discrimination as a racialized class, whatever the actual color of their skin. Monique offered an exemplary analysis of the senses in which it was necessary to recognize that PT policy had been “neoliberalized” and of the consequences of that process. The “popular participation” offered by the project was not only relatively empty in terms of the kind of “voice” it gave poor black people, but its conformity with a neoliberal logic also produced perverse consequences. The PT administration insisted that participation should be direct, based on dialogue between individual officials and residents, rather than mediated by collective organizations and communal leaderships, supposedly to avoid the vices of traditional clientelism. However, Monique showed that the result of the process was to create deep affective links between residents and friendly officials willing to dialogue, which created new patronage relationships of a paternalistic kind.
The model of citizenship embedded in the political language of the state inculcated not only the neoliberal principle of individual self-responsibility but also the duty to behave in a “decent” way, that is, to conform to criteria imposed by the socially “progressive” middle class to which most PT officials belonged. Residents had to inhabit their urbanized environment in a “modern” and “orderly” way in terms of cleanliness and social habits. Monique's ethnography revealed fundamental differences in the conceptions of residents and officials even when they used the same words. Citizenship for the popular classes consisted in being treated with respect, free from discrimination and police violence, and in having access to consumption. At the same time, people maintained the idea that their new homes were a “gift” from President Lula and the PT mayor. They did not think in terms of a liberal citizenship model of “rights to adequate housing” but in terms of being “cared for” within the framework of affectionate relationships between patrons and clients.
In practice, the PT did little to change this way of seeing things. When the election season came, the same officials visited the houses of relocated residents wearing PT shirts to ask for reciprocity in the polls for Lula's “gift.” However, there were disputes between authorities and residents over what the latter saw as deficiencies in their new urbanized environment, including the small size of the houses and restrictions imposed on the use of space inside them for making a livelihood, not to mention the difficulties some encountered in paying their electricity and gas bills. The new settlement also did not improve residents’ own security from crime and violence, as promised by the PT. Its “civilizing” project, which maintained a “securitized” concept of poor communities as a threat to the inhabitants of the rest of the city, in fact produced the opposite.
Nevertheless, many residents did see advantages in their new situation and felt they had moved toward “fuller citizenship” according to their own criteria. Having a mailing address was one of the advances. One of the virtues of Monique's ethnographic work was that she always listened to people carefully to eliminate her own prejudices. She confessed, for example, that her preference for the natural environment of the original river, canalized in the new settlement, was not shared by its residents. She also sometimes ventured to argue with them on issues to deepen her understanding of the reasons behind their positions. Monique practiced engaged ethnography in accordance with her political commitment to social justice, but her methods safeguarded her from romanticizing portrayals of “subaltern resistance.” Constantly reflecting on her own ideological preconceptions, Monique was able to learn from subaltern actors, in accordance with Paulo Freire's recommendations to intellectuals, without ever losing “critical distance.”
Such an ethnographic practice makes it possible to identify different views within the studied population and better understand the internal misunderstandings, conflicts, and ambiguities in their postures. Grounded in her engaged ethnography, Monique could develop original perspectives on the power structures at stake in the social situations that she was studying, with very different results from analyses that offered simplistic visions of “docile subjects of neoliberal governmentality,” or of people passively imprisoned in clientelist networks. Monique always worked with a dynamic concept of the formation of the subjectivities of social actors. Using her conception of the diverse “force fields” shaping their forms of consciousness and being in the world, she could explain not only the apparent paradoxes of the present, but also transformations over time. As an ethnographer, she did what Gramsci recommended his communist militants do: understand the feelings of ordinary people. As a theorist, she was able to shed new light on the production of those feelings, in structural, processual, and explanatory terms.
Monique's work helps us understand why the question of Lula and the question of the PT are distinct questions. When Lula finally won the presidency in the 2002 election, it was not due to the support of the poor in northeastern Brazil but to the votes of the “progressive” middle class of the center and south. Poor northeasterners joined the PT ranks when Lula was reelected in 2006, and the northeast was the only region in Brazil to give the majority of its votes in 2018, almost 70 percent, to Fernando Haddad, Lula's anointed replacement. Throughout the world, however, large segments of the working classes have ceased to feel represented by neoliberalized social democratic parties that did not stop deindustrialization, precarianization, and rising inequality. The Brazilian left needs to reconnect with its popular bases and rethink its ways of doing politics. Lula is an extraordinary figure. A trade unionist born in poverty, he became a statesman enjoying international prestige. Even some center-right Brazilian politicians still supportive of neoliberal models now acknowledge publicly that Lula was leading a real national project, whereas Bolsonaro is unworthy of his office. Yet Monique's perspective on power from below gives us a way to understand how Brazil arrived at its current disastrous situation, since some poor people did vote for Bolsonaro and his allies, although many more expressed their disillusion with politics by casting null or blank votes. At the same time, we can draw inspiration from Monique to think about where Brazilian politics might take us in the future, should Lula return.