De-hygienization Clusivities / Clusividades de De-higienização: Urban Renewal and Parastatal Power in Vila Mimosa

This chapter looks at attempts to remake Rio to be like Global North cities during the period 1889–2020. It highlights local elites’ plans to whiten, Europeanize, and (later) Americanize a city that has remained obdurately nonwhite. Adopting the perspectives of major Carioca urbanists, the chapter unpacks the imported North American concept of gentrification in Carioca contexts, suggesting that the emic category of hygienization might better conceptualize the constant desire of the city’s elites to create a Paris of the tropics in the face of chronic undercapitalization and political resistance by varied sectors of the urban masses. The authors take the red-light district of the Mangue/Vila Mimosa as the empirical object of analysis. The Mangue still survives in today’s Vila Mimosa and is presently facing political and economic threats to its existence brought about by a new wave of land speculation and authoritarian municipal politics in the São Cristovão neighborhood.