I met Zuenir Ventura in 1993, inVigário GeralThe community was still mourning the massacre that had killed 21 residents. That Sunday, we were there with the AfroReggae Cultural Group to carry out an activity that lasted all day. There were children, music, and the effort to build, alongside the residents, a space for coexistence amidst the pain. This was the early days of AfroReggae, and I was part of that organization.
I was also part of the Center for the Articulation of Marginalized Populations, the CEAP, where I worked on articulating Black youth. With us were the late Jorge Damião, another CEAP director, José Júnior, Teco Rastafari, Mônica, Arcélio Farias, Marcelo Yuka, and many other companions on that journey. José Júnior and Teco Rastafari were among the founders of AfroReggae and remain linked to its direction. Marcelo Yuka, also late, would be known as one of the creators and founders of the band O Rappa. At that time, I was Big Richard, a young hip-hop artist who found in culture a way of organization and struggle.Zuenir was also there.It was like this, sharing a day of work in Vigário Geral, that our stories crossed.
At the end of the activity, the local command of the Military Police decided to interrupt the event. Until then, everything had been happening peacefully. The police entered the community and treated us as suspects, as if the presence of Black youth organizing culture and interacting with the residents was enough to associate us with the crime. There were shots, repression, and fear. We left there with the help of residents who, despite being exposed to violence, protected us.
I have a very clear memory of that contrast. During the day, we had seen what a community was capable of doing for its children and for its collective life. At nightfall, we saw how a cultural action could be treated as a threat. For us, Black youth, that approach had a familiar meaning: suspicion arrived before any question.
I wrote about the incident in the newspaper.AfroReggae NewsText: A newspaper, published by the group. The Rio de Janeiro press also reported the incident. Later, Zuenir depicted it inCity torn apartThe book I consider a classic. On the pages of the work, he also recordedMy work with the Black YouthAnd in the hip-hop scene during that time. To hear that experience recounted by someone who had been there with us had a special weight. Zuenir knew the scene, the people, and the work we were trying to build.
The title of your book continued to haunt me. The torn city lay before us that Sunday: a city where the entry of a cultural group into a favela could arouse police suspicion, while residents had to protect those who had come to be with them. The massacre had already shown, in the cruellest way, the unequal value attributed to lives in Rio de Janeiro. What we experienced afterward exposed another aspect of the same logic, present even on a day dedicated to music and children.
Zuenir's death on September 22nd brings me back to that encounter. I remember the reporter who went to Vigário Geral and closely followed its residents. I also remember the man with whom I have developed a relationship of affection since then. Every time we met, there was recognition of having shared a difficult moment and preserving a common memory.
This September, just before receiving the news of his departure, I was back in Rio de Janeiro. It was my birthday month. I now live in Salvador, a city that also knows violence and deep inequality marks. I return to Rio whenever I can, but this time, the return to Rio Comprido, my hometown, hit me in a particularly personal way. I walked through places that are part of my history and felt that the city we used to call "departure" is now fractured, bleeding openly.
I do not write this as someone amazed by a reality I just discovered. I know Rio, its powers and its wounds. Perhaps it was precisely because I know it that the shock was so strong. Time has passed, many things have changed in my life and in the lives of those companions from 1993, but certain scenes remain too familiar. The distance between the city presented to the world and that lived by its residents is still measured in the right to move around, to raise children, to make culture, and to return home.
:: Would you like to receive news from Brasil de Fato RJ on your WhatsApp? ::
Today, I sign as Richard Santos. I am a professor at the Federal University of Southern Bahia, I have a post-doctoral degree, I participate in the monitoring committee of the decisions of the 9th Pan-African Congress linked to the African Union, and at this moment, I hold the position of Chief of Staff of the Secretariat for the Promotion of Racial Equality and Traditional Peoples and Communities of Bahia, Sepromi. But Big Richard has never stopped accompanying me. He is present in the way I listen to young people, in my understanding of the political power of hip-hop, and in my recognition, in every territory, of people creating paths where many only see problems.
It is also because I carry this history that I continue to feel the divided city. Today, we might call the social and political technology that produces these fractures, distributes protection unequally, and teaches part of the population to live with the pain of the other side, a "divided country." On the eve of another election, this experience cannot be reduced to a word battle. It concerns the concrete living conditions and the decisions we make about Brazil's future.
I write to thank Zuenir for this companionship and for helping to record a history that belongs, above all, to the residents of Vigário Geral. I also write because remembering that Sunday is remembering the work of a generation that responded to violence with organization, culture, and presence. Many of the companions who were there have already left. Their contribution remains in the stories we tell and in the initiatives they helped create.
More than thirty years later, we still need to ask how the city has changed for black youth in its peripheries. This question crosses my memory of Zuenir Ventura and accompanied me on my recent return to Rio Comprido. As long as there are families forced to fear police violence and young people whose cultural participation is received with suspicion, Vigário Geral will continue asking for our attention.
I bid farewell to Zuenir with sadness and affection. It was in Vigário Geral that I met him. It is from there that the strongest memory of him comes to me today: present, attentive, sharing with us a day that did not end when we left the community. When I recall that Sunday, I also remember the commitment we made there. The Big Richard of 1993 and Richard Santos of today continue to ask the same question: what city, and what country, are we willing to build together?
*Richard Santos is a writer, researcher, lecturer, and extensionist at the Federal University of Southern Bahia (UFSB), where he serves as a professor in the Graduate Programs in Teaching and Ethnic-Racial Relations and in State and Society. He has a Post-Doctoral in Culture and Society from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of Brasília (UnB), and a Master's in Communication from the Catholic University of Brasília. He coordinates the Research Group on Contemporary Black Thought. Regional Director for the Northeast of the Brazilian Society for Interdisciplinar Communication Studies (Intercom). Author of the book "Majority Minority: A Device of Racial Identity."
**This is an opinion piece and may not necessarily represent the editorial stance of Brasil do Fato.This is not a news article and does not reflect the official position of Brasil do Fato..