It felt like a tsunami: The racialization of Black people in Rio de Janeiro

In this thesis, I explore the role of media in the racialization of Afro-Brazilians, particularly how the narratives surrounding arrastões and urban violence, contributed to the construction of Black youth from favelas as inherent threats to public order through terms like pivete and funkeiro. The coverage of the 1992 arrastão did not simply report on a public safety incident — it amplified moral panic, selectively framing the event through a racialized and classist lens. By repeatedly associating arrastões with funk culture and depicting funkeiros as inherently dangerous, the media helped solidify a stereotype that extended beyond the beach, shaping public perception and influencing policy responses. These thefts were covered primarily in Jornal do Brasil, one of the country’s most circulated and respected newspapers of the time. Its reporting blamed the thefts on youths from Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, a region where the city’s poor and working-class Afro-Brazilians have historically been concentrated. Jornal do Brasil routinely characterized the youths as funkeiros, referring to Brazilian funk parties associated with Rio’s favelas. The newspaper also called the youths pivetes, a colloquial term meant to associate petty crimes with minors. Both terms were highly stigmatizing and laid the discursive groundwork for the emerging category of arrastões, framing collective actions by poor Black youths as inherently criminal. By racializing the figure of the youth through labels like funkeiro and pivete, the newspaper obscured the fact that public fear was fundamentally rooted in the presence of Black youth in public space. Before October 1992, however, arrastões as a term were broadly defined to mean a group of people walking in a public area, without any attribution of racial difference. I argue that the media’s coverage, among them Jornal do Brasil, was instrumental to transforming the term arrastões to become a pejorative euphemism for poor and working-class Black teenage youths from Rio’s North Zone. This thesis historicizes the racialization of Afro-Brazilians in the media preceding and leading up to the events of October 1992. Through analyzing the use of the term arrastões and related discourses, I demonstrate how media representations contributed to racializing Black youth amid the unresolved inequities from Brazil’s transition from military dictatorship to a multiracial democracy.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Latin American Studies

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Geremias Goulart, Daiane

Contributors dc:contributor

• Davila, Walter J.

• Arrastão
• Racialization
• Spatial Segregation
• Rio De Janeiro
• Critical Media Studies
• Afro-brazilian
• Brazil

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Daiane Geremias Goulart

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129989

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129989