Home at the Margins: Police Violence, Evictions, and the Resistance to Belonging in São Paulo's ‘Cracolândia’

ABSTRACT

In São Paulo's Cracolândia—one of the world's largest open‐air drug scenes—urban transformation operates not through direct expulsion but through the systematic erosion of territorial bonds. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic research with unhoused crack users, NGO workers, and state officials, this article examines how interactions with the state—entangled with commercial and legal pressures—dismantle the survival infrastructures that enable marginalised populations to remain: work opportunities, social networks, housing access, and community ties. Home, we demonstrate, is not merely space but a political claim to stability, community, and the right to remain—a claim constantly under erasure yet persistently reinvented at the margins. Through two extended ethnographic vignettes, we trace how deterritorialisation unfolds in individual lives: one trajectory ending in departure after years of cyclical displacement; another sustained only through alliances with neighbours and outsiders as the condition for conditional belonging. We argue that anthropological attention to these trajectories reveals mechanisms invisible to urban studies focused on physical removal or state action alone. Deterritorialisation operates through making people's identities with territory untenable—severing the relationships, routines, and survival infrastructures that constitute home—even as physical presence remains technically possible.