"The City of Women": Fighting Black Dispossession in the Coastal City of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil

Poor black women in the northeastern city of Salvador are currently leading a mass struggle for land and housing rights. These activists understand the Bay of All Saints – the sea that wraps around the city– as an extension of that land. Until recent decades, coastal lands were seen as undesirable and fitting only for blacks and poor people to live. Today, coastal development for leisure tourism and luxury residences has led to the displacement of many poor black neighborhoods. Few black communities have survived the rapid processes of forced removal accompanied by militarized violence, and their persistence on the coast is the result of organized struggles primarily led by black women. Drawing from the experiences of Gamboa de Baixo, a century-old black fishing community located in the center of the city and surrounded by luxury residences and yacht clubs, I describe the public support for and state investment in a racial and gender project of “cleansing” the land and the water in the process of modernizing the city. This paper will explore the discursive strategies of human rights that these social movements use to mobilize communities against forced displacement and for access to the land and sea. A key aspect of this political work is the demand for clean drinking water, basic sanitation systems, and ecological protection. Furthermore, their reliance on anti-racism and human rights discourses connect them to African diasporic struggles for rights and resources throughout the Americas.