THE DYING HOME: “Bad Deaths” and Spatial Inscriptions of Mourning in a Favela

Abstract

In Rio de Janeiro's favelas, where residents have experienced economic precarity and racialized police violence, “good deaths,” wrought by natural causes and at old age, are distinguished from “bad deaths,” which may take victims' entire families and houses. This essay chronicles the story of Maria who died at fifty-two, following the death of her youngest son at the hands of the police, and inquires into the generativ-ity of mourning related to these two bad deaths. As graffiti and altars became spatial inscriptions of a new moralization of space, Maria's house gradually transformed from a substrate of life into a marker of death. In the end, the home died too, as it was sold and its attendant social relations were unmade. Bad deaths thus reveal the moral entanglement between families, communities, and the materiality of houses, as well as the severance of these ties in the face of violence and intergenerational loss.