Guarding the Urban Elite: Hospitality Security in São Paulo

Abstract

In the past decade, Brazil's largest city, São Paulo, has witnessed an exponential growth in private security. In this article, we contribute to understandings of how security shapes urban life by focusing on what we call hospitality security, which takes place in elite spaces of residence and leisure such as high-end neighborhoods, gated communities, and shopping malls. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, we argue that hospitality security is a specific urban formation that combines protection with care for spaces and clients. As such, it is not just another paid protection service, but is viewed as a necessary force for creating a desirable quality of life and fostering an ease of urban circulation that is seen as absent from public spaces due to high crime and ongoing eruptions of police violence. Hospitality security thus attempts to produce urban stability and predictability by maintaining harmony in residential and commercial environments and ensuring foreseeable social interactions while requiring security guards to uphold an unequal, racialized status quo.