Social Tourism 'In Practice': The Tourist Experience of Homeless People in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro-RJ, Brazil

Abstract

When they are disregarded as citizens, people on the street seem to be invisible with regard to their rights, while in their daily lives their presence causes discomfort, generating the inverse of invisibility. This work, when undertaking tourism as a social right, describes how the tourist experiences of a group of homeless people - assisted by a public social assistance agency, in partnership with a UFF extension program - took place, which they visited tourist attractions in the metropolitan region of Rio. In addition to contact with authors / research that dealt with the reality of people living on the streets, the theoretical basis intertwined the themes of the Right to Leisure and the City, the Tourist Experience and Social Tourism. The analyzes carried out from ethnographic bases, including participant observation and interviews with a semi-structured script, indicated that tourist experiences seem to have aroused affective memories that work for this group as a means of resistance to the condition in which they find themselves. Even so, some experiences were crossed by serious situations of prejudice and discrimination, directed by conventional visitors to the group.