“It’s already carnival, City!”. After two years without Carnival, the city of Salvador wakes up humming the classic by Gerônimo Santana — despite the fact that, in the rest of the country, Carnival does not start until next Saturday (18). Salvador misses Carnival and its icons, such as Gerônimo’s own music, the disputes over the best circuit, band, trio, rhythm, and more marginal icons such as the beer aunt, the ice guy, the acarajé baiana , porridge or any food that gives energy to follow behind the trio.
Although the party is organized around these icons, and it is customary to exalt them, the street vendors, who guarantee food and drinks for revelers of all social classes, have gone through and continue to go through hard times. From the queue in front of the Municipal Secretariat of Public Order (Semop) to the improvised camps along the circuits, street vendors have many complaints to make.
Male and female workers even spent days in line at Semop waiting to get a license / Vanessa Santos
Queue and pepper spray
On the last 8th, male and female workers were waiting in a huge queue in front of Semop to get a street vendor license. This year, the city hall determined that registration would only be done online. Many of these people, however, had difficulty accessing the site and carrying out the procedure and, on the 8th, the system was down. The crowd in front of the secretariat asked for a solution, but it was disbanded with pepper spray and tear gas from the Municipal Civil Guard.
In a note, Semop repudiated what it called “acts of vandalism”. “A group of people tried to invade the organ, threw stones and set fire to mattresses at the gate of the folder. The Military Police and the Civil Guard were called to guarantee that the traffic was released and that security could be maintained in the place”, he says. the Secretariat in a note. We tried to get in touch with Semop to find out what solutions were presented to the demands of street vendors, but until the closing of this article, we still had not received a response.
“I’ve been working as a street vendor for 15 years, and all these years nothing has changed! And this year the humiliation was worse: spending a month living on the street to get a permit”, says Alessandra Santos indignantly. She says that she entered the site at 9:00 am and, at 9:05 am, there was no longer a license for sales in Pelourinho, where she usually works during Carnival. In the end, she also had to face the line at Semop to get a license in a different location.
Alessandra Santos has been working as a street vendor for 15 years / Personal archive
“This is the side that revelers don’t see, the reality of the days of chaos around here. And the treatment we received, the exploitation of labor in exchange for just being able to work to guarantee our livelihood”, defines Vanessa Santos, one of the people who was at Semop. She has worked for 25 years as a street vendor at Salvador’s summer festivities, which begin with the New Year and also include the Senhor do Bonfim and Yemanjá festivities and the pre-Carnival celebrations.
Vanessa says that she started working at popular festivals “on her mother’s skirt”. “Then I started working on my own, as an adult, as a means of survival,” she says, while apologizing to me for taking so long to answer the phone. “Charging your cell phone around here is like winning the lottery,” she says. Here, in this case, is Farol da Barra, where she has been since the beginning of the week in an improvised camp. “I stay on the circuit, I don’t have the physical conditions to go back home”, she explains. To return home, she would have to take the bus and subway with all the products for sale, a cool box, etc.
Street vendors improvise camps along the circuits during Carnival / Vanessa Santos
Alessandra adds that the income she manages to raise at Carnival tends to meet many demands for those who don’t have a steady job. “It represents six months of problems solved! A month of a full fridge, school supplies paid for…”, she says. And she adds that she is a single mother and solely responsible for the financial support of the family.
black women
For Silvio Humberto, a member of the Movimento Negro Unido (MNU) and councilor in Salvador, Vanessa and Alessandra have exactly the profile of street vendors who guarantee an important part of Salvador’s carnival: woman, black, financially responsible for supporting the family. “The profile of those people is precisely the 14th of May (1888) which does not reach its end. It is the color of poverty in the city of Salvador. They are black people and made up mostly of women, ”he says.
Silvio Humberto also points out that this whole process with street vendors at Carnival reminds him of the project to de-Africanize the streets of the capital at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, when the public authorities repressed the presence of black people who worked on the streets of Salvador, as a way to guarantee sustenance, in order to “whiten” the city. “For me, this is always the explanation in this city, wrapped in this vicious cycle of poverty, in which racism structures its social relations, structures its daily life and contributes decisively to the concentration of income”, he says.
At this point, Vanessa Santos also seems to be an example of what explains the militant and councilor. She says that she works as a street vendor to ensure that her children can study in private schools and have the opportunity to break out of this vicious cycle that Silvio Humberto talks about. Vanessa once dreamed of having a degree in higher education, but with the arrival of her children, she made it a priority for them to have access to education. That way, all the money she manages to collect from sales at popular festivals is invested in enrollment, school supplies, books, etc. “I just graduated the oldest, who even had an excellent score on the Enem: 860 in the essay”, she says proudly.
Vanessa Santos has been working as a street vendor for 25 years and is proud of ensuring her children’s education / Vanessa Santos
Solutions
“The problem is not technical, it is political”, states Silvio Humberto emphatically. And he explains that the problem is not the fact that the registration was done online, but accepting that those people could be subjected to the undignified treatment of standing in line, under strong sun, for hours. “If the city hall manages to raise more than R$ 27 billion to hold the carnival, can’t it solve the Semop queue?!”, he questions.
As solutions that could have been previously adopted by the city hall, he presents the presence of Semop technicians who could help the workers to carry out the registration and, mainly, to anticipate a problem, which is already recurrent, with the tools available in the city hall. “And recognize that I could listen to street vendors so that they can also present solutions. These people are not just for voting. These people are in the city, they experience the city’s problems, and the city government should at least listen to them”, he adds.
Silvio Humberto, member of the MNU and councilor in Salvador, says that “the problem is not technical, it is political” / Priscila Chagas
Alessandra Santos is emphatic when she says that the city hall does not listen to street vendors and does not care about their proposals. “The City Hall never called street vendors to talk. They act as they want and we have to accept it. We have a lot of ways around this license problem, and they think we are ignorant! They don’t give anyone opportunities for a meeting,” she claims.
In the City Council, Silvio Humberto presented some proposals in an attempt to solve the problem in the following years, among them, prioritizing the accreditation of people with disabilities, the elderly, women heads of households and street vendors already registered with Semop. In addition to carrying out the accreditation in person and virtually and the anticipation of registration, there are at least 6 months of the popular festivals.
This year, Vanessa Santos got a license to sell drinks, but regrets not getting a license to sell food, which is usually her biggest income. “This year I’m a little scared, psychologically shaken after everything that happened, the queue for licenses here. But, since I can’t give up… Sometimes I look at this Lighthouse and think: I need to have hope that everything will work out, at least the enrollment and books I need to be able to pay ”, she summarizes.
O Brazil in fact sought out the press office of the Salvador City Hall and awaits a position on the questions.
Source: BdF Bahia
Edition: Alfredo Portugal
