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the
cleaning staff. He met with numerous and repeated difficulties in his educational
progress. No tutor his mother enlisted lasted longer than a few months. Bouncing
between boarding schools in the United States, Switzerland, Argentina, and Brazil,
he developed a serious addiction to heroin and other illicit substances. An
encounter with angel dust at a party thrown by friends in Iguatemí led him to drive
a brand-new Mercedes coupe off an overpass, but he was so intoxicated that he
suffered only minor injuries. After a short involvement with a local neo-Nazi group
and repeated stays in rehabilitation centers, he dropped out of Mackenzie
Presbyterian University, in São Paulo, where he had enrolled to study business, a
profession which his family had long dominated. An arrest for possession of ten
grams of cocaine, a tin of marijuana and three Ecstasy tabs led to a suspended
sentence. His community service included working with less fortunate fellow addicts
in other parts of the city. Quickly befriending several of these individuals—friends
of his parents remarked in the most restrained manner possible that from childhood
the boy had possessed uncouth predilections and tastes—he increasingly spent time in
city neighborhoods in which most people of his background, under no circumstance,
would dare set foot. The bodyguards his parents hired gave up trying to keep track
of him. One evening in midsummer, he left the flophouse—where he was staying with a
woman he’d met on a binge—to score a hit. . . .
    Â 
    â€œOh, this terrible ancient pain
    we feel down to our bones
    that fills the contours of our dreams
    whenever we’re alone—”
    On Brazil
    S ão Paulo,
once a small settlement on the periphery of the Portuguese state, is now a vast
labyrinth of neighborhoods upon neighborhoods, a congested super-metropolis of
more than fourteen million people, the economic engine of Latin America. As Dr.
Arturo Figueiras Wernitzky has noted in his magisterial study of the region,
millions of poor Brazilians, many of them from the northeastern region of the
country, including the states of Bahia, Sergipe and Pernambuco, have migrated
over the last four decades to this great city, its districts and environs,
suburbs and exurbs, primarily in search of work and economic opportunities.
    Among these
nordestino
migrants, many of them of African
ancestry, were members of the Londônia family from the towns of the same name in the
states of Bahia, Sergipe, and Pernambuco, who constructed and established
unauthorized settlements, or
favelas
, across the city of São Paulo, lacking
sewage and electricity, and marked by the highest per capita crime rates outside of
Rio de Janeiro—murders, assaults, drug-dealing, and larceny, as well as
well-documented police violence.
    Among the most notorious
favelas
is one of the newest, as yet
unnamed, only marked on maps by municipal authorities by the
letter—
N
.—perhaps for “(Favela) Novísima” (Newest Favela), or “(Mais)
Notório” (Most Notorious), or “Nada Lugar” (No Place), though it is also known,
according to journalists and university researchers like Figueiras Wernitzky, who
are examining its residents as part of a larger study of demographic changes in the
region, among those who live in it, as “Quilombo Cesarão.”

AN OUTTAKE FROM THE
IDEOLOGICAL
ORIGINS OF THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
    Origins
    I n January 1754, Mary,
a young Negro servant to Isaac Wantone, wealthy farmer and patriot of the town of
Roxbury, Massachusetts, gave birth in her master’s stables to a male child. An older
Negro servant, named Lacy, also belonging to Wantone’s retinue, attended Mary in her
prolonged and exacting labor, during which the slave girl developed an intense
fever. For an half-hour after Mary delivered the child, a tempest raged within her
as she lay screaming in a strange tongue, which was in part