Abstract
Based on the analysis of the case of Sete Jovens Square, located on the outskirts of the northern São Paulo city, this paper aims at contributing to the debate on public security. The Square, which was the stage of a massacre against local young people in 2014, is an arena of a dispute of senses associated to the production of public space and collective memory. The name of the Square is a tribute to the seven young people hit by another slaughter, in 2007, in the same neighborhood. This research produced a narrative of the struggle history for the occupation of the Square, having the discursive plot related to the slaughter as its object and the problematization of the regimes of truth, in Foucault’s perspective, as its analytical axis. For the construction of this narrative, we conducted interviews with nine residents based on the methodology of oral history and ethnographic experiments in the region, especially in the surroundings of the Square, during 2016. These incursions were recorded in field journals. In this journey, a set of security measures for the control of the poor population, preponderantly black, and for its circulation, were observed, especially in the form of “urban operations” and “social projects” which articulate “security and citizenship” and open air control. Such “operations” are the subject of consideration in the article that articulates the local disputes to the historically built intersection in Brazil between dangerousness, race and poverty, and between social control and crime discourse.
Security Mechanisms; Youth; Drugs