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adhesive tape like the false beard of a pharaoh. He served us lunch in the tiny dining section of the car. Dr. Penido announced, laughing his soft sarcastic laugh, that it was just as well the car was there because the Aimorés hotel had turned out so hopelessly unsanitary that he had induced the owner to pull it down entirely and start all over from scratch.
    In spite of the loss of its hotel Aimorés was a busy little town full of dusty traffic and new building. House building offers few problems in these parts. A carpenter makes around twenty cents an hour. The valley is full of sawmills and every tiny hamlet has a brick kiln. Everybody complains of the expense and scarcity of cement but they have an abundance of cheap tile and brick. On every street we saw new brick houses going up with tiled roofs, and wellfinished woodwork and beautifully laid parquet floors. From the top of the hill we climbed to visit Monty’s waterworks, about half the roofs of the town straggling out over the valleyfloor beneath us looked new. Right at our feet were the new tiny shacks, some of brick and some of the common mud and wooden frame construction, of the workingpeople’s suburb which in Brazil is known as a
favela
.
    This favela was the best we had seen on the trip. Thehouses were in row and each had a yard and a solidly built brick privy. “Look at all the privies,” Dr. Penido burst out waving his arms with humorous pride, “An orgy of privies.”
    “This is such decent housing,” said Monty, “we shouldn’t call it a favela.”
The Favela: Symbol of the New Brazil?
    The word favela as usual set off an argument. Everybody started talking at once.
    Favela in Brazilian Portuguese means slum. A favela is a particular type of recent slum that takes its name from the hill near Rio where the first one appeared. The favela is the sign and symbol of the population explosion which has resulted from the success of just the sort of public health measures Dr. Penido and his associates were showing off with such pride.
    With the growth of industry, and the caving in of the scanty rural economy, people came crowding out of the back country into cities and towns. In the back country they had lived a barefoot life as ungarnished in every aspect as the little huts with dirt floors they were born in and dwelt in and died in, but at least they had space about them and air to breathe. Except in very bad droughts the rural economy had furnished sufficient food. People lived according to certain standards of civilized rustic behavior. The landowner was feudal lord. Feudalism, when it works, is far from being the worst form of human organization.
    In the cities the immigrants find no housing ready for them, so they pick themselves out a back lot and put themselves up a shack out of whatever materials are cheapest and handiest just the way they would back up in the hills. Individual initiative. They cook on charcoal. They can’t read and write so they don’t need much artificial light. The women and children fetch water in gasoline tins from the nearest pump that may be a mile away, just as they would have gone downto the river back home, and they deposit their excrement behind the fence and throw their garbage out on the path just as they always did. The shacks agglomerate into rattletrap settlements, like the Hoovervilles of depression times in the States.
    In Rio—this was in 1948—there were said to be three hundred thousand people living in favelas. Today there are nearer a million. You come on favelas in the most unexpected places. In Copacabana a few minutes walk from the hotels and the splendid white apartment houses and the wellkept magnificent beaches you find a whole hillside of favelas overlooking the lake and the Jockey Club. In the center of Rio a few steps from the Avenida Rio Branco on the hill back of one of the most fashionable churches you come suddenly into a tropical jungletown.
    In Rio under the pressure of metropolitan life